The working life of Museum of London

Welcome to the February Dickens Book Club.

My name is Sally, the Librarian at the Museum of London, and I have volunteered to read Bleak House with the book club as it is a novel I studied at school (rather a long time ago now) and enjoyed. 

Whereas studying ‘Silas Marner’ put me right off George Eliot, ‘Bleak House’ was so good it  encouraged me to go on and read other books by Dickens, although none of them ever seemed to match up to original impact of ‘Bleak House’.

I am looking forward to revisiting the novel as an older person, and I am also going to be reversing my Luddite tendencies and will be reading the novel on an e-reader, a well-known version of which was given to me as a Christmas present and on which my second download was the complete works of Dickens.

‘Bleak House’ followed the familiar publishing route for a Dickens novel, in that it was published as a partwork, over 19 monthly instalments (the last one being a double issue), from March 1852 to September 1853.

While readers at the time would have had a month to consume a few chapters, we will be reading the novel over just one short month, which means aiming to read at the rate of 2.5 chapters a day (well, that’s the plan).

As I remember, we will be encountering the whole gamut of Victorian society, from the homeless poor to the landed aristocracy, and will encounter issues of the day, such as slum clearance, sanitary reform, philanthropy, the development of a detective branch of the Met., and the iniquities of never-ending court cases. 

Encompassing it all is London – dirty, decaying and foggy – so let’s get started with the most magnificent opening of any Dickens novel, and immerse ourselves in fog…..

If you would like to join Sally in reading Bleak House our friends at Foyles are offering Dickens Book Club followers an additional 10% discount for online purchases of  the novel here. Simply enter ‘MOLBC’ at Checkout to activate this discount.

As part of our collections online programme bringing greater online access to our collections over the next three years, including the addition of over 90,000 objects. Project Assistant, Ed, talks us through his work with the Museum’s Roman coin collection:

The Museum’s Roman collection boasts some very fine examples of bronze, silver and gold coinage, and traces the history of Rome from the Republic, through the rise and eventual decline of the Empire, and culminates in the ascendancy of Byzantium.

The collection spans a period of no-less than seven centuries and represents over 100 different emperors, empresses, princes, rebels and usurpers.

The biggest challenge in working with this collection stems from the sheer volume of coin designs that the emperors could produce.

Recently I have been working with the coins of Emperor Domitian (81-96AD). Domitian alone was responsible for producing over 400 different coin designs during his 15 year reign. This is obviously a huge amount, but such numbers are not uncommon, and indeed such an output is dwarfed by that of others, such as Hadrian, who introduced nearly 1100 different coin designs during his rule, 117-138AD.

It may initially seem surprising that the emperors put so much thought into their coinage.

However, in a period before mass media, coins offered the perfect opportunity for the emperors to ‘meet’ their public. The minting of coins was the greatest source of propaganda available to the emperors.

They range of designs is astonishing. Coins were issued to commemorate great military victories, grand building projects, the quelling of rebellions and to celebrate the might and history of Rome.

They also gave ample opportunity for the emperors to associate themselves and their rule with a particular god, goddess or virtue by depicting them on the reverse.

In this respect the coins offer a real window into the ideology, principles and concerns of the emperors themselves. They could choose to depict themselves as philosophers, facilitators of peace and prosperity, or conversely, they could adopt a very different stance and associate themselves with Mars, the god of war, showing that they were prepared to hold onto their power with an iron fist if circumstances required it.

With such a vast array of coins being minted, correct identification offers a significant challenge.

Fortunately much of the collection is very well preserved. Some of the coins appear as if struck yesterday, and are identified and read as easily as they would have been millennia ago. However, time has taken its toll on many others.

The portraits are worn and reverses corroded, inscriptions are obliterated and details reduced to little more than a few lumps and bumps. In a few cases, identification is simply impossible. However, more often than not, identification can be made from the slightest of details. Until the fourth century the portraits of the emperors are very distinctive; subsequently, little more than the curve of the nose or the curl of a beard can give away their identity. Similarly the flick of a wing or the angle of an arm can all help identify the figure on the reverse.

