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

up a collection that they had rescued from a similar fate. The guild members said it was an honor to attend the auction with Morris, and I did feel privileged to tour the place with someone who had served as an adviser to the museum and had spent decades collecting, archiving, and researching Victorian taxidermy. Morris was famous here; the Bonhams press release described him as "a leading authority on taxidermy in the U.K."

Morris led me up a narrow staircase and into the museum, where we vanished into a compartmentalized version of the natural world. I followed him through a maze of crooked corridors packed with hundreds of domed birds, each more vibrant than the next. Tropical butterflies pinned to boards like patterned wallpaper, jars of zoological horrors floating in spirits the color of Kool-Aid, and fantastic typologies of hawkmoths and minerals and sea horses and nautilus shells covered every surface. Horns and trophies lined the walls and rafters. Birds with outstretched wings too huge for domes hung down from the ceiling.

Just about every craze I had read about (and plenty of others) was represented in this room, each some obsessive attempt to understand—or, really, to accumulate—the natural world. Spiders, scorpions, and corals; dragonflies, African beetles, and migrating monarch butterflies—all were meticulously arranged in glass cases like rare jewels. Floating in jars of spirits were dissected frogs, grass snakes, a porcupine, a sea mouse, and a lung-fish. There was a bisected rabbit head and a kitten with two bodies. I couldn't believe you could actually buy this stuff, but you could. And people would, the next two days.

Victorians may look uptight in photos, but they flocked to tidal pools to collect sea anemones, shot and stuffed owls, foraged for ferns for fern albums, robbed nests of eggs for oology cases, and netted butterflies and pinned them to corkboards. Each year came some exciting new fad.

All these marvels existed at Potter's in one form or another. Random and cluttered, lacking wall text and any open space at all, Potter's was the exact opposite of the Smithsonian. I wondered whether contemporary museums had perhaps become too scripted ("Come Meet Your Relatives!") or whether I was enjoying something here at Potter's that I was supposed to be too sophisticated to enjoy. If I ignored some of the conspicuous add-ons (tribal weapons and military memorabilia), it was possible to envision England as a nation of self-taught naturalists. The power of these relics to prompt the imagination was as strong today as it had been 150 years earlier, and I kept asking myself how that was possible.

Normally, Morris has a measured walk and a serious demeanor. In here, he grinned like a kid, and his gait had some spring in it. He'd been in here hundreds of times, and I could see why. To be surrounded by the "freaks and fancies of nature" (Charles Waterton, 1825) was incredible. It's hard to stay composed when surrounded by curiosities that are horrific and beautiful at once.

There was a "reverse taxonomy" to it, a randomness that was both naive and playful. Victorian bird mounts, Morris noted, were often formed with near-total disregard for ornithological exactitude, and birds from three different continents were often grouped together to show off their colors and plumage, as opposed to their species relationship. Distorted and often mounted without support wires in their legs, these domed creatures did not convey a bird's real anatomy. A group of Potter's Australian and South American birds, for example, resembled Christmas tree ornaments, with bodies unnaturally bent at the neck and outstretched wings resembling the fans of a flamenco dancer.

By the mid-1800s, serious ornithologists grouped complete bird families together as a sort of three-dimensional field guide. The great hall at Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, for instance, has extraordinary bird cases filled with gannets, auks, puffins, owls, hawks, ducks, pheasants, and species likely to be seen near the estate. However, your average Victorian—the type of person likely to visit Potter's—wasn't interested in a scientific investigation as much as an exotic escape from his drab existence. Yet Victorian enthusiasm for nature was a serious hobby, a passionate pursuit.

This might explain the odd pairings. They weren't haphazard—Potter was as purpose driven as any Victorian—but his gift for merging spectacle with science to entertain his customers was superior. Thus the seal cub with the greater kudu skin and elephant soles; the beagle head with the lamb skeleton; the two-faced kitten with the goldfinch and immature flycatcher. I couldn't quite wrap my mind around Potter's Californian Curiosities: a horned toad, a tarantula, a scorpion, a centipede, a deformed calf head, and, of course, ostrich and springbok skins (lot 130). But the magic of this place was that I didn't have to. For all the Victorians' moralizing, nothing in here was didactic. The whole point was to marvel.

"He collected freaks!" one trader gasped, astonished by one of Potter's deformed specimens. "You won't see this again!" another dealer said, racing from case to case.

Potter was fascinated by freaks. He got them from a local farmer. We encountered his two-faced puppy with three eyes and two mouths; his two-faced kitten with four eyes, two faces, and two mouths; his three-legged duckling (with, of course, a corncrake and a starling)—all mounted in the late 1800s at the end of his career. The Victorians loved the distorted and the macabre; unwrapping mummies and public dissections were popular forms of parlor entertainment. So, apparently, do we.

The more ghastly the specimen, the larger the pre-auction crowd. Nothing drew more people than the Siamese twin fetal piglets in lime green formaldehyde. I edged over for a closer look. Two pink snouts (or was it a single snout with four nostrils?) were pressed against the bell-shaped glass in surreal symmetry. Four shriveled pink legs were crammed into the jar's base. Rumors circulated that prop seekers for the Harry Potter films were after the conjoined swine, and the tension mounted among traders who lusted after only the pickled piglets. Factions were forming. They