From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections ed. by Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections ed. by Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter Toby Burrows Walker, Alison, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter, eds, From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections, London, British Library Publishing, 2012; cloth; pp. x, 310; 72 colour illustrations; R.R.P. AU$89.95; ISBN 9780712358804. Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) was ‘arguably the greatest collector of the eighteenth century’ (p. 9), itself a great age of collecting in Western Europe. His huge collections of objects, plants, books, manuscripts, and art works – estimated to amount to nearly 80,000 items – formed much of the basis for the British Museum and its subsequent offshoots, the Natural History Museum and the British Library. They are also represented in numerous other institutions, from the Wellcome Library to the Victoria and Albert Museum to the National Portrait Gallery. They focus especially on natural history, medicine, and science – as befitting a man who succeeded Isaac Newton as the President of the Royal Society. According to one contemporary obituary, this was ‘perhaps the most magnificent … collection upon earth’ (p. 39). This volume brings together nineteen papers from a conference held at the British Library in 2010. The contributions reflect the extraordinary breadth of Sloane’s interests and activities, ranging across botany, medicine, and geology, the Netherlands, East Indies, and Jamaica, books, manuscripts, and pictures. They also cover Sloane’s long life and career as a very successful physician, scientist, benefactor, and entrepreneur. Also included is the first publication of the earliest surviving life of Sloane, written by Thomas Birch. Several themes stand out amid the richness of this almost overwhelming variety. A number of essays look at the ways in which Sloane’s networks of contacts, and his extensive correspondence with them, enabled him to assemble such a massive ‘collection of collections’. His ability to use ‘the power of curious specimens as levers of ascent’ (p. 21) in eighteenth-century society is reflected in the accounts of his life and career. Another prominent theme is how the global reach of eighteenth-century Britain is reflected in Sloane’s collecting activities, not least in his own travels in Jamaica. Several of the contributors work to analyse and exploit the numerous catalogues which [End Page 275] Sloane himself compiled and commissioned. And several work to reconstruct how the collection was organised and displayed in Sloane’s house in Chelsea, and to reconstruct now-dispersed elements of the collection, in an effort to see the collection as it was in Sloane’s lifetime. Sloane’s motivations for collecting on such a gigantic scale remain enigmatic; he was reticent about his aims, and the man behind the collection remains elusive. But these essays combine to form the best account to date of his remarkable life and work, as well as identifying a number of important lines for future inquiry – not just into Sloane himself but also into other collectors on a similarly massive scale. [End Page 276] Toby Burrows The University of Western Australia Copyright © 2014 Toby Burrows