Book Review : Enlightenment: discovering the world in the eighteenth century

Abstract

This is a very beautiful book, stylishly presented, lavishly illustrated and beautifully crafted. The editors and the Press need to be congratulated for producing such a work of art. The book was published at the end of 2003 to coincide with the opening of the newly restored King's Library at the British Museum, as the home of the permanent Enlightenment Gallery. It is not a guide to the gallery. The book has twenty-five chapters organized into five parts, each of which considers the material component of the Enlightenment, roughly taken as the period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, as represented by the museum's holdings. The museum's curators, past and present, have written all of the contributions. The first part, ‘The “Universal Museum”’, discusses the spatiality, design and contents of the original room, which now houses the Enlightenment Gallery. Readers are introduced to the museum's greatest benefactors, Sir Hans Sloane and Sir Joseph Banks, as well as to other collectors whose donations and benefactions form the core of the holdings. This part not only provides a context for the later parts but it also, successfully, invites the reader to consider the meanings of museums and libraries in this period, to their owners as well as their guests. Parts Two and Three concentrate on the private collections of the eighteenth century that eventually came to form the museum's own. In common with the organization of enlightenment cabinets of curiosity, these respective parts consider first the natural world—natural history, medical botany and fossils—and then the artificial world—coins, engraved gems, vases, scientific instruments and maps. These collections were the result of travel and this act, perhaps more than any other, was central to the idea of the Enlightenment. The travelled world, which in the eighteenth century became increasingly wider, confronted and challenged the collector with visual contact. Reliance on classical and religious texts, the source for much information about other cultures before the eighteenth century, could no longer be taken for granted. Antiquity, whether it be the classical world, Babylon, or Britain itself, was now being reinterpreted because of travel and its products. Part Four of the book discusses how a new and sometimes uncomfortable understanding of the ancient world began to emerge. Part Five, the final section of the book, is the most dynamic in the sense that it examines the fruits of the kind of travel which is perhaps most emblematic of the Enlightenment: the organized, state- or institutional-supported maritime expeditions to other continents and seas. Cook's three voyages are given prominence, not only because they are best known, but also because, thanks to Sir Joseph Banks, the collections made on these, and even later voyages, found their way directly to the museum. The Americas and the Pacific, regions where Cook spent a good deal of time and where extensive collections were made, are the subjects of two chapters. Notwithstanding Cook's pre-eminence, it is important to remember that other parts of the world were being re-discovered by Europeans during this period, namely the Far East and Africa, both of which receive attention. As stated, this is a beautiful book. Its aim is to explain to the reader the nature of the collectors and their collections in the period of the enlightenment, and this it does admirably. What caught their eyes is there for us to see. What is less certain is what twenty-first-century eyes make of all this.