13. A Purpose-built Museum —
1835

Saull’s museum and lectures were a major means of propagating the geological naturalism that lay behind the Owenites’ alternative education. Hence his offers to “open the great book of nature to your view” personally at Aldersgate Street, which he made to every audience. These included the Owenites at the Institution of the Industrious Classes, the Rotundanists buoyed up by “science and liberty”, union activists, Mechanics’ Magazine readers, provincial co-operators, French savans, and so on. All were invited, “rich and poor”, women and children equally with the men.1 And here they were to have a hands-on introduction to the hundreds of sequenced fossils in his gallery and hear them described “as facts much to[o] hard for the parsons”.²

Only now there were more than hundreds of fossils, many more. Sir Richard Phillips talked of “ten thousand”. By 1835, when Sir Richard was commending Saull’s museum in his Million of Facts, the exhibition had grown huge. Saull’s astronomical mentor and Jacobin compatriot was one to know, as a welcome visitor who could spot expensive fossils of the “highest interest”.3 A Mining Journal reporter called the fossil repository “very extensive, consisting of many thousand specimens, and I found it particularly rich in the department of fossils, of which it possesses a very perfect and valuable series. The whole is arranged stratigraphically, in a very instructive and judicious manner”. The collection was clearly a visually stunning display, being laid out in expensive “glass cases, [which] have the advantage of being easily commanded by the eye, and are much more conveniently seen than by the ordinary arrangement in drawers.” Saull had been on a phenomenal spending spree through the early thirties and had built up one of the country’s premier private collections. His long purse from wine profits meant that the museum had now become “Immense”. It was bursting at the seams in Aldersgate Street. The Mining Journal complained that the “extensive series of well preserved diluvial bones completes the collection”, but that their crowding now ruined the overall effect, only to be told by Saull that this would soon “be obviated”.4 He was about to expand.

Not only was the warehouse overflowing, but courtyard stables were hardly a salubrious siting for an exhibition assuming national prominence. So, to accommodate the burgeoning exhibits, in 1835 he substantially rebuilt the complex to house both the museum and wine depot. Although no contemporary description survives, the new building must have been large. The sales advert for the Champion Commercial Hotel, which bought the site in later Victorian times, lists a “substantially-built Warehouse in the rear, four storeys in height, being No. 6 Falcon-street, conveniently occupying an area of 4,700 feet”.5 We do know that the assemblage now occupied two floors, with an upper and lower gallery. The complex with its “stratigraphically arranged” exhibits was then re-launched, with British and French press adverts appearing from October 1835.6 Coincidentally (or not), the wine business partnership of W. D. Saull, J. Castle, and T. Saull was dissolved in February 1835, with Castle leaving.7 Perhaps this gave Saull greater control and freer rein to rebuild and devote more space to display his fossil assets.

He certainly needed the shelf space, given the sudden influx of gigantic slabs, some of which required multiple workmen to move. Newly identified giant reptile fossils were being washed out of Wealden rocks on the Isle of Wight. Saull was quickly on the spot, becoming a frequent steamboat visitor to the island, and, by November 1835, he had stocked the museum with “many portions of saurian animals”,8 probably from this source. A year later, as Hugh Torrens points out, Saull and the Spitalfields silk manufacturer Thomas Field Gibson were arranging to exhibit parts of an Iguanodon femur from the Isle of Wight, “nearly as large as Mr. Mantell’s”, at the Geological Society. Saull, Mantell, and Gibson were evidently well acquainted by 1835,9 and Gibson’s country house at Sandown on the Isle of Wight seems to have been their base.

