Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (26 page)

At home, too, Mayer's urge to collect encouraged him to make contact with scholars, connoisseurs and other private collectors in an effort to improve his knowledge and expand his collection.
He was an enthusiastic member of the local Arts Association and a founder member of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. He made regular visits to the library, meeting rooms and gallery of Liverpool's Royal Institution. Whereas the local clubs, like the Athenaeum and the Lyceum, were gentleman's clubs with restricted membership and predominantly daytime hours, the Royal Institution was open to everyone and was available for use during the evenings for those who, like Mayer, had to work during the day. Beyond the region, he also made an effort to know as many influential collectors as possible and as time went on his collection became a favourite stopping-off point for those travelling north from London: Charlotte Schreiber was among the visitors from the capital who made sure to see what Mayer was collecting. Making the journey in the opposite direction, Mayer frequently combined business in London with visits to museums, in particular the British Museum, and he became a member of a number of respected London organizations, including the British Archaeological Association, the Royal Society and the Royal Geographic Society. By 1850, he had also become a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, which put him in touch with some of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic scholars of his day, including Augustus Franks at the British Museum.

Mayer's particular interest in antiquarian objects drew him into different circles of collectors from those of which Robinson and Charlotte Schreiber were a part. The term ‘antiquarian' loosely – and usefully – covered a wide range of artefacts from the past, including archaeological finds, books, remains of the ‘antique' classical civilizations and even scientific instruments, with a particular emphasis on objects as historical evidence of past lives. It had long been a popular area with collectors, not least on account of its variety, and a tradition of antiquarian writing went back as far as the Middle Ages. As early as 1572, a national society
had been established to encourage the study and preservation of antiquarian remains and in 1717 this was officially constituted as the Society of Antiquaries, receiving a charter from George II in 1751.

In the nineteenth century, the enthusiasm flourished. The Victorians' adulation of progress and empire was accompanied by a reverence for history and an urge to preserve ideals, traditions and objects from the past. A taste for historical painting pointed to a nostalgic longing for an idealized lost age, while ‘the antiquarian style' became a fashionable architectural genre during the mid-century. The antiquarian look brought together artefacts from a variety of historical styles and periods to create interiors full of everything from Greek sculpture to medieval tapestry and Elizabethan furniture. Robinson's Newton Manor owed much to this kind of eclectic decoration, but it was Sir Walter Scott's carefully designed home at Abbotsford in Melrose, created between 1812 and 1832, that was at the forefront of the trend. The fashion became associated with mystery and romance, and Scott's novel
The Antiquary
– featuring an historian, archaeologist and collector, family secrets, hidden treasure, a mysterious aristocrat, a ruined abbey and hopeless love – only added to a popular fascination with re-creating an imagined past. Even reasonably ordinary objects became increasingly entangled with the idea of memory and nostalgia: ‘inanimate and senseless things' took on a new importance as the ‘object of recollection', suggested Dickens in his 1841 novel
The Old Curiosity Shop
. ‘Every household god becomes a monument.'

The popularity of all things antiquarian influenced what was being collected both by individuals and institutions. Since its foundation in 1753, the British Museum had largely turned its attention abroad, and had ignored British antiquities in favour of pieces from the Mediterranean and the Near East, such as the famous Elgin marbles or the Assyrian sculptures from Henry
Layard's excavations. The increasing expertise and enthusiasm of British collectors by the middle of the nineteenth century, however, brought growing calls to fill the gaps. In 1845, the British Archaeological Association, of which Mayer was a member, met at Winchester to express the hope that a museum of national antiquities would be formed, and three years later, when a hoard of Iron Age bronzes was found at Stanwick Park in Yorkshire on the land of Lord Prudhoe (later Duke of Northumberland), it was offered to the British Museum on the condition that a special room was set aside for these and other British antiquities. Although this was agreed, by 1850, nothing had happened. Politics, finance, the constraints of space and simple procrastination seemed to be in the way. It was not until the appointment of Franks, in March 1851, that any progress was made. His commitment to collecting British antiquities, and his links with collectors and collecting organizations, brought the issue to the forefront of the debate about what kind of role the British Museum should have. With the support of colleagues like Mayer at the British Archaeological Association and the Society of Antiquaries, Franks managed to persuade the museum's trustees and management that this popular area of interest deserved space and attention, and in 1866 he finally won approval for a new and distinct department devoted to British and Medieval Antiquities, with himself at its head.

