“To Commence at Half-past Eight Precisely”

Thomas Pettigrew’s Exeter Hall Mummy Unrollings

It is about as big as a large smartphone screen; in Imperial measurements, four inches by three and a half. It is ticket number 22 of an unspecified number, and admitted the bearer to rear seats in Exeter Hall in the Strand, London, for a course of lectures on Egyptian antiquities on Mondays and Thursdays over four weeks in late February and early March 1837. The lectures were by T J Pettigrew, F.R.S F.S.A F.L.S. The year and ticket number have been written in pen and, presumably as a security measure, it is not only signed by Pettigrew but has a small red wax seal on it. At the bottom is the warning that the lectures will begin at precisely half-past eight.

The venue was relatively new, having only opened six years before on March 6 1837, and had been built in response to a lack of venues for large meetings in London. It had two auditoriums, the smaller holding around 1,000, the larger more than 4,000, and the offices and committee rooms of a number of societies were also in the building. On the Strand, shops at street level and apartments above flanked its entrance. It was noted as a venue for meetings by campaigning groups, and was eventually so associated with the Anti-Slavery Society that ‘Exeter Hall’ became a popular expression for abolitionists. It was demolished in 1907, and the Strand Palace Hotel now stands on the site.

The man giving the course of lectures was Thomas Joseph Pettigrew (1791-1865); a prominent surgeon whose patients included members of the Royal Family, a Freemason, an antiquarian, and a pioneer Egyptologist. As well as being a founder member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Registrar of the Medical Society of London, he was closely involved with the Royal Humane Society, and became its Secretary. It still exists, and promotes life-saving interventions, but was originally established in the Eighteenth century as the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned. It was an early promoter of artificial respiration, and also at one time of tobacco smoke enemas as a resuscitation technique.

Pettigrew was awarded the Society’s medal for the restoration of a case of suspended animation, and his work in this area drew him to the attention of Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of George III and patron of the Society. Experiments in the use of electricity, known at the time as ‘galvanism’, to restore cases of suspended animation, the forerunner of modern resuscitation techniques, were carried out in 1819 at Pettigrew’s house, many in the presence of Augustus, Duke of Sussex, sixth son of George III. The Duke of Kent appointed Pettigrew, still under thirty, as one of his Surgeons Extraordinary, and on his marriage to Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield, as Surgeon to the Duchess and Surgeon in Ordinary to himself. In this capacity, Pettigrew vaccinated their only child, the infant Queen Victoria, probably against smallpox. The Duke died shortly afterwards in 1820, when Victoria was only eight months old, but Pettigrew then became Surgeon to the Duke of Sussex.

His relationship with the Duke, which went far beyond the medical, was to change his life, and lasted almost until the Duke’s death in 1843. Around 1817 Pettigrew, who was already a keen antiquarian, was invited to catalogue the Duke’s library at Kensington Palace. Royal invitations were tantamount to commands, and this was a Herculean task which he had to combine with his professional duties and other interests. When he started, the library comprised 6,000 volumes. By the time he finished it had grown to 40,000. The catalogue, the Bibliotheca Sussexiana, was no mere listing of titles, but a descriptive and historical account, with bibliographical details and biographical notes on the authors, and in addition to cataloguing his collection Pettigrew purchased books on behalf of the Duke.

As sixth son of the monarch, the Duke was unlikely to succeed to the throne, and concentrated instead on becoming a patron of the arts and sciences. He was a man of very liberal, almost radical, views for his era and position, and held frequent meetings at his Kensington Palace apartments, at which free and unrestrained discussion and expression of opinion were not only tolerated, but encouraged. Pettigrew’s advice was normally sought when issuing invitations to these gatherings. For six or seven years Pettigrew himself held soirées at his house in Saville Row for political, literary and scientific celebrities of the day, where he displayed items from his own museum and volumes on loan from the Duke’s library, and the Duke himself attended. The Duke was a Freemason, and instrumental in the formation of the United Grand Lodge of England in 1813, and in 1818 Pettigrew became a Freemason in the Lodge of Antiquity No. 2, of which the Duke was Master, resigning from it in 1833. He joined the Royal Arch Chapter of St James in 1821, but resigned in 1822. Between 1824 and 1842, he was a joining member of the Royal Alpha Lodge No. 16. This was a private lodge under the personal control of the Duke in his role as Grand Master of the United Lodges of England. Its membership was selected, and in almost all cases proposed, by the Duke himself, and included many of his personal friends. Despite the close friendship between the Duke and Pettigrew, which is clearly evident from the tone of the Duke’s letters to him, they were to become estranged. The reasons for the breach between them are not clear, but are now believed to stem from the Duke’s election as President of the Royal Society, which Pettigrew supported, but where the Duke seems to have felt Pettigrew misled him to believe that it would be unopposed.

