Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves

by Jacqueline Yallop

  It was a lofty room of middling size, obscurely lighted by high narrow latticed windows. One end was entirely occupied by book-shelves, greatly too limited in space for the number of volumes placed upon them. . . while numberless others littered the floor and the tables amid a chaos of maps, engravings, scraps of parchment, bundles of papers, pieces of old armour, swords, dirks, helmets, and Highland targets. . . The top of this cabinet was covered with busts, and Roman lamps and paterae, intermingled with one or two bronze figures. . . A large old-fashioned oaken table was covered with a profusion of papers, parchments, books and nondescript trinkets and gewgaws, which seemed to have little to recommend them, besides rust and the antiquity which it indicates. . . The floor, as well as the table and chairs, was overflowed by the same mare magnum of miscellaneous trumpery, where it would have been as impossible to find any individual article wanted, as to put it to any use when discovered.

  In Daniels’ new portrait, Mayer’s study fitted the model perfectly. It would have been immediately clear to anyone seeing the painting, just what kind of man Mayer was (or at least how he wished to present himself); the viewer would have understood that by surrounding himself with objects in this way he was displaying himself as both fashionable and apparently learned. Daniels painted Mayer to look exactly how most Victorians thought a collector should look.

  In one hand Mayer holds a book. This is both serious and fitting, an indication of his connoisseurship. But when it came to selecting something particular for him to hold in his other hand, there was perhaps more of a problem. The random selection of objects in the painting aptly illustrates the haphazard and eclectic nature of Mayer’s collecting, which was enthusiastic rather than particularly knowledgeable. Although he no doubt wished to appear studious and erudite in his portrait, he was in fact much more likely to be guided by his instincts than by learning. He was not, as he admitted himself, particularly scholarly. He was the product of an average education at a local grammar school and his classical, historical and scientific understanding was limited and uneven. He could show Daniels an intriguing jumble of things to be painted but not the ordered, comprehensive collection of an intellectual. Some of his pieces were significant and historic; others were merely curiosities, and a few were little more than household junk. Mayer liked all sorts: rare antique objects from the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt, and broken archaeological finds from Anglo-Saxon burial sites; arms and armour, swords, guns and all things military; manuscripts from Burma, scraps from German prayerbooks, illuminated medieval missals, books of hours and fine bindings; Napoleonic memorabilia; gems, ivories and enamels; engravings, cartoons, the occasional oil painting and examples of local Liverpool pottery. There were few things he could resist if they had the scent of history about them.

  Mayer’s table was littered with Roman and Etruscan antiquities, with candlesticks and antique figurines. But what he chose to hold in the portrait, in the end, was a miniature vase, shaped like an ancient Greek urn and set on a pedestal. It was small enough to fit comfortably in one hand, light enough for him to hold up through the long sittings, and pretty enough to hold Daniels’ attention. But, in fact, it was a very ordinary piece, an example of English pottery from the Wedgwood works and unfashionable. It was not a status symbol; it did not testify to wealth or learning; it had not been unearthed during a risky foreign voyage. It was just something Mayer liked and apparently it did not disturb him that it was relatively new, or that in the 1840s no one else seemed to share his taste in china. Wedgwood pieces pleased him; he admired their colours and forms and their strong references to the ceramics of the past. It was, he thought, a fitting object to include in his portrait.

  Within a few years, the room which Daniels had so carefully depicted had disappeared. By 1844, Mayer had given up the smart house in Clarence Terrace, and the gentleman’s study, and had moved instead into modest and simple accommodation above his business on one of Liverpool’s busy shopping streets. He had been apprenticed at the age of nineteen to his brother-in-law James Wordley and had been a successful partner in the business since the early 1830s, but now he was looking for change and greater independence. In 1843, he broke the partnership with Wordley, acquired premises a few doors down, and set up alone. Without ties, he could do as he pleased. He could try his hand at designing and making his own silver, and he could begin to establish his own name in the trade.

  Mayer’s new workshop flourished. He became highly skilled in designing large, often ceremonial pieces of gold and silver plate, spectacular trophies and civic regalia, and he studied innovative techniques, exploring the commercial potential of affordable new processes like electroplating. The business became respected and thriving; the shop imposing and magnificent. Mayer presented himself within the tradition of Renaissance silversmithing, and he designed a new building to invoke a sense of monumental art and of continuum with an impressive past. Either side of the entrance door were two massive frescos, one of the Renaissance smith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, and one of the seventeenth-century goldsmith and royal jeweller George Heriot. Two huge busts, one male and one female, gazed down from the balustraded façade on to the shoppers below. Immense plate-glass windows were piled high with objects to the height of three or four men, and Mayer’s name was emblazoned, twice, above the display. Inside, watches and clocks, cameos, precious stones, heraldic engravings and a glittering array of silver and gold were all carefully arranged in specially designed showcases.

  With such a prosperous showroom, it was not enforced economies that persuaded Mayer to give up the ease of the Clarence Terrace house. It was the lure of collecting. All his energies and resources became focused on finding and buying objects: it became his obsession, his life’s purpose. Unlike J. C. Robinson, he could not bear to have the distractions of fashionable living divert his attention, and his money. He was fascinated by the past, and the objects it had left behind, and he did not mind giving up the comforts of the present if it meant bringing him closer to history.

  While Mayer contented himself with simple living in the rooms above his shop, he was anything but reclusive. He was naturally a sociable man, but, more than this, he understood that to be a successful collector he needed to explore new places and meet new people. He travelled whenever he could, sending frequent parcels and crates back to England. He made his first trip, at the age of twenty-five, in 1828, and he spent the next few decades exploring the archaeological sites of Italy and the ruins of the ancient world, steaming down the Rhône to the towns of Southern France, and uncovering objects in Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia and Prussia. Mayer was only nine years older than Charlotte Schreiber, but was setting out on his journeys when she was busy at Dowlais, long before she had begun to collect; twenty years the senior of J. C. Robinson, he was beginning to explore the treasures of the Continent at a time when popular Victorian collectors’ routes were still being etched into the European map. In the 1820s and 1830s, collecting off the beaten track of the established Grand Tour had a sense of trailblazing; it seemed exciting, daring and new. Mayer travelled for business, to buy stock, make deals and keep abreast of fashionable trends. But his journeys soon became about much more than the demands of trade. His moment of conversion to collecting, he always maintained, came when he was convalescing from fever during a business trip to Dijon, and had time to wander around the town’s museum and picture gallery. The antiquities he saw there captivated him, and suddenly turned his journey from business to pleasure; from commerce to collecting.4

  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 wit
h 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 e
asy 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