Material accumulation is a common enough human instinct, although the scope to indulge varies widely. For those with the least in the eighteenth-century British world, the ability to collect might extend as far as a locked box or even just a pocket. For others, large households with room upon room were the compass of their material accretion. When domestic accumulation is termed ‘collecting’, it takes on rather grand connotations – imperial trade, global travel and the big names of Britain’s earliest museums: Tradescant and Sloane.¹ Moreover, the term ‘collecting’ implies a highly conscious approach with a view to developing and sharing personal curiosity or furthering knowledge. Nonetheless, collecting things at home was an activity that anyone with a little disposable income could do, and many did. Some people styled household accumulations of one variety or another as a conscious ‘collection’; others just amassed according to their own interest, use or desire. Whilst eighteenth-century readers of the periodical press may have marvelled at the findings of naturalists, imperialists and voyagers, they would not have been surprised to hear about the methods they used. These methods – record-keeping, letter-writing, journal-keeping, collecting, drawing and annotating – were wholly familiar.

In this period, the mind itself was often characterised as a collection of accumulated artefacts. As Sean Silver has discussed, the view of the imagination as a creative force was the product of a later age and, in the eighteenth century, the mind was much more likely to be conceptualised as a storehouse of objects, ordered and assessed through wit and reason.² The analogy of the collection was pervasive and also found expression in print culture, most especially in the periodical press. Even the word ‘magazine’ was understood as a repository of sorts and acted as a synonym for museum.³ The notion of the mind as a collection had a long history, recognisable in the works of Aristotle, Renaissance humanism and seventeenth-century natural philosophy. However, the concept gained renewed cultural purchase in the eighteenth century.

This was also an era in which museums proliferated and became increasingly accessible to non-elite viewers.⁴ Famously, the British Museum opened semi-publicly in 1753, but other collections in private houses and urban coffeehouses contributed to the opportunities for viewing antiquities, natural specimens and hybrid assemblages. For example, Don Saltero’s coffeehouse on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea was one of London’s most notable attractions and had been established in the late seventeenth century by a servant of Sir Hans Sloane, James Salter.⁵ Don Saltero’s housed over 10,000 artefacts and specimens, which visitors could inspect when they dropped by for refreshments, a haircut or even dental work.⁶ Sir Ashton Lever (1729–88) brought his collection of around 27,000 objects from Alkrington Hall in Lancashire to Leicester Fields (later Leicester Square) in London in 1775, charging a fee of five shillings and three pence for entry.⁷ Later in the period, William Bullock (c. 1773–1849) moved a 32,000 object collection from Liverpool to Piccadilly, London, including natural history, archaeology and ethnography.⁸ Irish physicians (Sloane being a famous example) were active in epistolary networks and associational activities that saw them collecting natural history and materia medica.⁹ Small collections were visible in the homes of the middling sort upwards and other social spaces like public houses and coffeehouses, especially in towns and cities.

Many of the earliest collections that became publicly accessible in London had of course started life as private collections in homes, which invited visitors were able to view. Even when such collections inhabited new walls, they no doubt bore the marks of their domestic origins in the quantities and kinds of objects that had been acquired and which originally fitted into the spatial parameters of a given household. Ashton Lever’s Alkrington Hall was one such household built on a large scale: a three-storey, brick mansion in the Classical style designed for the Lever family and erected in the 1730s. However, much more modest collections were to be found in many homes in this period. For example, on 15 January 1829, Benjamin Williams and John Brinkley were tried at the Old Bailey for breaking into the stationer Michael Watson’s home on 26 November 1828 and stealing a range of objects including two vases, pasteboard ornaments, a pheasant’s tail and five shells among other items of value.¹⁰ According to Watson’s servant, Susannah Stracey, the items were stolen from the cabinet of curiosities and the mantelpiece in the ‘summer room’, which overlooked the river Thames at this Wapping address.¹¹ In this case, a witness who lived in Chancery Lane and dealt in ‘shells and other articles’ attested to Brinkley later selling him some similar items for six or seven shillings.¹²

Along the same lines, on 20 October 1784, Robert Artz and Thomas Gore stood accused of shoplifting from Hyam Hart’s shop in Hemmings Row in London’s West End.¹³ Hyam kept ‘a shop of curiosities of all kinds, pictures, shells, fossils’.¹⁴ On account of Hart being ‘very often at sales’ acquiring merchandise for his ‘cabinet of curiosities’, his wife Deborah Hart and her son were in the shop at the time of the theft.¹⁵ In these accounts, it becomes clear that ‘cabinets of curiosity’ were present in a wide range of establishments, including modest homes, shops and public spaces of leisure such as coffeehouses. As such, those who collected and those who could visit a collection were a growing population. As strong connections were drawn between observing ‘curiosities’ and understanding nature, the increasing accessibility of natural historical specimens to urban residents who might lack the ability to collect from nature themselves was a significant development.

