Inside the Museum of London

Did you see our curator Meriel Jeater make a special appearance on the Royal Institution 2012 Christmas Lectures? She tells us all about her experience here…

Well, actually more like two minutes of fame but anyway, here’s how it happened. Recently I had the great pleasure and excitement of taking a Roman gold necklace, strung with emerald beads, to be filmed as part of a Royal Institution of Great Britain Christmas lecture. The necklace is from the Museum of London collection and is normally on display in our Roman gallery. The RI wanted an example of an ancient gold object that would demonstrate the amazing properties of gold – that it doesn’t tarnish or rust and can come out of the ground after thousands of years looking as fresh as the day it was buried. We offered them a selection of gold items from our collection and they chose this beautiful necklace fragment.

A necklace composed of seven hexagonal Egyptian emerald (beryl) beads on a gold chain. The links are flat, figure-of-eight shape, attached to the beads by straight pieces of gold wire threaded through beads and then twisted through main link.

Where was it found?

This necklace was found by archaeologists excavating on the site of 48-50 Cannon Street in the City of London in 1975. It probably dates to between 100 AD and 300AD.

Why is it an interesting piece?

Fine jewellery like this is very rare in Britain. This was the first necklace of its kind to be found on an excavation in Britain so it is an incredibly important piece. Delicate, flexible gold necklaces with emeralds like this were fashionable across the Roman Empire and several examples have been found in places like Pompeii in Italy. This necklace shows that people in Britain were following fashions current across the empire, even though they were living right on the edge of the Roman world.

Where did the necklace come from?

It’s made from gold, which could have come from a number of places in the Roman Empire. The main source of gold in Britain was Wales but there were also sources in Scotland and Cornwall. The only known Roman gold mine in Britain was in Carmarthenshire in Wales. It isn’t possible to tell where the gold is from but from analysis we know that it is very pure – it contains around 95% gold and up to 5% copper. Roman gold jewellery is commonly much purer than ours is today (a modern 9 carat gold ring can contain as little as 37.5% gold).

Analysis has shown that the emeralds are from Egypt. Emeralds were highly prized in the Roman world for their colour. Colour was very important in Roman jewellery. Today we are more concerned with our gems being clear and sparkly, whereas in Roman times people didn’t mind that gems were cloudy, they just wanted them to have a vivid colour. We don’t know if the necklace was made here with the emeralds shipped in from Egypt or whether it arrived already made.

It’s important to remember that this object is the result of many people’s back-breaking labour. Roman mines for gems and metals like gold were manned by slaves and condemned criminals. The conditions were appalling and very dangerous. The workers were often chained and kept down in the mine under constant guard and beaten regularly to keep them working. People may have died so that this necklace could be made and worn. If the gold came from Britain it could have been mined by native British people pressed into service in the mines. Just like with many of our modern products, the poorest and most deprived people in Roman society would have worked to produce something worn by the most privileged.

Who might have owned this necklace?

We can’t be sure who owned this necklace and how they came to lose it. It has almost certainly been lost otherwise it would have been melted down and turned into something else and we would never have found it. We don’t know whether it was lost by a jeweller working in Londinium or whether it belonged to a rich Roman lady. In 1994 a nearby archaeological site uncovered evidence of gold working in this area with the discovery of three crucibles containing traces of gold. This shows that gold melting and refining was happening here.

If it did belong to a lady, she would have been wealthy, possibly the wife or daughter of a rich landowner or merchant. We know from excavations around Cannon Street that there were high status houses here with mosaic floors, central heating and beautifully painted walls. Perhaps the lady owner lived close by and was walking through the streets of London on the way to visit the baths one morning or to see friends and her necklace broke. From burial evidence in London we know that some women were able to afford silk clothing with gold embroidery – she may have been one of these elite ladies able to afford the finer things in life. Whoever the owner was (we could let our imaginations run for days coming up with ideas around this) they must have been very upset to lose such a lovely object. I’m certainly very glad that we have it in our collection and that I was able to take it to the Royal Institution for an amazing day of science.

