ABSTRACT
On Thursday, 29 April 1819, at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London, William Bullock began to auction off his museum collection. At a conservative estimate, by then the museum had been visited by several hundred thousand people, a figure which includes a very large proportion of ‘the upper ten thousand’, the educated opinion formers and consumers living at the time in London and the country. The eventual destinations of Bullock’s material have attracted considerable attention (Kaeppler 1978) but the significance of his collection and his museum has been relatively neglected. This is, in large part, because Bullock was a showman as well as a natural philosopher and a collector, and as such his intellectual respectability as a player in the history of ideas was only marginal. Yet the style of the displays that he mounted can fairly be claimed to have invented a new visual language of objects, one which museums across the globe have, one way or another, been working through ever since. This chapter endeavours to trace the changes Bullock initiated in his collecting and exhibition practices between 1795 and 1819, and to draw out their wider implications.
