The British Museum: working-class people attending a guided tour and looking at exhibits of English history in glass cases and on the walls. Etching by G. Cruikshank, 1843.

The exhibits on the left are instruments of torture, punishment and execution: fetters, the stocks, cat o'nine tails, handcuffs, gibbet (for asphyxiation by hanging), "the new drop" (for breaking neck by hanging), the pillory. Top, portraits of famous coachmen on the highways to London from Yorkshire, Bristol and Birmingham ("Yorkshire Jim, Bristol Bill, Brummegum Joe"), grouped together as "The red noses". Right a small model of a stage-coach, and life-size models of a Whig and a Tory. Right foreground, an English tax-gatherer's book, labelled "A tax-gatherer's book. Vill show vat the slaves of this land used to submit to!!! NB very scarse cos it's the only vun there is"

"George Cruikshank's nineteenth-century print, the "British Museum: curiosities of ancient times," depicts a group of tourists looking at a sequence of torture devices representing a "tyrannical" ancient English past, amid references to vanishing "races" and abuses to which the poor and enslaved had formerly been subject. The scene makes fun of the narcissism of progress, and the self-congratulating role of museums in seeming to make barbarous cruelty a thing of the past, precisely through displaying its instruments as curiosities."--Delbourgo, op. cit. pp. 19-20

[London] : [David Bogue], [1843]

1 print : etching

British Museum - Curiosities of ancient times. ... George Cruikshank. Bears number: 2043 The guide, speaking in a version of uneducated English, says "On the right are warious articles vith vitch the tyrants of old used to torture & put to death poor people as didn't do vot the tyrants thought was right. Them picters on the wall are a exact representation of a race of men as used to inhabit this werry country, they was a red nosed people & was supposed to be the grandfathers of the Red Indgins of America, but they are all now totally extinguished. That there model there is the exact image of a male coach, & the man vot sits in the front vos call'd the coachman. In course you've hear'd talk of the Vigs and the Toe-rees, them's considered werry fine specements on 'em & next reek I expects to be able to show you a stuffed soger." A family comments on the Whig and the Tory: the man says "Well now: to look at 'em one would not think they'd been such desperate chaps arter all!", while the mother says to her son "Ccome away Billy for tho' they ar'nt alive they may be pisonous". A pretentious couple have been looking at the torture instruments: the husband says "No dewellopment of the higher faculties you see Celestianna, like owern.", to which his wife replies "Oh dear no! What awful monsters they must have been!"

James Delbourgo, 'Slavery in the cabinet of curiosities: Hans Sloane's Atlantic world', 2007, online

Wellcome Collection 32525i