I’ve written a lot about the textile tokens at the Foundling Museum and have recently come across the complete digitised collection of admission papers complete with the tokens left by mothers with their children.
I have also recently discovered the complete digitised collection, at Oxford University Herbaria, of Jacob Bobart the Younger’s Herbarium. It was his father’s Herbarium on display in a recent exhibition at the Ashmolean museum which piqued my interest in these specimens, but since looking through the archive, they have become an essential part of my thinking.
First of all the Foundling Museum tokens which I have already talked about at length. These tokens, left by mothers with their children, were meant as a means of identification should the mother ever be in a position to take the child back.
The tokens themselves comprise all sorts, from thread to ribbons, textiles to coins such as that below, left with a girl, aged 6 weeks, at 9.00pm on Friday 19 February 1742.
I’ve talked before about how I unpack objects in museums and tease out the gestures within them and in particular about the Foundling Museum tokens:
My work is, in part, an attempt to know the past as a present-day, lived experience; to empathise with those who lived before me and see the natural world as they would have seen it, before so much was lost.
In 2018 I visited the Foundling Museum in London, established as The Foundling Hospital in 1739 to receive and care for abandoned children. It was an emotional experience, not least because of the scraps of fabric left by mothers with their babies; a means of identifying their child in the event they might reclaim them in the future. Amounting to over 5000 items, this sad catalogue is Britain’s largest collection of 18th century textiles.
When we attempt to engage with the past, often what is left – whether a name, a ruin, an object or story – is like those scraps of fabric, and the dress from which the fabric was cut, the world from which they’re estranged. In our mind’s eye, we can take the scrap and attempt to extend its pattern to form a view of the world long gone; the dress from which it was cut, the woman who wore it, the streets down which she walked. Whether a name, a ruin, an object or story, the process is the same; we take a fragment and, in our imaginations, extend it.
But in this endeavour we are always like a parent, claiming a child with a mismatched pattern, pointing out the parts that rhyme, aware of those which don’t.
Of course many of the tokens were ribbons or pieces of plain fabric and were not cut from a dress at all. But I wanted a way of showing how, with a simple piece or fabric, we can extend a pattern out to create the wider world from which it came. With the token above, one can imagine doing just that, extending the lines of the embroidered plants beyond the token, onto a bigger piece of fabric. What I’m aiming for isn’t historical accuracy per se, but a vocabulary – a means of expressing that move from fragment, to body, to world; from pattern, to dress, to world.
Below is a specimen taken from Jacob Bobart the Younger’s Herbarium on the Oxford University Herbaria website.
It’s hard to believe, looking at this, that it was growing in the ground over 350 years ago. We are used to seeing things that old of course. Indeed, in Oxford, 350 years is nothing compared to what else we might find around us, let alone what we might discover in a museum. But specimens like this are a different thing altogether. We are used to seeing plants grow, flowering season by season, year by year. We might place particular value on those we grow in our gardens whilst walking past those growing from walls or kerbs. The fact is, they are everyday things which – although we might notice them – occupy the background much of the time. That’s not to say they are not important – far from it – but they, more often than not, occupy the periphery of our attention.
If we think of an event 350 years ago – for example, the Restoration of Charles II – then in history we see the headlines of that world – restored 29 May 1660 – not the everyday, background parts which bring that world to life. These specimens in the herbarium, however, do just that. They show us the peripheral world of the mid 17th century, the everyday parts which bring that world so suddenly and wonderfully close. It’s as if the spring of that year, 350 years ago, is only a matter of weeks past.
Flowers and plants are fleeting and yet here they are on the page 350 years later. The plant in the image is almost as it was in the mid 17th century. It’s as if we can still see its growingness, as if the mid 17th century is still in the act of unfolding. In a Goethean sense, to know something is not to stand outside it and describe it, but to participate in its continuation. When I look at the plant on the page, that is what I find myself doing – participating in its continuation.