Pettigrew’s antiquarian interests, which had brought him to the Duke of Sussex’s attention, also led Pettigrew to become keenly interested in Ancient Egypt, information about which was becoming increasingly available after the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. Around 1820 he met Giovanni Belzoni, who requested him, as a medical practitioner, to examine several mummies that Belzoni had brought to England. In 1821 Pettigrew bought his first mummy and examined it at his house in Spring Gardens, and in 1825 he began to systematically collect notes on Egyptological topics. In 1833 he bought a mummy at the sale by Sotheby’sof the third collection of Egyptian antiquities made by Henry Salt, British Consul-General in Egypt, and subsequently unrolled and examined this and another mummy from the same sale at Charing Cross Hospital in Villiers Street, the start of the public mummy unrollings and lectures for which he was to become famous. He knew Egyptologists of his day, such as J G Wilkinson, Samuel Birch and James Burton personally, even naming his second daughter Maria Sophia Burton Pettigrew. Pettigrew’s interest in mummification was taken to its logical conclusion in 1852, when he mummified Alexander, 10^th Duke of Hamilton, who was buried in a genuine Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus. After his wife’s death in 1854 he retired completely from medicine to pursue his antiquarian and Egyptological interests. He was a member or fellow, usually an active one, and not infrequently an officer, of a daunting number of societies, including being an Honorary Member of the Institut Egyptien of Alexandria, and with J G Wilkinson one of only two Honorary Members of the Egyptian Literary Association, founded in Cairo in 1836. He was above all a leading member of the British Archaeological Association, formed in 1843. As long as his health permitted, he attended its annual conferences, delivered the inaugural address at most of them, and unrolled a mummy at one.

He wrote on a wide variety of other subjects as well as medical matters, including the Encyclopaedia Aegyptiaca, the first in a projected series of which it was the only one published, but is best remembered now for A History of Egyptian Mummies….ⁱ This was more than its title suggested, being a comprehensive survey of what was then known about Egyptian funerary archaeology, and it is now generally regarded as the first scientific work in English on mummies. It was published in 1834 as a pre-funded subscription edition, and had 354 subscribers at 2 guineas (£2.10), equivalent to about £240 today, or 3 guineas (£3.15) for a large paper edition, equivalent to around £380 today. The thirteen plates, of which four were coloured, and twelve drawings were the work of George Cruikshank, a personal friend who also illustrated the works of Dickens. Subscribers to the book, as well as leading Egyptological personalities of the day, included the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London, Michael Faraday, and Captain James Mangles, who along with Captain Charles Irby had assisted Belzoni in entering the temple of Abu Simbel.

i Its full title is: History of Egyptian Mummies and an Account of the Worship and Embalming of Sacred Animals by the Egyptians; with Remarks on the Funeral Ceremonies of Different Nations and Observations on the Mummies of the Canary Islands, of the Ancient Peruvians, Burman Priests, &c.

Only four years after his first mummy unrolling, Pettigrew delivered his lecture series at Exeter Hall, almost certainly in the smaller auditorium. The programme for the lectures unsurprisingly followed the structure of his History of Egyptian Mummies. Unrolling mummies was an unpredictable procedure, and Pettigrew was unable to complete the unrolling with which the series concluded in the time allocated for the lecture, so in his closing remarks he told the audience of another unrolling he would be carrying out soon, of one of the mummies in the collection of the excavator, collector, and dealer Giovanni d’Athanasi. Born Ioannes Athansiou, and generally known as Yanni, he was of Greek origin, and had moved to Cairo when he was eleven, eventually being employed by a succession of British Consul-Generals to assemble collections of Egyptian antiquities for them. While doing so he built up a collection of his own, and in 1836 came to London where sales of it were held by the auction house Sothebys in 1836 and 1837.ⁱ The collection was displayed at Exeter Hall for several months before its sale, and the 1837 sale was held a week after the unrolling which marked the climax of Pettigrew’s lecture series.

Popular accounts of nineteenth century mummy unrollings often refer to them being carried out as ‘entertainments’, and a number of them indeed took place in private residences. Pettigrew’s was part of a lecture series run as a commercial venture,ⁱⁱ and it was not unusual for the audiences at unrollings to take away pieces of mummy bandages as souvenirs. However, to dismiss such events as spectacles rather than science is unfair. The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, which have been delivered annually since 1825, are a good example of scientific content delivered by respected speakers, also intended to be enjoyable. Pettigrew was largely self-educated, but he sustained a serious interest in Ancient Egypt over many years, as well as knowing personally many of the leading figures in early Egyptology. His History of Mummies was a success in spite of its expense, had a distinguished list of several hundred subscribers, and is still considered an important early work on the subject. Similarly, while we may be horrified nowadays at how destructive unrollings were to the mummy, it is worth remembering that Pettigrew was not only a surgeon, but an anatomist, used to demonstrating to students using human remains. Surgery at the time was still a brutal process, with the first use of anaesthesia in dentistry and surgery not until 1846, nearly ten years after Pettigrew’s unrolling at the Exeter Hall. In an age where we now have non-invasive technologies like x-rays and CAT scans to examine mummies, it is all too easy to condemn those who dismantled them to learn more about them, and those who watched while they did.

i The remainder of the collection was auctioned in 1845.

ii It has been suggested that at the time it took place he needed additional income, having been dismissed from his post as Professor of Anatomy at the Charing Cross Hospital the year before. However, the allegation that he had solicited payment to appoint someone to a vacant position was strongly contested by Pettigrew, and seemed to do his subsequent career no harm. See Gabriel Moshenska ‘Unrolling Egyptian mummies in nineteenth-century Britain’. The British Journal for the History of Science, November 2013, pp. 1-27.