Whilst homes often accommodated collections, networks of sociability and business procured the objects themselves. Middling sort collectors could reach a wide range of spaces and groups for the acquisition of specimens.¹⁶ Studies of Sir Hans Sloane’s acquisitions reveal the network of other collectors he relied upon, including entomologist Eleanor Glanville (1654–1709); the famous naturalist and apothecary James Petiver (c. 1655–1718); and shoe-maker and book-seller John Bagford (1650–1716).¹⁷ As mentioned above, it was Sloane’s own servant James Salter who established and ran one of London’s best-known coffeehouse museums.

As much as social connection facilitated collecting, the practice was also firmly linked with another mainstay of the domestic and commercial world: record-keeping. This was true of collectors up and down the social scale. Hans Sloane used detailed record-keeping about the circumstances and encounters that brought an object into his possession, and that object’s own history of ownership, in order to develop ‘a new form of collecting’. By doing so, Sloane ‘promoted the practice as a method of understanding and classifying experience itself and turned his curiosity cabinet into a kind of university’.¹⁸ Sloane was not alone in expanding the ambitions of collecting in this period. The Duchess of Portland established a collection that combined diverse priorities, including the extension of understanding through categorisation, aesthetic presentation, entertainment, sociability, wonder and delight.¹⁹

Alongside the positive images of men and women of science – or virtuosi – discovering the secrets of nature, elite habits of collecting were also often satirised as compulsive, greedy and obsessive and collecting material things at any strata of society certainly posed questions concerning the prudence of the purchaser. However, curiosity and the urge to amass clearly overcame such social censure as eighteenth-century homes readily filled up with objects and specimens. What follows explores the domestic activity of collecting, revealing both the ubiquity and diversity of this practice in the period. In doing so, this chapter (alongside Chapters 4 and 5) seeks to undermine a view of science as a series of rarefied practices undertaken by scholars who then shared their findings with the ‘public’ via print and suggests, instead, that the actions of scientists were merely extensions of existing everyday practices.

The highly theorised and studied subjects of scientific observation and experiment will be considered in the next chapters, but here, examples of different genres of collecting will be examined to illuminate the way this practice operated and – where possible – to situate collecting within domestic space. The examples of collectors are largely drawn from the wealthy classes, who had the greatest scope to acquire, store and display collections. Nonetheless, lower-status individuals took an active role, especially in the realm of natural history collecting, illustrating and publishing.

Specimens

During the eighteenth century, specimen collecting, documenting and illustrating was a widespread activity. As mentioned in Chapter 2, many people kept nature diaries and the collection of information about a locality was considered an entirely appropriate form of empirical practice. The English naturalist and illustrator, James Bolton (1735–99), who will be discussed in greater detail below, published a three-volume text, An history of fungusses growing about Halifax (1788–90), and this geographically localised enquiry was typical of many natural history publications of this period.²⁰ These studies had the obvious advantage of allowing the author to study their own neighbourhood and achieve a comprehensive exposition of its plants or animals. A deep and long-term familiarity generated the detailed knowledge needed for such an undertaking. However, some naturalists did embark on projects of a larger geographical scale, at which point the acquisition of information and specimens from a dispersed network of contacts became crucial. James Sowerby (1757–1822) was one such naturalist and illustrator who created 2,592 hand-coloured engravings for the ambitious thirty-six-volume English botany, which was published at the turn of the nineteenth century over a period of twenty-three years.²¹ Sowerby’s career had begun with an education at the Royal Academy and a specialisation in flower painting, but he later pursued interests in natural history and mineralogy. Surviving correspondence between Sowerby and the Irish naturalist, John Templeton (1766–1825), reveals the tactics and networks of specimen acquisition that fuelled natural historical research in this era.

The Sowerby–Templeton correspondence evinces a number of common characteristics of specimen collecting. Like other examples in Chapter 2, Templeton was an avid journal-keeper as well as a letter-writer, and he regularly included details on the weather in his journal alongside his main subject. With a wealthy mercantile background, Templeton maintained connections with a range of English naturalists – including Joseph Banks – via correspondence and was an important supporter of the establishment of the Belfast Botanic Gardens. Whilst Sowerby was the skilled artist of the two, Templeton included many sketches of plants in his own journal and he stitched into his 1806 volume a pamphlet by the painter, Edward Dayes, entitled ‘Essay on the usefulness of drawing’, which had been printed in the local press.²² The essay argued that drawing provided a foundation for painting, but – more than that – it offered a range of advantages to everyday life: ‘drawing opens the mind … it teaches to think’.²³ Templeton’s letters and notebooks offer a combination of visual and textual accounts of the subjects of his enquiry and make the point that record-keeping, especially concerning collections, could take a pictorial form.