I feel incredibly lucky to be able to handle these objects on a daily basis, and think of the many hands they may have passed between in their long history and the day to day transaction they may have been involved in. Yet, they are not simply discs of metal used to buy bread, wine, clothing or even be exchanged for possible brothel tokens! They can give us a real insight into the minds of the emperors themselves and the state and character of the empire.

I hope that when these coins are made available online to the public  in the summer of 2012 you will find them as interesting as I do.

It is hoped that by opening up of this collection online it will not only help the Museum engage with a wider public audience, but also offer a considerable contribution to the understanding of Roman numismatics in London, and provide increased opportunity for further enquiry, study and fresh analysis.

All images copyright Museum of London.

To mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II the Museum of London will be staging an exhibition in June 2012.

Celebrating the capital’s enthusiasm and affection, ‘At Home with the Queen‘, will feature Londoners photographed in their own homes with their cherished souvenirs of Queen Elizabeth II.

Here, exhibition curator, Julia Hoffbrand, updates us on the search for people and souvenirs to feature:

“Right. Just back from a very extended Christmas and New Year break. Mince pies and lie-ins behind me, I sit down, coffee in hand, to look at my inbox. Lots of enquiries, some general briefings for the Museum’s collections online resource, and some stray spam asking if I want strange things I’ve never heard of. And then on to the ‘At Home with the Queen’ inbox and post pigeon-hole.

Hurrah! Several new submissions have arrived whilst I’ve been away. They’re great! I print them out and put them with all the others received so far to review after the closing date for submissions on 31 January.

The exhibition’s beginning to look good.

I’m really pleased and excited by the range of Londoners who’ve sent in photos of themselves so far – a real mix of ages and backgrounds, some quite unexpected. Older people who remember the Coronation, people in their 20s and 30s who’ve inherited their grandparents’ commemoratives, and kids with books about the Queen which their parents read aloud to them before bed.

It’s fun working on an exhibition where Londoners themselves provide the content – you have no idea what’s going to arrive next and, barring the obscene and offensive, anything goes in this exhibition. It’s what Londoners make it – my role is to bring everything together and with the exhibition team create a display people want to visit and enjoy.

I’ve been really encouraged by the positive reactions I’ve had from people whenever I mention ‘At Home with the Queen’.  A brief chat at my local fish and chip shop where I put up a poster reveals that the owner once met the Queen when he was a kid and will hunt out his photo for the exhibition. A conversation at the library (and another poster later) uncovers a woman who has two Golden Jubilee shot glasses bought she says, at a petrol station on the way to Devon in 2002 (she says it’s a long story ….).

The next step for me is to start writing the design brief for ‘At Home with the Queen’. This outlines the exhibition’s content, structure and ‘feel’ for the designer to work from. After this, I’ll revisit our stores to choose a small selection of the Museum’s commemorative objects to display alongside Londoners’ photographs (I have had a quick look already and had these by my desk):

We’re hoping to also display some of the objects that appear in people’s photographs so I’ll need to speak to our design department to find out what display cases we can use …

A blog post from Jon in our conservation team on the work looking after and preparing our objects for display.

As this years’ intern within the applied arts section of the conservation department at the Museum of London I am very grateful to have been given the exciting opportunity of experiencing the build-up and installation of the Museum’s major new exhibition – Dickens and London.

In the months before installation began, conservators were busy ensuring all the objects and artefacts were suited to being placed on display. Within the new exhibition objects of a range of materials are installed including shop signs from Dickensian London, documents written in Dickens’ own hand and furniture from Dickens’ house.

This required the knowledge and expertise of our whole conservation team, particularly specialists in paper, textiles and the applied arts.

Within the Applied Arts section we work to conserve many artefacts of Victorian social history; however, as an admirer of Dickens it has been incredibly rewarding being able to work on objects with a particularly close connection to the man himself – such as this chair he was often photographed in.

Dickens’ chair is on open display within the new exhibition, so work was required to stabilise and secure the aged leather upholstery, predominantly around the back rest, where the degraded material had begun to laminate and fall away.

In addition to this, surface cleaning was conducted to remove dust.

