Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane by James Delbourgo (review)

The Irish-born physician, natural historian and collector, Hans Sloane (1660–1753), is an individual crucial to our understanding of eighteenth-century science and society. Hitherto dismissed as a ‘mere’ virtuosic collector—a fame-hungry fondler of trinkets—Sloane’s extraordinary life and legacy has been the subject of much recent scholarly activity. James Delbourgo’s highly anticipated and eminently readable biography of the man demonstrates the value of bringing his story to a wider public and encouraging greater engagement with his many influences and colossal impact.

The book opens with the reader being led on an evocative tour through Sloane’s collection at his manor house in Chelsea, accompanying the Prince and Princess of Wales on their visit in 1748. On display were all sorts of gems, metal ores, ethnographic ornaments, specimens, portraits and valuable manuscripts. The range and number of riches and the calibre of his visitors reveal a worthy collector held in the very highest esteem by eighteenth-century British society. Sloane was an extremely successful doctor who married into a sugar plantation fortune, he was president of both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society, was both an official court-and army-physician, and he was on the governing board of every hospital in London. Yet, as Delbourgo’s book amply demonstrates, Sloane’s ascent through the ranks of society was anything but assured, being the product of intense labour, strategy and acquisitive opportunism. It therefore reveals a great deal about the unusual times in which he lived. His story is equally about imperial exploitation and individual empowerment, empirical reason alongside awesome wonder, and a man so attuned to the structures of society around him, that he was able to gain advantage from connections of all descriptions. Through his vast correspondence networks, he encouraged diverse communities to create and communicate knowledge of all kinds. As one contemporary, William Stukeley, put it rather sharply: “The whole business of his life has been a continued series of the greatest vigilance over his own interest, and all the friendships he ever makes are to himself.” Delbourgo puts it more evenly: “collecting a world of things meant collecting a world of people. Universal knowledge demanded universal acquaintance, up and down the social hierarchy and reaching across different cultures” (xxvii). It is the breadth of Sloane’s involvement with the world around him that makes him a valuable figure for scholars and an interesting subject for general readers.

This is the most comprehensive account of Sloane ever attempted, and each chapter approaches the task from a different direction. This is a productive methodology, reflective of the move within wider scholarship to explore diverse strands and forms of early modern intellectual inquiry together, and one that works particularly well when examining the life of an individual. So here we have Sloane’s high-society work as a physician, advising the government on quarantine, inoculation and breastfeeding, grounded within his early experiences as an apprentice apothecary and his work within the Royal Society. Questions raised by the management of collective labour across vast distances speak, quite rightly, to the concerns of the team of curators tasked to unite the records of the collections they helped to create for, as one stated in a published article: “Fifty volumes in folio would scarce suffice to contain a detail of his immense museum, consisting of above 200,000 articles.” It is refreshing and rewarding to have all these different aspects of collection-building considered together.

Part One is particularly excellent in this regard, describing Sloane’s formative and early years with greater clarity than has ever been achieved before. Delbourgo emphasizes Sloane’s uncertain position in society, and hints that it was partly this initial experience of a lack of power that made Sloane so shrewd when it came to gaining and maintaining his position in society: “being born without property into Ulster’s Protestant elite had dealt him a mixed...