The British Museum and Fanny Price’s East Room

Fanny Price’s cherished possessions in Mansfield Park’s East Room reflect the three major divisions of the British Museum’s collections in Jane Austen’s lifetime: books, antiquities, and botanical specimens. Like Mansfield Park, with its revenues from Antigua, the British Museum relied on the riches that its founder, Sir Hans Sloane, derived from his slavery-dependent plantations in Jamaica. Fanny’s quotations from William Cowper’s The Task (1785) link Sotherton, Mansfield Park, and the British Museum by illuminating how naval and colonial endeavors underpin the collections, the labor, and the transplantation that sustain stately homes and museums alike.