Henry Willett, Esq., Of Brighton
1266. Mug. Cream ware, printed and coloured with ploughing with inscription “The Weathers fare, the Season’s now, Drive on my Boys, God speed the Plough”. H. 4 in. c. 1780
486. Plaques, a pair. Earthenware, with bos of Fox and Pitt in relief. 6 by 5.5 in. c. 1800
274. Pipe. Earthenware. A man astride a barrel. H 6.5 in. c. 1790.
Henry Willett was one of the Victorian characters behind the founding of the Museum. Willett, who was born in the local town of Newhaven, collected fossils before turning his attention to pottery and art. A friend of John Ruskin, to whom he offered some of his finds, his collection was enabled by the money made through his businesses, including brewing.
In one reference that I found, Ruskin praised the “magnificence … unsurpassable beauty [and] extreme interest” of the objects Willett had intended as gifts. But from what I understand of the Willett’s collection that was first lent to the Museum (in the 1870s) and then donated (in 1903), this sense of the rare and the splendid did not really animate his pursuit of pottery and porcelain. Rather than being constituted by unique treasures, the ceramic collection that Willett bequeathed to the Museum represented something more deliberately mundane. This was the “homely pottery”, that Willett believed could trace "the history of a country”.
Stella Beddoe, Senior Keeper and Keeper of Decorative Art at the Museum, gave me an copy of the 1899 catalogue that was produced for Willett’s collection when it was on loan to the V & A (though the collection “illustrating popular British history” was consigned to the Bethnal Green outpost rather than displayed in all its colloquial glory in the halls of South Kensington). Three entries from the catalogue start this post. The pages of the catalogue have turned the most delicate of browns that darken towards the stitching. The pages give off a slightly stale odour that is not at all unpleasant.
Willett’s perspective resonates with much more contemporary ideas. His identification of the values of a history learnt from everyday life chimes with some of what Richard Hoggart was saying in the 1950s in Uses of Literacy about mass and popular culture and with parallel ideas about ‘le quotidien’ from French thinkers in the 1960s like Lefebvre and De Certeau. There is also a sense that what Willett’s project – like Henry Wellcome’s – was a precursor to what late twentieth century archaeologists, and anthropologists came to call ‘material culture’.


