1 - Tradesmen, Collecting Networks and Curious Ephemera

Summary

Early modern collecting both expressed and enhanced social status. It was practised by elites with the necessary wealth, learning and ‘taste’ to surround themselves with objects of cultural capital. In later Stuart Britain, collectors modelled themselves on the ‘virtuoso’, a gentleman-scholar derived from the Italian Renaissance cultural elite who promoted art and learning. The intellectual agenda set by the New Science and taken up by the Royal Society, however, marked a potentially more inclusive means by which one might achieve status as a collector. In principle, Francis Bacon’s injunction to compile empirical observations free from bookish authority had a ‘levelling effect’. Now anyone could contribute to the factual ‘store-house’ with observations and objects, so long as they were ‘rare’, ‘useful’ and ‘curious’. Accompanying this new intellectual agenda was an expansion in the public audience for natural philosophy and antiquarianism. Virtuoso culture became a fashionable ‘sensibility’ that encouraged the viewing and collecting of curiosities in not just the gentleman’s cabinet of curiosity but also the cosmopolitan coffeehouse.

In response to this burgeoning scientific scene, new goods and services were provided by retailing and manufacturing tradesmen to cater for the aspiring virtuoso. As early as 1660, a young Samuel Pepys spent an evening drinking, playing music and looking ‘over many books and instruments’ at the home (and probably shop) of John Spong, a mathematical instrument maker. ‘I find him to be as ingenious and good-natured a man as ever I met with in my life’, Pepys recorded, ‘and cannot admire him enough, he being so plain and illiterate a man as he is.’ Other surprisingly ‘ingenious’ and sociable middling-sorts included Thomas Britton, a coal merchant who had an ‘unexpected Genious to Books and Musick’ and held weekly concerts in his ‘diminutive Habitation’; and Richard Smyth, a prison deputy in Cheapside, who ‘collected that grate and valuable Collection of Bookes especially relating to the History of England’. Some tradesmen were valued for their intellectual contributions to the store-house of knowledge. In Norwich Kirk Patrick, an assistant to Peter Le Neve, was described as ‘a mighty genius for Antiquities considering his education wch has been a linnen draper’; while the antiquary, George Ballard, was known as the ‘ingenious Taylor of Campden in Gloucestershire’; and into the eighteenth century, the ironmonger Joseph Ames rose to the position of secretary to the Society of Antiquaries.