Saull’s deep pocket was now stretching to foreign fossils. After the sale of Big Bone Lick mastodon bones from Kentucky by Stevens’s auction room in 1836 (with tusks or jaws selling for twelve or thirteen guineas10), the tourist guides reported seeing some in Aldersgate Street. The Stranger’s Intellectual Guide to London found, among Saull’s “extensive and valuable” mastodon collection, “a scapula, which must have measured, when perfect, five feet long by three feet wide; with vertebrae fourteen inches in diameter”.11 Others spotted fossil horse teeth from the Kentucky site.¹² With proliferating exhibits and so many hefty fossils, the museum was apparently expanded yet again in December 1838. A syndicated review of the refurbishment now appeared in periodicals as disparate as the Gardeners’ Gazette and Court Gazette:

The extensive and valuable collection of Mr. Saull, F.G.S., in Aldersgate-street, was, on Thursday [27 December 1838], after receiving a great many additions, re-opened to the public. It is satisfactory to add, that the wishes of the liberal and benevolent proprietor were gratified by a very numerous attendance. There is not, perhaps, so perfect a school of geology in the metropolis, or one to which the attention of the young geologist may more advantageously be directed than to the one in question.13

The bulging, purpose-built museum drew more praise from the press. By 1841, Saull’s exhibits vastly exceeded 10,000, making this the “principal museum of geology in London”.14 Within a decade of its founding, the collection was being hailed as “one of the first in the metropolis for number of specimens and the excellence of their arrangement”.¹⁵ And thus it was trailed extensively in the newspaper listings for the capital’s holiday attractions, suggesting that many visitors must have been given a Christmas or Easter conducted tour. Some scientific visitors were now mooting that it could actually be “the largest private collection of fossil remains in the kingdom”.¹⁶ In truth, one wonders whether the selling point, “the largest private...”, repeated in so many press reports and tourist guides, did not emanate from within the museum itself. Was it a self-aggrandizing selling-point raised as a lure?¹⁷ Another draw was the continual influx of new fossils. The arrival of shipments was announced by press releases, which in turn increased visitor numbers. Typical was the Morning Post’s note on the “numerous attendance” after the museum received one particular batch of “valuable additions”.18

At some point in the thirties these additions were truly spectacular, notably the trove of Iguanodon bones. Mantell had been the reptile’s discoverer. He had first unearthed a thigh bone twenty-three inches in circumference from Tilgate Forest in Sussex, christened it Iguanodon, and scaled up using a lizard model to suggest a reptile “from sixty to a hundred feet in length!” Its teeth were massive, as were the vertebrae and claws, and it appeared to have a horn on its snout.19 By 1839, it was reported that Saull had “The largest known collection of the bones of iguanodon, from the Isle of Wight, consisting of humeri, numerous vertebrae and ribs of this stupendous animal, whose claw alone must have measured seven inches.”20 He also had a huge, intact, and complete sacrum (made up of the fused vertebrae of the pelvic region, that part of the spine supporting the hip girdle).²¹ It was unique, nothing like it was known in any other collection, or in any other reptile.

Tellingly, there was one expert who possibly did not realize the importance of this low-life museum until late in the day—the grave young Anglican Richard Owen, the new Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons. This is surprising on two counts. Firstly, press reports in 1839–41, if nothing else, should have alerted the rising star of palaeontology to this horde. The Peelite Morning Post’s report of acquisitions in December 1841 (which reiterated that Saull had “the largest known collection of bones of the Iguanodon, from the Isle of Wight”), would have left the Peelite Owen in no doubt of the museum’s importance.22 Geology primers themselves talked of the enormous size of the bones in Aldersgate Street.²³ And secondly, Owen, the darling of the Oxford divines, had actually been tasked by their British Association for the Advancement of Science to draw up a report on British Fossil Reptiles. He was on the lookout for saurian fossils, and had consequently “ransacked” every “collection, public and private”. What he had not found was a good Iguanodon sacrum. Mantell had been working on a partial skeleton from a Maidstone quarry in 1834, but the blasting had fragmented the pieces, and there was next to nothing of the spine in this crucial sacral region.24 Only after delivering his verbal report to the BAAS, somewhere between September 1841 and April 1842,²⁵ did Owen finally catch up with the prize specimen in the “well-stored museum of J. [sic] Devonshire Saull”. The mistake is telling: the fact that the grave Church-and-Queen anatomist did not know the correct initial suggests a social distancing. In fact, I doubt there was much beyond formal contact between the haughty Tory and the irreligious socialist. Owen might even have been reluctant to step into the socialist cess-pit, knowing all that it stood for. The explicitly anti-transmutationist and anti-materialist conclusions to so many of Owen’s major papers at this time suggest that personal intimacy would have been very difficult, with contacts kept at a formal level.26

