Book review: "Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves..."

“Magpies, Squirrels & Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World” by Jacqueline Yallop

As someone who is utterly fascinated by the Victorian Era, I’m not one for passing on a book that’ll educate and entertain on that aforementioned topic. Now I bought this book several years ago in Aberystwyth, but I, for several reasons, never got around to read it, until now. And I am very glad that I finally did.

The book starts out with describing the Victorians and their relationship with collecting in general and then uses that as a jumping-off point for looking closer into a handful of specific collectors.

The collectors in question are: John Charles Robinson, Charlotte Schreiber, Joseph Mayer, Murray Mark and Stephen Wootton Bushell. Each of them representing a different archetype of collector, each of them highlighting the good and the bad of Victorian England and the roles they fulfilled and each of them not only watching but influencing the history happening around them.

“…the Victorians continued to debate the ways in which art might influence their lives…making space for objects in their homes because they liked them there and because their desire for lovely things seemed irrepressible.”

Yallop’s writing is very dynamic and engaging, making the reader really get to know and like her selection of collectors. At the same time she manages to weave in other topics like racism, gender inequality and greed, just to name a few. And she does this seamlessly without taking the reader out of the moment or lose the focus on the collector in question.

And while at the surface she appears to focus on some specific players on the collecting scene, her narrative also manages to tell the story of collecting as a business and a hobby, and of how museums came to be as we know them today. All this information is never presented in a boring or “slow moving” way making the book a rather quick read.

“Clubs and galleries and organizations brought collectors together across Britain and Europe, but collecting in the mid-nineteenth century was as much about competition as about cooperation.”

I thoroughly recommend this book if you’re interested in history or the Victorian Era specifically, not only will you learn a lot reading it, but you’ll also go on quite the ride with her cast of different collectors and maybe you’ll even catch the collecting-bug yourself.

Hope you enjoyed this little review, and I’ll see you in the next one :)