Find out more: Metal working in Roman London

Vauxhall, 1785 by Thomas Rowlandson

Pleasure gardens competed for visitors, vying with each other to offer evermore exciting entertainments. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens offered a wide variety of entertainment, including lion-tamers, trampoline clowns, fortune tellers, ventriloquists, monkeys, dogs, jugglers, horses who danced to a waltz and fire walkers.

Tournaire's Equestrians, Vauxhall Gardens, 1846

Costumes from the Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

The Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

Have the recent TV and radio adaptations alongside celebrations for the upcoming 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens seen you revisit or read for the first time a work by this creative genius?

If so there is still time to join our Dickens Book Club and share your thoughts on the work of this great author via Facebook and Twitter.

We will be focusing on Bleak House in February, sharing favourite passages and our thoughts as we progress through this work.

We will also be completing our reading of Barnaby Rudge from January, so do look out for updates here as the novel approaches the Gordon Riots of 1780.

When the book club was launched in September 2011  we decided to ask our social media followers which work of Dickens to read to close our book club in May 2012.

Having reviewed the suggestions and comments received. The title that we have chosen to feature in May is David Copperfield. With its “memorable characters written in the first person” this was agreed to be a worthy title to close our book club celebrations of Charles Dickens work.

Alongside this online book club we have also been running a series of book club events at Foyles Bookshop flagship store at Charing Cross, London. The next meeting is being held at 6.30pm on Monday 6 February 2012 focusing on Bleak House with our Dickens and London exhibition curator Alex Werner.

 There is no need to book just turn up on the night and meet in person other fans and aficionados of Dickens.

Our books clubs are ran in support of our Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London which is open until 10 June 2012.

Having in previous months featured such titles as The Mystery of Edwin Drood and A Tale of Two Cities on our virtual book club in support of our new exhibition, Dickens and London. We are focusing this month on one of Dickens less renowned works – Barnaby Rudge.

It is early days in terms of my reading (and the sharing of my thoughts which can be found on our twitter and Facebook pages) but I have already been struck by how this work may have influenced a later addition to the Dickens canon, Great Expectations.

I have also had a look for Barnaby Rudge related content from our exhibition, and have found this from 1840 that details the execution of one Francois Benjamin Courvoisier:

(c) Museum of London

From its supporting caption I noted mention that Dickens witnessed three public executions in his lifetime including that of the Swiss valet Francois Benjamin Courvoisier convicted of murdering his master Lord Russell.

Dickens was horrified by the effect of the public spectacle on the crowd. Amongst the crowd gathered outside Newgate for the execution he noted there was ‘nothing but ribaldry, debauchery,levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes’. Such scenes were recreated in the novel Barnaby Rudge that he began the following year.

I plan to blog again once I have completed sharing my thoughts on the novel but until then it would be great to hear if you plan to read along with me!

Dickens and London is open until 10 June 2012.

It’s official, we are now starting to feel rather festive as our Christmas trees are in place and decorated at both the Museum of London and the Museum of London Docklands.

Above is the tree for the Museum of London which is displayed in our foyer near to the entrance to the first of our galleries, London Before London.

Here is a look at the tree in place in the foyer of the Museum of London Docklands…

With Victorian Grotto’s created especially for Santa (although we hear that after Christmas a certain Scrooge will be in residence) due to open at both museums on Saturday and lots of festive fun for families planned throughout December we hope that a visit to either (or both) of our museums will add some Christmas cheer!

Now that our reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood has come to an end Records Manager, Sarah Demb, shares her final thoughts and experiences on completing this unfinished work.

In truth, I find Dickens a difficult read, although I’m a voracious reader of maximalist fiction and devoted to fictional London, which informs my immigrant experience of the city almost as much as my daily life. But I had to force myself through this short novel (I highly recommend Dan Simmons’ ‘Drood’- his fictionalisation vision of events that could have inspired the writing of the book as Dickens and his friend, author Wilkie Collins, confound each other in nightly escapades and attempt to identify the mysterious Drood, who us far more menacing than the innocent victim in Dickens’ story).

