Dust

Buried in the 1715 catalogue of Ralph Thoresby's museum, in a category the antiquarian refers to as his 'Humane Rarities', is a curious object described in a single sentence:

A Pugill of the Dust (unmix’d with Earth) of a noble Countess, not easily distinguish’d from common Dust and Ashes. (Ducatus Leodiensis, 431)

By a ‘pugill’, Thoresby means a pinch — a tiny amount of granular matter which he tells us is the cremated remains of an unnamed countess. Thoresby says that these ashes are pure, not mixed with earth, though he acknowledges that (at least visually) the pinch of powder could easily be mistaken for unremarkable dirt. This is what makes the object curious — on whose authority does Thoresby hang this illustrious provenance? What kind of container was it kept in, in order to keep it ‘unmix’d’ with the ambient dirt and dust of his Leeds residence? To visit his collection in 1715, how would a visitor identify this pinch of dust among Thoresby’s other curiosities?

These tantalising questions are typical of those invited by many early modern collections, whose objects — since decayed, lost or rendered unrecognisable — are now only accessible through textual descriptions. Although catalogues like Thoresby’s deal with the arrangement and categorisation of physical things, the materiality of these things must be inferred from the more durable (but perhaps less reliable) traces that they’ve left on paper. As the remains of Thoresby’s countess illustrate, the distinction between ‘noble’ dust and ‘common’ dust depends entirely on who’s writing the label.

George Vertue, ‘Engraving of Ralph Thoresby’ (1712), © The Trustees of the British Museum

Like the majority of affluent European collectors in the early eighteenth century, Thoresby’s collection encompassed all kinds of scientific and antiquarian objects, alongside an extensive library. The collection, dubbed the ‘Musaeum Thoresbyanum’, contained everything from polar bear feet to Roman coins, fossils to Egyptian mummies. Thoresby brags that the Prussian ambassador, after visiting his collection, wondered ‘how it was possible for a private Person to become Master of so vast a Treasure’ (Ducatus Leodiensis, xv).

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, collecting was increasingly popular due to accelerating colonial expansion and broadening networks of global trade. The foundation of the Society of Antiquaries in 1717, meanwhile, marked increased interest in gathering and interpreting the material remains of the past. Yet the popularity of collecting also raised concerns about thoughtless accumulation — amidst the flood of objects circulating through English collections, how could one properly discern what had ‘value’?

For example, while Hans Sloane was insisting that his collection of Jamaican flora and fauna would promote ‘the Advancement of Natural Knowledge’ (Voyage, vol.1, sig.[Ar]), Joseph Addison was dismissing natural history specimens as the mere ‘refuse of nature’ (The Tatler 216). While Addison himself was busy with his coin collections, Mary Astell mocked collectors who traded their useful currency for obsolete ‘old Coins’ (Essay, 98). At every turn, collectors were confronted with the reality that their decisions to preserve or to discard, to categorise or to cast off, were in some sense arbitrary.

Thoresby’s contemporary Matthew Prior captured this arbitrary quality of collecting when he wrote that

The various Estimate we make as to the Value of Things cannot be better Illustrated then by the wants we find in the pursuit of our Studies, every Man adding to his heap, and desirous to compleat his Collection; Books, Pictures, Medals, nay dryed flowers, insects, Cockle-shells, any thing will do […] perhaps a little Boy Yesterday at Canterbury tore that Butterfly in Pieces, or at Dover threw the very Shell into the Sea, the Species of which were the only Ones now missing in Sir Hans Sloans Cabinet, and an Oyleman on Fish Street Hill did actually wrap up his Anchovies in the first Horace that was ever Printed. (‘Essay Upon Opinion’, 194)

Prior illustrates that collecting operates at the border between the known and unknown, the preserved and the forgotten, treasure and trash. A rare printed book in one hand becomes wrapping paper in another, and scientific collectors of the period were constantly reminded that the fossils, insects and plants that they pored over were seen by others as worthless trifles. As Prior goes on to write, these examples show that value is not inherent in objects, but instead emerges from the contexts in which we encounter them.

Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities (c. 1690). Museo dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence.

Without the context of its written description, Thoresby’s dust becomes indistinguishable from the dirt that surrounds it. Whether the dust was truly the ashes of a countess or not, its association with human remains adds a poignancy to its liminal material condition. It was once the stuff of human life, but now it has transformed into the kind of anonymous matter that is swept away or brushed aside. Dust is most often an unwanted incursion into collections, its presence on artefacts, books and other treasures indicates neglect and oblivion. Preserving dust is therefore a powerful memento mori, and Thoresby’s acknowledgement of his dust’s proximity to ‘common dust and ashes’ is a reminder of the essential impermanence of collected objects and the meanings attached to them.

How the pinch of dust was kept in Thoresby’s museum remains a mystery, and this is true of many of the objects that were described in his 1715 catalogue. The catalogue is not useful as an inventory for navigating the collection, but it does function as a kind of narrative guide to Thoresby’s museum, a virtual visit that lingers on the details and qualities of objects that Thoresby himself found most interesting. The ways in which the catalogue animates the Musaeum Thoresbyanum are thrown into relief by another catalogue of the same collection, written when the objects were put up for auction in 1764. This later account is more concerned with the collection’s commercial value, and the bemused auctioneer lumps many of the weirder curiosities together into lots like ‘sundry odd Things’ (Musaeum Thoresbyanum, 19).

This is another reminder that the value and meaning of an object depends on who’s writing its label. The pinch of dust is a particularly acute example of the power of descriptive language in collections, but the questions it raises are pertinent to all kinds of collected objects and their interpretations. Like the objects themselves, the stories and identities contained in collections shift over time – any claim to permanence or objectivity is undone by the ambiguities of Thoresby’s dust.

Will Burgess recently completed his PhD in the Department of English at Queen Mary, University of London.

Selected Bibliography.

Astell, Mary. An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London: Roper et al, 1696).
Bond, Donald F., ed., The Tatler, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
Bristow, Whiston, Musaeum Thoresbyanum (London: n.p., 1764).
Prior, Matthew, ‘Essay Upon Opinion’ in Dialogues of the Dead and Other Works in Verse and Prose, ed. by A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907).
Sloane, Hans, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, 2 vols. (London: for the author, 1707-1725).
Thoresby, Ralph, Ducatus Leodiensis: Or, the Topography of the Ancient and Populous Town and Parish of Leeds (London: M. Atkins, 1715).

24 March 2022.