Victorian Collectors

The first area of our permanent displays is a tableau depicting Frederick Corbin Lukis and his daughter Mary at home amid a 'cabinet of curiosities'. The Lukis family antiquarian and natural science collections were effectively the starting point of the modern museum service and we have used their figures as a focus for displays representing the wide range of items present in our historic collections. Many of these are displayed in 'period' cases and presented with minimal captioning in a deliberately 'old-fashioned' way.

Interactive panorama: courtesy of VisitGuernsey. More panoramas...

Like many museums, our present holding of museum objects was founded on an amalgamation of earlier private and institutional collections. These collections were built up in a very different world to the one we know today. The scientific classification of nature was still in its infancy and amateur naturalists could still make useful contributions by physical collecting - rather than simply collecting observations which is what tends to happen today. Most of our forebears could only experience exotic places by reading descriptions or seeing items brought back by travellers - unlike the modern world of telecommunications which can bring live images of those places into our living rooms. Our 19th and early 20th century collections are therefore worldwide in terms of their origins, and offer many insights into the time when they were put together. The items on display in this area range from Egyptian antiquities to oriental porcelain, from fossils and the bones of an extinct bird to ethnographic items and weapons.

One object in this area - the Mallicollo Island Tree Fern Figure - is among the items we have included in our contribution to the British Museum / BBC A History of the World Project.