Collecting the World by James Delbourgo
Author:James Delbourgo [Delbourgo, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780718194444
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-05-04T00:00:00+00:00
By the time he composed his autobiography decades later, completed and published in the course of the American Revolution, Franklin had made his life into a parable of self-making to be emulated by the youth of the new American republic. But in 1725 it was Franklin the colonial journeyman who had sought out Sloane the virtuoso, not vice versa; Franklin who had pressured the collector to meet with him by threatening to leave town; and Franklin who had talked up his curiosities to get Sloane to buy them.64
The meeting between Franklin and Sloane might appear to have been one of opposites: the colonial apprentice and the metropolitan connoisseur. The contrast, however, is not as sharp as it seems; perhaps Sloane even recognized something of himself in the young American. After all, as with Franklin, much of Sloane’s early life had been colonial, from Ulster to his own Atlantic crossing to Jamaica; his own training bore the stamp of practical arts, in his case via the apothecaries and gardeners of Chelsea and Montpellier; and when Franklin sold him his purse, there were even shades of Sloane impressing the chemist Lémery with his rare phosphorus samples in France. Both Sloane and Franklin understood the power of curiosities as commodities of ascent for ambitious men courting patrons and allies and, moreover, how those on the rise enjoyed certain advantages over their betters. In some ways Franklin had little to lose from his meeting with the great collector, but for virtuosi like Sloane journeymen like Franklin were his stock in trade and as such demanded careful attention. Collectors depended on travellers as much as the other way around. Franklin’s asbestos purse might not look like much – nor the ‘flower used for tea in New England’ that he also sold Sloane – but dealing in curiosities was a speculative game; the value of some strange new substance might come to light only with the passage of time. So too might the value of an ongoing relationship with such travellers. Sloane could not, of course, have predicted that Franklin would one day help lead a revolution against British rule, prompting him to rewrite their meeting as but one brief episode in the inevitable progress of an American hero. Indeed, Franklin’s rewrite is a spectacular example of how stories about collecting vary dramatically depending on who tells them, when and why.65
Almost a decade later, in 1733, another striking traveller came into contact with Sloane and, although we do not have his side of the story, the encounter between the two men raises similar questions about the multiple meanings of a single exchange. This traveller’s name was Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a West African who had been pulled towards London by the Atlantic slave trade. He was rather different from the rebellious young African Sloane had been given as a present years earlier by Alexander Stuart, or so observers insisted. All who met him remarked that Diallo was a person of singular grace. ‘By his affable carriage and
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