Stevens Auction Rooms
Where Victorian Collectors Went Shopping
FOUR SALES
1851 - 1912
Most well-heeled Victorian collectors never went near a jungle.
In London one of the best places for a Victorian collector of natural history to buy what they wanted was an otherwise plain auction room in Covent Garden: Stevens’ at 38 King Street.
For this article I’ve used four surviving auction catalogues and a paper to show typically what went through these auction rooms, and the range is wide:
A country-house menagerie in 1851
A zoo in 1855
Great Auk eggs in 1865
A sale of Congo objects in 1912.
Stevens - a family firm
John Crace Stevens (1809 to 1859) founded the business in 1831. According to Wikipedia, its first big sale was about 40,000 insects collected by the entomologist Adrian Hardy Haworth. His brother Samuel Stevens (1817 to 1899) joined him in 1840 and left in 1848 to run his own natural history agency in Bloomsbury Street, acting for collectors such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates.
After John Crace Stevens died in 1859, the next generation took over the business. John’s son Henry Stevens (1843 to 1925) held the licence from 1863, and the firm closed in 1939. The firm’s own printing in 1912 claims it was “established 1760”.
One oddity is worth noticing. The papers of 1865 and 1912 still name “Mr J. C. Stevens”, yet John Crace Stevens died in 1859. They evidently kept the name as the firm’s official name, and why not, since J.C. Stevens embodied every type of collector’s desire. Whoever stood at the rostrum, the buyer was dealing with the established brand of “J. C. Stevens”.
DATE: 1851
A MENAGERIE SOLD IN A COUNTRY HOUSE: KNOWSLEY HALL
Auction Catalogue: Knowsley Hall 1851
The most remarkable of the old auction papers I unearthed is a catalogue for a sale not held in King Street at all. When the 13th Earl of Derby died in June 1851, his collection of living animals at Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool, was put up for auction. The catalogue is dated Knowsley, 27 August 1851, and describes the Earl as the “late Earl of Derby, K.G., President of the Zoological Society of London”. Stevens was the auctioneer. The sale was to be held on the Knowsley premises, beginning on Monday 6 October 1851 and running for six days.
Natural History on a huge scale
The scale is startling. The summary at the back of the catalogue counts 412 species and 1,617 animals: 94 species and 345 mammals, and 318 species and 1,272 birds, not counting poultry. Of these, Knowsley had bred 84 species and 756 animals. The sale was arranged by kind. The first day was deer, the second antelopes, the third cattle, goats, sheep and llamas, and the fourth zebras, kangaroos, rodents, lemurs, armadillos and dogs. The last two days were birds, from eagles and parrots to cranes, ibises and swans.
Victorian Auction Culture
The conditions of sale show how it worked. Viewing began on Monday 29 September. You could not enter the auction without a catalogue, which cost five shillings. The highest bidder bought the lot. A buyer paid a 25 per cent deposit if asked, settled the rest within a week, and had a month to remove the animals at his own risk and “with all faults”. Boxes and travelling cases were available from the Aviary keeper. Knowsley Hall stood two miles from Huyton station on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway so that the animals could leave by train.
1855: A Zoo is Emptied
A few years later Dickens’s magazine “Household Words” described another Stevens sale in an article called “A Zoological Auction”: the entire animal collection of the Surrey Zoological Gardens, sold on 27 November. The proprietor wanted to clear the animals and build a concert room for M. Jullien’s band. The article puts about five hundred people in the crowd. They included animal dealers, led by “Mr Jamrack of Ratcliff Highway”, showmen including the Wombwells, London bird-stuffers, and agents for the Regent’s Park gardens and the Crystal Palace.
Prices were low by our standards. The writer notes a cockatoo at two guineas, a pelican at eighteen guineas, white storks at sixteen shillings and rhesus monkeys at twelve shillings each. He also suspects that some of the eagles on offer were already stuffed, “full of hay and tow, with glass eyes in their heads”. The year isn’t printed on the page I have; it comes from the volume, which covers late 1855 to early 1856.
