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Portable Museum of Raw Materials and Manufactures, by Thomas E. Dexter, English, c. 1860

Inventory Number 14976

Acknowledgement: © History of Science Museum, University of Oxford, inv.14976

Brief Description
Museums now emphasise the value of learning from objects. But this is not a new phenomenon. In the middle of the 19th century the military schoolmaster Thomas E. Dexter created and sold his Portable Museum to support the popular teaching method of "object lessons". The intention was to enable children to understand the world through physical objects, and especially Britain’s imperial position and commercial power. One of the accompanying booklets for his cabinet said: “The collection will be found invaluable in pointing out the extent and variety of our import and export trade, the source of our commercial greatness, and useful in every branch of that sound and practical education which has for its object the preparation of the Pupil to enact his part in the busy scene of life.”
Item type
Object
Provenance
Purchased from Bonhams Knightsbridge sale on 27 October 2015 with the support of Jeri Bapasola.
Inventory No
14976
Accession Number
2015-10

Description

Wooden cabinet with six drawers, each with a printed title. The insides of the folding doors carry printed notices which advertise the character and purpose of the cabinet. Both the sheets carry a royal coat of arms and running across them a single piece of text: "Patronized by her Majesty. Portable Museum of natural substances, raw and manufactured, from the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. || Illustrative of the imports, exports, productions, & manufactures, of Great Britain and her colonies. Compiled and arranged by Thomas E. Dexter, Royal Military Asylum, Chelsea."

The cabinet comes with an original companion booklet on Minerals and Metals and a modern reprint facsimile on Animal and Vegetable Substances. The Minerals and Metals booklet was originally published in 1858 but this copy must be a reprint from c. 1874 because its (defective) end papers include statisical summaries of British imports and exports from 1873. This does not necessarily provide the date of the cabinet since the booklet may only have been brought together with it at a later date (as was the modern facsimile of the work on animal and vegetable substances). But it does suggest that the cabinet itself could date from anywhere between the late 1850s and the mid-1870s.

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