Richard Owen was an exceptional and prolific fossil anatomist. He revealed that this sacrum was composed of five fused vertebrae, not the two typical of living reptiles. This sturdy, fused bone, supporting the pelvic girdle, became central to his reconstruction of these fossil giants. Rather than Mantell’s long, stupendous lizards, Owen shortened the iguanodons and megalosaurs by making them stand erect like huge mammals. Then he separated them off as a unique group of advanced reptiles, and in 1842 he christened them ‘dinosaurs’.

Press interest suggest that Saull’s own strange views were becoming better known. Hence the syndicated Gardeners’ Gazette puff for Christmas visitors to London in 1838: it describes a

very rich and rare museum of specimens, placed in a commodious and well-lighted building, erected for their reception at the back of his premises. The great variety of specimens are displayed to the utmost advantage, from being arranged in the order of the deposition of stratas—from where there was almost apparent chaos, through the gradations of animated species, to the period when the earth became a fit receptacle for man. The museum is open to the public every Thursday morning, at eleven, when Mr. Saull attends his visitors, and describes the gradations, according to his arrangement of the numerous specimens.27

“Gradation” was a keyword, used by Sir Richard Phillips in the 1832 essay republished by Saull. It was caused, in Phillips’s understanding, by the “progressive evolutions” of life,28 which Saull’s infidel circle saw as an unfolding or growth from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ animals and plants. Indeed “gradation” would shortly move from keyword to buzzword, standing for something akin to what would later be called “evolution” (a transmutation of one form into another). It might have meant that in the Gazette story. Certainly, the reporter returned after Christmas and filed a more revealing account. Saull obviously explained his views, perhaps monkey-to-man and all, but the perplexed hack was not about to pass them on to innocent readers:

Apart from all theory, the arrangement is a very satisfactory one, taking the successive depositions of the earth’s strata in the order in which they occur in nature; bearing evident marks of a succession of agencies before the world was fitted for the comfort and reception of man. There is no science which leads to such speculation as geology, or in which the mind may so soon lose itself in its bewilderment, and Mr. Saull’s theory is as compatible and consistent as that of any other. The various agencies may have been millions of years at work, and the gradations have been produced by many successive alterations of place and structure, without impugning the common received records of the formation of the world.

The fossil remains of animals are historically curious, from the period when the immense saurians reigned the undisputed masters of the seas, to where the earth became fitted for living animals [mammals]. Here again we perceive the huge mammoth, the elephant, and rhinoceros, full three times their present natural size. In the collection of fossil organic remains of our own country, Mr. Saull has shown a most praiseworthy and persevering industry. The cabinet of animal remains is, perhaps, the most extensive of any in this country; and shows that the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, tiger, hyaena, and boar, were its inhabitants; whilst the very numerous specimens of tropical vegetation, the cocoa, the tamarind, the coffee, and various spices, seem likewise to prove, that they once flourished here. Mr. Saull attends his visitors personally every Thursday morning, at eleven o’clock.29

The hack was not alone in scrambling these novel vistas, so new and confusing. Some religious rationalizations of these “hideous” creatures, supposedly living among pre-Adamite men, could miss the chronological mark completely:

Why may we not suppose that some of the hideous animals, which the comparative anatomists have found for us, may have been more suitable to the very corrupt state of the ante-diluvian population, than to ourselves, corrupt as we are; and been suffered to co-exist in the way of correction and punishment, to annoy, plague, harass, and alarm, those sinful, incorrigible generations of men?30

