Odd this day

As it’s 25 April, it must be time to celebrate the 310th anniversary of somebody trying to get a smiley face burnt onto a bit of wood into the private collection which would eventually form the basis of the British Museum.

It was on this day in 1713, you see, that someone who called himself ‘Tim Cockleshell’ wrote to Hans Sloane enclosing this exciting new item for his extensive collection of objects from around the world. His letter read:

Whoever Tim Cockleshell was, he was taking the piss. This was given him by a Brahmin — i.e., from the priestly caste of the Indian subcontinent — and depicted an “Antient King” of Mexico, did it? Righto. (Never mind what a “Catoptrical Adustion” might be.)

A ‘nicknackatory’, incidentally, is — according to Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) — a toy ſhop.

I would have cropped this image more, but the definition of ‘nickumpoop’, while irrelevant, was too good to leave out

This wasn’t the only mockery Hans was subjected to. In The Transactioneer, a satire written 13 years earlier, one William King had mocked the Royal Society’s Secretary for the undiscriminating eclecticism of his collection

…hence the name on this letter — and King had a point. Just one part of Sloane’s collection, Vegetable Substances, had a “three-volume handwritten catalogue … [which] lists 12,523 items”, and included

Sloane’s collecting started when he travelled to Jamaica in 1687 as doctor to the governor, the Duke of Albemarle. When he came back two years later, he brought with him hundreds of plant specimens — and “the duke’s body preserved in a cask”.

While in Jamaica, he’d met colonist, slave-owner, and doctor Fulke Rose (and together they had treated former privateer Henry Morgan, of Captain Morgan rum fame). When Rose died, Sloane married his widow, whose wealth further fuelled Sloane’s collecting.

Sloane had cash of his own — being physician to Queen Anne, George I, and George II, he was what Tom Lehrer once described as the sort of doctor who specialises in diseases of the rich — but this marriage means that much of his collecting — and therefore, much of what’s in the British Museum — was financed by slavery (and that’s leaving aside the controversy over objects which were either rescued or nicked, depending on who you ask).

(Sloane is sometimes also credited with ‘inventing’ chocolate milk, which… isn’t entirely accurate.)

We might also ask why Sloane married Elizabeth anyway, given that one of his fellow collectors, William Courten, was — according to Sloane biography, Collecting the World — his “very particular and intimate friend”.

Maybe, just maybe, it was the money — which allowed him to build a network of suppliers of Stuff from around the world. Sooner or later…

He also bought other collectors’ collections when they died or just needed to sell. In fact, in 1702, he bought his ‘friend’ William Courten’s family collection, worth £50,000, for £2,500, so William could pay off his late father’s debts.

It’s usually said that Sloane left his collection of 71,000 objects to the nation, forming the basis for the British Museum. In fact, his trustees were instructed to sell it to George II for “the bargain price of £20,000”. One of them, Horace Walpole, wrote:

The king initially turned it down, on the grounds that “he did not believe there are twenty thousand pounds in the Treasury”, but after the matter was raised in parliament, the act establishing the British Museum passed on 7 June 1753.

The crucial question, though, is obvious: is this ridiculous smiley face in the British Museum? Well, Sloane was not taken in — the name of the sender and the use of the word ‘nicknackatory’ presumably being enough to tell him this was a precursor to Edna Welthorpe and…

Front covers: The Timewaster Letters, Robin Cooper; Delete This At Your Peril! The Bob Servant Emails by Neil Forsyth; David Thorne, The Internet is a Playground; The Complete Henry Root Letters

BUT! Rather magnificently, he kept both the letter and the very silly object, and both remain in the British Library (Sloane Manuscripts 4043 ff. 143–5, if you want to go and have a look) so they are part of this nation’s rich and glorious heritage. Hurrah!