1865: Eggs and Skins
By 1865 the firm of Stevens was advertising in “The Field”, the sporting and country paper. The advertisement for 1 July announces that Mr J. C. Stevens “will sell by auction at his great rooms, 38 King Street, Covent Garden, on Tuesday, July 11”, among other things “four fine examples of the egg of the Great Auk”. The same sale offered a collection of eggs and bird skins obtained by the Rev. H. B. Tristram “last year in the Holy Land”, a small collection of eggs “just received from the ‘Old Bushman’ in Sweden”, and eggs from Turkey, Tunis and Canada. People could view it the day before and on the morning of the sale, and catalogues were available.
The Great Auk
The Great Auk was a flightless seabird of the North Atlantic. The last known pair were killed on Eldey, off Iceland, on 3 June 1844. Only about seventy-five eggs survive today, so four in one sale, twenty-one years after the bird’s end, is a striking number. As the bird became rarer, its eggs became more valuable, and Wikipedia says that prices sometimes reached eleven times a skilled worker’s annual earnings. Collectors wanted the Great Auk because it was rare, and every egg bought made its fate more certain.
1912: An Auction Room That Sold Everything
A Catalogue of a Collection from the Congo
The last paper comes after Victoria during the Edwardian period. It is the catalogue for Sale No. 12206, held on Tuesday 17 September 1912 at half-past twelve, titled “A Catalogue of a Collection from the Congo”. The cover advertises Congo fetishes in ivory and wood, charms, idols, war horns, masks, spears and knives, and “rare currency”, together with Oriental porcelain, netsukes, bronzes, colour prints, silver, miniatures and jewellery. The telegraphic address printed on it is “Auks, Rand, London”: even in 1912 the firm was still known for the bird.
An African Extravaganza
The Congo section began at lot 101 and ran to about lot 190, followed by “West African and other curios”, with a Benin head, Ashanti pieces and a war drum from the Cameroons. The catalogue is a list, not a story. It describes “finely carved ivory fetish figures”, a medicine man’s necklet of human teeth, ivory war horns and bundles of knives “used as currency”. One lot is a wooden idol said to have “belonged to the King of Katanga”. I couldn’t find a collector or vendor named in what I read. The sale also ran alongside Japanese prints, a pair of Kutani vases and a Kruger sovereign.
The Diversity of the Stevens’ Auctions
The back cover gives an overview of the firm’s week. Photographic and scientific apparatus sold on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and china, pictures, and curios every Friday. “General natural history objects” were sold twice a month. The following Tuesday, 24 September, brought British Lepidoptera, including the final portion of the late J. W. Tutt’s collection, and on 8 October they sold “heads and horns and general natural history specimens”. Natural history was just one line among many.
This matters for the Congo sale because it shows how African objects reached English collections: through a sales room that treated them as curiosities, next to netsukes and pewter, with nothing printed about who took them or how. That is a question for another article.
What these papers show
Taken together, they show an auction room as a link in the chain from the field to the glass case. Dealers and agents brought the animals in, and Stevens sold them to museums, showmen, bird-stuffers, and private collectors. For collectors, these catalogues also served as research tools. A lot number, a sale date or a printed description may be the only record of where an object stood before it reached you.
Read more: The Victorian Journey of the exotic beast bird and animal · The wonder and wounds of the Belgian Congo · Cabinets of curiosities · The gentlemen collectors: Edward Booth · Boucard, Burton and the feather trade.
My Sources
“A Zoological Auction”, Household Words, vol. XII, p. 570
Household Words, vol. XII, p. 571 (the sale continued)
The Field, the Country Gentleman’s Newspaper, 1 July 1865, advertisement page
- C. Stevens, Sale No. 12206, “A Catalogue of a Collection from the Congo”, 17 September 1912
Stevens’ auction rooms (Wikipedia)
This article is part of the Victorian Natural History Mania section. Explore more research here →
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