The mysterious man behind our greatest museum

COLLECTING THE WORLD: THE LIFE AND CURIOSITY OF HANS SLOANE by James Delbourgo (Allen Lane, £25)

THE ghost of Sir Hans Sloane is everywhere in London. He haunts Hans Town, Hans Place, Sloane Square and Sloane Street. Following his death in 1753 his vast collection of curiosities — or Sloaneana — including wasps’ nests, Chinese earcleaning utensils and animals coiled in spirit-filled jars, formed the core of the British Museum, which should really be called Sloane’s Museum.

A pursuer of universal knowledge who traded in anthropological oddness, Sloane would be fascinated by the roaring tribe of thoroughbreds who now carry his name. Were he around today he would doubtless add Eighties Liberty scarves and velvet Alice bands to his Aladdin’s cave.

Sloane is barely remembered by the city he once dominated, and James Delbourgo sets out to change that. Born in provincial Ulster in 1688, Sloane ironed out his Irish brogue and refashioned himself as a society physician, a gentleman naturalist, and “the most curious man in the world”.

Assembling collections was an 18th-century hobby and a way of ensuring genteel status. Collectors, says Delbourgo, “imagined themselves as Promethean heroes — masculine, cunning and inventive”, and Sloane was duly loaded with honours: President of the Royal College of Physicians, President of the Royal Society, a baronetcy.

Royalty queued at his front door to inspect his cabinets of moths, corals, coins, snakes, stones and plants, believing that, from the centre of the civilised city, they were circumnavigating the globe.

Given that his legacy is the world’s first free national museum, why, asks Delbourgo, is Sloane remembered, in the words of the British Museum, as a “flamboyant eccentric” rather than a figure at the first rank of Enlightenment pioneers?

His wealth came from his medical work and an advantageous marriage to the widow of a West Indies plantation owner, whose land Sloane inherited. The British Museum was thus built, Delbourgo points out, on the proceeds of slavery. So essential to his achievements was his place at the centre of the network of links provided by the empire that a more exact title for this book would be Collecting the Colonial Outposts.

Apart from 15 months in Jamaica, where he amassed hundreds of plant species and curios and had no moral qualms about the traffic in human beings, Sloane never travelled and knew little of the world that was not ruled by his monarch. His collections were built on buying in bulk the collections of others, whose curiosities came from West Africa, North America, the Caribbean, and South and East Asia — all places under British rule. Having brought these disparate items together, Sloane tried to unify and give them meaning. This involved the new skills of categorisation and documentation, and his literary genius, says Delbourgo, lies in his catalogue cards.

It has become a biographical cliché to explore the life of a subject through a few objects, but what is most curious about Sloane, whose life was his objects, is how little they reveal about him. All we know of his character is that he preferred the thinginess of things to the trickiness of people. “The list”, says Delbourgo, was Sloane’s “quintessential literary mode”, and a list is, accordingly, the form this biography takes. Collecting the World is composed of a vast collection of facts, dates, and figures sifted and arranged to give meaning to a life and pursuit that seems utterly alien to us.

Delbourgo’s purpose, superbly achieved, is to give us Sloane not as an individual but as a small piece in the great puzzle of the Enlightenment project, to explore through him the strange birth of modern knowledge.

What is most curious about Sloane, whose life was his objects, is how little they reveal about him