Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

fascinating collections ever to come under the hammer. Nothing like Potter's would ever be available again: which is to say all kinds of sensational creatures preserved in glass domes and specimen jars, and great glass display cases, as well as the over-the-top anthropomorphic scenes for which Potter was famous.

One of England's oldest private museums, Potter's belonged to the era of the amateur nature lover, when museums were spirited jumbles, not the sober typologies they would become postDarwin. Potter's verged on the freakish: random, cluttered, crammed to the rafters with curios and oddities, weird accumulations, and creatures that were stuffed, pickled, dissected, and deformed. And I was arriving just in time to see a world that had vanished long ago. The next day, it would be dismantled, and if the taxidermists at the guild show were right, this distinctly British collection of ten thousand artifacts (six thousand of which were taxidermy pieces) might be dispersed to America and Japan.

It was remarkable that Potter's had evaded the hammer this long. Nearly every museum of its kind—such as Charles Willson Peale's Repository for Natural Curiosities in Philadelphia, John Scudder's American Museum in New York, and Daniel Drake's Western Museum in Cincinnati (where John James Audubon briefly worked as a taxidermist)—had shut down years before. P. T. Barnum had bought Scudder's and Peale's museums in the 1840s and merged them into the Greatest Show on Earth. And Drake's Western Museum had morphed from a repository of stuffed birds, fish, and mammoth and sloth bones into a waxworks depicting Satan and other figures from hell. In England, William Bullock's London Museum of Stuffed Animals and the Lever Collection, both outgrowths of fabulous personal collections, had been auctioned off in the early 1800s. The Lever auction had drawn naturalists from every museum in Europe except the British Museum, which couldn't afford to buy the collection. The director of the British Museum wasn't going to make that mistake again; he was coming to the Potter's sale.

As the train neared Bodmin Parkway station, I reread du Maurier's description of the inn with uneasy anticipation:

It was a dark, rambling place, with long passages and unexpected rooms. There was a separate entrance to the bar, at the side of the house, and, though the room was empty now, there was something heavy in the atmosphere reminiscent of the last time it was full: a lingering taste of old tobacco, the sour smell of drink, and an impression of warm, unclean humanity packed one against each other on the dark stained benches.

Then I exchanged du Maurier for the auction catalog. The cover featured a photo of a disfigured giraffe (circa early 1900s) with a gaping seam down its neck. State-of-the-art in its era, perhaps, the giraffe was oblong and distorted, as if someone had pulled its ears to stretch its face while it was drying. I discreetly slipped the catalog under my arm while I hailed a taxi, though I couldn't have been the only one with a copy of the catalog on the platform that day. According to Bonhams, the auction house in charge of the sale, more than a thousand catalogs had been sold.

The driver, a pleasant man with a Cornish accent, raised an eyebrow at the words "Jamaica Inn," and I felt like Mary Yellan when the coach driver tells her that respectable folk don't go there anymore. You could barely see three feet of the narrow road ahead, much less the green hilly farms it cut through, but the driver was a self-appointed Cornish ambassador, eager to show the sights to an American. "It would be lovely if you could see Cornwall, because it really is quite pretty," he said, squinting through the rain-streaked windshield.

That was an understatement. Cornwall's spectacular landscape draws thousands of people every year. They come to see ancient stone circles, the Godrevy Lighthouse (which inspired Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse), and the Eden Project biospheres (the world's largest greenhouses), or maybe just to sit on a wharf sipping tea. But I was here to see taxidermy, and the driver did not hide his disgust.

"It was a Victorian thing," he said. "A bit gross, isn't it? A bit weird, don't you think? Those stuffed kittens in family scenes. Stuffed cats at the tea table."

I nodded sheepishly. The seventeen kittens at the tea table were nothing compared to the four-legged duckling with two beaks, three eyes, and four wings. I flipped through the catalog, looking at the bizarre animals, each assigned a lot number. There was a pair of wandering albatrosses with ten-foot wing-spans (lot 308) and semihuman toads doing calisthenics (lot 167)—zoological wonders that would have delighted the Victorians—but I didn't bother to explain to the driver, thoughtful though he was, how crazy people were for this stuff back then, how the world was exploding with new discoveries and everyone wanted to live vicariously.

In 1861, for instance, the year Walter Potter displayed his first taxidermy case to the public, the French American explorer Paul Du Chaillu brought the first gorilla skins back to England, confirming the species' suspected existence and igniting what amounted to a gorilla craze. This was good timing because the public obsession with ferns was waning and the mania for aquariums hadn't yet taken hold. The revelations that tadpoles turn into frogs and leopards don't change their spots still riveted people's attention. Indeed, in 1861 it was still possible, if you absolutely had to, to squeeze all the known species onto Noah's ark—and that was fantastic.

We pulled into the Jamaica Inn. Rain streamed down the windshield and formed puddles in the gravel parking lot. A sign hung outside the entrance: "Come and absorb the atmosphere of a museum in Victorian times. Featuring the famous tableaux of Walter Potter, plus a murderous truncheon, a two-headed lamb, mummified creatures, the largest shoe in the world, a bird-eating spider, spittoons and opium pipes, a piece of the old London Bridge, a Victorian toy collection and LOTS, LOTS more." The driver shrugged and said, "It