Franks, Pitt Rivers and the Government
Pitt Rivers' attitude to the British Museum
Henry Christy (1810 - 1865)
Franks, Pitt Rivers and the Government
Extract from John Mack's Antiquities and the Public: the Expanding Museum 1851 - 1896 in Caygill & Cherry 1997Of all the great collections that came within Frank's reach, the Pitt-Rivers [sic] was the one that got away. The collection was ultimately turned down by the Government, despite Franks producing a compromise solution whereby the Pitt-Rivers collection might have remained in South Kensington but been administered from a distance by the British Museum, as, after all, the Christy Collection had been in Victoria Street. The collection went to Oxford where by the time General Pitt-Rivers gave his Presidential Address to the 1888 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science it had been redisplayed on the same principles as before. Pitt Rivers' version of the story now roundly blamed Franks for the failure of the Government to endorse his scheme: 'some of the authorities of the British Museum thought it undesirable that two ethnographical museums should exist in London at the same time' (Pitt Rivers, 'Address as President of the Anthropological Section of the British Association, Bath 6 September 1888' in Reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, p827).
Pitt-Rivers [sic] went on to characterise the disjunction between his vision and that of Franks in more combative terms. Franks was heir to an élitist tradition. The 'arranging' had resulted in displays of exclusive interest to the few specialists, for the rest the result was incoherence:
The British Museum, with its enormous treasures of art, is itself only in a molluscous and invertebrate condition of development. For the education of the masses it is of no use whatsoever. It produces nothing but confusion in the minds of those who wander through its long galleries with but little knowledge of the periods to which the objects relate. The necessity of storing (presumably principally in the cases) all that can be obtained and all that is presented to them in the way of specimens precludes the possibility of a scientific or an educational arrangement. (Ibid, p827)
The Science and Art Department at South Kensington, his former hosts, fared little better in terms of public accessibility. Pitt-Rivers' [sic] comments have all the fervour of an enthusiastic, well-endowed evangelical with a popular mission. He was a difficult man. He fell out with other colleagues at Oxford, not least Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, the occupant of the first chair of social anthropology in Britain and father of social evolutionary thinking in the anthropological field. Yet Pitt-Rivers' [sic] views on the assumptions behind the style of presentation in the British Museum galleries are neither unprecedented nor eccentric.
To the ordinary visitor to the Museum galleries in the late decades of the nineteenth century the principles on which the displays were arranged would certainly have been obscure - or even, by the volume of exhibits, obscured. ... This passion for crowded spaces showing ranges and series of objects from similar cultures carried on well into the twentieth century. ... [An] anonymous commentator makes a distinction between the interests of those attracted by the spectacle of the British Museum, for whom the Great Exhibition and its offspring were one kind of progenitor, and the learned, scholarly visitor. The former suffered to serve the latter.
Within the Museum itself ... [p]opular appeal did count. In 1880, when Franks was instrumental in promoting the case for removing natural history to make way for the Christy Collection and the expansion that Christy money would allow, he drafted a submission which sought to balance the competing claims of the savant and the populous. Ethnography, he argued, would provide the bridge:
If there is a country where travellers and others have a right to expect that there should be a well organised and well arranged ethnographical collection, it certainly is in Great Britain which is in closer connection with all parts of the globe than any other nation. The museum has now at its disposal excellent materials for such a collection obtained at a trifling cost, and which could not easily be replaced. Moreover it is probably in great measure to the Ethnographical collection that the museum will look for its attraction to the less learned visitor and to replace the interest [excited] in them by the Zool. Collns. Although Mr Franks would be the last to measure the importance and the value of collections by mere numbers it must be remembered that in this country any museum is to some extent dependent for its supplies on the popularity of its attractions. (BM [MLA] draft report 8 May 1880)
Pitt Rivers' attitude to the British Museum
Extract from W. Chapman's unpublished D.Phil thesis, 1981
(p174 on; note that throughout this thesis, Chapman calls Pitt Rivers 'Fox'):
The British Museum's ethnographical collections might be said to be as old as the Museum itself. Many of its individual pieces, even in Fox's time, could be traced to the nuclear cabinet of curiosities of Sir Hans Sloan, donated to the nation in 1759 and serving as the beginning of the national collection. Sloan's mostly American and West African collection of 'Miscellanea' was augmented in turn by those of Richard Kaempler and James Petiver (1663 - 1718), and later, under the Museum's own authority, by the substantial South Seas collections of Byron and of Wallis and Carteret acquired in 1776 and 1770 respectively. Several pieces from the famous Cook collection followed soon afterwards through the several loans or bequests of the Admiralty, Sir Joseph Banks (1743 - 1826) and the Royal Society between 1771 and 1781. Expanded considerably during the early nineteenth century through the successive contributions of British travellers, tradesmen and naval personnel, the collection was, by Fox's day, unrivalled in range and variety, although the museums of other cities [in the UK] with which Fox was also familiar were gradually coming to emulate the British Museum's example.
