The tedious & expensive journey

Described as ‘the second founder of the British Museum’, Augustus Wollaston Franks, Keeper of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography, methodically extended the British Museum's collections into parts of the world previously little considered. A private and public collector, he was, unusually, very much a European. He made numerous journeys to the Continent, collecting, advising and meeting Continental scholars. In August and September 1874, he made a journey from Stockholm to St Petersburg and back through southern Finland. This is described, quite briefly, in the British Museum's official reports. Supplementing these from local sources, this paper not only illuminates one antiquarian's journey but also, importantly, reveals its impact on contemporary Finnish cultural circles. The medieval Turku Cathedral attracted Franks's interest, and he made several sketches of its treasures. He also studied various museum collections and made an excursion to the medieval church of Nousiainen, where he studied St Henry's sarcophagus. In his investigations in Finland, Franks pursued his own scholarly aims as well as those of the British Museum, but his visit also, perhaps inadvertently, provided an opportunity to further the aims of the nineteenth-century Finnish National Movement or ‘Fennophilia’.

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Ethnography · National museum · St petersburg · Classics · Historical and Archaeological Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Historical Studies of British Isles · History