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collecting of the sailors (Thomas 1991: 140). Thomas argues that the sailors
also aroused the irritation of the scientist-explorers because they were seen as
not being entitled to these potent signifiers. As scientific specimens and material
evidence, curiosities were linked to the high value placed on empirical, firsthand
knowledge. As such, they were expressive of the experience and social position
of the gentlemen explorers and the scientists who had travelled on the voyages
(Thomas 1991:143). The sailors recognized in them the means to become
wealthy; indeed this was one of their prime motivations for undertaking such
journeys. Already we see a split between the official and scientific acquisition of
ethnographic objects for museum collections (supplied by the gentlemen
explorers) and the curiosity market, which supplied private collectors and
museums via the sailors.
By the mid-nineteenth century, scientific curiosity is differentiated from
acquisitive or prurient curiosity (Oettermann 1997: 127). The latter becomes
associated with new forms of popular entertainment and a sensation-seeking
public. Curiosity’s association with scientific learning was now viewed posi-
tively, but its longstanding association with ostentation and overconsumption,
and its association with popular displays of scientific (and not so scientific)
marvels also led it to be viewed very negatively. The once refined passion
of the aristocracy had become an appetite for the spectacular associated with
the ignorant rural poor, the urban working classes, and with children and
women of all classes. It was courted by the commercial cousins of the public
museum, such as the amusement park, circuses and fairs, as well as sensational
popular museums such as P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York and
Bullock’s Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London. Barnum described his museum
as an ‘encyclopaedic synopsis of everything worth seeing in this curious world’.
His exhibits included hoaxes such as the feejee ‘mermaid’ (half-monkey, half-
fish), and, notoriously, human ‘oddities’. As well as exploiting the vulnerable
people he showed, Barnum played on the ignorance and gullibility of the
audience (Cook 1996). Bullock also exhibited people – one exhibit included
Laplanders and reindeer in front of painted panoramas. An 1816 caricature by
George Cruikshank satirizes the ‘swarm’ of curiosity seekers who came to see
Napoleon’s coach at the Egyptian Hall: while the audience, which includes
everyone from peasants to fashionable gentlemen and a disconsolate Frenchman,
clamber over the coach, a museum employee shows some fascinated women
‘one of Napoleon’s shirts’ (Oetterman 1997: 127).
The popularization of curiosity was also the marginalization of the gro-
tesque and the unclassifiable. Where curiosity had once been an indifferent
term, it now became a reproach. A similar change occurred with the term ‘non-
descript’, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a non-judgemental term
for animals not yet described or labelled. By the early nineteenth century