Administratively, the British Museum's ethnographical collections originally had been linked to the Department of Natural History and Curiosities, remaining there, while other more specialist collections were gradually separated throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After 1836, the Department of Antiquities, ... was established and ethnography transferred to that new department. The first officially designated 'Ethnological Gallery' came shortly afterwards, in 1845. Finally in 1861, the ethnographical collections, together with Oriental antiquities, were fully separated from other antiquarian departments, and in 1866, they were placed under the charge of Fox's later friend Augustus Franks, along with other 'British and Medieval Antiquities'. It would remain attached to that department well into the twentieth century.
In the broadest sense, the British Museum collection could be said to have followed what Fox would later term, and criticize as 'the geographical method' from the first. Sloan's core collection was catalogued simply as 'Miscellanea', but since many collections ... had been gathered from single areas, they tended often to be listed together ... During the late eighteenth century, the essence of such a system was promoted, therefore, almost by default, since most of the new materials were from the same general geographical area - the South Seas. .... In 1808, the so-called geographical system was, in consequence, fairly well established.... The 'Ethnological Gallery' of 1845, ... gave a coherency or legitimacy to the system. No longer simply a convenient method of classification or arrangement, the British Museum's geographical system was becoming the principal method of organizing collections of that type ... Only a few, such as Fox, were intent to provide an alternative. ...
Fox was generally critical of the British Museum's ethnological department, referring to the department as an 'ethnological curiosity ... selected without any regard to the history or psychology' of the people which the collections represented. Also he saw its 'geographical arrangement' as less a considered system than a matter of convenience, which, in terms of its history, was probably true. ...
Henry Christy (1810 - 1865)
Extract from King's 'Franks and Ethnography', in Caygill & Cherry, 1997
... it is not yet clear when Christy began to collect ethnography. Like Franks [AW Franks, British Museum] he was 'powerfully influenced' by the Great Exhibition; it was probably this, and his European travel in the early 1850s, that led to his first steps in forming a collection. There is no specific literature to explain the intellectual genesis of his collection, but a crucial moment occurred in 1856 when Christy met the founder of social anthropology Edward Burnett Tylor (1832 - 1917) on an omnibus in Havana. They subsequently spent four months travelling through the Mexican altiplano. While it is usually assumed that the older Christy influenced the younger Tylor, Christy's vigorous collecting dates to the late 1850s after his encounter with Tylor. ... Christy appears to have travelled home through North America in 1856 and purchased significant materials in Canada, including an important Ojibwe shaman's drum.
Christy's significance is, however, more profound than in simply having introduced a future co-founder of anthropology, Tylor, to Mexico. In organising his collection Christy was eventually to bring to the British Museum the beginnings of a coherent paradigm for European prehistory: the Three Age system of Stone, Bronze and Iron. In 1852 Christy visited Copenhagen where he was impressed by the Danish museums ... [he knew] C.J. Thomsen (1788 - 1865), the archaeologist responsible for the first practical application of the Three Age system and curator of what became the National Museum of Denmark.
In 1861 Steinhauer [(1816 - 1897) assistant to Thomsen] was asked to catalogue Christy's collection and published a catalogue the following year. This arrangement, and the privately distributed publication, provided a scheme for looking at both Old World prehistory and ethnographic materials from outside Europe. Whereas today archaeologists use ethnographic models and analogies to elucidate ancient social and economic forms, in the nineteenth century the contemporary material culture of the non-European world was employed to substantiate the material finds of pre-historic Europe. These were then organised in the social evolutionary schemes of the 1860s. To achieve this end great series of artefacts were accumulated to explain European origins. Eskimoan materials, for instance, were examined with an eye to comparison with Palaeolithic European finds. ... The corollary of this collecting strategy was that there was no need for Franks [at the British Museum], in the 1860s, to acquire thorough documentation with the collections. In particular, the context - linguistic, symbolic and ethnographic - was irrelevant to the process of seriation. This was because, especially at the beginning of Franks' career, a series was significant only in relation to current models of European development. Non-European archaeology was simply fitted into a simple stage-by-stage developmental sequence. Christy, Franks, Blackmore and others acquired vast numbers of flaked and ground lithic materials, particularly from the Americas, for typological arrangement and comparison with their European equivalents.
Henry Christy's collection came to the British Museum under a section of his Will dated 5 February 1863 in which Trustees of his estate were empowered to 'make over the said Collections either in whole or in parts to an Institution..'. ... Christy died on 4 May 1865 and in an exchange which took place in November the collection was transferred by Christy's Trustees to the Trustees of the British Museum. The original idea was that Henry Christy's museum and home at 103 Victoria Street should be rapidly vacated. However, because of the lack of space in the British Museum it was recommended .. that the Victoria Street lease be retained for the time being. Franks gradually expanded the Museum into areas of the building which had previously had a domestic function ... The exact extent of the Christy collection in 1865 is uncertain but it may have included more than one thousand ethnographic items. ...
One of the conditions in the agreement of November 1865 was that the Trustees of the British Museum should prepare a catalogue within two years. Franks ... wrote the 1868 Guide to the Christy Collection. Apart from his own collection, Christy provided five thousand pounds for the development of the collection after his death. This money, identified by the designation 'Christy Fund', initially producing one hundred pounds a year in interest, enabled Franks to acquire many, perhaps twenty thousand, artefacts for the collection now identified by the designation 'Christy Fund'.