The Dudley Bug
In this, my first ever blog, I want to write about a topic very dear to my heart as a former museum curator; namely, why we value objects. It’s a topic I’ve talked on many times and continue to find it fascinating. My career as a curator brought me into contact with many objects; everything from dinosaur dung to Egyptian mummies to great works of art. But my interest in objects began long before I became a curator. I was first a collector. I remember what inspired me. It was a piece of sandstone on display at the school open day, with beautifully symmetric ripple marks formed in a sandy lagoon 200 million years ago, and right in the middle, a perfectly preserved dinosaur footprint. It was the specimen’s aesthetic value that hooked me; and the fact that a moment in prehistoric time was captured for millions of years in stone.
My first permanent curatorial position was as Keeper of Geology at Dudley Museum in the English Midlands. The title ‘Keeper’ was important to me. It conveys the responsibility of the role; of preserving, in perpetuity, the material culture of a community. In the world of museums an object without provenance has greatly diminished value. Curators methodically record ownership history, and therefore the value of an object has, since my first days as a curator, been a particular interest of mine. Because objects in themselves have no intrinsic value. The value is determined by the significance placed on it by its owner – or by those would wish to own it.
What I have discovered on my curatorial journey is that people collect and own objects for different reasons: its price and investment potential; aesthetic appeal; sentimental value; heritage value; association with a person or event, or even as a status symbol. So people can own or value the same object for entirely different reasons.
Moreover, objects, like people have lives, and during in which their value can change many times. I will illustrate my point with an object I encountered during my time as a museum curator – a trilobite fossil from Dudley, England. Dudley is famed for its beautifully preserved Silurian fossils, particularly extinct marine arthropods called trilobites. In fact, the commonest variety, Calymene, is known colloquially as ‘the Dudley Bug’, and features in the town’s coat of arms. The trilobite in question, a beautiful, complete example of Calymene, was donated to Dudley Museum in my first week in the job in 1987, by a lady called Mrs Wedge. She had bought it in an antique shop in 1974 as part of a geology collection which came with the cabinet she had purchased.
Remarkably, this was not the first time the fossil had been given to the museum. It was one of the very first objects to be displayed there when the museum first opened in 1839. It had belonged to the museum’s first honorary curator, a man called Henry Johnson. Henry was a very keen collector of fossils from the local limestone mines. But he didn’t collect the fossils himself. He actually owned the mines where the fossils were found, and he would pay his miners for good quality fossils. The miner who found this trilobite would have been paid about five shillings, equivalent to a whole week’s wages, so its value to him was solely a financial one.
Henry on the other hand had entirely different reasons for wanting the fossil. He was a gentleman scientist; the president of the Dudley natural history society. His goal was to have the finest collection of Dudley fossils in existence – and to preserve them all in Dudley Museum, which he set up and funded specifically to display them. After Henry’s death in 1862 the fossil passed to a wealthy private collector; a Mr Haroun – a collector of all things geological – from diamonds to dinosaur bones. The Dudley Bug became one of hundreds of fine specimens, most of which he left to his son, who had no interest in them and likely sold the collection. From here it disappeared for almost 100 years until it turned up in the antique shop and was purchased by Mrs. Wedge.
So, the fossil had at least 6 owners – probably more – each of whom valued it for different reasons. For the limestone miner and antique shop owner it was purely monetary value; for Henry Johnson it was scientific value and the desire to have the best fossil of its kind. For Mr. Haroun and Mrs. Wedge, its value was aesthetic. At Dudley Museum it is cherished for its aesthetic and scientific value; but more than this; because of its unique historic significance and association with the foundation of the museum itself. A label attached to the fossil, written in Henry Johnson’s hand states: ‘This fossil was exhibited at the meeting of the British Association [for the Advancement of Science] meeting held in Dudley in 1839, and was at that time the finest of its kind that was known’.
Today, the trilobite is displayed in the Black Country archives, near the mines where it was discovered. An object that died 400 million years ago, but that has had many more lives since it appeared in the torchlight of the miner 190 years ago.