Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks and the cabinet of curiosity: rethinking legacies of early modern collecting and the nineteenth-century museum

The collection practices of Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, the British Museum’s first Keeper of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography from 1866–1896, offer powerful evidence for rethinking the importance of the early modern cabinet of curiosity to the history of the modern museum. In this article, I examine Franks’s curatorship as one clearly invested in and evolving from the cabinet of curiosity’s ideological and architectural practices of collecting. Foundational guidebooks, institutional reports, and correspondence from Franks reveal his recurring engagement with “curiosity” despite the British Museum’s explicit efforts to distance itself from its institutional beginning – Sir Hans Sloane’s cabinet of curiosity in 1753. Further, Franks’s curatorship evokes earlier collection histories as it was his personal interests and authority that informed the key areas of expansion in the museum’s holdings and the organisation and display of the collection in his department’s galleries. Ultimately, I aim to counter dominant scholarly narratives that the modern museum is a distinct break from the cabinet of curiosity to explore the cabinet as a process of collecting that will offer new insights into the curatorship of one of the British Museum’s most eminent and influential curators.