Meanwhile, a new generation of private collectors began to move the study of the antiquarian on to a more professional footing. Dedicated and discriminating, they started to develop practices for fieldwork, and to create frameworks for shaping and preserving their collections. Some were members of the nobility. Lord Londesborough (1805–60) was an enthusiastic antiquary who published his collection of ‘ancient, medieval and Renaissance remains' in an illustrated volume in 1857. The 3rd and 4th Dukes of Northumberland began to collect pieces found on their estates
in the 1820s and went on to undertake their own excavations at home and abroad. Their collection included a number of objects from Pompeii; its museum in Alnwick Castle still survives today. Most of the enthusiasts, however, were of more modest means. Compared to art collecting, antiquarianism was a relatively cheap interest to indulge. The breadth of antiquarian interest meant there were always neglected objects to be had at a reasonable price: the medieval manuscripts, Anglo-Saxon finds and medieval ivories which Mayer collected were largely ignored at the time, unwanted by the national collections and passed over by wealthier collectors.

Antiquarianism brought collectors together without great emphasis on class, status or wealth, and, although most of the collectors were men, it was otherwise a relatively egalitarian activity. In Yorkshire, John Mortimer, a corn merchant, began a personal programme of research based around the Wolds. Inspired by a visit to the 1851 Great Exhibition, Mortimer collected stone implements, fossils and geological specimens before moving on to excavate prehistoric barrows and Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, eventually displaying his rapidly expanding collection in its own museum in Driffield and publishing his life's work in an illustrated volume. John Evans, a partner in a paper manufacturing firm, undertook scholarly work in periods from pre-history to the post-medieval, as well as in geology and numismatics. His publications, especially
Ancient Stone Implements
(1872) and
Ancient Bronze Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain
(1881), marked an advance in antiquarian study. They shaped the way in which many antiquarian collectors worked, and are still important today. After Evans's death in 1908, his collection was presented by his son to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. A close friend of Franks, and President in turn of the Geological Society, the Numismatic Society, the Anthropological Institute, the Society of Chemical Industry and the Society of
Antiquaries, as well as a Trustee of the British Museum and a Fellow and Treasurer of the Royal Society, Evans was held in high regard across Europe and was knighted for his work in 1892. His visionary and committed collecting set the standard for many of those who shared his interests, raising the quality and profile of antiquarian study.

The status of antiquarianism, the role of antiquarian collectors and the importance of antiquarian objects were fashionable issues, and in the middle decades of the century Mayer was at the heart of these debates. As a member of the key societies, he was able to contribute both locally and nationally, and to meet his peers across the country. While this was important for all collectors, it was especially crucial for Mayer. Unlike Robinson, for example, Mayer had never acquired any particular assurance or expertise. He lacked confidence in his knowledge and scholarship, and much preferred learned company to having to display learning himself. Left to his own devices, he could be muddled and uncertain – an easy target for swindlers – and he looked to his more cultured colleagues for something more consequential than the usual social round. He needed them to help him make informed decisions about his collecting.

