The Duchess of Portland
The Portland Vase (British Museum)
The second Duchess of Portland possessed one of the largest and finest collection of shells in England, if not in Europe. It later was described by Thomas Martyn, who illustrated one or two of her shells in The Universal Conchologist. "So rich a display in the number as well as rarity and perfection of these subjects, together with every other species of marine productions, perhaps is not to be equalled" (p. 10). But her purchase of shells and objets d'art was so extravagant that the collection had to be sold to meet the demands of her creditors. The auction began on April 24, 1786, nine months after her death, so long did it take to prepare the sales catalog.
It included shells brought back by Captain James Cook from his voyages to the Pacific, one of which was an "exceeding fine and large Cypræa Aurora, S. or the Orange Cowry, from the Friendly Isles. in the South-Seas, extremely scarce" (No. 3831) that realized £3.5s. This was on the thirty-fifth day of the auction, on June 2, 1786. That day in The Times of London (which had begun publication just the year before), there was an advertisement for a performance of Handel's Messiah at Westminster Abbey the following week. The price of admission was one guinea, a gold coin weighing approximately a quarter ounce that was the equivalent of £1.1s or twenty-one shillings. Seating at the opera that evening was half a guinea. Because the birthday of George III was being celebrated, there also were more popular amusements: plays and performances, musicals and displays of horsemanship that could be enjoyed from a box seat for 3s.—the price of Robert Burns' Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect which was published the following month.
One of the last items to be sold at auction was a first-century BC Roman blue cameo glass vase (No. 4155), which the Duchess of Portland had purchased two years before from Sir William Hamilton. It realized £1,029, an extraordinary sum when one considers the cultural economics of the time. (In 1845, the eponymous vase was shattered into more than two hundred pieces by a drunken visitor. Pieced back together that same year, it was restored in 1949 and then more meticulously forty years later.)
London entertainment may seem inexpensive but, as Hume indicates, only about three percent of the English population in the eighteenth century had an annual income of more than £200, of which about £16 per year (27s. per month) could have been set aside for discretionary spending. An evening at the theater in Covent Garden or Drury Lane for a family of four, coach fare, and dinner at a tavern afterwards would have been the extent of their entertainment for the month. To purchase a novel in four volumes (as books often were published) required almost a full-day's pay. Few families, in other words, earning less than £200 per annum could afford to buy most of the books sold in England or attend the theater on a regular basis.
Hume uses a multiplier with a range of 200–300 to determine contemporary purchasing power, which he feels is less problematic than a simple conversion multiplier. For the period 1740–1792, he calculates 3s. (a box seat at the theater or a single book volume) to be the equivalent of £30–£45 and a guinea seat at Westminster, £210–£315. (A conversion multiplier calculates the relative value of a guinea in 1786 to be worth considerably less, approximately £115.)
References: The Duchess's Shells (2014) by Beth Fowkes Tobin; "The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England: Incomes, Prices, Buying Power—and Some Problems in Cultural Economics" (2015) by Robert D. Hume, Huntington Library Quarterly, 77(4), 373-416; A Catalogue of the Portland Museum, Lately the Property of the Duchess Dowager of Portland, Deceased (April 24, 1786); The Universal Conchologist (1789, second issue) by Thomas Martyn;
