William Bullock’s Liverpool Museum established in London in 1807 was something of an extraordinary place. Bullock was among the first collectors to present his creatures in theatrical, almost atmospheric displays, with an eye to both the scientific interest and the spectacular entertainment value of exotic specimens. Ever the entrepreneur, Bullock was hardly immune to the dramatic fascination rarely seen animals held for his Victorian visitors. Down the center of his museum, Bullock arranged his large exotics including a giraffe, an elephant, a lion and a rhinoceros surrounded by artificial models of tropical plants in order to produce an “panoramic effect of distance and … affording a beautiful illustration of the luxuriance of a torrid clime.”

Bullock's Museum also known as the Egyptian Hall.  Image taken from here +

Even in a taxidermied state, exotic beasts and birds incited imaginings of the living creature, its behaviors, the look of its native geographic, and – with dangerous beasts – the titillating fear of its savagery. One display cabinet featured a Bengal tiger locked in a deadly battle with a boa constrictor, two creatures of near mythical menace, surrounded by luxuriant artificial foliage to intensify the “natural” aura of the scene. In the museum’s catalogue, Bullock made sure to describe the combat as luridly as possible:

Bullock's tiger is still on display at the Rossendale
Museum in Lancashire, England.  Go +"The Royal Tiger (F. Tigrina). This is represented expiring in one of those dreadful combats which take place betwixt this powerful and sanguinary destroyed of the human species, and the immense serpent of India, called the Boa Constrictor, in whose enormous folds its unavailing strength is nearly exhausted, and its bones crushed and broken by the strength and eights of its tremendous adversary.”

Big snakes and big cats obviously excited visitors’ sense of the drama and death on colonial frontiers.  Viewers couldn't help but be impressed.

In a catalogue to his Liverpool Museum published in 1810, William Bullock lists “near seventy various Humming Birds,” all arranged together in a single display case.Two years later, Bullock boasted to having the “finest collection in Europe,” more than one hundred hummingbirds, and after his travels through Mexico in 1823, Bullock’s collection had swelled to over a hundred and seventy little birds.

Of all his birds and beasts, Bullock paid special attention to his hummingbirds, taking special care to express species’ most cherished physical traits: their diminutive size and shimmering plumage. Of a male and Female Trochilus mininus or least hummingbird, Bullock describes the species, “little larger than the Humble Bee,” as exhibiting an impossible daintiness: “its bill is about as thick and as long as a small pin; and the feet are almost imperceptible to the naked eye.” The Trochilus Moschitus or Ruby Topaz Hummmingbird was “the most beautiful of the genus: the head and crest have the sparkling fire of the ruby, while the neck and breast dazzle like the aurora topaz of Brazil.” Around such exquisite daintiness, no description of fairy-like perfect ion was too saccharine: hummingbirds lived – however fleetingly – in a world of blossoms, sweet nectar, and the untainted freshness of everlasting spring:

“It is easy to lay hold of the little creature while it hums at the blossom. It dies soon after it is caught, and serves to decorate the Indian girls, who wear two of these charming birds, as pendants from their ears. The Indians, indeed, are so struck and dazzled with the brilliancy of their various hues, that they have named them the Beams or Locks of the Sun. Such is the history of this little being, who flutters from flower to flower, breathes their freshness, wantons on the wings of the cooling zephyrs, sips the nectar of a thousand sweets, and resides in climes where reigns the beauty of eternal spring.”

Yet when Bullock penned his romantic vision of hummingbird daily life he had not actually seen a living hummingbird. It was not until his stop in Kingston, Jamaica in early 1823 on his way to Mexico that Bullock caught his first glimpse of “this extraordinary little family.”  During his travels, Bullock kept a large aviary – nearly seventy birds in cages – but was unable to bring a single bird back to England alive. This was the eternal struggle with hummingbirds: they were almost impossible to transport alive to Europe from North America. Standing in front of glass cases, Europeans had to envision the birds reanimated, to imagine the humming velocity of their wings, to picture the speed at which the birds dated between flowers, how they hovered almost motionless, as if suspended in air. Even Bullock had to admit that his specimens were poor copies of the sparkling vivacity of the creatures:

“Europeans who have seen only the stuffed remains of these little feathered gems in museums have been charmed with their beautiful appearance; but those who have examined them whilst living, displaying their moving crests, throats, and tails, like the peacock in the sun, can never look with pleasure on their mutilated forms. I have carefully preserved about two hundred specimens, in the best possible manner, yet they are still but the shadow of what they were in life."