Modern ethics within the field of conservation maintain that minimal intervention should be practiced when conserving artefacts – this means altering the original material and structure as little as possible, whilst ensuring the object is sturdy enough to be displayed or stored. We also aim to make every process and alteration reversible, so our changes could be ‘undone’ if needed in the future. For Dickens’ chair this meant adhering loose leather with a removable adhesive to consolidate the fragile material.

Historic leather can suffer acidic degradation due to reactions with sulphurous pollutants in the air. Testing the pH of the leather of Dickens’ chair revealed the leather had become particularly acidic – it was therefore thought appropriate to treat the leather with an aluminium compound – a process that effectively re-tans the leather – neutralising acidity and reversing some degradation processes.

Preventive conservation is also a key role of the museum’s conservators and collection care staff. With regards to this we have been carefully monitoring light levels (particularly important where objects such as Dickens’ handwritten manuscripts are displayed!), ensuring the environment within the gallery is suitable for the collections and that the cases are dust free – the latter involving several days spent cleaning the inside and outside of display cases!

It has been brilliant to see the culmination of many people’s knowledge, ideas and skills work together to create such an exciting and enchanting exhibition.

You can hear more about the conservation work at the Museum’s next free ‘meet the expert’ event at 2pm on Wednesday 25 January.

As part of our collections online programme bringing greater online access to our collections over the next three years, including the addition of over 90,000 objects, today sees our collection of tinsel prints go live on our website, just in time for Christmas.

Either search “Theatrical tinsel portraits” to browse the collection or you can access them directly using this link.

Here our Project Assistant, Ellie, provides her perspective on some of the prints she has recently been working with:

During the nineteenth century, London’s theatres were a popular medium. Whole genres of popular plays would develop and protests were carried out when theatre prices rose. Theatre-goers could buy prints of actors playing various roles and soon tinsel prints also became available. Many of the plays included spectacular combat and dramatic sequences, and by adorning prints with paint, fabric and metal foil, theatregoers could convey some of the spectacle of the stage.

One of the collections the museum is putting online is its collection of theatrical tinsel prints. These have been carefully photographed and their museum database records updated. The prints could be intricately detailed, which suggests that they were made by adults. The majority of subjects of tinsel prints are male actors, and a high proportion of these are depicted in combat. Figures in chain mail and armour offered ample potential for the keen tinseller, as the metallic elements of their costumes invited tinsel adornment.

They could use metal foil and fabric, such as these velvet ‘monstrous beasts’. Often tinsel prints depict spectacular moments of drama within a performance. The earlier ones give information about roles, performances and actors. Later on the activity of tinselling became an established pastime and the information about specific performances is printed infrequently.

Most of the items in the museum’s collection come from Jonathan King, who ran a stationary shop in Essex road, Islington. His collection of tinsel prints was especially illustrative, as it gave an account not only of the material cultures of enthusiasm, popular craft and souvenir collecting, but because the prints themselves also include a printed record of London’s theatre during the middle of the nineteenth century. The collection is also significant because it includes items relating to the production of tinsel materials.

This illustration shows how sample sheets were used to decide which colour adornments would be used. The way the imaged is repeated reminds me of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn series (external link).  The repetition of shapes and colours pre-empts the ways that Warhol’s colourful, printed images would later depict the actress as iconic.

The museum’s collection includes a number of actresses, such as this print, which have been adorned. Women feature less often in tinsel prints, perhaps because their costumes didn’t offer as much scope for the tinsel-mad enthusiast. Writers have also speculated that the scarcity of actresses suggests that tinselling was an activity for young boys, who were more interested in dramatic and heroic scenes.

The collection also includes some of the printing plates used to make the penny prints and this one also shows Mrs Daly as Poll Maggot.

Initially tinsel pieces were sold to match the prints, and this stock sheet shows how they were fastened and bundled in packages.

 Dies like these would be used to cut out individual pieces. This bow stamp is from the collection, and looking along the side of the stamp you can see evidence of how hard it must have been struck to shape the metal foil pieces.