The correspondence between these two men reveals many of the dynamics of naturalist networks of this period. Publication projects relied on the wider access to observations and specimens offered by friends and colleagues across the country and, in some cases, much further afield. On 26 July 1798, Templeton congratulated Sowerby on his ‘scheme of having a true British Museum’ of natural history and hoped that ‘by sending you still some of the rarest [specimens] that some may be of use either to embellish your publication or increase your Collection’.²⁴ Templeton was not Sowerby’s only contact in Ireland and he encouraged his English friend to exploit other connections on the island to secure what was necessary:

Templeton further urged Sowerby to ‘look at some [specimens] I sent Dr Shaw’ at the British Museum, on account of their being ‘the Most Curious ones of this part of Ireland’, adding, ‘I thought to receive an account of them from him [Shaw] before this, for I was very anxious to know the proper Names of some of them, as also whether I was right in my Conjectures about the fish which I sent the specimens of to him’.²⁶ Thus, naturalists like Templeton sent specimens to members of their network for a range of reasons – to participate in scholarly exchange, to provide an example that would fill a gap in a colleague’s knowledge or collection, to prompt reciprocation and to secure further details about the specimen from an expert. Specimen collecting represented one part of a larger naturalist practice, but the opportunities and imperatives provided by research practised close to home fuelled the development of these networks of exchange.

A letter written by Templeton to Sowerby on 5 July 1797 reveals the difficulties encountered by collectors, including the task of keeping specimens in good condition and the pressure to exchange both specimens and useful information: ‘I will delay sending it now in hopes of getting a fresh specimen. I now enclose you Rhodiola rosea Empetrum nigrum [a perennial flowering plant] with a berry’.²⁷ The promise is followed by details of observations made in Templeton’s own garden as well as on hill walks in the north of Ireland: ‘some plants in my garden had female flowers alone this spring nor could I find any Male Flowers on the Wild Mountain plants’.

Templeton’s information betrays the particularities of the Irish landscape, noting the presence of the ‘Myrica Gale Monæcius Variety’ of flowering plant – commonly known as ‘bog-myrtle’ – and commenting on its regular presence in the bogs of his neighbouring countryside.²⁸ Templeton described how the specimen might suit Sowerby’s purpose in illustration – ‘to figure with the Dioecius Males and a branch with leaves’ – and noted that ‘by the Specimen you will see it varies greatly in the form of its leaves, in the broad leaved Variety the Rose Color is much more brilliant than the others they are both found on Bogs in the County of Down Near Donaghadee & Grey abbey’.²⁹ The exchange speaks to Templeton’s familiarity with Sowerby’s art practice and his efforts to meet the needs of his colleague.

It seems that Sowerby was also conscious of the pressure he placed upon his correspondents. On 25 July 1810, he apologised for giving ‘trouble to my friends’ in his persistent collecting of specimens but stressed that he ‘had rather be obliged to Gentlemen for some things, especially if I can make a return, than go to a dealer where there is no obligation’.³⁰ Thus, semi-social relationships which engendered reciprocity were, in this case, preferred to straightforward transactions. The mutuality of shared endeavour was a strong motivation for these men. In January 1820, Templeton’s letter arrived with Sowerby via the hands of ‘perhaps the best Conchologist in this Country [Ireland]’. Templeton noted that this man ‘wished to present you with what he think a distinct species of Trochus’, but encouraged his reader further with the promise of other specimens and the benefit of yet another useful contact: ‘I believe he had however some other truly distinct species and as he is a diligent Collector once you are acquainted I have hoped he will not be a useless acquaintance to a Man of Science.’³¹ In these letters, frequent and specific demands are made, especially of Templeton’s time and resources, however, this exchange of specimens and knowledge was skilfully eased by a careful combination of apology, deference and flattery.

Although geographically disparate, Templeton and Sowerby occupied a similar social stratum. However, specimen collecting often produced interactions between individuals with divergent class identities. For example, famously, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, second Duchess of Portland (1715–85) amassed a vast collection, and the preface to the sale catalogue for the 1786 auction of that collection claimed ‘to have had every unknown Species described and published to the World’.³² Portland’s ‘totalizing interests of curiosity’ were able to incorporate highly disparate categories of objects in one whole.³³ However, the acquisition of this remarkable collection embraced a diverse range of intermediaries. Whilst expensive and imported ceramics formed a core part of the Duchess’s project, sourcing natural specimens entailed a network of helpful contacts. James Bolton was one such contact, a naturalist, botanist, mycologist and illustrator. The younger son of a weaver, it is not known if Bolton received any formal education, and he was a self-taught artist. Having first worked in the same trade as his father, Bolton later became an art teacher and, in the last years of his life, a publican in Luddenden Foot in Calderdale, West Yorkshire.³⁴ As a naturalist, Bolton benefitted from the patronage of Portland and, in a letter most likely written around 1780, it is clear that he facilitated her interests in birds. Bolton would later publish a two-volume work on British songbirds, Harmonia ruralis.³⁵

