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the people in them, and then turned that knowledge and those narratives into instructive public display for the masses. Outside the capital, similar museums on smaller scales were cropping up in university towns and regional cities. If you were taken as a child to see, say, an Egyptian mummy, a fossilised tree fern, a locally excavated Roman mosaic and a selection of mothy taxidermy, you were most likely experiencing
; wrinkled, and dry as they: She is Egyptian Mummy.’93 Skin’s texture, then, could be as telling as its evident colour. Thus the courtly upstart from George Chapman’s Gentleman usher is thought to have an appropriately despicable aspect: Strozza: … Medice That fustian Lord, who in his buckram face, Bewraies, in my conceit, a map of basenesse. Vincentio: I, theres a parcell of unconstrued stuffe, That unknowne Minion raisde to honours height, Without the helpe of Vertue, or of Art.94 In like manner, a rakish pair of courtiers engage in some misogynistic gossip about a
that transgressed the boundary and stung her, his body was violated in turn. He received one slap to the face for each mosquito discovered. The punishment was executed in public, adding shame to injury. 51 If necessary, Gehrts's body was enveloped ‘from head to foot in blankets and tablecloths’ like that of ‘an Egyptian mummy’. 52 German colonial officers gave up their personal quarters or houses to ensure that the White Woman was accommodated in an enclosed space that
early years and still catalogued only in French. 70 Both men mentioned an Egyptian mummy (Burmeister in fact mentioned three) as featuring in the collection, a curiosity that was neither natural nor Argentine in its origin. 71 The presence of these items suggests that South American museum curators sometimes found it hard to confine themselves to the products of their own
is extremely harmful’ and recommended filling the mind ‘with pleasant thoughts and concentrate on something outside yourself’. 128 Powell in 1926 recommended, ‘Lectures, provided they are not about Egyptian Mummies or some other equally doleful subject, form another useful means of uplift’, and ‘Sermons, too, help if your preacher be an optimist!’ 129 For many reading was an important source of cheer with Browning and Burns's poetry and the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Punch magazine commended for inspiring a ‘mood of hope and courage and good cheer
’s bounties’. 119 Alongside the Chinese lived other non-Europeans like the ‘swarthy Syrian hawker’, his baby a ‘brown atom of humanity’ resembling an ‘Egyptian mummy’, ‘Indians, negroes, half-castes, [and] half-breeds’. 120 However, dismissing the task of ‘purifying the morals’ of such ‘visitors … [as] a Herculean one’, child rescuers focused on ‘the white heathen, those of
an alternative world of forbidden knowledge that seemingly centres on the type of pre-Christian pleasures that we have witnessed elsewhere in Machen. This is a decadent world in which amorality leads to death and Walters plays a key role in leading Mr Headley, the owner of the coin, to Dr Lipsius, who murders him and then disguises the body as an Egyptian mummy that he intends to sell to the British
matter; whether French or Cornish the ghostly inhabitants figure as foreign to the English tourist, contributing to the sense of Cornwall as different from the England of which it is at the same time a part. The difference between the Cornish and the foreign seems collapsible, as in the case of Leon’s African savagery, or Trelawney’s daughter’s exchangeability with the Egyptian mummy. In many stories of
Manchester, however, Dawkins found few ethnological objects in the Natural History Society collections that met his approval. He was seeking representative specimens rather than oddities, and the ‘curiosities’ in Peter Street were by definition were extra-ordinary. After the sale of most of them, only the Ancient Egyptian mummy Asru and a handful of ethnological pieces remained to be transferred to Owens College. Although few in number, these items nevertheless occupied the crucial hinge point of his planned arrangement of the Manchester Museum. In the 1870s Dawkins had
one occasion, Tawhiao fled an ensuing mob and protested on a couch in the tailor’s shop, the crowd’s ‘noses against the windowpanes’. 31 The delegation took in the sights: the British Museum (according to press accounts, Tawhiao fled in fear of the Egyptian mummies after fifteen minutes), St Paul’s, the Strangers’ Gallery of the Commons (the press reported that one member of the delegation nodded