ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates a shift in the function and meaning of Sir Hans Sloane's private collection developed both organically and quite deliberately from the changing ways in which it was used by contemporaries, and shows how the intertwined with Sloane's public identity and social importance. Sloane and his collection were seen to be worthy of international celebration, representative of British learning and its growing political and cultural power. The collection originally pursued in the course of largely private and professional ends steadily became a tool of both social preservation and communal representation. In nineteenth century, and the early twentieth century, there was increasing agreement that collectors who wanted to preserve their collections for posterity and who felt some obligation to public good should either make a bequest to a public institution or establish such an institution themselves. In these ways, Sloane influenced the later history of collecting, even as his own collection became increasingly neglected in its British Museum home.