Bolton’s correspondence with Portland is packed with the details of his observations of a number of different species of birdlife. His letter opens with the boast that ‘My success in regard to birds has prompted me to Write to your Grace and to Hope for Pardon.’ The letter was, in this sense, part bid for patronage and part exercise in natural historical knowledge-sharing. Bolton included two of his own drawings of buntings with the letter and offered to provide more, impressing upon the Duchess his skills as an observer and illustrator. He also intended to send her ‘a fine pair’ of crop bills he had shot, which he hoped would ‘afford an agreeable pleasure to your Grace, They being so very different in Colour that one could scarce believe them the same were it not for the Bill & Feet’.³⁶ However, this was not the first communication between the naturalist and the collector; Bolton referred to ‘your Graces command concerning Insects’ and hoped to be able to ‘send up a few [specimens] about the end of summer which are not found in Cabinets’.³⁷ Bolton’s letter indicated that he could secure a range of specimens in the future, including ‘a fine cock bird of the Tawney Bunting’, which he described as ‘a beautiful and lovely Bird and never before seen by me’. He also had in his possession a mountain bunting, a greater middle and lesser spotted woodpecker and a ‘Coalmouse’ meaning a coal tit.³⁸ Accompanying each offer of a specimen were details about the birds that Bolton found notable, for example, the woodpeckers he regarded as ‘beautifull & rare’ but also ‘imperfectly described by the writers’. Meanwhile, the coalmouse he declared ‘absolutely Different from the marsh titmouse with which it has been confounded’.³⁹ In this way, Bolton stressed the importance of first-hand examination of such specimens and, if not, the use of high-quality illustrations of the kind he could offer.

Bolton’s letter is a piece of advocacy for the study of birds, but especially those of ‘the smaller kinds’ and he bemoaned the ‘great imperfection and deficiency’ in the understanding of these creatures and the persistent ‘errors in respect to colour, which cannot be corrected any other way than by writing new descriptions immediately from life’. Bolton insisted that there ‘are many new Observations to be made regarding their manners, haunts, food, Nests, Eggs, Young, times place &c. &c.’ but reassured the Duchess that ‘from long observation & strict inquiry’ he was ‘pretty well acquainted’ with these details.⁴⁰ Although Bolton had himself secured a ‘fine specimen’ of a mountain bunting, he also noted that this was a bird that ‘Mr Pennant’ had never seen, referring to the well-known Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726–98). Thus, he nodded to his own connections within naturalist networks but also to his privileged access to unusual specimens and promised to ‘omit no opportunity of procuring such nests and eggs as are rare or beautifull’.⁴¹ By using a combination of convincing ornithological detail based on first-hand observation, alongside offers of drawings and rare and beautiful specimens, Bolton endeavoured to secure Portland’s interest and, ultimately, her financial support. Unfortunately, the Duchess’s death in 1785 put an end to this arrangement and Bolton would only publish his work on birds a decade later.

This example illuminates the socially encompassing character of natural history in this period. James Bolton was brought up on a farm near the Calder Valley and around three miles from the hub of textile industries, Halifax. However, the Bolton family produced two naturalists, as James’s older brother, Thomas (1722–78), was also active in this field, focusing his energies on entomology and ornithology. It was Thomas Bolton’s name that was given to a large species of dragonfly found in Britain, Cordulegaster boltonii, in recognition of his having collected the specimen. The fact that two brothers from obscure origins were both involved in natural history activities has led to some confusion about the attribution of works, and it also seems likely that they collaborated on some projects.⁴²

When James Bolton married in 1768 and started a family, he fostered this self-taught occupation in his children, and his sons certainly participated in natural history observing and collecting.⁴³ Similarly, James Sowerby – discussed above – involved his children in natural history, leading to his son James de Carle Sowerby (1787–81), and subsequent generations, making a contribution in this field. Like other trades and occupations, the home acted not only to accommodate the pursuit but also as a place of transmission. Children growing up in the household of a naturalist or collector easily acquired those skills and knowledge which was – in turn – underpinned by the many other complementary aptitudes developed at home.

In these examples, it becomes clear that the observation and documentation of natural history was an accessible scientific pursuit in a number of ways. Not only was a focus on a local area entirely justified, even preferred, but the acquisition of skills and knowledge was not entirely dependent on an expensive education or a family with financial resources. Whilst the Bolton brothers could be viewed as exceptions, their life histories and accomplishments speak to what was possible from a modest home a few miles distant from even a market town. The networks of contact between naturalists in this period were inclusive precisely because of the need to secure geographically dispersed and rare examples of plants and animals. Moreover, naturalism was a calling that was passed from one generation to the next, a process eased by a domestic environment that both accommodated and demanded the development of skill and knowledge. The larger project to fully ‘know’ nature was impossible without high levels of participation and verbal and written exchange across these islands in this period.