The museum’s collection of the tools for tinsel production is very rare. Collections online makes it possible to see the stamps, the tinsel pieces made from them and then to find the pieces on the finished tinsel print.

You can read Ellie’s first blog post on her work here.

The Museum has a collection of over 4,000 17th century trade tokens, 1,800 of which Verity, one of our team of Project Assistants , is getting ready to go online:

Trade tokens were issued between 1648 and 1673 at a time when there was little low denomination coinage being issued by the crown.

As a result traders and business proprietors began issuing tokens as an alternate coinage with equivalent denominations of usually of a farthing, half penny or penny.

On rare occasions higher denominations were issued, in the collection we have two-penny tokens and a sixpence.

On the token could be represented a variety of things including, the issuers name, business (written or depicted as a sign- buildings didn’t have numbers, so signs were used to recognise them), and the date of issue.

Tokens would be accepted by other businesses in the area which would be collected and then exchanged for the equivalent silver coinage from the issuer.

Part of the process of getting the collections online included having all the trade tokens scanned. We were lucky enough to have an excellent team of volunteers that scanned the trade tokens, as well as weighing and measuring them. This has allowed us to gather and display a lot more information about them than we otherwise would.

It left me free to update the records, which involved using existing catalogues, as well as re-examining the tokens to check inscriptions and signs to provide the correct information about a token; it also gave me the time to do some additional research into issuers and the places of issue which provided some fascinating contextual information.

The location of issue for the tokens has involved some interesting research using a variety of sources; mainly the changing names of streets and areas around London over the past few hundred years. Whilst many street names have remained for centuries, some have changed to reflect the changing trades and ownership apparent in some areas. These need to be researched to allow us to place the location of issue of a token as accurately as possible.

We’ve already got a small amount of trade tokens online, in The Great Fire of London 1666 collection. The first batch of trade tokens I have been working on should be online soon and I will be getting the rest of the 4,000 ready to go online next year.

In the meantime I’ll be working on Roman samian ware, so look out for my next blog post about the variety of artwork on Roman samian.

In our latest blog from our team bringing our collections online, we hear again from Ellie and her continuing work with our printed ephemera collection…

Our collection of business cards, invoices, brochures and receipts, provides a snapshot of London’s working life.

The collection will be made available online for the first time next Spring, giving researchers the chance to access the objects from the comfort of their own homes.

I imagine this resource will be well-used by family historians as well as academic researchers, who will be able to search the online information for specific names and trades.

Each of the cards and receipts will have a photograph to accompany the printed information, allowing anyone to virtually delve into the boxes.

As well as showing the aesthetic development of professional branding, the cards illuminate some canny combinations of careers.

I was surprised to find one prudent gentleman whose card advertised his work as both Carpenter and Undertaker.  I have since learned this was a common combination of careers and presumably provided a relatively stable source of income.

The museum’s collection of Valentine’s cards is the largest of the three collections I am working with.

The collection contains almost 1800 Valentines cards, the oldest of which are early nineteenth century, and predate the uniform penny postal service introduced in the 1840s.

The majority of the cards were hand made by workers employed by the stationer Jonathan King from premises in Essex Road, Islington.

The collection includes a number of experimental cards and although there is a great deal of Victorian sentimentality, some of the more unusual cards include those with comic or insulting messages and several featuring photographs of cats.

Whilst some motifs have remained in today’s commercial Valentines cards, it is not difficult to see why cards featuring the ‘Lobster in Love’ did not take off.

Similarly, it is some relief that cards with stuffed birds attached no longer grace the shelves of high-street stationers. I will blog in more detail about the Valentine’s cards in February when the collection goes online.

You can catch up on all our collections online blog posts to date here.

In our latest blog from our team bringing our collections online, we hear from Ellie and her work with printed ephemera…

This is a photograph of part of one of the museum’s stores.

Inside these boxes the museum has a remarkable collection of printed ephemera, which is often described as the minor, transient documents of everyday life.

The collection includes things like tickets, posters, flyers and greetings cards: the kind of material which holds lots of information about everyday life but is often thrown away.

My job as collections online project assistant is to work to get some of this material available online.

