We have previously met George Shaw as author of the epic Naturalist’s Miscellany, published in 287 monthly installments from 1789 until the author’s death in 1813. A few years into the project, Shaw detoured to produce the similarly formatted Museum Leverianum, with five numbers in 1792-93 and a sixth in 1796.

Sir Ashton Lever, creator of the Museum that bore his name, died in 1788. But by then it was no longer his museum; the collection had been sold by lottery in early 1786. The winner was James Parkinson—no relation to Parkinson’s Disease Guy—almost by accident, as his wife had bought a ticket shortly before her death.

Parkinson maintained the Leverian Museum or Holophysicon as a public museum until 1806, when he too ran out of money and the collection had to be broken up and auctioned off. There’s a recent book by Adrienne Kaeppler tracing as much of the Leverian collection as has been possible to hunt down.

Each number of Museum Leverianum contains twelve articles, each featuring a hand-tinted engraving—at least in some copies. Disap­pointingly, the work doesn’t show a representative selection of everything exhibited at the Museum, such as the ethnographic items collected on Cook’s voyages. Instead it is strictly concerned with animals: 44 birds, 29 mammals—and a lone reptile. (The total is 74 rather than 72 because the last two Numbers each end with a doublet.)

A dozen of so of the animals pictured in the Museum also appear in Shaw’s Naturalist’s Miscellany. Shaw didn’t hesitate to cite himself; whichever of the two was published first (1789–1813 for the Miscellany as against 1792–1796 for the Museum) will be listed among the sources for the other one.

For more about identifications, see the Taxonomy section of the introduction to Shaw’s Miscellany.

Illustrations

Unlike the Miscellany, the Museum always identified its artists. In order of frequency:

Artists (“delineavit”)

C. R. Ryley

Charles Reuben Ryley (1752?–1798) is by far the most prolific artist in the Museum, responsible for 57 plates, more than three-quarters of the total. He also shares credit (with Sarah Stone) for the fronti­spiece.

That “57” figure includes seven plates engraved by Fittler or Laurie, both of whom spelled his name “Riley”. We will stipulate that it’s the same person.

Reinagle

Philip Reinagle (1749–1833) started out doing portraits but eventually specialized in animals. He had eleven children, several of whom also became artists. His name—sometimes spelled “Reinagale”—appears on seven plates in the Museum.

“Mrs. Smith late Miss Stone”

Sarah Stone (c. 1760-1844) was a very active artist for the Leverian Museum—she crops up on every other page of the Kaeppler book—though only a handful of her illustrations made it into the Museum Leverianum.

In May 1790, when she drew the Splendid Parrot, she was Miss Stone; by January 1791 and the Rock Manakin she was Mrs. Smith. She also shares credit (with C. R. Ryley) for the frontis­piece. It is undated, but must have been early, since she is named as “Miss Stone”.

S. T. Edwards

Sydenham Teast Edwards (1768–1819) was another animal painter. Unlike the other illustrators in the Museum, his plates—just two of them, one each in Nos. 4 and 6—carry joint credit as artist and engraver.

Engravers (“sculpsit”)

Skelton

William Skelton (1763–1848) engraved 36 plates, or pretty exactly half the total.

Fittler

James Fittler (1758–1835) was one of the rare engravers to make it into the Royal Academy as an engraver. But in the Museum, where his name appears on 16 plates, his distin­guishing feature is . . . a flat refusal to spell the artists’ names right: “Riley”, “Reinagale” and so on. Other times, for variety’s sake, he misspelled his own role: “suclp.”, “scup.”

G. Noble

George Noble (dates unknown) engraved 12 plates in the Museum.

S. T. Edwards

see under Artists.

Laurie

May be Robert Laurie (c. 1755–1836) of Laurie & Whittle. His name appears on just one engraving, the King Paradise Bird in No. 6.

Ogborne

May be John Ogborne (1755–1837), though it would be fun to think it was his sister Mary (b. 1764, m. Meadows 1793). One engraving, the Brasilian Weasel or Coati Mondi in No. 6.

Pegge

I have no idea. Fortunately he only engraved one plate, the Musk Mouse or Musk Shrew in No. 6.

Technicalia

None of the individual Numbers are dated, but the plates provide a rough terminus post quem. Plates in the first three Numbers were dated anywhere from May 1790 to July 1792, with considerable overlap. No. IV is mostly October 1792, though a few are earlier. In No. V, dates vary between December 1792 and February 1793. The sixth and final Number, published as Volume II, is significantly later, with most plates dated 1795 or 1796.

The bottom line of the figure captions—“Publish^d” with date—was generally unreadable on plates oriented sideways (caption nearest the gutter).

If you look closely, you will see the publisher rendered vari­ously as “I. Parkinson” or “J. Parkinson”. This reflects two different scripts, apparently chosen at random:

Museum used a larger format than the Miscellany: quarto rather than octavo. To make up for it, there were no blank pages. If an article happened to end on a recto (right-hand) page, the next article begins straight-off on the following verso (left-hand) page. This in turn means that some plates were printed after the first page of an article. I have put each one at the beginning, before the Latin text.

The first five Numbers are continuously paginated, 1-248, with signatures continuous through Z and then Aa-Ee. The final Number starts anew from page 1, signature B.

The “united British states” means the United States of America. In Shaw’s time, “United States” by default meant the Netherlands.

Orthographic quirk: The Character Specificus sections have “cornibus”; the prose has “cornubus”. I think this means Shaw felt obliged to repro­duce Linnaeus’s spelling in -ibus, but personally preferred -ubus.

Formalities

This ebook is based on two different originals, both from scans at the Internet Archive. Nos. I through V are taken from a copy at the Wellcome Library. No. VI, as well as the frontispiece, come from a copy at McGill University. The latter includes all six parts—but only No. VI has colored illustrations, suggesting that the two parts were bound together after the fact.

Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups and are listed again at the bottom of each page. The word “invisible” means that the letter or punctuation mark is missing, but there is an appropriately sized blank space.