I’ve talked before about Goethe’s concept of ‘urpflanze’ and my thoughts on an ‘urpresent’:
For Goethe, things were also best understood not as static forms, but as visible processes of becoming. With the example of a plant, what appears to us as a collection of separate parts was, for Goethe, a series of transformations: leaf becoming petal, petal becoming stamen, form passing into form. In his work he sought not to look behind the plant for some hidden cause, but to perceive within the plant the law of its own unfolding (an authentic whole within the parts). This was the ground from which his idea of the Urpflanze emerged.
Goethe’s Urpflanze (ur-plant) is not a force or thing behind the plant, or some kind of Platonic ideal. It’s seeing that what looks like a plant is actually something happening.
I see the plant growing, but not as it is now, but as it was in the mid 17th century. And in my imagination, as I turn from the plant, I glimpse the weather to which the plant, like everything else was in thrall. For a brief moment, I see the weather and the world of the mid 17th century. As Tim Ingold writes:
‘For the things of this world are their stories, identified not by fixed attributes [petals, stamen, leaves – my addition] but by their paths of movement in an unfolding field of relations. Each is the focus of ongoing activity. Thus in the storied world… things do not exist, they occur.’
They occur not in isolation but in relationship with other occurring things. So as I look at the page, as I see the plant growing (occuring) so I see it becoming in relation to other becoming things; the weather, other plants, people walking beside them lost in conversation about the restoration of the king.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, ‘I look outward, and in me the tree grows’. So it is with the plant. I feel into it (einfűhlung) and the plant grows into me (weltinnenraum). So as I look at the page, that small part of the 17th century grows within me too.
“Reason,” Goethe also wrote, “is concerned with what is becoming, understanding with what has become… Reason rejoices in development; understanding wishes to hold everything fast so that it may make use of it.”
Becoming is, as I’ve written above, the unfolding field of relations.
The plant, as a specimen, has become. What I see when I look with my imagination and tease out the gestures is its becoming within what has become. I can’t actually go back to the mid 17th century to see it’s actual ‘becoming’ but I can see it through what exists before me.
I know what it takes to make a plant grow; sunlight, rain, soil and so on. And these most everyday of things become the empathetic bridge connecting me to the 17th century garden in which the plant grew. The 17th century rain and sunlight are still there within it and that sunlight still casts a plant shaped shadow 350 years into the future. I pick up the gesture of the weather and with the knowledge of light and rain from my own time, continue the plant’s trajectory.
The same is true of the foundling token. I look at that fabric token and imagine the wider piece of textile from which it came. Into that textile the pattern grows, but it doesn’t stop there. Nothing, as we’ve seen, exists in isolation and like the plant in the 17th century soil, the textile exists in the 18th century town. And although I can never see that town of 1742, I know the town I live in now; a town which, like the town of 1742 and the plant of the 17th century receives ordinary weather, is full of connections which are always being made and unmade. The best description of this will always be the words of Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities:
“In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency… you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.”
“Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”
In the archive of the Foundling Museum, we might read that a baby was left on a certain date and at a certain time. That they were six weeks old when given into care.
We are used to history being written in years (1660 – the restoration of Charles II); events described as happening on certain dates (the Great Fire of London, started Sunday 2 September 1666), but these are often events of historic import like battles and coronations. They aren’t things describing ordinary people, let alone poor and desperate mothers. And certainly they are rarely described to the hour or quarter hour. 6 ¾ o’clock. 6.45pm in our money. It’s the moment a mother says goodbye to her child leaving all her hope in a small piece of fabric sealed in a billet which will never, in all likelihood, be opened. It’s as if such a trauma requires a sharper point than that which even a day can allow.
That moment becomes folded, like paper around the token. The edges are defined and the paper sealed with wax. It has become.
Earlier I wrote:
Whether a name, a ruin, an object or story, the process is the same; we take a fragment and, in our imaginations, extend it.
But in this endeavour we are always like a parent, claiming a child with a mismatched pattern, pointing out the parts that rhyme, aware of those which don’t.
I realise now that the process was slightly different. The claimant would say what the sealed billet contained and then, when it was opened, their words would be set against the token inside.