Certainly, Bullock’s specimens were poor replicas of the real thing, but whether the birds were crumbling or not, whether their sheen and shimmer had faded with sunlight and death, the birds were, nevertheless caught up in an aesthetic culture of romanticised nature that couldn’t but see them as beautiful. If anything, the impossibility of witnessing life in a creature which was so profoundly lively intensified audiences’ infatuation with hummingbirds to a near ecstatic poetic high. Not only were the birds beautiful but also frail, sensitive, and fleeting: an ideal grouping of romantic characteristics.

A Victorian cabinet of hummingbirds on display at the Natural History Museum, London and
believed to have been Bullock's.

Encouraged by the poetry of William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, by the 1820s a romantic branch of natural history was well in swing. It viewed nature not so much as a passive object of contemplation but as a vehicle for self-consciousness and an educator of senses, and indeed, only a sensitive soul could properly appreciate nature and the beauty of all living things. It became almost obligatory to preface any nature book – even scientific works – with a few lines from Wordsworth.  In a sense, the perception of nature was inseparable from its aesthetic appreciation; that is, the ability to appreciate birds and bees and flowers and mountainscapes was the ability to fibrillate in tune with the natural world, although – of course – that tune was a human composition filled with lyrical melodies of beauty, loss, and transience. “The accepted approach to nature had become no longer to set down what one saw plainly and accurately,” David Elliston Allen writes in The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History; “the aim now was to record one’s reactions – and the livelier these reactions appeared, the more beneficial, the more exalting, the more ‘tasteful’ the contact with nature was assumed to be.” Romantic nature was nature extruded through the poet’s imagination, and aesthetic appreciation was an index of cultivation:“the eye misted over, the pen trembled, Sense gave out as Sensibility came in.”

In her work on romantic era collecting, Judith Pascoe argues that stuffed hummingbirds epitomized the romantics’ eternal pining for the fleeting and their infatuation with the beauty of ruin and rupture: the pleasurably suffered longings and almost-blissful experiences in romantic poems, the overbearing sense of loss and ephemerality, Pascoe argues, conditioned the aesthetic appreciation of Bullock’s mass of dead birds: “No sounds emerge from their thousands of beaks, but these birds provide mute testimony to their collectors’ insatiable longings, romantic desires fuelled by the impossibility of fulfilment. The superannuated hummingbirds have staved off death with their arsenic-laden stuffing and survived to epitomize the romantic pursuit of perfect and permanent beauty.”

It must have taken several days to lug the stuffed exotic birds and beasts from the Saffron Walden Museum in Essex, England to the city dump. They’d lingered immortal and musty for long enough, and the museum’s young curator, Gillian Spencer, was determined to expunge the dusty relics from the museum’s 19th century golden age of international collecting. In fact, she’d been ordered to do so. A curator from the natural history headquarters in London had walked through Spencer’s small county museum in the fall of 1959, pointing to this dingy polar bear, to that golden mole, and decreed such exotic remnants were – to be brief – worthless. They were old and badly stuffed. Worse, they were foreign. Local museums, Spencer was told, must exhibit local nature not the haphazard remains of eccentric Victorian ramblings. And so, the following March, after having convinced the Saffron Walden Rural District Council that “nostalgia should be banished in the interests of greater usefulness for the Museum,” Spencer sent a letter to every museum in Essex in the hopes of unloading what she tepidly described as “foreign mammals which have been pronounced tolerable (though not outstanding) specimens.” No museum wanted them. A long lipped sloth bear, a llama, a lioness and her four cubs donated in 1840 from George Wombwell’s famous travelling menagerie, a puma, an untold quantity of lemmings, an Africa secretary with impossibly long eyelashes, a black tailed wallaby, a mischievous green monkey that had died in the sharp frost of 1836, two koala bears, an unspecified lizard and a boletus – the first natural specimens received by the museum – donated by Mr. Wedge on June 6th, 1833 and apparently infested with the worm, honeybirds, jackals, and a pair of golden cuckoos sent with Robert Dunn’s extraordinary 1834 shipment from Algoa Bay just east of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, four stuffed eels of varying lengths, eleven Taiwanese barking deer, and large blue butterfly, over 200 animals, birds, snakes, and fish, most over a hundred years old, all decidedly not local English fauna. The exotics were martyred by fire on May 4th, 1960. On that day, nostalgia reeked like burnt hair.

A long century now yawns between us and the Victorians. No one quibbles when museums display chamber pots, corsets, and other such charismatic Victorian icons, but their stuffed animals – particularly the exotics – are a different matter. Mildewed and moth-eaten, these mementos from an era when Britain ruled the world, embody the best and worse of 19th century’s fervour for natural history: tireless passion, relentless destruction, imperial delusions of purpose. Grimacing with shrunken lips and wooden teeth, the straw-stuffed survivors from an increasingly distant age seem better labelled as “cultural relic” than “nature” especially for our Discovery channel era, when wildlife videos can bring living, breathing, fighting, mating creatures into everyone’s home, no shooting or stuffing required. How much nature could possibly remain in a fusty piece of taxidermy? “Not much,” thought Spencer. When she purged her museum of pitiable creatures, she was sluicing out the imperial heritage of the Saffron Walden Museum, Britain’s second oldest purpose-built natural history museum.