Instruments

Another example of a collection amassed in a wealthy household is that of Margaret, Lady Clive (née Maskelyne, 1735–1817), although the focus in this case was instruments of astronomy. The Maskelyne family’s close connections with the East India Company led to Margaret’s marriage to the military leader Robert Clive (1725–75) in Madras in 1753. Despite losing her mother, Elizabeth Maskelyne, at the age of thirteen, Lady Clive’s adult letters recalled the importance of this relationship in initiating her own interests in poetry and astronomy. The maternal influence in the Maskelyne household was also evident in the path taken by Clive’s brother, Nevil Maskelyne, who became Astronomer Royal and a member of the Board of Longitude and who published an annual nautical almanac with tables that facilitated the lunar-distance method of finding longitude at sea. As a child, Clive had been tasked with copying out her mother’s poems and, in adult life, she often quoted them in her letters.⁴⁴ The Clives’ fortunes changed in the late 1760s when Robert Clive became embroiled in a political scandal and his actions in India became subject to a public enquiry in 1772–73. Clive was forced to defend not only his reputation but also his private fortune. Although Clive won this battle, he died suddenly in 1774, leaving Lady Clive to lead her remaining decades at Oakly Park in Shropshire.⁴⁵

Margaret Clive’s letters dating from this later period of her life 1775–1805 survive in the British Library. The extant letters are addressed to her brothers Edmund (d. 1775) and Nevil Maskelyne (1732–1811), her sister-in-law Sophia (Nevil’s wife, 1752–1821) and her niece Margaret (Nevil and Sophia’s daughter, 1785–1858). Her correspondence documents her engagement with astronomy and her collection of globes and telescopes at Oakly Park. Astronomy became increasingly accessible to women in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with educators such as Benjamin Martin (1705–82) and James Ferguson (1710–76), giving public lectures and offering courses to diverse and often female audiences. Clive’s access to astronomy was of course furthered by her family relationships and her incredible wealth. Moreover, the connection between astronomy and poetry revealed by Clive’s correspondence was a common one in this period, with Ferguson’s pupil Anne Lofft (née Emlyn, 1753–1801) receiving poems from her husband on the theme of her love of astronomy.⁴⁶

Clive’s letters of 1806 to 1808 refer regularly to her growing collection of terrestrial and celestial globes. She described how she used and valued them as instruments and personal possessions – possessions she would sometimes give away as significant gifts to favoured relatives. She was regularly looking for new acquisitions for her collection and would send globes to a Mr Dolland for repair and refurbishment. As a result, letters to her niece – Margaret Maskelyne, daughter of Nevil Maskelyne – contain regular requests and updates concerning the travel of her treasured globes to and from the repair shop and the possibility of buying additional pieces for her collection. In a note squeezed into the margin of an 1806 letter, Clive asked her niece to find out if her father had ‘seen a pair of Globes fit [for] my use?’. She simultaneously bemoaned the loss of the painted imagery from her existing German-made globes, saying ‘the Bears alas! alas! now almost bare after this scrubbing’.⁴⁷ When they had been with Mr Dolland for some time, Clive decided to ‘hurry Mr Dolland’ to send back her ‘t[w]o lamented old friends’, resolving to ‘love them as before, & not mind the shabby dresses of the poor Bears, who could ill bear the scrubbing of soap & water; & who had survived three or four ugly falls’.⁴⁸ This and other globes in Clive’s collection would enter Dolland’s workshop on a regular basis, and once there she would anxiously await their return.⁴⁹

On 2 March 1806, Clive wrote to Margaret Maskelyne saying, ‘I had hoped every mail & waggon day would have gratified my longing eyes with the sight of the globe’.⁵⁰ Clearly, Dolland took time over his work because on Easter Day that same year, Clive revealed that her ‘old globe’ was still in his hands and she worried that ‘none of the Wise Artificers can do any thing to it’. Nonetheless, the traffic in globes continued apace, as Clive rejoiced ‘to hear my fair terrestrial Globe is coming’ and felt ‘tenderly about my Globe now on the road to Mr Dolland’ insisting that she ‘must [have] it back, or have one to follow with it, covered with any map Doctor Maskelyne will conjure up for me’.⁵¹ Mr Dolland’s work extended beyond the technical task of painting and re-painting maps onto the globes, he was also directed to ‘brighten the brass parts, & to make them as nicely clean as he can’.⁵² These comments reveal a trade not only in new and antique globes, but also the role of artisans in a variety of design and repair work. These objects were valued for their insights into the terrestrial and celestial worlds, but also for their visual appearance within a domestic environment.

Newer additions to Clive’s collection included a celestial globe which she dedicated to her brother Nevil Maskelyne and a terrestrial one she dedicated to the naturalist, Sir Joseph Banks, which she reported positioning between two chairs in a principal room of the house and ‘upon high stands’ so that ‘the room will look very handsome’. Clive noted that ‘the Cedar tables may remain against the door, as it is so ornamental to the room’.⁵³ Elsewhere, Clive mentioned rejecting a chintz sofa to put a globe in its place. Pleased with the result, she reported, ‘it looks delightfully just facing me as I sit with my back to the fire in my morning working room, & I can draw it about just as I please’.⁵⁴ In December 1806, Clive announced, ‘Now I am finely set up with Globes and all the honour of my family.’⁵⁵ These globes were clearly appreciated for their aesthetic contribution to a room as prized pieces of furniture, as well as for their more explicit function. For Clive, they became household personalities that accompanied her about her domestic business.

