About the Velvet Drawing Room.

Who Am I?

Dorne Lovegrove

I am an early-retired, ex-blue chip corporate marketer. I moved from the UK to live in the French countryside, and live a more relaxed and peaceful life.
I'm an enthusiast of high-quality Victorian taxidermy, and am very interested in its cultural context

This is probably the right place to state very clearly and in the strongest terms that I am opposed to killing animals specifically for taxidermy purposes, and specifically for "adventure" or "sport". This is abhorrent and immoral and is simply unnecessary in today's world. It implies the highest levels of selfishness and a crudeness of development in any person who defends it. If people find this alienating there's no compulsion to read further any article in this blog.

The Victorian taxidermy industry took advantage of the abundance of creatures in the 19th century. Climate change hadn’t yet impacted our attitudes or destroyed animal habitats, neither had the global economic market started – nor the collective moral conscience.
Let’s not pretend that killing animals was ok back then. It wasn't, but we know better now.
What we can do is appreciate what we have managed to conserve so far and ensure that future destruction is avoided as far as possible.

How this website started

I first started to write all this down because my adult kids are not remotely interested in my taxidermy collection. I was afraid they'd sell it on eBay when I died. I promised to haunt them if they did.
I wanted to provide them with idiot-proof access to the knowledge they would need in order to sell it, but I knew I had to leave it in a place they would find it, so I made a website and it has now grown into a kind of online magazine.

Stories from The Velvet Drawing Room

There are established reference books by the likes of Frost and Morris that give the history of taxidermy in a factual way which provided me with endless pleasure and inspiration over the years.

However, I wanted to tell stories about the makers and their lives, not just about the collectible pieces. Getting access to online historical records of the census, births and marriages, old newspapers, court records and the like has been so important because it has enabled me to see and tell these stories through the details that speak of the lives of the British Victorian taxidermists and naturalists who’ve left us this wonderful heritage.

Some of the stories I’ve uncovered have never been known or heard before and they give us a different perspective on the usual narrative. (I can only imagine what some of the people from the stories would say about that!)

So, sit with me in my Velvet Drawing Room, and listen to some of the stories. You might be amazed by what you see and hear…