‘Marvels and monstrosities from all quarters of the globe’

Abstract Although the museum of the Hartley Institution in Southampton was ostensibly intended to display local material, it attracted donations from much further afield. Southampton’s connections in the second half of the nineteenth century were global, as the Indian butterflies, Australian boomerangs and numerous other items from around the world that entered the collection attest. The expanding reach of the British Empire, as well as the port’s international commercial maritime links were reflected in the objects that found their way to the Hartley Institution. The geographical and historical origins of the institution’s collections underscore the ways in which the local and the global – in terms of both connections and collections – were equally important in establishing the museum’s remit. Centrifugal forces always exerted a considerable pull, drawing the focus of the collections and the museum to the wider horizons of Britain’s nineteenth-century maritime world. Unfortunately, the collection no longer exists but is reconstructed in the article with the aid of various archival records and other sources.