In Hot Springs, South Dakota, there's a museum—the Pioneer Museum, Where the Past is Present!—occupying the town's original red-rock schoolhouse high on a hill overlooking the canyon in the southern Black Hills. And it's a fine little place, with old washing machines, wood cook stoves, and kerosene lamps. Old furniture, hand-crafted carpenter's tools, and pot-bellied stoves. The glass liniment bottles and steel instruments of a pioneer-era doctor's office. The paper packets and ribbon spools of an old general store.
No one would call this a first-rate museum, akin to the Smithsonian in Washington or the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Even by the standards of small-town museums, Hot Spring's Pioneer Museum doesn't stack up well—not in a nation with, say, the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Alice Walton used her Walmart fortune to assemble a good collection of works by American artists from Gilbert Stuart to Andy Warhol. Or the museum in Shelburne, Vermont, where sugar heiress Electra Havemeyer Webb used her fortune to collect Hudson River School paintings and folk art, opening her collection to the public in 1947. Or the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, Wyoming. Or the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut.
Still, in its way, the Pioneer Museum may be truer to the original idea of a museum than many of those more distinguished places. And that's because it's a jumble. A mess. A riot of whatever got left to the museum by whichever of the townsfolk thought their grandmother's collection of blue-glass knickknacks was a special thing that deserved preserving. Or their great-uncle's set of spent Minié bullets, collected on annual summer trips to Civil War battlefields. Or their great-aunt's complete collection of native bird feathers. The hoarder's indiscriminate madness was always somewhere near the root of the notion that curios needed to be displayed for the greater edification and entertainment of the public. The strange magpie impulse to assemble sets of odds and ends was always the origin of the museum.
Or so, at least, it seems from the life of Hans Sloane, the 18th-century British doctor responsible for the birth of the British Museum. As James Delbourgo tells Sloane's story in his new biography, Collecting the World, the museum emerges as a very modern idea—and an idea very much tied to Enlightenment self-assurance, the seafaring of European imperialism, a Protestant dismissal of Catholic superstition, and a distinctly British form of eccentricity.
Perhaps the Australopithecus and Neanderthals set small rows of pyrites and shiny rocks on a shelf in their dens. Perhaps ancient kings and emperors used rare and fancy objects to decorate their summer palaces. Perhaps the medieval churches collected saints' relics. But the notion of cataloging the world, the thought of importing samples of nearly everything, was born of a modern confidence in the power of curiosity to categorize and encyclopedize both nature and the social order. "There was nothing inevitable about the creation of public museums," Delbourgo notes—and he goes to warn us, in these days of social agitation, that "there is nothing inevitable about their survival."
A historian of science at Rutgers University, Delbourgo tells in extended fashion the life of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), whose wealth from his high-tone medical practice and wife's slave-plantations in Jamaica allowed him to become the premier collector of his age. By the time he died, he had assembled over 3,000 manuscripts and 50,000 books—together with 32,000 coins, 6,000 seashells, 12,000 "vegetable substances," and innumerable other objects. His will left all of it to the British nation, on the condition that the government provide £20,000 to erect a building to hold it all and display it "not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the publick."
Sloane was born a member of the Anglo-Protestant gentry of Ireland. After medical training in London and Paris (and an early friendship with the scientist Robert Boyle), he managed an appointment as personal physician for the new governor of Jamaica, the Duke of Albemarle. His time in the Caribbean was not a complete success—his principal patient died of drunken liver failure at age 35—but it confirmed him in his botanical interests, collecting the samples that allowed him to write his Natural History of Jamaica (1707). And it established him in the remunerative position as a doctor to the high aristocracy.
He married well and used his large income to purchase at auction any available collection of rarities (including that of the antiquarian polymath Sir Thomas Browne). The only man ever to be head of both the Royal College of Physicians and the scientists' Royal Society, he used his connections, correspondence partners, and wealth to persuade sea captains to provide him material from around the world. Benjamin Franklin schemed to meet him. Persian visitors delivered historical and natural oddities. Social climbers brought him rarities that they thought might entice him to let them into his rarified social circles.
Sloane's collecting was far from discriminate, and he seemed under only the smallest compulsion to impose order on it all. Perhaps the sole unity that emerges from his writing is a vague sense that a full cataloguing of the natural world would demonstrate the essential unity of Anglican Protestantism and modern science.
The British nation, as recipient of his lifelong collecting, would prove surprisingly churlish about recognizing his contributions, and one of James Delbourgo's purposes in writing Collecting the World is to restore to historical memory the name of Hans Sloane. But forgetfulness about Sloane is interestingly connected to the direction in which the new British Museum would grow.
At its opening, the institution was mocked by one critic as a "nicknackatory": a mishmash of iron ores placed beside Chinese shoes, Hindu necklaces ranged between stuffed African animals. Within a few decades, however, the museum had begun to emerge as a testament to British imperialism and social domination of the globe. It became a symbol, perhaps the greatest symbol, of the nation and its central place in geopolitics. All things flowed to London—and the proof was that the odder and more interesting bits of the world's flotsam and jetsam ended up on display at the British Museum.
One element remained unchanged from Hans Sloane's original vision, however. The museum was open to all, rich and poor alike, both as a matter of egalitarian principle and as a social device intended to aid the education and uplift of the working classes.
Such things are often mocked these days. The British Museum is seen by its detractors as a set of collections begun with Sloane's wife's slave money and expanded through Britain's cultural rape of its colonies. If the idea of museums began in the early modern confidence of Enlightenment Europe, then all museums must be considered suspect, instruments of an intellectual imperialism that imposed rational order on the world with gunboats and colonial conquest.
That's a shame, for human beings have always had something of the collector's impulse. And those human whims found their fullest, most useful expression in the modern museum—whether one of the world's truly great institutions, in the case of the British Museum, or a minor hodgepodge of local knickknacks, in the case of South Dakota's Pioneer Museum. We did not collect these things and put them on display because we are despoilers of oppressed cultures. We collected them and put them on display because we are human beings—which is to say, people who always have in them at least a small portion of the mad hoarder and the curious magpie.