around her and supported her. The Prince of Wales knelt beside her bed. The German kaiser stood silently at the head, beside the queen. The other children and grandchildren were there as well, all their names were spoken from time to time. She died peacefully. After the king left for London, the German kaiser arranged the rest.’
In the end it was Kaiser Wilhelm, along with his uncle, King George, who lifted his grandmother Victoria into her coffin. That was how things went among the eternal kin, within the European family.
And there was yet another bedrock certainty: the British Empire. In Southwark, on Walworth Road, one finds the Cuming Museum. This ‘British Museum in miniature’, as it is sometimes called, is in fact more like an incredible collection of curiosities, piled high in the upper room of a library. Over the span of 120 years, father and son Richard (1777–1870) and Henry Cuming (1807–1902) dragged everything they could lay their hands on back to this plush lair; they were true nineteenth-century gentlemen. Father Richard's passion was born in 1782, when an aunt gave him three fossils and an old Indian coin for his fifth birthday. When Henry Cuming died in 1902, he left behind more than 100,000 objects,plus enough money to run a museum that would preserve the results of their collectors’ frenzy for all eternity. Consequently, we can still today wander about in the dream world of two Victorians.
The museum's cabinets and showcases contain, among other things: a length of Roman sewer pipe, an apple corer made from a sheep's bone, a phial containing crumbs from the wedding cake of Edward VIII, a stuffed chimpanzee – originally sold as ‘the mummy of a two-hundred-year-old man’ – an orange tooter from the 1864 races at Epsom, a piece of plaster from the room in which Napoleon died, every programme from every play the Cumings ever attended, a pair of Etruscan vases, a cigarette butt thrown away by a member of the royal family, a Roman child's toy, a medieval flute found in the Thames, a piece of the vest of Charles 1 and six ‘figurines from a lost civilisation’, kilned and aged in 1857 by two dredgers who turned a profit on the Cumings’ collectors’ mania.
A walk through this museum inevitably leaves one with the image of a huge pyramid of bones, knick-knacks, cake crumbs and slices of mummy, and atop it all two neatly dressed London gentlemen. With their museum they hoped to ‘create a storehouse of knowledge’ for ‘the merchant and the manufacturer, the archaeologist and the historian, the painter and the playwright, the military man and the naval strategist, the philanthropist and the philosopher, for the lover of culture in general’. The more they collected, the Cumings believed, the more people would know. And the more people knew about other cultures, past and present, the better they would realise that Britain under Queen Victoria formed the apotheosis of human civilisation, and that the Briton was the pinnacle of creation.
The Cumings were eccentric, of course, even in their own day. But they did reflect the mentality of the times, and they said openly what many Britons thought. What's more, they had the wherewithal to draw their personal conclusions. As the current curator has rightly noted, it is a collection that flies in the face of all known international agreements. The Cumings could never have hauled in their Indian masks, Roman toy sheep, Egyptian falcon mummies, Pacific scalps and Chinese inkpots so easily had their country not grown during that same period into the mightiest power on earth. Around 1900, the British Empire stretched from North to South Pole: Canada, Egypt, the Cape colonies, India, Burma, Malacca, Singapore, Australia and so on. The British Navy was strongenough to fight two wars at the same time, its fleet could – theoretically, at least – take on the combined navies of Germany, Russia and the United States. The British aristocracy was imitated
In the end it was Kaiser Wilhelm, along with his uncle, King George, who lifted his grandmother Victoria into her coffin. That was how things went among the eternal kin, within the European family.
And there was yet another bedrock certainty: the British Empire. In Southwark, on Walworth Road, one finds the Cuming Museum. This ‘British Museum in miniature’, as it is sometimes called, is in fact more like an incredible collection of curiosities, piled high in the upper room of a library. Over the span of 120 years, father and son Richard (1777–1870) and Henry Cuming (1807–1902) dragged everything they could lay their hands on back to this plush lair; they were true nineteenth-century gentlemen. Father Richard's passion was born in 1782, when an aunt gave him three fossils and an old Indian coin for his fifth birthday. When Henry Cuming died in 1902, he left behind more than 100,000 objects,plus enough money to run a museum that would preserve the results of their collectors’ frenzy for all eternity. Consequently, we can still today wander about in the dream world of two Victorians.
The museum's cabinets and showcases contain, among other things: a length of Roman sewer pipe, an apple corer made from a sheep's bone, a phial containing crumbs from the wedding cake of Edward VIII, a stuffed chimpanzee – originally sold as ‘the mummy of a two-hundred-year-old man’ – an orange tooter from the 1864 races at Epsom, a piece of plaster from the room in which Napoleon died, every programme from every play the Cumings ever attended, a pair of Etruscan vases, a cigarette butt thrown away by a member of the royal family, a Roman child's toy, a medieval flute found in the Thames, a piece of the vest of Charles 1 and six ‘figurines from a lost civilisation’, kilned and aged in 1857 by two dredgers who turned a profit on the Cumings’ collectors’ mania.
A walk through this museum inevitably leaves one with the image of a huge pyramid of bones, knick-knacks, cake crumbs and slices of mummy, and atop it all two neatly dressed London gentlemen. With their museum they hoped to ‘create a storehouse of knowledge’ for ‘the merchant and the manufacturer, the archaeologist and the historian, the painter and the playwright, the military man and the naval strategist, the philanthropist and the philosopher, for the lover of culture in general’. The more they collected, the Cumings believed, the more people would know. And the more people knew about other cultures, past and present, the better they would realise that Britain under Queen Victoria formed the apotheosis of human civilisation, and that the Briton was the pinnacle of creation.
The Cumings were eccentric, of course, even in their own day. But they did reflect the mentality of the times, and they said openly what many Britons thought. What's more, they had the wherewithal to draw their personal conclusions. As the current curator has rightly noted, it is a collection that flies in the face of all known international agreements. The Cumings could never have hauled in their Indian masks, Roman toy sheep, Egyptian falcon mummies, Pacific scalps and Chinese inkpots so easily had their country not grown during that same period into the mightiest power on earth. Around 1900, the British Empire stretched from North to South Pole: Canada, Egypt, the Cape colonies, India, Burma, Malacca, Singapore, Australia and so on. The British Navy was strongenough to fight two wars at the same time, its fleet could – theoretically, at least – take on the combined navies of Germany, Russia and the United States. The British aristocracy was imitated
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