ABSTRACT
Collectors were encouraged to seek out nature's hiding places; to examine, quantify, classify, describe, make pictures and attach names to natural history specimens gathered on rambles in the countryside. These activities were the culmination of an ongoing fascination with nature's curiosities that had been mounting for over a century. Studies of nineteenth-century collections have linked their popularity and formation to the expansion of the British Empire, romanticism, nationalism, the birth of the natural history museum, interior decorating and the activities of commercial enterprises. As the natural sciences gained recognition in the universities, collectors were further subdivided into naturalists and scientifically oriented biologists. The very fact that the activities of collectors can be shown to exhibit many elements of the socioeconomic, political, intellectual and cultural developments that shaped British sensibilities during the nineteenth-century implies that they represent more than an eccentric aspect of British culture.