Among his many new acquaintances, Mayer came to rely in particular on two useful and loyal friends: Joseph Clarke, a natural historian, enthusiastic amateur archaeologist and Keeper of Saffron Walden Museum, and Charles Roach Smith, a pharmacist and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, as well as a leading light in the British Archaeological Association. Both men were collectors in their own right, and Roach Smith in particular was becoming an expert on objects that were exposed as London expanded and trenches were dug on new building sites throughout the city. Roach Smith's collection was accumulated over twenty years by bartering directly with labourers. He had no opportunity to study the building sites or to undertake any kind of contextual
research, but he did what he could, rescuing objects from across London and relying on old texts and maps to piece together their history. By dint of his energetic legwork and extensive investigation, his collection eventually amounted to a coherent history of the capital, a ‘Museum of London Antiquities', which included ‘a very curious collection of swords and spear heads from the Thames' and ‘an enamel buckle or brooch similar in workmanship to the Alfred Jewel. . . an object of great rarity'.
⁵
This is now recognized as an Anglo-Saxon treasure known as the Dowgate Hill brooch, a late-tenth- or early-eleventh-century gold disc brooch decorated with colourful cloisonné enamel and a filigree border set with four large pearls, found in 1831 at the foot of Dowgate Hill on Thames Street. By 1857, Roach Smith's collection was so extensive and so widely admired that it was given a home in the British Museum.

Roach Smith and Clarke appreciated the impulses driving Mayer and were conscientious on his behalf. They were his eyes and ears in London and for many years they were attentive to Mayer's needs, constantly on the lookout for objects he might like. ‘If you set me to work I go to it in earnest,' declared Clarke enthusiastically,
⁶
and on one memorable occasion he discovered an entire shop full of pieces for Mayer: ‘The owner told me he had not been in the rooms for seven years and only once for fourteen and if you had seen me when I came out you would have laughed, no chimney sweep would have been blacker, three washings, I am not clean yet.'
⁷
During the 1850s and 1860s, Clarke and Roach Smith acquired a variety of ancient artefacts to send back to Liverpool: ‘I have received for you a fine British urn. . . found. . . at Felixstowe. . . I got it. . . for a little above £2,' enthused Roach Smith in a letter of December 1852. In April 1856, he wrote again, ‘I yesterday secured a Roman vessel, from Blackfriars Bridge & two old English vessels from the Fleet Ditch for you.'
⁸

More significantly, it was Roach Smith who was instrumental in helping Mayer acquire a number of complete collections that firmly established his reputation as one of the most influential collectors in the country. The first of these, the Faussett collection, had been assembled by Bryan Faussett of Heppington in Kent, an eighteenth-century churchman and amateur archaeologist. Faussett collected thousands of Roman and English coins, and had so many duplicates that he was able to melt down 150lbs of bronze to be cast into a bell. His real interest, however, was graves, and he spent all his time between writing sermons and visiting parishioners excavating Anglo-Saxon barrows in the woods and downs across Kent. He opened up over 630 graves in an eight-year period during the 1760s and 1770s, amassing a collection of grave goods, from plain hammered-metal bowls to intricate brooches. Unlike many amateur archaeologists of the time, he kept painstaking journals of all his excavations, sketching the sites as he found them, and recording every detail of his discoveries in five substantial volumes which were kept with the objects at his house.
⁹

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the collection had been forgotten. Faussett had died and the objects were simply gathering dust in the family home. Strolling in Kent in 1842, Roach Smith found himself close to Heppington and found the name half-familiar. Eventually, he managed to recall the details of an eighteenth-century work,
Nenia Britannica
:
or, a sepulchral history of Great Britain; from the earliest period to its general conversion to Christianity
. This was, as its title suggests, a wide-ranging survey published in 1793 by another Kent clergyman, James Douglas, who was also an officer in the Corps of Engineers. Douglas used his military expertise to survey barrows and other archaeological sites, and was one of the first antiquaries to meticulously record, draw and publish his findings to a high standard, laying the foundations for the work of the Victorians
who followed. In
Nenia Britannica
, he recounted something of Faussett's collection, being the first to realize that the objects were Anglo-Saxon. Roach Smith recalled the description of Faussett's work, his archaeological explorations, and the diversity of his collection and he decided to pay a visit, unannounced, on whichever surviving relatives he could find.