Then there were the visitors who did grasp the chronology. The museum was now large and important enough for famous faces to be seen, geological and otherwise. One of Saull’s closer geological confidants was another outsider, Gideon Mantell. His books and chauvinistic talks on his Iguanodon and the other saurians “of a most appalling magnitude” did so much to promote the idea of an “age of reptiles”. It was becoming apparent that monstrous lizard-like creatures had once dominated the earth. They were, in Mantell’s words, “the Lords of the Creation”—even if this “romantic doctrine” was too alien and unorthodox for many and dismissed as more “infidel” nonsense by scripturalists.31 Saull and Mantell had exchanged fossils and visits through the 1830s, constantly checking one another’s new exhibits. Mantell would breakfast at Saull’s, and take tea or sleep overnight when he was in town. They would make long-haul visits together to see other collections—up to Stratford, for instance, to examine elephant fossils from Ifield (there were “many fine elephantine remains” in Saull’s collection, according to Mantell32). Or to visit quarries, such as the commercial quarries in Maidstone, Kent, which were exposing more Iguanodon bones.33

There was clearly a camaraderie between Saull and Mantell, which was shown as Saull brought his priceless fossils to illustrate Mantell’s London lectures on Britain’s great reptile past.34 Not only did Saull allow Mantell to take casts of his prize Iguanodon sacrum, but to chisel away some covering rock. Inside, Mantell claimed to have exposed six fused vertebrae, not Richard Owen’s five. Mantell was careful to publish the first illustration of this increasingly important fossil as a riposte to the haughty Owen, whom he had come to hate.35 A rather snippy Owen then got his own back by publishing his own plates of Saull’s sacrum.³⁶ Personal rivalries were now pushing Saull’s fossils to the fore.

Far less familiarity was shown by Mantell’s bête noire, the pious Richard Owen, whose contacts with the infidel republican were undoubtedly restricted to professional visits. The ambitious Owen abominated transmutation. Patronized by Oxford divines, Owen proved his worth by a masterly study of adult chimpanzee anatomy in 1836. This emphasized their bestial, heavy-jawed physiognomy and, by so doing, distanced apes from men to discredit the transmutationists’ claim that we came from monkeys. And look again at the underlying worth of Owen’s ideological coup de grâce in 1842, the ‘dinosaur’. That an indicted blasphemer actually owned the prime specimen on which Owen based his new “Dinosauria” could only have re-emphasized the materialist threat for the young Anglican. He now used Saull’s fossils among others to reshape Mantell’s long, sprawling, lizard-like monster into an upright-standing, rhinoceros-like, crown of the reptilian creation. This was again used to scotch any belief in the inexorable, upward, self-propelling progress of life, his point being that reptiles had degenerated from their majestic dinosaurian heights.37 Owen was poised to become the premier British palaeontologist, the “English Cuvier”, and he was shortly to start monographing his way through the History of British Fossil Reptiles (ultimately collected into a monumental four-volume set). Publishing the descriptions of Saull’s fossils was mutually beneficial: Owen had a ready source of fossils, while the museum acquired kudos, the more so, Saull “rejoiced”, when Owen turned up new species.38 But there must always have been an elephant in the room, even if Victorian decorum rendered it invisible. Any personal contact between the Carlilean atheist and haughty Anglican must have been mediated by the fossils, with “Mr. Saull’s theory” and its socialist underpinnings studiously avoided.

