Journal of the History of Collections Advance Access originally published online on October 4, 2006
Journal of the History of Collections 2006 18(2):257-266; doi:10.1093/jhc/fhl028
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Chance and certitude
Pitt Rivers and his first collection
Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (1827–1900) amassed his first collection between the 1850s and 1884 when he donated the collection to found the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Pitt Rivers obtained most of the items in this collection from auction rooms, dealers, institutions and other individuals. This paper considers his relationships with the sources that helped form the collection of some 20,000 artefacts. In examining this issue, it draws attention to the fact that his certitude when writing about his collection was in fact based upon the happenstance and coincidences of accidental collecting.
1 Note that, for convenience, throughout this paper I have used the name Pitt Rivers, adopted by the former Lane Fox after 1880.
2 According to a letter he wrote to Augustus Wollaston Franks on 27 June 1880, he started collecting around 1852 (Pitt Rivers Museum Foundation Box, fols. 3–4. Manuscript Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum).
3 A. Petch, ‘Man as he was and man as he is’, Journal of the History of Collections 10 (1998), pp. 75–85.
4 Calculated on 28 February 2006.
5 A. H. L. F. Pitt Rivers, ‘Typological museums, as exemplified by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and his provincial museum in Farnham, Dorset’, Journal of the Society of Arts 40 (1891), pp. 118–19.
6 These catalogues are held in Cambridge University Library and are discussed in M. Thompson and C. Renfrew, ‘The catalogues of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham, Dorset’, Antiquity 73 (1999), pp. 377–92.
7 Petch, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 79–80.
8 W. R. Chapman, ‘Ethnology in the Museum’, D. Phil thesis, vols. i and ii, University of Oxford (1981), p. 35.
9 Pitt Rivers, ‘Primitive warfare i–iii: lectures delivered at the RUSI’ reprinted in The Evolution of Culture (Oxford, 1906), p. 54.
11 His role as field collector or archaeologist has been considered by many other authorities including Mark Bowden, Pitt Rivers – The Life and Archaeological Work of Lt. General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers DCL FRS FSA (Cambridge, 1991), and M. W. Thompson, General Pitt Rivers: Evolution and Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century (Bradford-on-Avon, 1977), to name but two.
12 Zita van der Beek and Marcel Vellinga, ‘Man the collector: salvaging Andamanese and Nicobarese culture through objects’, Journal of the History of Collections 17 (2005), pp. 135–53.
13 Chapman, op. cit. (note 8), pp. 40–1.
14 Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Pitt Rivers correspondence, B403 [Wright], B409 [Cutter], B413 [Fenton], B431 [Lawrence], B456 [Webster].
15 B. M. Wright to Pitt Rivers; see note 14.
16 G. F. Lawrence to Pitt Rivers; see note 14.
17 W. D. Webster to Pitt Rivers; see note 14.
18 Taken from Philip J. C. Dark, An Illustrated Catalogue of Benin Art (Boston, 1982).
19 Pitt Rivers, Address delivered at the Opening of the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, January 7 1884 (Dorchester, 1884), p. 8.
20 Journal of the Anthropological Institute 9 (1879), p. 462. The reviewer was writing about artefacts from the Godeffroy Museum, Hamburg, part of which collection was acquired by Pitt Rivers.
21 Pitt Rivers to A. W. Franks, 27 June 1880; see note 2.
22 Harold St. George Gray, quoted in Bowden, op. cit. (note 11), p. 144.
23 Pitt Rivers, ‘Address to the Dept of Anthropology of the British Association at Brighton’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1872), p. 171.
24 These figures reflect the fact that an individual can be categorized as having more than one of these professions, for example William Greenwell who was an academic, an archaeologist, antiquarian and churchman. It is hardly surprising that most of the people who contributed to this collection and were associated with Pitt Rivers either were archaeologists or served in the military services.
25 Osbert H. Howarth to Pitt Rivers, dated 26 October 1888, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Pitt Rivers correspondence collection, L559.
26 Pitt Rivers, ‘On the Egyptian boomerang and its affinities’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute 12 (1883), pp. 454–5.
27 Chapman, op. cit. (note 8), p. 191.
28 Pitt Rivers, Catalogue of the Anthropological Collection lent by Colonel Lane Fox for exhibition in the Bethnal Green branch of the South Kensington Museum June 1874 ... Parts i and ii (London, 1874, updated 1879), pp. xi–xiii.
29 Pitt Rivers, ‘On the principles of classification adopted in the arrangement of his anthropological collection, now exhibited in the Bethnal Green Museum’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute 4 (1874), pp. 293–308 (read at the special meeting of the Institute held at Bethnal Green Museum on 1 July 1874, on the occasion of the opening of the collection to the public); reprinted in Pitt Rivers, op. cit. (note 9), p. 3.
30 Pitt Rivers, ‘Address as President of the Anthropological Section’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1888), p. 828.
31 Petch, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 79–81.
Address for correspondence Alison Petch, Pitt Rivers Museum, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PP. alison.petch{at}prm.ox.ac.uk