29-07-2025
Confessions of obsessive collectors — the history of a mania
In the spirit of writing a good, honest review: Beanie Babies, striped stones and exhibition postcards. These are a few of the things I've collected since I was a child. What, if anything, do they say about me? That I was born in the Nineties. That I've probably seen the carefully positioned pebbles at Kettle's Yard. That I fancy myself as an amateur curator maybe — several of the postcards are tacked on a pinboard in my office. So I have an eye for beauty and a desire for order. But am I mad?
In his book the historian James Delbourgo wonders whether collecting is a sign of madness — it's an idea, he writes, that 'has exercised an enduring hold on the imagination'. Is there something unsettling, something creepy, about people who love things more than … well, people?
A Noble Madness, as richly detailed as it is researched, charts the changing image of the collector from antiquity to the present. Across centuries and continents, it presents a 'grand portrait gallery' of writers, artists, naturalists, neurologists, bibliomaniacs and hoarders, as well as pop culture's best obsessives and bogeymen (often one and the same).
People who love things too much have been around since the start of recorded history. In the 1st century BC Cicero prosecuted the Sicilian magistrate Gaius Verres for plundering art and sculpture from Greek temples, denouncing him for having not only a 'singular and furious madness' but also 'perverted desires'.
In the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with a statue, a woman he had carved out of ivory. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the emperor Caligula, besotted with art and sculpture, commanded Greek statues to be decapitated and their heads replaced with models of his own head. Supposedly he also ordered his troops to gather up seashells — 'spoils of the ocean' –— and fill their helmets and the folds of their dresses with them.
From ancient Rome to medieval Europe, coveting physical objects has, Delbourgo writes, 'raised the spectre of sacrilege'. Collecting relics was a way for the Church to control their use and meaning as part of a regulated system of worship until the Reformation erupted.
Swinging like a pendulum between different places and perspectives, Delbourgo whisks us to Ming China, where collecting was seen as 'a desirable form of personal sophistication', and Choson Korea, where it was a means of obtaining social status. A comprehensive exploration of Renaissance Europe tracks the rise of collecting alongside global trade and colonisation and the contrast between those gathering goods for aesthetic pleasure and scientific knowledge.
'The figure of Eve continued to bedevil the image of the female collector with her aura of carnal seductiveness and lusting after forbidden fruit,' Delbourgo says before turning his attention to Marie Antoinette, who collected clothes, jewels, snuffboxes, porcelain, furnishings, books and, reportedly, 348,000 earrings.
In the eyes of her enemies the 'trinket queen' came to epitomise 'frivolity, greed and indifference to the suffering of the French people'. After her execution her clothes were donated anonymously to a hospital except for the shoe that slipped off when she was ascending the gallows and can now be seen in a museum in Caen. 'Every wave of iconoclasm produces its own relics,' Delbourgo says.
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In the 19th century the line between collecting and personal identity became tracing-paper thin. Romanticism, according to Delbourgo, changed everything 'by shifting the meaning of collecting from convention to compulsion'. Romantic artists, philosophers and poets led a 'bold new journey of individual self-discovery' and collectors joined them, crystallising the notion that their treasures were 'expressions of an essential inner identity'.
Charles Darwin, who started accumulating specimens, shells and coins at the age of eight, became one of the first scientists to reflect on the damage collecting can do to the self. Sorting information, he believed, had produced a 'curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes'.
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Enter Sigmund Freud. By the end of the century the founder of psychoanalysis (himself an antiquities collector) had arrived at the question that has preoccupied us ever since: why do people do it? Post Freud, Delbourgo writes, 'the act of collecting was always about something else and never entirely about the thing collected'.
Hans Sloane was the subject of Delbourgo's previous book, Collecting the World, and his vast collection of specimens, artefacts and oddities formed the backbone of the world's first national public museum, the British Museum. Sloane claimed that the purpose of natural history collecting was 'to figure out what species were good for, what they cost, and how to make money off them'.
Between 1850 and 1914 the number of museums in the US ballooned from 50 to 2,500 as American industrialists, financiers and heiresses used their new fortunes to collect art from round the world in what became known as 'the great art drain'. Chief among the 'picture pirates' was the New York banker JP Morgan, who became a great collector of art and books, creating the Morgan Library and acting as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some saw him as a hero, others a villain (one cartoon shows him seizing the Colosseum).
'It's because collectors seek to turn a chaotic world into an ordered one that they make for particularly unsettling figures,' Delbourgo says. 'Madness is never so disconcerting as when it appears in the guise of reason.'
Chief among his fictional players is Norman Bates, the protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock's horror film Psycho. He is shy, polite, a bit of a loner and also a taxidermy enthusiast and serial killer. Plus, Oscar Wilde's character Dorian Gray hops from one kind of collecting to another in a desperate attempt to escape grief and guilt, while Orhan Pamuk's protagonist in his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence, compulsively amasses objects that chronicle his romantic pursuit of a shop girl.
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If that all sounds like a lot to pack into one book, it is, but Delbourgo has a deft touch, interweaving heavy passages on Nazi collecting and the dilemma of the private collector under communism with light bursts of cinematic and literary criticism. The collector-creep factor increases with the page numbers: a gruesome tangent into trophism and cannibalism features the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who between 1978 and 1991 killed 17 boys and men, stored parts of their bodies in a freezer and sketched out plans to curate them in what he called a temple.
The story comes to a close by suggesting that the question one might ask in the 2020s isn't 'Why do people do it?' but rather: 'How much is their stuff worth?' 'Today's collectors aren't crazy,' Delbourgo says, 'they're savvy.'
If I look up my 1996 Peace Bear in the Beanie Baby database I find out that it's now worth several thousand pounds (with the Ty tag intact, that is). Too bad I ripped the tags off to make the cuddly critters look more lifelike.
A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now by James Delbourgo (Riverrun £25 pp320). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
