#31: Collecting the World

By the time Hans Sloane died in 1753 he had amassed and catalogued vast numbers of natural and artificial objects from around the world. In his will he stipulated that these should be kept together, housed in London, and available to anyone who wanted to see them. He asked a knockdown price of only £20,000, to be given to his two daughters. Parliament, pressed by trustees who he had lined up, eventually agreed and so the British Museum was born.

Collecting the World promises an exploration of ‘The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane’. So how much of his ‘life’ and ‘curiosity’ do we get? We learn that Sloane suffered a long childhood illness, and always ate and drank healthily afterwards. When young he was enthralled by gardens, talking admiringly of an early greenhouse in Chelsea Physic Garden which the head gardener Mr Watts warmed with ‘a great fireplace’ under the floor.

He was, says Delbourgo, ‘a cautious, sober and doggedly unimaginative Protestant empiricist – all of which he considered positive virtues as a man of science’. He saw his role as gathering fragments of nature, not interpreting them. (It would fall to later experts such as Linnaeus to use Sloane’s specimens to help build categories for understanding nature which we still use today). 

But generally Sloane does not emerge from the book as a distinct personality, and aspects of his personal life, such as his marriage, are not dwelt on. Instead, he’s interpreted in terms of the influences upon him – of the patrician Protestant Ulster where he grew up, of the ‘genteel and learned society’ of the London in which he moved, and of slave-era Jamaica, where he went as personal physician to the governor Christopher Monck, Duke of Albermarle, and where he collected large numbers of plant specimens.

A strength of the book is that it gives us hefty chunks of background to help us understand these influences. When Sloane calls Jamaica an island ‘in the torrid zone’, for example, we are told exactly what ‘torrid’ meant at the time, and given a brief outline of European attitudes to weather in the tropics, starting with Aristotle. When we read about visitors coming to see Sloane’s collections in London, we learn a bit about the tradition by which people toured collections and wonder cabinets in Europe, and how this linked with pilgrimages to saints’ relics. The book is perhaps aimed at the specialist rather than general reader, but such information makes it more widely accessible. 

Sloane's box of medical specimens

And what do we learn about the Sloane’s curiosity? ‘Curiosity was the currency of learned exchange and favour’, says the book, and there is plenty of detail about how the trade in objects bought influence and how Sloane, not having a university education, had to cultivate influential contacts. However, in this book Sloane’s love of exploration and discovery takes a backseat to the author’s interpretation of the pursuit of knowledge as a product and symbol of money and power. For example, the financial reasons for Sloane’s journey to Jamaica, and the likelihood that he would earn money from keeping slaves alive, is given more space than his desire to see new plants at first hand.
 

One result of this is to call into question the value of Sloane’s collections, since according to the book they are ‘an artefact of British imperial power’, and in fact I remain unclear about their value as continuing research resources or even just as interesting objects. Delbourgo’s view is that understanding the ‘global journeys’ of the objects Sloane collected reveal the origins of the British Museum, show us that objects’ meanings change over time, and highlight the ‘extraordinary variety of people – from savants to slaves’ who helped to contribute to the first public museums. I would like more evidence that they are relevant to our own time and even to the future. Still, the author also makes clear that much of Sloane’s collections have still not been examined properly, such as a 16th century watercolour of a ‘great temple’ at Constantinople by the English galley slave Thomas Morgan.

I also missed an enthusiastic voice – the book is a result of years of research and as so often in scholarly works, I would like to understand more of the researcher’s enthusiasm. There is even sometimes an undertone of distaste for its subject, perhaps because of Sloane’s links with slavery and Empire or because he was a very rich man who charged high fees. For example, we are told that Sloane was ‘harping on a familiar theme’ when he said insects on Jamaica were similar to English ones – but is it not natural to try to understand something new by comparing it with what you already know?

The book is wonderfully illustrated and I would recommend it to anyone who would like a detailed account of Sloane’s collections, interpreted according to the social and political mores of our own time.

To learn more about Sloane’s collections online see the Reconstructing Sloane project, which aims to digitise all Sloane’s manuscripts and collections. To see some of them in reality, visit the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum.

Sir Hans Sloane by Stephen Slaughter (1736)