My blog posts will introduce the collections I am working with to give an idea about some of the fascinating collections that will be accessible through collections online in the coming year.

Recently I have been working on our collection of embellished theatrical portraits.

These images, known as tinsel prints, depict actors in popular roles. They were sold plain and uncoloured, often for a penny each, with metal foil adornments which would be used to decorate the prints.

The museum’s tinsel print collection is extensive and includes completed prints, unfinished pieces, tinsel ornaments and the punches used to stamp out the ornaments.

The tinsel prints will provide an insight into the history of theatre, into theatrical costume and scenery and props as well as the hobbies and souvenir collecting of nineteenth-century Londoners.

They also provide a resource for researchers interested in individual actors and a later blog will elaborate on one actor in particular.

The Tinsel prints should go online during December and I will blog about them in more detail at that time.

I will also update you shortly with a blog post on my work with our collection of trade and valentine cards.

Until then the team would love to hear from you with your thoughts on exploring the 10,000 plus objects currently available from our collections online.

You can catch up on all our collections online blog  posts to date here.

We have a fantastic collection of 1950s and 1960s photographs of London.

Many of these were taken by photo journalist Henry Grant, a freelance photographer who had started out working for a news agency on Fleet Street. He was known for his skill at capturing spontaneous ‘moments’ within ordinary life, resulting in some great pictures giving us a fantastic vision of London in this period.

As well as photographs of favourite London sights such as the pigeons in Trafalgar Square or a ship sailing through Tower Bridge, there are also photographs of people shopping in markets and department stores, children playing in parks and adventure playgrounds, students at training colleges, the funfair on Hampstead Heath, patients at health clinics and protestors attending demonstrations against the H bomb, the Colour Bar Immigration Bill and Rent increases.

We are working to get a total of 1,000 of these photographs online by August next year (you should be able to see the first of these online by February 2012), adding to the selection already on our Collections online.

There are over 80,000 photographs in Grant’s archive and so the first job is to select the images we want from the hundreds of contacts sheets. This can be very time consuming but the biggest problem is the careful selection – we could include so many more!

The next step is to prepare the actual negatives for digitisation.

The negatives are all 6×6 or 35mm and the strips usually require cutting down, which means using a light box to check that you have the correct image and to ensure that no damage is done to the negative itself.

Using the lightbox means there’s no Seasonal Affective Disorder for me! The negatives are then sleeved and numbered and will all be photographed this December by our in house team. I will be researching the images and writing captions until August 2012.

Negatives that I’ve worked on this week were a varied bunch and included Ton Up boys (early Rockers) and their motorbikes outside the Ace Café, young children at the Robin Hill Day nursery in Notting Hill and Londoners on a daytrip to Brighton (my favourites are an elderly lady in her furs on the seafront and a couple sunbathing fully clothed and fast asleep in their deckchairs!).

Our Collections online resource currently allows access to over 10,000 objects from the Museum’s collections, available through a single point of access. Click here to begin exploring!

Meet our Project Assistants who are coordinating the documentation and digitisation of our objects for Collections online in the first of our blog posts here.

The Museum of London recently launched a new web resource called Collections online which currently allows access to over 10,000 objects from the Museum’s collections, available through a single point of access.

The Museum now has ambitious plans for making greater online access to its collections over the next three years, including the addition over 90,000 more objects.

To achieve this aim the Museum has recently taken on four Project Assistants to coordinate the documentation and digitisation necessary to achieve this target.

Working closely with curators and to a strict data standard, they will be upgrading records in our collections management database and either scanning the objects themselves or liaising with photographers to create new digital images.

The four Project Assistants, and their current areas of focus, are:

Anna: Photographs by Henry Grant

Verity: 17th century trade tokens and Roman Samian ware

Ed: Roman coins

Ellie: Trade cards, Valentine cards and Tinsel prints

Records will be released in batches throughout the year and during this time the Project Assistants will be keeping you up to date with their work via blog posts discussing the objects they are digitising and the techniques used to put them online.

So check back soon for the first of our posts starting with updates from Anna and Ellie in the coming weeks.