Globes formed a central interest for Clive, but her letters reveal her engagement with other astronomical instruments and the relationships that existed between these objects. On 6 April 1805, Clive commented that a ‘little quadrant will be a fine play-thing’.⁵⁶ In her Easter Day letter of 1806, Clive mentioned ‘the Quadrant of Altitude, which belongs to that lovely Globe Dr John Walsh so kindly gave me’.⁵⁷ Moreover, ‘pocket globes’ were also the subject of regular mentions.⁵⁸ Clearly the imposing aesthetic contribution of full-sized globes represented part of their appeal, but the attraction of pocket-sized versions suggested that Clive valued the globes as portable objects or that her urge to collect extended to all sizes and categories.

This collection was put to work in service of Clive’s scientific interests. She read about the latest discoveries in astronomy – in particular, the new discoveries of stars in the early 1800s. To gain the best chance of sighting a new addition to the known constellation, Clive would move her telescope from place to place in her house. Unfortunately, her instrument was not powerful enough to capture all such discoveries and, in 1807, she was disappointed in her search for an asteroid named Vesta, which Clive referred to as ‘Dr Olbers the second’.⁵⁹ She likewise tried and failed to see Uranus. However, nearer planets were in her sights. In 1804 she described the conjunction of Venus and Saturn (when viewed from Earth they appear to align in a similar part of the sky) as ‘Venus pulling Saturn’s ring in a rude manner’, demanded that someone draw ‘the exact & precise manner of his impertinence’ and contributed her own sketch of the phenomena to this purpose, hoping that it might resemble what had been seen by astronomers at Greenwich.

However, Clive’s light-hearted style belied a serious engagement with her subject and the letters show that aunt and niece collaborated to gain greater insight into the night sky. On 1 July 1804, Clive admitted to begging her niece ‘again and again’ to ‘relate to me your adventures and observations’ in respect of astronomy.⁶⁰ Her interest related specifically to the question of viewing the newer planets through a particular telescope ‘before Jupiter gets too far from my favorite portion of the heavens’.⁶¹ Clive also referred to an ‘assistant’ who was helping her to locate the new planets without success, suggesting that a household servant had been directed to this task. On 4 May 1807, Clive requested, ‘When you favour me with accounts of the appearances of new planets; let me beg you will specify exactly on what part of the Heavens they shew themselves.’⁶² Later the same month, Clive pressed her niece further:

Likewise in early 1808, in a note added after her signature, Clive demanded, ‘When you tell me of the Comet’s places, say in that part exactly of a constellation, as well as of it’s [sic] right assension &c. pray tell me if the new Comet will or does appear here, pray do!’⁶⁴ These letters imply that both Margarets were viewing the same celestial phenomena at the same time, often using instruments known to both of them and comparing notes in their regular correspondence. However, there was a larger network of individuals who Clive encouraged to join them in these activities.

On 9 December 1804, Margaret Clive was entertaining. At three o’clock in the early hours of the morning she ‘caused three families to rise & keep themselves awake, to watch Venus & Saturn, & they saw them plainly’.⁶⁵ A week later, Clive reported rising twice in the night to catch a glimpse of these same planets and failing to do so. However, three houseguests ‘saw the two planets & a very pretty creature besides’, prompting Clive to comment that ‘Had I known that the 3 worthy observers would have seen any thing so plainly, my telescope should have been carried over night to the best spot.’⁶⁶ Clearly, Clive regularly entertained people who were either engaged with astronomy already or encouraged by Clive’s own enthusiasm and the ready availability of a telescope.

Clive and Maskelyne were highly privileged in terms of the money and social connections they could bring to this enterprise. Very few could boast access to the Astronomer Royal and his instruments and knowledge as tools of their enquiry. Nonetheless, these women relied upon cheap printed resources, such as an ephemeris,⁶⁷ that made astronomy accessible across a wide social spectrum, as will be explored in the next chapter. In fact, Clive complained of the barrier cost placed on other facets of astronomical information, ‘I really think astronomical observations ought not to be charged, but go free’, suggesting an interest in broadening participation in this field.⁶⁸

Whilst Margaret Clive registered an interest in the accessibility of her favourite pursuit, her most concerted efforts were put into her own family’s ongoing specialism in this field. Significantly, in 1792 Clive left instructions for the ‘Maskelyne and Banks’ pair of globes to be given to her brother, Nevil, after her death. She added, ‘I hope you will give them to your sweet child by & by’, referring to her correspondent Margaret Maskelyne.⁶⁹ Clive’s insistence that this treasured globe should ultimately come into her niece’s hands underlined the female tradition of studying astronomy in the Maskelyne family. The globes were gifted to father and daughter alongside ‘the pianoforte, the old family cabinet … together with the antique cat’,⁷⁰ revealing the categorisation of scientific instruments as prized domestic objects of practical, aesthetic but also sentimental value. Clive’s letter to her brother to express these wishes was to stand in place of lines in a will, she admitted, ‘I ought, long ago, to have said this but indolence about altering a paragraph in my will … has occasioned me to say nothing about it till now.’ The letter was intended to be preserved and, Clive hoped, accepted as the ‘trifling marks of a sister’s love’.⁷¹

