Finally, consider the great domed Reading Room (now mostly a visitors’ space). For over a century, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, and hundreds of obscure researchers sat at its desks. But the peculiar desire here is subtler: the desire for anonymous proximity.
Library archives reveal Victorian-era complaints about "inappropriate notes" being passed between readers. A 1887 logbook entry by a Keeper of Manuscripts records: "A gentleman of middle age repeatedly solicited a younger man in the Theology section. Ejected, but returned next day."
The museum, paradoxically, became a space for queer desire before it was legal to name it. The chronicles of those longings are not written in official histories but in the margins of books, the scratched initials on desks now replaced. The Chronicles of Peculiar Desires in the Briti...
No section of the museum breeds more peculiar desires than the Egyptian galleries. The mummies, with their painted coffins and unwrapped linen, provoke a distinct psychological cocktail: horror and attraction.
In the 1920s, following the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, a condition known as "Egyptian delirium" swept Britain. Londoners attended "unwrapping parties" where Victorian hosts would literally cut mummies out of their wrappings as entertainment. The British Museum’s mummies were handled so frequently that their bandages crumbled to dust. Finally, consider the great domed Reading Room (now
What desire drove this? A peculiar longing to touch death, to possess a body that had outlasted empires. For some, it was necrophilic in the psychological sense—an attraction to the absolute stillness of the preserved corpse. The novelist Algernon Blackwood wrote of a man who fell in love with a mummy in the British Museum, sleeping in the gallery at night. Fiction, perhaps. But the number of security incidents involving visitors trying to kiss or caress the Egyptian sarcophagi suggests otherwise.
What remains of these peculiar desires? We like to think we are more enlightened, more honest. Perhaps. But walk through any British antique fair, and you will see them: the collectors of Victorian taxidermy (mice playing cricket, squirrels drinking tea). Scroll through any niche online forum, and you will find the heirs of Flinders-Haig—people obsessed with the reproductive habits of deep-sea anglerfish, or the manufacturing defects of 1970s British Leyland cars. The chronicles of those longings are not written
The peculiar British desire has not vanished. It has merely mutated. It is the desire for the perfectly curated misery of The Great British Bake Off’s soggy bottoms. It is the desire for queuing in the rain. It is the desire to say “I’m fine” when drowning.