This rich volume recounts a curious but characteristic phase in Victorian history, the age of the collector, a kind of national kleptomania. Jacqueline Yallop, a novelist and former curator of the Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield, points out that we take for granted our modern world of auctions, car boot sales, public collections and museums, but she wants to “take a step back, to a period during the 19th century when many of the aspects of collecting which we now take for granted were being newly explored, when collectors were emerging into the public eye and when the hunt for objects was at its most inventive and eccentric”. Victorian collecting, she adds, had a character of its own. She sets the scene with the International Exhibition of Industry and Art in London in 1862. “The exhibition was a symbol of mid-Victorian aspiration, manufacturing success and consumer confidence. It was a message to the world about the ambition of Britain and its Empire. But to the millions of visitors that pushed through the crowded galleries, it was also, quite simply, a chance to admire and desire beautiful and unusual things.”
Yallop sheds new light on some of the colourful characters – the magpies, squirrels and thieves of her title – of the High Victorian Age.
John Charles Robinson (died 1913) trained as an artist in Paris but became a great collector and advocate of museums. With tours and adventures around Spain and Italy, he helped foster the British adoration of the art of the Renaissance.
The formidable Charlotte Schreiber (died 1895) taught herself Arabic, Hebrew and Persian and, at the age of 29, married the rich widower John Guest, MP for Merthyr and master of the word’s biggest iron works. When he died in 1852. she married Charles Schreiber, MP for Cheltenham and a brilliant classics scholar. Charlotte and her husband embarked on a European campaign – with her famous Big Red Bag – collecting china. The accounts of their travels and travails are among the most fascinating in this book: “The bag itself was not, on the whole, remarkable. It was roomy and practical and slightly patched. What was special was what was in it. By May 1871, when the Schreibers were making their steady progress towards the outskirts of the French capital, they had been on the road already (not to mention the seas, the railways and the back alleys) for almost a year. They’d been through the south of France, across the Pyrenees, taking pickaxes to the wheels and ships to the horses when needed, then on to Girona, Barcelona, Seville, Cadiz and Gibraltar and back through northern Spain into France, all the time stuffing the bag with “the spoils of the hunt – a delicate fan of exotic feathers, a perfect silver serving jug, pieces of fine china”. They were amazed at the state of the country after the Franco-Prussian war. Such are the hazards of treasure seeking. The Schreiber collection of English porcelain, the finest in the world, is housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the 18th century fans, games and playing cards are in the British Museum.
As a boy, Joseph Mayer had obtained a modest collection of Roman coins and fragments of pottery that proved to be the seedlings of the huge harvest of antique valuables he would bequeath the country after a lifetime collecting, excavating and sponsoring efforts to preserve the glories of the past. He was silversmith and successful businessman in his own right, a Radical, Non-conformist, patriotic Englishman with a love of knowledge for its sake, the antithesis of the Victorian philistine, who contributed to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857.
He travelled the continent, doing deals and sending parcels and crates back home. He is particularly associated with porcelain and pottery and assembled a considerable collection of Josiah Wedgwood (the Wedgwood archive is now housed at Keele University). “He was not interested in gestures. He envisaged sturdy and practical facilities for the young and the old, for learning and for entertainment, not an empty monument to his wealth.”
Murray Marks (died 1918), a Dutch connoisseur of Oriental porcelain, spent his working life in London at the centre of literary and artistic life. His legacy was the creation of the perfect means of exhibiting wares, the modern gallery: “a ground floor showroom 30ft wide, 50ft long and over 12ft tall, a splendid airy space, with two more intimate showrooms upstairs… there was a neo-Georgian bow window with carved wooden frames to lure customers off the street with a promise of old fashioned courtesy and hand picked treasures and the huge doors were moulded with Renaissance ornament.” His story is spiced with his adventures with moneymen, forgeries and various squabbles, but Marks should be remembered as the creator of this style of space at the Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street.
Stephen Wootton Bushell, a 23-year-old doctor who sailed from Southampton in 1868 to take up his appointment at the British legation in Peking, learned Chinese and became the first Westerner to undertake the serious study of Chinese art. He was a pioneer in this revolutionary development in European aesthetics, hitherto dominated by loyalty to the world of Greek and Roman antiquity. “Few collectors in the future would have such an opportunity to unravel the mysteries of an unknown nation through its objects, or would make so much of the chance when it came”.
This delightful book ends with a thoughtful meditation on Ruskin’s comment: “To stay what is fleeting… to immortalise things that have no duration.”
