When we visited the Booth Museum – Brighton – I had no idea we were going to see such an incredible collection of Victorian stuffed animals. Or that we would enjoy it so much because I generally do not approve of killing animals and stuffing them. In Brighton or anywhere else. This entry will tell you why it was so good.
The Victorians
I taught the Victorians to my Year 5 class a year or so ago. It’s not a time period I knew much about beforehand so in some cases the teacher was learning along with the pupils. I was surprised as to how interesting it and they were.
It was an era where a girl could be born into an agricultural, rural life of horses, threshing and candlelight. But she could eventually live in a city where men would lean out of crowded, electric trams in the hope of seeing a well-turned ankle, and, years later, talk about it on TV.
CC BY-SA
So much happened in the UK in this period it must have been dizzying trying to keep up with it. For a time, it must have seemed like Britain was leading the world in everything and where there was no solution that engineering and a can-do attitude could not find. Victorians were the first people to get to spend a penny in the first working public flushing toilets–exhibited in the Great Exhibition, alongside other wondrous examples of art, science and technology. Admittedly this lay alongside some horrifying poverty. Nevertheless, people travelled in their thousands to see the future under the glittering, glass monolith. Meanwhile, explorers were travelling to the four corners of the Earth and sending back astonishing (although rather one-sided) tales of derring-do to newspapers in London. In fact, explorers and naturalists had pop-star status.
Your gloomy Victorian parlour
Victorians would have read about these adventures in drawing rooms (parlours) that were usually dark and gloomy, and–by our standards–cluttered with unusual curios and objects of art. How in-the-swing you were depended on how much of this new stuff you had to show off. They liked taxidermy and stuffing things, especially if it was something rare hard to come by.
Grey Heron (Ardea cinerea) diorama on display at the Booth Museum of Natural History, Brighton, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, CC BY-SA
The Victorians, therefore, were culpable for a lot of rare animals being killed. They say you can’t judge history by the standards of the present so, I guess, we will have to assume they didn’t know what they were doing. They may have thought differently about sitting rooms stuffed with jaguar paws and rhino feet if they knew how devastating this was to the world’s ecosystem. As do we.
One such naturalist was Edward Thomas Booth. A well-off individual, he dedicated his life to stuffing everything that moved in the British Isles. Apparently, he achieved a large amount of this; around 70% of British wildlife entered his taxidermied collection. Some of this can be seen at this amazing museum.
The Booth Museum collection
Brighton’s Booth Museum has done a fantastic job of recreating the feel of a Victorian display space. Glass display cases line the walls, and weirdly preserved animals stare out at you in frozen diorama of their lives. There is a stuffy Victorian sitting room replete with bell jars and vivid displays of small birds and vibrant butterflies. If you have kids, there is extra stuff for them to do at colouring and drawing tables.
I am not sure if it is the museum people, or Mr. Booth himself to thank, but all the displays are arranged in interesting aspects. Seagulls appear to have been quite dangerous animals in Victorian times as some of the displays show them plucking out the eyeballs of helpless goats and sheep.
There is a fantastic skeleton display, where you can see the likes of “Saucy Bill” – or the skeletal remains of his Pomeranian body.
Getting to the Booth Museum
The Booth Museum – Brighton – is opposite Hove Green: a pleasant, leafy park where there is an auditorium used for occasional shows. It’s easily reached via train from either Brighton, Hove or Preston Park. If you are coming by car, there is quite a lot of parking on the street and around the park.
It is free to enter, though they suggest donations, and it wouldn’t hurt to visit the interesting gift shop by the entrance.