Clive’s engagement with astronomy incorporated both her literary sensibilities and her commitment to scientific observation of natural phenomena. Her collection of instruments attended to scientific need, domestic aesthetics and the collector-connoisseur’s urge to acquire in number as well as quality. Her collection ranged from large globes, set on pedestals, to a three-inch pocket globe. For Clive, astronomy was an explicitly domestic activity, but also one that had been transmitted from one generation to the next and, notably, down the female line.

Antiquities, art, books and manuscripts

In the papers of the Earls of Malmesbury in Hampshire Record Office lie a series of catalogues and inventories belonging to the English MP and grammarian, James Harris (1709–80).⁷² Harris authored several works, including Three treatises – on art; on music, painting and poetry; and on happiness (1741) and Hermes, a philosophical inquiry concerning universal grammar (1751) and was also a composer of music. In 1763, he became an elected fellow of the Royal Society, he was a Trustee of the British Museum, a Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty, a member of the Board of Treasury and comptroller to Queen Charlotte. In support of his wide-ranging interests, Harris became a keen collector of art, manuscripts and antiquarian artefacts and the extant catalogues – three stitched notebooks – contain lists of books, prints, etchings, views and descriptions of places, ruins, antiquities and maps alongside the details of where they were kept within his home at the Close, Salisbury. As his biographer notes, ‘Harris has come down to us, so far, like a piece of unsorted intellectual debris’. An influential figure in his own time and an active enabler of other artists and thinkers, Harris’s notes on his own collection offer a glimpse of a large domestic collection closely connected with a scholarly life.⁷³

The first of the notebooks is entitled a ‘Catalogue of books of prints’ and includes information about Harris’s etchings, maps and depictions of ruins; the second is, similarly, a ‘Catalogue of drawings, prints and etchings’. Both are dated on the back cover as having been compiled in 1780.⁷⁴ The third notebook contains details of the ‘Arrangement of papers, keys &c. in various chests’ and was comprised several years earlier, in 1776.⁷⁵ These notebooks offer insight into the way collections were organised, housed and secured in the context of an affluent eighteenth-century home.

Harris’s Salisbury home had undergone significant remodelling in the early 1700s and the house included an impressive, first-floor library, which he had decorated in the contemporary Gothic style. The contents of the library were described, in 1780, as one of the best private collections in Europe and most of the locations recorded in Harris’s notebooks are in this galleried room with a fireplace and nine ‘Recesses or Apartments for Books’.⁷⁶ Besides the volumes displayed in the, presumably shelved, recesses – there were a series of chests that contained the prints, manuscripts and other artefacts.⁷⁷ To orientate the reader, Harris mapped the storage of his collection onto the layout of the library as follows:

Harris used abbreviations to refer to specific locations, noting that ‘In the following Catalogue, R.1. R.2. &cr denote the respective Recesses in the Library’s C.1. & C.2 denote the two Chests in the Gallery.’⁷⁹ Chests were usually locked, and the third notebook reveals the locations of keys and master keys for boxes, chests and rooms containing parts of the collection. It is perhaps no great surprise that the library was the centre of Harris’s collection and a room he had devoted resources and care to remodelling. In keeping with philosophical discourse, Harris compared the mind to a library with a single classificatory system – arguing that the mind should be ‘furnished, like a good Library, with proper Cells or Apartments’ in which ‘our Ideas both of Being and its Attributes’ can be filed, ready for recall when required.⁸⁰

Whilst the library was the primary location for Harris’s collection, the catalogues also refer to an exchequer room, a chapel and two closets – adjacent to the library and the chapel respectively. In many cases, the locations of artefacts are given in precise detail, such as a ‘Cellarii Geographia’ being housed in ‘R.5 – lower shelf’.⁸¹ Similarly, ‘Large Medals of eminent Persons in Russia’ made of copper and acquired by Harris’s daughter, Gertrude, in October 1779, were to be found ‘in the lowest Drawer of the second Chest’.⁸² When describing the position of a ‘Fine Mezzotinto’ on the upper shelf of the second chest, Harris noted that they share a shelf with ‘six Impressions in wax, given me by that excellent artist Mr. Wray, from Intaglio’s cut by himself’.⁸³ In the third notebook, the relocation of articles from one place to another was considered worth recording. On 20 August 1777, ‘I removed, from the Closet in my Library’ one quarto manuscript, five folio manuscripts, a further couple of marked folio manuscripts and ‘placed [them] in my Exchequer on the shelf over the door’.⁸⁴ Whilst the category of artefact comprises one part of the spatial organisation, security also seems to be a deciding factor. In the exchequer, Harris kept keys to the chapel, the harpsichord, the library and the library closet. However, he kept the keys to the exchequer itself, the chapel closet and a master key for the library and library closet in his pocket, close at hand.⁸⁵ Whilst these notebooks were practical guides to accessing and understanding this diverse and valuable collection, they occasionally hint at the connection Harris made between himself and his objects. For example, in the front of the notebook describing the arrangement of papers and keys, Harris pinned a declaration, dated 1776, by Matthew Burgate that he had made groundless aspersions against James Harris.⁸⁶ By combining these details, Harris articulated something of the sense of self that was harboured by a personal collection, relating the safekeeping of his reputation to the security of his prized things.

