FOX, George Townshend. Synopsis of the Newcastle Museum, late the Allan formerly the Tunstall, or Wycliffe Museum… Newcastle: T. and J. Hodgson for Emerson Charnley and W. Wood, 1827.
8vo (229 x 140 mm). 8 engraved plates, 4 vignettes in the text, one double-page family tree (spotting or browning to plates, some offsetting from plates to text). Original cloth, leather lettering-piece gilt, uncut (front joint and ends repaired, some sunning and surface wear to extremities). Provenance: George Townshend Fox to Charles Fox (see presentation inscription below, dated 1830); gifted from “Mrs. Charles Fox” (pencil notation dated 15 November 1915); Johann J. Laurence (small bookplate).
FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR TO HIS SON, CHARLES FOX. Includes copious notes throughout, some lengthy, in the author’s hand, providing additional and supplementary information. In addition, there are two original museum labels tipped-in with a note above in the author’s hand reading “See Preface, pp. viii, ix”. The labels read in a contemporary hand (probably George Allan’s) “An Hooka, a Persian smoking pipe…” and “Model of an American Canoe”. On the pages referenced, the author writes regarding these labels: “Mr. Allan began to name scientifically the subjects, which undertaking was completed by him in a very masterly manner, shewing marks of much research and reading. All the specimens under glass were labeled by him in the neatest and most beautiful hand-writing, with their common and scientific names… When the Museum arrived at Newcastle, several of these labels had suffered, and become illegible, yet so much interest appeared in those which remained, as to make them be judged worthy of being preserved, and, for that purpose, I transcribed them as carefully as possible…and in the subsequent catalogue I have inserted them in their proper places”. George Allan’s collection was the basis for the Newcastle Museum (see note below).
A RARE CATALOGUE OF THE MUSEUM’S HOLDINGS that include a section entitled “Utensils of Savage Nations” which consists of notes on artifacts from New Zealand, “Owhyhee & other Sandwich Islands”, Otaheite, Tonga, New Caledonia, and the “Americas” (i.e. the Northwest Coast), including material collected during Cook’s voyages, and a number of natural history specimens are described such as the wombat, the koala, and the duck-billed platypus from Australia.
ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT 18TH-CENTURY COLLECTIONS OF NATURAL HISTORY AND ETHNOGRAPHY. Fox’s synopsis is an important work in the early cataloguing of collections of this type and remains the main source of information for this still extant collection. The Museum grew from two important private collections: the naturalist Marmaduke Tunstall began collecting for his private museum in London in the 1770s, acquiring numerous “curiosities brought by Captain Cook”. He moved the collections in 1776 to his new home at Wycliffe, Yorkshire and after his death the Wycliffe Museum was bought by George Allan, lawyer and avid antiquary, adding it to his own substantial holdings to form the Allan Museum. On his death the museum went to his son, and in 1822 the combined collections passed into the hands of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne. The collection remains intact in Newcastle today. Forbes lists only one copy and could find no references to this work. Forbes 661; Freeman, British Natural History Books 1257; Hugo, Bewick Collector 472; not recorded by Ferguson.