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processes in 1839 did not have an immediate impact at
the British Museum. Although individual Museum
Trustees and staff became interested in photography over
the course of the 1840s, photography was not embraced
at an institutional level as quickly as it was, for example,
at the South Kensington Museum. The fi rst demonstra-
tion of photography at the Museum was undertaken by
Talbot, inventor of the calotype process. In the summer
of 1843, when Charles Fellows considered using the
calotype process on an archaeological expedition, Tal-
bot was invited to the museum to conduct experiments.
However, because of the diffi culty in producing good
results, the process was deemed unsuitable for the harsh
conditions of the journey.
It was the 1850s when the British Museum became
signifi cantly involved in photography. By the early
part of the decade, the Museum had received dona-
tions of photography, including books illustrated with
calotypes, and Museum offi cials had received requests
from photographers seeking to take pictures of objects
in the collection. Museum Trustees gave serious consid-
eration to the reproductive possibilities of photography
in 1852, and they agreed that photographs would be use-
ful for scholars interested in deciphering the cuneiform
inscriptions on tablets in the Museum’s collection. In
1853, Edward Hawkins, Keeper of Antiquities, pressed
Museum Trustees and Principal Librarian, Henry Ellis,
to support the in-house production of photographs. Plans
to build a photographic studio on the roof of the Mu-
seum were discussed, and equipment and cost estimates
were solicited from two photographers, Roger Fenton
and Philip Henry Delamotte. On the recommendation
of Sir Charles Wheatstone, inventor of the stereoscopic
camera, Fenton was given a temporary appointment as
museum photographer in the fall of 1853. The Trustees
gave Fenton permission to purchase equipment, and they
asked him to produce a trial series of photographs. The
fi rst results of Fenton’s work, produced in early 1854
using the wet collodion process, were photographs of
recent acquisitions of antiquities and Assyrian tablets
from the collection.
Fenton’s relationship with the Museum was produc-
tive and, from his point of view, profi table, but it was
not without interruptions and disputes. The Trustees
approved further expenditures on photography after
the initial trial, however Fenton’s excursion to the
Crimea in the summer of 1855, and his subsequent
illness, meant that he was absent from the Museum
until 1856. Upon his return, Fenton earnestly resumed
producing photographs of items in the collection. One
signifi cant undertaking was the reproduction of the
Clementine Epistles in an early Christian manuscript,
the Codex Alexandrinus, for divinity professors at
Oxford and Cambridge. The professors proposed
that reproductions of the epistles should be published
because they had been omitted from recent editions
of the codex. With Fenton’s expertise, fi fty copies
were produced for sale by a London dealer. Despite
the scholarly value of photographic reproductions,
mounting costs from photography and failed attempts
to recoup expenses through the sale of prints signaled
the commercial failure of photographic operations at
the Museum. Ultimately, the Trustees decided that
photography was too costly, and they suspended
Fenton’s work in 1858.
Another fi gure who had a signifi cant impact on pho-
tography at the Museum was Anthony Panizzi. As Keeper
of Printed Books, he suggested new applications for pho-
tography. He proposed that photographs could replace
missing plates and pages in incomplete copies of books
and that photographs of pages from selected rare books
could be consulted by researchers. Upon his appointment
to Principal Librarian in 1856, Panizzi became increas-
ingly involved in photographic work. Enthusiastic about
photography’s potential as a reproductive tool, Panizzi
was nonetheless challenged by the administrative task
that the photographic operations presented. In response
to the Trustees’ concerns about high costs, Panizzi began
to monitor all photography requests. When Trustees
decided to terminate the arrangement with Fenton in
1859, Panizzi organized the transfer of photographic
reproductions to the Department of Science and Art at the
South Kensington Museum. The agreement only lasted
from 1860 to 1863, but it caused Fenton’s association
with the Museum to end bitterly.
In subsequent years, the Principal Librarian con-
tinued to administer arrangements with the many
photographers requesting to photograph objects in
the collection. While photography continued to serve
primarily as a means of reproducing objects in the
Museum’s collection, photographic reproductions of
carefully selected documents were purchased in an ef-
fort to build comprehensive collections in various Brit-
ish Museum departments. One instance of this was the
purchase of a photographic copy of a sixteenth-century
French mappemonde. Throughout the 1890s, a high
demand for photographic work meant that library staff
spent a great deal of time supervising photographers.
Richard Garnett, Keeper of Printed Books at the time,
recommended establishing a photography department
to handle the work; however, it was not until 1927 that
a new museum photographer was hired.
Today, the British Library has an impressive collec-
tion of photographs and photography-related materials.
Among the Library’s holdings of nineteenth-century
texts are signifi cant works in the history of photogra-
phy. Notable examples include Daguerre’s Historique
et description des procédés du daguerreotype (1839),
Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844), Eadweard Muy-
bridge’s eleven-volume Animal Locomotion (1887), and
BRITISH LIBRARY
