What is so fascinating about Stirm's letter is the way no principle of organisation seems to operate, the way everything is jumbled together and exerts an equal pull on the viewer, a goose which grows on a tree in Scotland and pieces of the True Cross, the robe of the King of Virginia and a Passion carved on a stone. Stirm's only form of taxonomy seems to be the list. Just as the Mona Lisa in the Louvre is, for most visitors, merely ‘Leonardo's masterpiece’, to be wondered at before one passes on, so the elk's hoof, the mermaid's hand or the instrument used by the Jews for circumcision, wrenched from their original contexts, become objects of curiosity and nothing else.
This sense of the sheer abundance of objects in the world, no longer clearly linked to the single unifying story of Creation and Redemption, fuelled by the discovery of the Americas — and, later, of the Pacific and the African interior — is reflected in much of the writing of the period. The enormous lists of Rabelais and Ben Jonson, the overwhelming number of examples of melancholy in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and of quincunxes and even ‘vulgar errors’ in Thomas Browne — these strike the reader as expressions of delighted exuberance at the sheer variety and richness of the world, but also as a kind of panic at the lack of any real or underlying order. And the attitude is not confined to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nicholas Thomas, in a fascinating article on Cook's Pacific voyages, describes, for example, a set of plates of curiosities in the British Museum, John and Andrew van Rymsdyck's Museum Britannicum (1788):
The plates included Taylor-birds and wasps' nests; the Oculus Mundi, or eye of the world, a Chinese pebble that becomes transparent in water; a penknife with a gold tip, employed in an alchemist's sleight-of-hand; a brick from the Tower of Babel; ‘A very curious Coral, modeled by Nature, in the form of a Hand or Glove’; Governor Pitt's brilliant diamond; and some weapons, including the Flagello, an unlawful instrument said to have been extensively used ‘in the Irish massacre of King Charles's time; though far be it from me to advance any thing that is not true’.
Thomas, like a number of recent scholars, is concerned to trace the uneasy cohabitation in such works of the scholarly and the prurient, and to alert us to the tension which, in eighteenth-century England at least, lay behind the use of the words ‘curio’, ‘curious’ and ‘curiosity’. For Dr Johnson, for example, in his Dictionary (1755), to be curious is to be ‘addicted to enquiry’, but in his Journey to the Western Isles (1775) he reproves a writer who failed to ascertain the precise breadth of Loch Ness for being ‘very incurious’. And this tension, Thomas shows with great erudition and sensitivity, is still there in the accounts (and no doubt the minds) of those first African explorers, John Barrow and Mungo Park who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, were still unclear whether their voyages were scientific, colonialist or driven simply by curiosity.
This was the time too, as we have seen, when the notion of genre first began to ring hollow, for genre depends ultimately on the sense that there is a place for everything and everything is in its place, that the world is ordered and art can reflect that order. It is no coincidence that the breakdown of genre, typified by Dr Johnson's criticism of Lycidas, should coincide with the rise of the novel, that genreless form which cannot make up its mind whether its ultimate appeal is to Truth or curiosity. Sterne plays with this (and with the reader) all the way through Tristram Shandy, notably when he orders the female reader back to the previous chapter and then stops to comment: ‘I have imposed this penance upon the lady, neither out of wantonness nor cruelty, but from the best of motives … — 'Tis to rebuke a vicious taste, which has crept into thousands besides herself, — of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them … — But here comes my fair Lady. Have you read over again the chapter, Madam, as I desired you?’ (I.20).
In the wake of Krzystof Pomian's pioneering work on early Italian collectors and collections, many scholars have begun to explore the ways in which and the reasons for which national museums grew out of private and church collections, and to reveal the tensions that underlay them all between the claim to be advancing science, the pandering to curiosity and the growth of national pride. At first it was learned and wealthy individuals who collected. Humanist popes and Renaissance princes (often the same people) had started collecting classical statues in the fifteenth century. Others began to collect manuscripts and paintings. A number of Renaissance paintings (Las Meninas being among the last and greatest) actually depict the owner in the midst of his pictures, which are hung on and stacked against the walls around him. But by the nineteenth century the great private collections had been democratised. In Paris the Louvre, the ancient palace of the kings of France, became the Musée Napoléon; in Madrid the royal collections moved into the Prado, the first modern building to house an art museum. The Altes Museum was opened in Berlin in 1830, followed by Munich (1836), London (1838), Dresden (1855), Amsterdam (1885), Vienna (1891) and Moscow (1912).
But of course by the nineteenth century the mania for collecting had passed from the learned and wealthy, from emperors and governments to every middle-class child. This was the time when children's encyclopedias began to be published (the first, adult encyclopedias date from the previous century), and when fossils, butterflies, shells, pressed flowers and anything else one could think of began to be collected by children with the encouragement of their parents. Even in Egypt, on the fringes of the western world, in the middle years of the present century, I found myself caught up in the last stirrings of this mania, which was encouraged by the English books and magazines I read: The Castle of Adventure, Swallows and Amazons, The Railway Children, Boy's Own Paper, The Eagle, World Sports. I seem to have spent my childhood, when I was not playing football or tennis or taking part in swimming and athletic competitions, sticking pictures into scrapbooks, putting objects into boxes and labelling them or arranging them in specially prepared trays. My most treasured possessions were my collection of prehistoric flints, picked up in the course of walks and bicycle rides into the desert just beyond the confines of the little town where I grew up, and a scrapbook I made of the 1952 Olympic Games, in which every result of every heat of every event was lovingly included.
I'm not sure about stamp-collecting and train-spotting, but, by and large, it seems to me that the collecting mania was a richly educative one for the children who succumbed to it. One was, in a way, making something of one's own, and one learned in the process about archaeology and botany and history and geography and countless other subjects. Unfortunately, like so many other childhood passions, this mania for collecting can take on rather more sinister connotations when it passes undiminished into adulthood. One particular collecting mania indulged in by adults in the second half of the twentieth century demonstrates this only too clearly.