Reader, I was only truly interested in two characters, those whose relationship seemed to have tension and spark, namely Edwin and Rosa, betrothed at the behest and bequests of their respective deceased fathers.

I wanted so much to like the entire book, but only Rosa’s character really drew me in, with her passionate energy and desire to be honest in her emotional dealings.

Did Dickens do this on purpose? Discuss…

True to his serialist origins, the central mystery of Edwin’s disappearance (although to me the real mystery is what Jasper is up to and why his opium supplier shows up in Cloisterham) doesn’t occur until over half way through the book, which I think might drag even if it wasn’t unfinished, although the undercurrent of menace that Jasper exudes kept me hanging on.

As we know, Dickens died before completing the book, so perhaps it all would have made more sense had he finished the novel.

You can read Sarah’s blog post as she began her reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood here.

Dickens and London, a new exhibition from the Museum of London opens 9 December.

Our Primary Schools Programme Manager Nina Sprigge, reveals more about the build up to Kids Takeover Day 2011 at the Museum of London.

Preparations for November’s Dickens Book Club novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood with our Records Manager, Sarah Demb are now in place:

I love a good mystery but balked at the normal bulk of a Dickens’ tome, so surely The Mystery of Edwin Drood was for me.

It opens as a classic potboiler in its lurid depiction of an opium den in Victorian London’s East End.

Fascinating to both his readers of the time and countless others afterwards, he invites us to spy through Drood’s uncle John Jasper’s eyes, safe in the knowledge that this exotic depravity can’t touch us. But Jasper next fetches up in placid rural Cloisterham…

The opening chapter of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, classic in the Orientalism of the time, immediately made me uncomfortable.

The racist depiction of anonymous (and in real life almost certainly blameless) Chinese sits uncomfortably with our contemporary sensibilities and our acknowledgement of the rich cultural history of this city.

If this is Dicken’s London, then I prefer the stifled, cosy twin ‘cloister’ of Furvinall’s Inn, which puts us squarely in the precints of Holborn, in environs we can almost recreate during late night walks today.

The Inns of London provide some of the most magical, evocative landscapes, windows into the recent past, although Dickens may not have meant his readers to romanticise them.

I will be continuing my thoughts as we progress through the book via regular book club posts on Twitter and Facebook  (why not join us?) and will round up my final thoughts back here on the blog once we have completed our journey through the mystery of Edwin Drood.

Dickens and London, a major new exhibition at the Museum of London, opens 9 December 2011.

Planning to visit the Museum of London this half term with you family?

To support the launch of HiddenCity’s (external link) interactive text message trail we are looking for a family who would be happy to be filmed using the trail in our galleries early next week.

The film would then be posted onto the Museum of London’s YouTube Channel (external link) and mentioned in tweets (external link) and Facebook updates (external link).

As a thank you for taking part we will provide you with £50 of museum shop vouchers to spend during your visit or save until Christmas.

If you are interested in helping the museum launch this exciting new product email marketing@museumoflondon.org.uk with your contact details including your intended visit date and time and we will see if your timings match ours!

The Discovery Trail takes families on a journey of exploration through London’s turbulent history. Using text messages and a map of the museum, players are guided through a trail of clues, each leading them to a new location within the Museum where they use their ingenuity to deduce answers from their surroundings. Players who successfully complete the trail win a coveted ‘Certified Londoner’ badge by showing the Museum hosts their final congratulatory text message.

To take part, participants sign up in advance by visiting the HiddenCity website (external link), head to the Museum, send the message ‘start’ and get cracking. The trail takes approximately two hours to complete, including a break. It is ideally played by several teams, each consisting of two to four people and costs £16 per team. Entry to the Museum of London is free.

Those who take up the challenge will step through time and can expect to see, touch, hear and even smell exhibits spanning prehistoric, Roman and medieval London, right up to the 20th century and present day city.