To look at an object and imagine a past to which it belonged as best we can is to say what we think the billet contains then compare. Parts might rhyme, but for the most part there is dissonance. It’s as if the parent has said there was a plain red ribbon inside but in fact the ribbon was blue and embroidered.
Many of the billets were opened in the mid 19th century when the tokens were removed and pinned to the admission papers. What is evident in these samples are the folds of the opened billets.
These billets would have remained sealed for almost 100 years and those folds become like marks of tension, as if the sealed billet was like a clenched fist, holding something tight – something precious.
Hope.
When the billet was finally opened and the token removed, the tension was released, like the hand of someone letting go their last breath. The mother and child died long ago and yet that hope persisted in the folds of the paper. And even to us today, 280 years later, that hope is still visible.
The bond is still there.
It’s that unfolding which interests me.
The unfolding of the billet.
The unfolding of the flower.
The unfolding of the gestures.
The unfolding of the lost world.
The unfolding of my imagination.
I’ve spoken before about how a piece of a broken Hologram, unlike pieces of a traditional image, contains not a fragment of the image, but the whole of the image at a much reduced resolution. One can use that metaphorically to describe all objects from the past and, in our case, the Foundling token and the Herbarium specimen. The plant is not just a plant. It is the weather of its becoming, the wind which moved it, the people who saw it. Indeed, it is the whole of its time at a vastly reduced resolution. The same is true of the Foundling token.
It was Henri Bortoft who used the metaphor of hologram when describing the concept of authentic wholes. A plant, for example, is not the sum of its parts (petals, leaves, stamen etc,) but its happening, its becoming (urpflanze). Similarly, no time is the sum of its parts; it is imminent in every part (urpresent), parts which themselves do not occur in isolation. In Buddhist philosophy, dependent co-arising teaches that phenomena manifest only in relation to other phenomena: there is no self-nature, no birth, no death — only continual transformation. Any time in the past is not the sum of all its parts, it is immanent in each of them like the whole image is immanent within the broken piece of the hologram.
Bortfoft writes:
“If we start from this position, we must at least insist on moving in both directions at once, so that we have neither the resultant whole as a sum nor the transcendental whole as a dominant authority, but the emergent whole which comes forth into its parts. The character of this emergence is the ‘unfolding of enfolding’, so that the parts are the place of the whole where it bodies forth into presence. The whole imparts itself; it is accomplished through the parts it fulfills.”
This unfolding exists in the herbarium sheets in the way the plants point beyond themselves to the time – the weeks of spring and summer – in which they were growing (although, as we’ve seen are, that time is not beyond the plant but imminent within it. The plant therefore points both beyond and within itself.). It’s like looking at an open window in the facade of a house photographed in the 19th century.
Through the open window, beyond the picture plane, is a room – a room into which the sounds of the day outside pass (there suddenly becomes an outside and an inside, not just the surface of the picture). If someone is in there, they would hear those sounds. They would feel the breeze, smell the smells. They would know the weather, the temperature outside. It is a space into which we can climb as if the photographed town is unfolding and enfolding at the same time.
This extension of space can be seen too in the following newspaper article from Jacknson’s Oxford Journal in 1841.
**TERRIFIC THUNDER STORM.—**On Wednesday evening last we were visited with one of the most extraordinary storms of thunder and lightning ever remembered. The early part of the day had been exceedingly fine, but in the afternoon the sky became clouded, and at about five o’clock a few large drops of rain fell, accompanied with howling winds, indicative the approach of a storm. Shortly after dusk the lightning appeared in the south and western horizon, and soon became most vivid, blue sheets of lightning following each other in rapid succession, but unaccompanied by thunder. Before eight o’clock the storm increased, and distant peals of thunder were heard at short intervals. At half-past eight the effect of the electric fluid was truly magnificent—the whole expanse of the heavens being illuminated in the most beautiful manner, presenting one of the grandest scenes it is possible to conceive.
