John Lee’s private museum at Hartwell House was said to contain some 4,000 items. The main room’s sixteen large glass cases and several smaller cabinets formed a ‘miscellaneous collection of articles culled from the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; as well as antiquarian relics, and works of industrial art.’ The museum had sections devoted to the arts and sciences, portraits, busts, antique mathematical instruments, Greek and Eastern antiquities, ethnology of the Pacific Islands, global natural historical specimens, mineralogy, fossils, and ancient coins and medals. It was just one of an estimated 250 natural historical collections in early nineteenth-century Britain. [1]

Lee’s mineralogical and ethnological collections strongly reflected the two years he spent in Sweden as a young graduate, in 1807–09. His mineralogical collection, now housed in Buckinghamshire County Museum, included specimens he collected in Scandinavia.

Lee’s ethnographical collection included what he called a “Finland lyre” or Kändelet, and a decorated Saami shamanic drum now on display in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The museum label on the drum reads:

“Fewer than ten ceremonial drums from the Lule Sami region survive. Most were destroyed during a period of religious persecution between the 17th and early 19th centuries. When used in divination, a pointer was placed on the drum skin. By beating the drum, the noaidde (shaman) made the pointer bounce. Interpreting the symbols upon which the pointer landed gave the gods and goddesses answers to people’s questions.”

Networks were crucially important to collecting. Acquaintances and contacts sent specimens, artefacts, books and manuscripts for display and analysis. So Lee kept up with contacts he made in Sweden.

These contacts included the metallurgist, Eric Thomas Svedenstierna, whose “beautiful collection” is mentioned in Lee’s mineralogical catalogue [2]. Only one letter between the two men survives, however, in which Svedenstierna requested that Lee send him “a set of Lindley Murray’s Grammar and Schoolbooks” in exchange for mineralogical specimens [3]. This is just one example in Lee’s lifelong pattern of exchanging objects, books and information with international scholars.

Lee’s relationship with the mineralogist and traveller Edward Daniel Clarke is an interesting case in point. In preparing his mammoth nine-volume book, Travels in Various Countries, Clarke borrowed Lee’s Scandinavian diaries. Extracts from Lee’s diaries are quoted in Clarke’s book. Unfortunately, this journal of Lee’s has been missing ever since – possibly sold by Clarke’s widow, along with other personal papers and books, shortly after Clarke’s death.

In Clarke’s book, Lee is credited as authority on the Swedish language. His translation of a Swedish description of the mine at Falun appears as an appendix. The book also reproduced some of Lee’s original sketches of a runic stone and of “Tumuli or Mounds at Gamla Upsala; said to be the Sepulchres of Odin, Frigga, and Thor,” along with a note on Lee’s opinion of similarities between the Swedish mounds and those at Bartlow, Essex [4].

Lee has been remembered as an eccentric, not least for his outdated mode of dress [5]. Visiting Britain in 1857, the American astronomer Maria Mitchell found Lee “a whimsical old man” in possession of a house displaying Georgian luxury and fashion, filled with “books of antiquarian value […] almost never opened.” [6] Constance Battersea’s recollection of a childhood visit to Hartwell’s “wonderful and crowded museum” provides a further insight into Lee’s collections:

“Hartwell House was an attraction to us in our young years, and we used periodically to visit its strange old owner, the learned Dr. Lee. He would take us into his wonderful and crowded museum, where on one occasion he presented me with a little stuffed bird, hoping that it might prove the forerunner of a collection of my own, for he said that the pleasure of collecting, no matter what, was one of the chief roads that led to a happy life.” [7]

Further reading:

For more on Lee and his collections, see Chapter 4 of my book, Geographies of the Romantic North (Palgrave, 2013).

References:

[1] S.J.M.M. Alberti. “Placing Nature: Natural History Collections and their Owners in Nineteenth-Century Provincial England.” British Journal for the History of Science, 35, 2002, p. 291; W.H. Smyth. Ædes Hartwellianæ, or Notices of the Manor and Mansion of Hartwell. J. Bowyer Nichols and Son, 1851, pp. 135–6, 140–44; H.A. Hanley. Dr John Lee of Hartwell, 1783–1866. Buckinghamshire Records Office, 1983, p. 15.

[2] Quoted in W.R. Mead. “Dr John Lee of Hartwell and his Swedish Journey 1807–1809.” Records of Buckinghamshire, 43, 2003, p. 14.

[3] E.T. Svedenstierna to J. Fiott, 25 Apr. 1808. St John’s College, Cambridge: Box 1a, no. 24.

[4] Clarke, Travels, vol. ii, pp. 516–17 and note; vol. ii, pp. 578–80; vol. iii, pp. 1, 24 note.

[5] J.K. Fowler [‘Rusticus’]. Records of Old Times: Historical, Social, Political, Sporting and Agricultural. Chatto and Windus, 1898, p. 74.

[6] P. Mitchell Kendall. Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals. Lee and Sheppard, 1896, p. 109.

[7] C. Battersea. Reminiscences. Macmillan, 1922, pp. 139–40.