In 1765, Peter John Grosley, an accomplished and keen-eyed Frenchman, familiar with the Museums of Italy as well as with those of his own country, visited the new Museum, and recorded his impressions of it. With the building he was charmed. He had already seen many parts of England, but nowhere any house that he thought worthy to be compared with Montagu House. He calls it ‘the largest, the most stately, the best arranged, and most richly decorated’ structure of its kind in all England. He made repeated visits. What chiefly arrested his attention in the Natural History rooms were the beauty of the papillonacea—comprising, he thought, ‘all that either the old world or the new can supply in this kind’—and the strangeness of some mineral specimens brought from the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. The Printed Books he thought to be ‘the weakest part of this vast collection.’ In one of the principal rooms, ‘I saw,’ he continues, ‘not without astonishment, a very fine bust of Oliver Cromwell, occupying a distinguished place!’ He praises the courtesy with which Drs. Maty and Morton discharged, by turns, the duty of exhibition. ‘They show,’ he says, ‘the most obliging readiness to explain things to the visitor, but,’ he adds, with obvious truth, ‘their very courtesy is wont to make a stranger content himself with hasty and unsatisfactory glances, that he may not trespass on their politeness.’ And then he makes a wise practical suggestion, which was carried into effect, almost half a century afterwards.
‘In order really to carry out the intentions of Parliament,’ writes Grosley, in 1765, ‘it is to be wished that the Public should be admitted more liberally, and more easily, by placing a warder in every room, to be continually present during the public hours.’
Ten years afterwards, the difficulty on this score had so increased that a notification to the following effect was circulated: ‘British Museum, 9th August, 1776. The Applicants of the middle of April are not yet satisfied. |MS. Addit., 10,555, fol. 14.| Persons applying are requested to send weekly to the porter to know how near they are upon the List.’
Visit of C. P. Moritz in 1782.
In 1782, the plan had so far improved that instead of waiting from April until August, a visitor could usually get admission within a fortnight or so after applying for a ticket. We have an intelligent and amusing account of a visit then made. This time the narrator is a German,—Charles Moritz, of Berlin. ‘In general,’ writes Moritz, ‘you must give in your name a fortnight before you can be admitted. But, by the kindness of Mr. Woide’—a countryman of the traveller, and, at that time, an Assistant-Librarian in the Museum,—‘I got admission earlier.... Yet, after all, I am sorry to say that it was the room, the glass-cases, the shelves, ... which I saw; not the Museum itself, so rapidly were we hurried on through the departments. The company who saw it when I did, and in like manner, was variously composed. They were of all sorts, and some, as I believe, of the very lowest classes of the people of both sexes, for, as it is, the property of the Nation, every one has the same ‘right’—I use the term of the country—to see it that another has. |Wendeborn’s Account of the Museum. 1780–90.| I had Mr. Wendeborn’s book in my pocket, and it, at least, enabled me to take more particular notice of some of the principal things.’
The book thus referred to by Moritz is the German original of that account of English society and institutions which Wendeborn himself translated, a few years afterwards, into English, and published at London, under the title of A View of England.
Its author had settled in London as the Minister of a German Congregation. He was himself a studious frequenter of the Museum, and says of it: ‘The whole is costly, worth seeing, and honourable to the Nation; when taken altogether it has not its equal. When considered in its separate branches, almost each of them singly may be surpassed by some other collection even in England itself.’ But the only collection which he specifies as, in this sense, superior, are the Hunterian Museum, and that which had been formed by Sir Ashton Lever, and which, when the View of England was written, belonged to Mr. Parkinson. |Wendeborn, A View of England, vol. i, 323–325.| Of the Museum Library, Wendeborn says, ‘though a numerous and valuable collection, it is yet, in many respects, very deficient, and as to its use, much circumscribed.’
When the German visitor of 1782 pulled Mr. Wendeborn’s book from his pocket, as he was hurried through the Museum, the action attracted the attention of the other visitors. The more intelligent of them pressed round him to see if the book could be made to yield any information for their behoof also. And the stranger gratified their curiosity by translating a passage or two in explanation of the objects they were passing. Then came an exquisite bit of sub-officialism.
‘The gentleman who conducted us’ observes Moritz, ‘took little pains to conceal the contempt which he felt for my communications when he found it was only a German description of the British Museum which I had.’ ‘So rapid a passage,’ he continues, ‘through a vast suite of rooms, in little more than one hour of time, with opportunity to cast but one poor longing look of astonishment on all the vast treasures of nature, antiquity, and literature, in the examination of which one might profitably spend years, confuses, stuns, and overpowers the visitor.’
Two years later, we have a similar account of the experiences of an inquisitive Englishman, and of one who is much more outspoken in his complaint. |William Hutton’s Visit in 1784.| William Hutton, the historian of Birmingham, came to London in December, 1784. ‘I was unwilling to quit it,’ he writes, ‘without seeing what I had, many years, wished to see. But how to accomplish it was the question. I had not one relative in that vast metropolis to direct me.... By good fortune, I stumbled upon a person possessing a ticket for the next day, which he valued less than two shillings. We struck a bargain in a moment and were both pleased.... I was not likely to forget Tuesday, December 7th, at eleven.’ Hutton, shrewd as he was, did not suspect the real nature of his ‘bargain.’ He had met with a professional dealer in Museum tickets; one of several who, on a humbler scale, followed in the steps of Peter Leheup, but were lucky enough not to excite the anger of the House of Commons.