Why? Part 1

Today I will be examining a question to which I devoted several pages of my dissertation: why did people collect eggs? There's a lot of material here, so the post will be split into two.

I didn't spend a fortnight of all-nighters staring at this view not to mine it for blog material

Systematic egg collecting seems to have grown with the middle classes and the Industrial Revolution, which makes sense. With greater freedom of movement thanks to improvements in transport methods it became much easier to travel to remote collecting areas (or exchange material by mail), and the newly expanded middle classes found themselves with time to devote to their hobbies.

It's important to note, though, that egg hunters weren't all  Some “field men,” such as Denis Kiely, were near-exclusively finders and harvesters of eggs, often selling or giving their finds to others and only maintaining modest collections of their own. Others were “cabinet men,” preferring to acquire their collections through purchase or trade (the scarcity of women in the history of egg collecting will be discussed in another entry). Vivian V.D. Hewitt turned away from personally harvesting eggs, but continued to expand his collection by purchasing through agents, on one occasion handing a fellow collector a signed blank cheque in order to obtain an egg and skin of a great auk. Use of agents was not uncommon; by maintaining envoys in several locations, a collector or dealer was able to receive specimens without ever leaving the comfort of home. The agents might harvest eggs to eat in any case, and would be earning extra for any unusual finds they were able to send back. I found no examples of institutions (as opposed to private individuals) employing agents in Europe, but it appears to have been more commonplace in the United States. During the course of researching my project I found several requests for donations of eggs and skins from various museums, with varying levels of payment promised.

Some day I'd like to find out how many eggs they acquired this way

Some collectors combined their hobby with research, contributing significant understanding to the field of ornithology. Francis Jourdain both personally acquired eggs in the field and accumulated them in his cabinet, and was regarded as a definitive authority on Palearctic birds.

Michael Prynne, mentioned previously on this blog, gave five potential reasons for collecting eggs: financial gain, what he termed collectomania, sport, aesthetic enjoyment and scientific advancement. I adopted this list as a starting point for my research, as I found no other first-hand account for the reasons behind collecting that was quite so exhaustive.

Money

The first motivation Prynne immediately dismissed as not befitting a true collector, being of the belief that money corrupted an otherwise pure pursuit. Those who bought and sold eggs often acted as middlemen, which Prynne found acceptable only in the handling of eggs following the death of a collector. As procurers, however, dealers were often seen as inherently untrustworthy, valuing profit over integrity.

Professional dealing in eggs, while lucrative for some, never progressed into what might be called an industry, largely because of the preference of collectors for dealing with each other. Oological magazines were filled with advertisements for buyers and sellers, whom having exchanged details would then correspond without the need of a middleman. One advisement written in 1920 suggested that “an exchange is, or should be, quite as much an exchange of courtesies as an exchange of specimens” which suggests that collectors preferred their hobby to be a social activity rather than business. Their requirement for accurate records obliged collectors to rely heavily on trust, thus they preferred to build relationships with fellow enthusiasts rather than deal with those who might be more interested in profit than accuracy. Such trust relationships were valued by those who maintained them, not least because they allowed for the exchange of valuable material over extended periods of time and the option to repay “credit” at an undetermined point in the future.



A typical selection from 1886



The Collectomaniac

So money wasn't the primary objective, what about collectomania? Prynne never defined the term precisely, but it covers a lot of ground, from collecting for its own sake to collecting merely to possess. Absent is any sense of practical application: the eggs are not collected to be used (indeed one could say that being collected thwarts their intended purpose). Eggs were like art, they were there to be admired, not to be practical. At the same time, however, he insisted that eggs without a personal connection were worthless. If an egg didn't remind the collector of the joy of collecting it, of the hot summer's day or miserable climb on a cliff face, then it was pointless. To jog memory is arguably a form of utility, and it's worth pointing out that collectors like Hewitt would have disagreed with Prynne, if their substantial purchased collections are any clue.

An important part of collectomania is the notion of completeness, a central facet of which was variation. A complete collection of stamps, for example, is theoretically possible. Difficult, time-comsuming and monumentally expensive, but as Prynne writes, varieties of man-made items are known, or known not to exist: the limits of philately are expansive but delineated and potentially reachable (with the obvious exception of those no longer extant). Natural objects, by contrast, are highly variable: any collector might happen upon something completely singular. Theoretically infinite variety forever leaves open the possibility of discovering something new, rare or unique. To a near-pathologically acquisitive personality this is not disheartening, in fact just the opposite.

The Foucaultian notion of sameness-in-difference states that to be collectable a series of objects must exhibit variety within essential similarity. Different colours of stamps, different inscriptions on medals, different registration numbers on trains, varieties of bus ticket or paperclip, these are all inherently collectable because they are variations on a theme. Eggs too are variations on a theme, and thanks to Linnaean taxonomy they can be neatly classified. Susan Pearce wrote that “collections must have limits” but it might be more apt to suggest that collections must have milestones. Oologists collected by species and so in theory they might reach a point where they possessed an egg of every variety of bird (assuming for a moment that clear speciation is in fact possible). But they also collected by colour, year, location, and a host of other considerations. Eggs of unusual colouration, markings or shape were particularly prized, even from common species. Under such conditions, there would always be a reason to acquire another clutch, and there were those whose collectomania drove them to preoccupation.



Not that I'd know anything about that

This kind of motivation is perhaps one of the most familiar to the public, as it was the single-minded obsessives who came to attention when they kept collecting once it become illegal. People like Colin Watson, who continued to pursue his hobby after multiple arrests and a raid on his home. It was the avarice of men like Watson that gave egg collecting its low reputation today, or indeed when Prynne wrote in 1963:

It is such extremists who add the last straw to the disreptutation now accorded to all oölogists. Fortunately there are comparatively few of them, but these few have turned need into greed; collectomania into kleptomania; possession into obsession. It is little short of a psychosis in these exceptional cases, and, like the drug-addict, the victim is not to be easily thwarted.

Harsh words, and probably written with more than a little bitterness. It's worth pointing out, though, that the collectomaniacs of today are statistically different from the egg collectors from the days of legitimacy. They are typically working class (at least, the ones who get caught) and this slip in demographic suggests that the modern collectors see egg collecting as a path to self-respectability. By emulating a formerly respectable hobby they might become respected themselves. Or perhaps in maintaining control over a collection, by ordering it a they see fit, those who feel powerless might gain some measure of control over their lives or the world.

Looking at collecting is a fascinating subject in itself, and a much bigger one than my dissertation or this blog was set up to handle. Collecting has been characterised as a kind of illness, as consumption, as a form of control freakery, and collectors aren't always the clearest in explaining their own motives. I could write a book (and people have) on motives behind it; egg collecting is simply an exemplar of behaviour that is found all across humanity.

Thanks for reading folks, next time I'll have a report on how things are doing as far as the egg project itself is concerned. Yes, despite graduating, I'm still happily cataloguing away.

These probably won't be of much scientific use