Victorians were not content to view passively natural history in museums or menageries. Popular natural history was a physical, emotional, and sensual engagement with local nature in meadows and forests, at the seashore and in ponds. The distinct qualities and characteristics of encounters were not left to the individual’s sensibilities.  If it is difficult to exaggerate the mass appeal of natural history in the nineteenth century, it is equally impossible to overemphasise the influence of its popularisers. The impact of writers such as Rev. John George Wood and Philip Gosse, for example, is best evinced by the collecting crazes they provoked which quite literally swept across England’s landscape and gathered ferns, seaweeds, shells, and birds in Victorian parlours. Wood’s Common Objects of the Country (1858) sold 100,000 copies in one week, and his Common Objects of the Seashore (1857) only increased the mania for sea-shore collecting trips set in motion a few years earlier by Philip Gosse’s own introduction to seashore rambling - A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast - published four years earlier in 1853.

Always the satirist, Punch frequently poked fun at the collecting mania fevering the Victorian imagination. Image from August 21st, 1858.

The success of popular natural history writers arose in part from their ability to translate scientific knowledge into entertaining and instructive lessons and stories for the general reader. Natural history had not yet fully splintered into professional specialisations with a technical language beyond the reach of a general audience, and popular writers conveyed the sense that even amateur observers could not only learn from natural objects but offered the tantalising daydream that anyone could discover something new and useful to science. For example, in Henry Housman’s The Story of our Museum and What it taught us (1868), Housman describes his boyhood fascination with natural history in the hopes of encouraging young readers to learn about nature by establishing their own collection. A friend of his, Jack, an older boy and more expert taxidermist, showed Housman a newly-stuffed bird he had recently shot which appears to be a completely unknown species: a hedge-sparrow with a red tail. Together the boys consult various textual ornithological authorities with no luck and increasingly excitement on Housman’s part. Housman finally declares this red-tailed sparrow to be a new species to be named after Jack at which point Jack admits to the joke by knocking off the fake red tail. By scrutinising and noting particularities of form and colour in birds and animals, anyone - even young boys - could potentially participate in the production of knowledge.

Popular natural history, however, was far from a sterile science of facts. The enthusiasm for studying and collecting nature also derived from both its inherent aesthetic appeal and the close connection between natural science and moral edification.  Writers affirmed that the pursuit of nature was enlightening, delightful, and pious.  In accordance with natural theology, the design of nature was not random or meaningless, but quite the opposite: God's existence and benevolence could be deduced from nature’s wondrously harmonious complexity. Although the solidarity of natural theology was challenged and partly fragmented by Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859, popularisers maintained a revised form of natural theology and their readers remained enthralled by the traditional moral and aesthetic qualities of the natural world.

For those amateur naturalists who combined the meticulous methods of the field observer with sensitivity to the emotional resonance of the natural world, nature was alive with meaning and significance. Philip Gosse’s appropriately titled Romance of Natural History spoke poetically about his “communion” with the diversity and beauty of the natural world around him, suggesting that close observation could revealed the lives and dramas of starfish, beetles, and songbirds.

While fads in collecting came and when, taxidermy was a persistent presence in Victorian collections, and not only among the wealthier classes.  During the renowned American naturalist and artist John Audubon's trip to England from 1826-1829 he notes (as was to be expected) "a full and beautiful collection of the birds of England" at the entrance of the home of Mr. Rathbone.  Two days later while strolling through the Liverpool market "I saw here viands of all descriptions, fish, vegetbles, game, fruits - both indigenous and imported from all quarters of the globe, - birds sellers, with even little collections of stuffed specimens, cheeses of enormous size, butter in great abundance, immense crates of hen's-eggs packed in layers of oats imported from Ireland."  Taxidermy was everywhere from the conservatories of the great naturalists to the market stalls.

The paradox, of course, of natural theology as a motivating force in natural history was that the worship of nature led to its destruction. As natural history writers encouraged a passionate and empathetic communion with living nature, so too they encouraged collecting and stuffing it for display as a scientific object – that is, an object available for austere observations of size, form, and colour. From within an appreciation of poetics of taxidermy, the death and display of an animal was not viewed as a radical disruption in the appreciation of nature’s beauty and the frequently over sentimental desires for union, communion, and sameness.