Money matters: ‘following the money’ to reconstruct Walter Rothschild’s ‘zoological enterprise’ and the history of the Zoological Museum Tring, 1889–1900

Abstract

ABSTRACT Late-Victorian banker and private collector Lionel Walter Rothschild (1868–1937) dedicated his life to the study of zoology. He collected and studied huge quantities of zoological material, created a museum in which to house and display that material for the benefit of researchers and visiting publics, and started his own zoological journal for disseminating the research that he, his museum curators and other zoologists performed. Together, these activities constituted his ‘zoological enterprise’; the building of which depended on a constant stream of financial transactions. However, little consideration has been given to how money shaped its development. A focus on money and analysis of the surviving archival evidence of Rothschild’s financial transactions provides a novel methodology by which to explore his motives for the development of his zoological enterprise and the value he placed on its different parts. The argument is made that money is more than the merely pecuniary and that the approach of ‘following the money’ can therefore enhance our understanding of why museums, and enterprises like Rothschild’s, took the form and shape that they did.