Beyond the accessibility of Harris’s collection, the two catalogues occasionally attend to the circumstances of purchase and provenance of individual artefacts or groups of objects. They also highlight the Harris family’s elite social connections, the first Catalogue recording that the ‘Antiquities of Herculaneum’ were acquired via Harris’s son as a gift from the King of Spain.⁸⁷ Harris notes that the ‘first volume contains a Catalogue of the Curiositys found there’, ‘the four next volumes contain the Pictures; the two last, the statues & bronzes’.⁸⁸ Other acquisitions were sourced closer to home: ‘In May 1776 I bought at Boydel’s fine Printshop in Cheapside the Regulus and the Wolfe, both after the Pictures of West; also two elegant oval Landscapes (the figures graved by Basto-Cozzi) both after the Paintings of Leuterberg. The Regulus, being an original Proof, cost me three Guineas.’⁸⁹ Harris was spending part of a legacy of five guineas that he had been left by his ‘worthy Friend, Dr John Hoadly, Master of St Cross, & Chancellr of the Diocese of Winchester’.⁹⁰ The choice of artwork was not an idle one as Harris concluded that ‘these beautifull Works were things, which I knew I should often contemplate’ and in so doing ‘reflect on the Affability, the Ingenuity, and the Virtue of that good man’.⁹¹

Harris clearly benefitted from his wide-ranging social contacts to facilitate his collecting. He had, for example, secured ‘an Impression in wax from a small Gemm’ of ‘the pensive Hercules’ from Mr Hoare of Bath, who had himself acquired it in Italy. Harris commented on this ‘curious’ artefact, suggesting that it was a copy of the Ancient Greek sculptor, Lysippos, whose original works had been ‘destroyed (together with many more invaluable statues) in the year 1205 by the Barbarians of Baldwyn’s Crusade, when they sackt Constantinople’.⁹² The catalogue includes a further cross-reference to a work of reference with relevant page numbers. Thus, the catalogues speak not only to the importance of given objects to Harris himself, but also to the network of friends with which Harris shared his research and interest in classical antiquity. These documents appear to have been designed primarily as an aid to memory for the organisation of the collection as a whole, but the references to the particulars of prized items, the circumstances of purchase or the personal associations of given artefacts suggest that Harris’s social and intellectual networks intruded on his task of cataloguing. It is possible that he had an eye towards the use of his catalogues by those tasked with distributing his personal effects at death. However, the ad hoc quality of the inclusion of these details implies something less planned and more intuitive. They provide a glimpse of the networks of association that surrounded his collection and stretched far beyond the recesses of his library.

In these examples of collectors and collecting, several themes emerge. The importance of correspondence networks and the acquisition, via intermediaries, of rare and special specimens and artefacts have been well-studied. For the wealthy, foreign travel also offered opportunities to collect, especially works of art and historical artefacts. However, here it is clear that naturalists could turn a life rooted in a particular location to their analytical advantage. The inability to travel was certainly no barrier to this kind of enquiry. As Chapter 5 will show, the descriptive intensity made possible by prolonged engagement with particular species of wildlife was of real benefit. Whilst the collectors discussed here are drawn from the elites, they do offer considerable detail about the domestic arrangement and safeguarding of their objects. The way collections were arranged in their homes was highly meaningful, evoking important aspects of the artefacts’ histories, aesthetic qualities and social resonance. The curiosity, alongside the specimens and artefacts, was something to be passed on to future generations – generating linkages across time as well as space.

Conclusion

Collecting, especially on the scale of elite collectors in this period, is classed as an activity that transcends the parameters of home and occupies the grander spaces of public, intellectual life. However, for those who did amass and did so at some scale, the home was clearly the location for this pursuit. The household was not a passive container in which objects of meaning could be placed. On the contrary, the home offered collectors the possibility of displaying, organising, safe-keeping and interpreting their possessions and doing so iteratively over time. By identifying the role of the home in practices of foundational importance to many forms of enquiry in this period, their meanings are transformed. Instead of artificially separating the ‘scientific’ from the ‘everyday’, the discussion here has shown that they formed part of a piece and that the former can only be fully understood by acknowledging its domestic habits and ethos. The next chapter will move on to consider the activity of observation and will do so by attending to the ways it was shaped by the characteristics and contingencies of home.