Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum by James Delbourgo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum by James Delbourgo Neil Guthrie James Delbourgo. Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2017. Pp. xxxi + 504. $35.00. This is a good book—well researched and competently handled—but it does not always know what it wants to be. The Belknap imprint (Harvard's equivalent of Oxford's Clarendon Press) suggests it is meant to represent superior scholarship of enduring value—but the book itself seems to be pitched at an educated general reader, or even an undergraduate audience, rather than at scholars. In calling his subject "the first Sloane Ranger," Mr. Delbourgo strikes a false note. While Sloane gave his name (as proprietor) to what became one of the posh parts of London, he was in no meaningful way the precursor of the upper-class social set whose lives centered around Sloane Square in the late twentieth century. A scholarly audience also does not need the potted histories of Bacon and the scientific revolution, British political and dynastic struggles of the seventeenth century, the slave trade, the East India Company, European contact with China and Japan, or British North America. For some readers, these may provide useful background on unfamiliar topics; to readers of this journal, they may at times feel like filler. There could have been less of that and more of both Hans Sloane and the British Museum. While Mr. Delbourgo's objective [End Page 95] was probably not to write a traditional biography, Sloane lurks curiously in the margins for much of the book. There is biographical information of an ODNB variety, but no insight into the character of the man. The opening 140-odd pages of Collecting the World tell us a lot about Jamaica, Sloane's Natural History of the island, and the book's compilation. There is little in this section about Sloane personally, beyond his apparent lack of engagement with the enslaved population of Jamaica (although he took specimens from them). The author concludes that Sloane's own use of his collections during his life-time—apart from making them occasionally accessible to scientists and others—remains unclear. This leaves the reader without a concrete sense of the motivations behind the prodigious accumulation. The subject is the origins of the British Museum rather than the museum itself, but the institution occupies only a short tailpiece in the final forty pages of the book. There is the occasional factual error. Jacobites could not have tried to install Bonnie Prince Charlie on the British throne when Queen Anne died in 1714 (the prince was not born until 1720). It is unclear what Mr. Delbourgo means when he says the Hudson's Bay Company's territories were "later claimed by Canada" (they were ceded by the company to the new Dominion in 1870). Mr. Delbourgo does engage with the volume and variety of Sloane's collections. Statistics give a sense of both: approximately 32,000 coins and medals; 1,125 antiquities; 12,506 "Vegetable Substances"; 5,843 insects; 2,256 precious stones; 2,098 "Miscellaneous Things"; and much else besides. Many of the animal specimens had rotted by the nineteenth century and had to be jettisoned, but many of the plants survive, and parts of Sloane's vast assemblage remain unexplored today. Mr. Delbourgo tries to give us the flavor of it all, enumerating (in many places) a multiplicity of categories and individual examples of the material amassed by the voracious Sloane. There is a good account of those (including Pope, William King, Edward Young, and probably Swift) who satirized Sloane in his day as an undiscriminating, unscientific bulk buyer who preferred oddities to more useful, representative examples. At times, however, Mr. Delbourgo himself appears to fall into the trap of cataloguing for the sake of it, or out of sheer enthusiasm. As a result, Collecting the World can seem at times like the "nick-nackatory" that Sloane's contemporary detractors saw as the product of his insatiable acquisitiveness. This is "the wonder-cabinet problem" experienced by Sloane's own visitors, stupefied "with sheer riotous abundance." Mr...