Inside the Curio Cabinets of Victorian England

Carole Hamilton,
Cary Academy English teacher

The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.  R. L. Stevenson

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.  Keats

If you love to collect things, then you can understand the Victorians!  From butterflies to buttons, the Victorians loved to collect and display their treasures in scrapbooks, in their parlors, and in museums.  Every respectable Victorian mansion—and many smaller homes—contained a wood and glass curio cabinet, designed to house the curiosities that the owners of the house had amassed. Collecting was encouraged by teachers and family: shells, fossils, books, toys.  Reading about natural history was supposed to lead to the desire to collect.  Children learned from an early age to collect the wonders of nature, and adults collected trifles produced by the glorious factories of the new Industrial Age as evidence of their wealth.

Prince Albert was a great collector.  Children collected butterflies, shells, mosses, and fossils.  Men collected pipes.  Young ladies collected stamps.  Victorian families collected plates, silverware, and bric-a-brac, while officers in the far-flung territories of the Empire sent home shrunken heads, monkey paws, scarabs, jewels, canopic jars, and other antiquities from subjected cultures.  A walk through the many vast halls of the British Museum and Paris’s Louvre attest to the rapacious nature with which the Imperialists absconded with the prizes of the cultures they dominated.  Science museums collected rare species, oddities of nature, and culinary curiosities such as sea slugs and shark fins.  Cataloguing and collecting in the many varieties of “lesser” species served to confirm Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.  The species were ordered from simple to complex, with humans at the top of the pyramid.  Collecting lesser species reinforced the human sense of superiority over the objects and beings they arranged and confined in their display cases.  “This is a collecting age,” a journal The Graphic claimed in 1869.  Almost twenty years earlier, the Great Exhibition of 1851 had opened, housing thousands of collectibles within the shimmering glass roof and walls of the magnificent Crystal Palace.  The greenhouse-like design was perfect for showing off the treasures of the world, and it became an icon of Britain’s central, commanding position in that world.

Most Victorian affluent homes held the precursors for the Crystal Palace—the wood and glass curio cabinet.  Inside would be the prizes of private collections, from bird’s nests to silver pitchers. Country homes had long galleries and parlors.  The Victorian mansions that have survived as museums today looked like museums in their heyday, too; their parlors were stuffed with rugs, feathers, animal hides and mounted animal heads.  Collecting animal skins was a kind of testimony to humanity’s position at the top of the “great chain of being,” the fittest to have survived natural selection.  Victorian manors and mansions usually stood on the tops of the hills, dominating the landscape, announcing their owners’ sovereignty over all they surveyed. The Crystal Palace was like a giant curio cabinet in the grand parlor of London, filled with thousands of objects, the products and materials of art and industry.  It encompassed nature as well, since the trees that were on the property were left standing within the structure.

While the wealthy classes displayed costly valuables, the middle classes had their own category of goods: silverplate, a less expensive form of silver cutlery and Wedgewood china, marketed to middle class collectors who wanted to economize on their dinnerware.  Queen Victoria herself owned a Wedgewood dinner service, making the moderately priced china even more desirable.  Ostentatious display of wealth was expected.  Adam Smith, the great economist of the eighteen century, had said that “With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eyes is never so complete as when they appear to posses those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.”  Ladies ore dresses that were miniature architectural marvels, with layers of hoops, flounces, and yards of material attesting to their wearer’s investment in looking good.  Ladies and their equally dandified men made public promenades along the avenues, so that other could see  them in their finery.  Houses, like dresses, were adorned with so much superficial ornamentation, that the adjective “victorian” has come to designate extraneous or elaborate design. 

None of this profusion of design and accumulation of “things” could have been possible without one key invention of the nineteenth century: the police force. Prior to the advent of the British Police department, no one in England dared to own silverware or any other valuable; “The possession of such property at that time endangered their lives,” stated Edwin Chadwick, a Victorian gentleman.  Before the institution of a police force, people had to hide their valuables from sigh, for fear of theft.  Then, in 1829, Sir Robert Peel created a Metropolitan Police Force in London.  The term “bobbies” come from his nickname.  Bobbies wore tall hats that were stiff enough to stand on to peer over walls, looking for criminals.  The Victorians addressed crime by watching over society.  Many prisons were designed along the principles of 18^th century Jeremy Benthams’ Panopticon, where the rooms surrounded a central, overseeing guard tower that could observe all prisoners all day long.  With authority figures looking on, people began to feel safer about displaying their valuables.  In fact, they wanted to display them, to demonstrate their status. The Victorians became obsessed with seeing and being seen. The British claim that the ‘sun never set’ on the British Empire was as true physically as it was metaphorically.

Seeing and being seen could be extended beyond the moment through another Victorian invention--photography.  The first photographic method, the Daguerrotype of 1839, captured an image onto a silver-plated metal plate using a huge camera.  The subjects of daguerrotypes seem rather stiff compared with modern photos, due to the processing time of several minutes, as well as the formality of the era.  Queen Victoria was so delighted with the idea of capturing permanently what she could see, that she established a National Photographic record for collecting “photographic records of al objects and scenes of interest in the British Isles, and to deposit them with explanatory notes in the British Museum, where they may be safely stored, and be accessible to the public under proper regulations.” 

Victorians were great sightseers, and with photographs and picture postcards, they could now collect images as well as impressions and memories.   By the end of the century, French writer Emile Zola would quip, “You cannot say you have thoroughly seen anything until you have got a photograph of it.” (1901).  Those who could not afford to travel, could still collect images in diorama and panorama views of the outreaches of the Empire, such as ‘A Trip on the Nile,’ ‘Jerusalem and the Holy Land,’ ‘Overland Route to India’, and so on.  In France Jules Verne wrote a book with the title, Around the World in 80 Days (1873), expressing the sentiment that Victorians could, with a little effort, encompass the world they dominated.

Adam Smith had written in his Wealth of Nations (1776) that the accumulative effect of each individual in a commonwealth seeking as much money as possible would ultimately benefit the nation.  With everyone working selfishly for his own end, an “invisible hand” would distribute the benefits to the whole country.  Smith’s popular book was the economic counterpart to Darwin’s theory, in suggesting that the fittest would be the richest people. 

The Crystal Palace, with display of the wealth of all nations organized and catalogued was a fitting tribute to Industry worldwide, but especially to England’s central, dominating position in that wealthy enterprise.

Bibliography

 Briggs, Asa.  Victorian Things  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Teacher resource:  Explores the Victorian mania for collecting, from an economic point of view.  440 pages.

 Fomaro, Tom Bentham’s Panopticon [web page] http://www.dnai.com/~mackey/thesis/panpic.html [April 20, 1999] [accessed January 28, 2000]

A graduate thesis on “authoring” on the web that has a paragraph on the Panopticon and a copy of Bentham’s diagram.

 Judd, Denis.  The Victorian Empire: 1837-1901  NY: Praeger Publishers, 1970.

A detailed and rather gruesome account, with photographs and illustrations, of the rise and decline of the British Empire.

Ray, John and Mary.  The Victorian Age  London: Heinemann, 1966.

All aspects of everyday Victorian life, empire, and revolution, briefly described with many illustrations.  Textbook style with study questions.