Saull’s fossil trove provided rich pickings for Owen. In Aldersgate Street, Owen found more evidence of the reptile fauna of ancient tropical Britain. From the Isle of Wight’s south coast came sea-rolled vertebral fragments of a narrow-snouted, gavial-like crocodile (Streptospondylus), and a new species of the recently-discovered colossal saurian, called by Owen evocatively Cetiosaurus (“whale reptile”),39 as well as the remains of toes, hip, and spine of the Iguanodon. These were enigmatic creatures, and quite startling for many. No one was better equipped than Owen to make sense of the fragments, or to show how distinct many of the reconstructed reptiles were from anything on the planet today. In Aldersgate Street, he also distinguished bits of Megalosaurus (“giant saurian”) from Oxford’s rocks, and the vertebrae of a twelve-foot constricting snake (Palaeophis) from the later London Clay deposits of the Isle of Sheppey, at the mouth of the Thames.40

As Owen and Mantell grew increasingly antagonistic and tussled over interpretations of the Iguanodon sacrum, the gainer was Saull’s open museum. Mantell, piquing the public’s interest with his popular books, announced that “As Mr. Saull, with great liberality, throws his museum open to visitors every Thursday after mid-day, this unique fossil can be seen by any person interested” in the conflicting views of these giants.41

It meant that the museum was a port of call for the geological gentry as much as the rough-hewn radicals. As the proprietor, Saull mixed with the learned elite, and in return he was invited to soirées. He must have been the only socialist and atheist, once indicted as part of Robert Taylor’s nest of “vermin”, to move among the swells at Charles Lyell’s parties. He was known to be at one in May 1835, the same month that he was making stirring speeches at Robert Owen’s Institution demanding the repatriation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs (the Dorchester labourers transported for taking an oath not to accept a wage cut.)42 Yet, here he was, rubbing shoulders with those staunch Tory fossil fish enthusiasts Lord Cole and Sir Philip Egerton.43 Esoteric fossils were an unexpected arbitrating medium in the 1830s.

Even higher up the social ladder, the aristocrats who were mercilessly slandered in the pauper press made an appearance in his museum. Enter the Conde de Montemolin, exiled pretender to the Spanish Bourbon throne and “now located, we hope comfortably, in this island of refuge for all distressed notabilities”.44 Accompanied by his suite, the Chevalier de Berard and Colonel Garcimartin, the “illustrious Prince” toured the Library of the British Museum and the Royal Mint “where every preparation had been made for his reception by the principal officers of the different departments”.45 The Times’s deferential attitude towards the “Prince” and the red-carpet treatment meted out by the big national institutions, suggests that Saull’s museum, also on his itinerary, was now in the big league. The irony of a staunch republican entertaining royalty, even if it was not British, was probably not lost on “Citizen” Saull—not least because he shared the radical hatred of the “loathsome Bourbons”.46 This, after all, was the Saull who had once threatened the King with the fate of Charles I, causing a national uproar and censure in the Times.47 Anyway, the Carlist pretender graced his warehouse with a visit. The entourage included a reporter from the unyielding Tory Standard (London’s best-selling evening paper, founded to support the Iron Duke of Wellington’s efforts to block reform):

The Illustrious prince examined attentively the arrangements of the strata and the numerous fossils contained in that select collection. The Conde listened with great interest to the explanations given by Mr. Saull, which occupied full two hours, and expressed himself much gratified with his visit.48

Polite etiquette probably covered what he really thought of the republican’s materialist take on life. Court circular events (the visit was also reported in The Lady’s Newspaper49) had rarely seemed so incongruous. One wonders whether the affable Saull muted his levelling monkey talk for the royal ears. Or did he take advantage of the occasion?

Saull’s contacts with geology’s urban gentry were probably limited. In the 1830s he delivered no papers to the Geological Society, remaining essentially a merchant onlooker. And although he subscribed to the Reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and attended the peripatetic jamborees, which visited a different city each year, he exhibited but once, and that only a drawing of his fossil hippopotamus teeth (in Edinburgh, 1834).50 His ‘geological’ venues of choice remained the Co-Operative Institutes and Halls of Science, where the lecture profits were funnelled off to Robert Owen’s “Missionary Society” or the jailed street vendors.51 And with the rational education of the underclass his goal, his target audience remained radical sympathizers, even if he was preaching to the converted.