What interests me in this text is the fact it points to a time long before the event it describes. On Wednesday evening last we were visited with one of the most extraordinary storms of thunder and lightning ever remembered. Those words, ‘ever remembered’ suggest a span of time which takes us back into the 18th century so, much like the plants in the herbarium, it unfolds the moment to show us so much more and does so through the weather – that most ordinary and most recognisable of things.
We all know what a storm looks like and that image of silent flashes of lightning on the horizon allows us to find a way back to 1841. From there the report allows us to step back further still, this time through the collective memory of those who were there.
What this article also points to is the inner worlds of those alive at the time. Memories are contained within us. They exist within our inner worlds and if we are to empathise with those long since gone, we must recognise that they aren’t just names or people moving through the past like characters on a stage; they were people with inner worlds just like ours; worlds full of memories, loves, regrets, traumas and desires.
As Gaston Bachelard wrote: “Dreams, thoughts and memories weave a single fabric.”
The flower on the page of the herbarium is a surface. The Foundling token on the page in the archive is a surface. But like the windows in the surface of a photograph they are deictic – they point both within and without: to a mother and child, to a town, a room, a whole world and so on.
But objects in museums not only point to the worlds from which they’re estranged, they also point to the inner worlds of those who have known them.
We all have an inner world.
Mine is vast. Full, like everyone else’s, of memories, thoughts, stories and dreams. It is the landscape of my imagination. The great forests of pre-industrial England which I loved to imagine as a boy; the large country houses of the 18th and 19th centuries, full of rooms, stairs and passageways. So when we think of people in the past, we not only think of the world through which they walked, but the worlds they carried within them.
Below is the trowel used to lay the foundation stone of the Museum of Natural History in Oxford on 20 June 1855.
The label states that the trowel was carried in procession by Sarah Acland – the eldest daughter of Dr Henry Acland – who at the time would have been one week away from her 6th birthday. It’s amazing then to look at the trowel in its case, on display in the building for the laying of whose foundation stone it was made and to imagine the ceremony; the child in her best dress, the parents in their smartest attire, the other dignitaries and all the onlookers watching as the procession went past. One can imagine the weather – fine perhaps, the hubbub of conversation, the bored child as the ceremony wears on. I can see the space where the Museum would eventually stand and I can imagine too the day unfolding beforehand, at the Acland’s family home in Broad Street for example; the bustle of preparations, the conversations, the getting dressed, the nerves.
This is an example of unpicking the gestures still latent within an object. The past has gone and is irretrievable, but within this small object, that day can still be glimpsed through careful observation, not just with the senses, but also the imagination.
Sarah Acland would grow up to become an eminent woman in the field of photography, being as she was – along with Ethelreda Laing, also in Oxford – a pioneer of early colour photography at the beginning of the 20th century. Ethelreda took the photo below of her daughters in the garden of their home in Headington, Oxford.
That home became Bury Knowle library, and its grounds became the park I often played in as a child.
The photo below is a self-portrait of Sarah Acland taken in the early 20th century.
What I find interesting, looking at this photograph, is the fact that somewhere in her mind is the memory of that day in 1855, when, as a child, she had carried the trowel to the ceremony at the site of what would become the Museum of Natural History. The object I have seen in the Museum and which now occupies a space in my memory, also occupied a space in hers.
For some reason, I find that more incredible than imagining the day itself. Side by side, cheek by jowl with that memory of the trowel would be all her memories; of her mother and father, her siblings, events in her childhood, adulthood and so on, a vast hidden world wrapped up like tokens in a sealed billet. It’s as if by seeing the trowel, by sharing that image with someone who died almost 100 years ago, we can also glimpse that inner world.
The importance of this is that when we look at something like the Foundling token above, we aren’t just glimpsing London in 1742, but the inner world of the mother. The textile fragment would sit in her memories along with the image of her child. We aren’t surfaces. We are worlds enfolded within.
As the long lost past within an object unfolds to briefly meet me, so I unfold to meet it. And at the same time, that past is enfolded back into me and I, in turn, am enfolded into the object. We become folds within one another.