Henry Christy

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Not to be confused with Henry Christie.

Henry Christy
Born26 July 1810
Kingston upon Thames
Died4 May 1865 (1865-05-05) (aged 54)
NationalityBritish
OccupationBanker
EmployerLondon Joint-Stock Bank
Known forEthnographic collection, British Museum

Henry Christy (26 July 1810 – 4 May 1865) was an English banker and collector, who left his substantial collections to the British Museum.

Early life

Christy was born at

Quaker banker who started out in hat manufacture with interests in Stockport, before becoming a financier.[1]

Trained to business by his father, Henry Christy became a partner in the house of Christy & Co. in

towelling, taken up by his brother Richard, and amenable to mechanical manufacture with a technique devised by an employee, Samuel Holt.[4] Christy also innovated with woven silk rather than beaver for the manufacture of top hats.[5]

Interests

Christy was a philanthropist, active in the

free blacks in Ontario, writing afterwards to its founder William King, and giving money.[9] He was also a committee member of the British and Foreign School Society.[10]

Christy was also involved in numerous learned societies. He belonged to both the

Geological Society in 1858.[13] He took part in both the archaeological societies of the period, and the Royal Geographical Society.[14]
He was also a
Augustus Lane Fox (later Pitt Rivers), the other major British collector of the time in the ethnographic field.[15]

Travels and collecting

In 1850 Christy began to visit foreign countries. Among the fruits of his first expedition to the East were an extensive collection of Eastern fabrics, and a large series of figures from Cyprus, which are now in the British Museum.[2]

After the

Great Exhibition of 1851, Christy began the study of tribal peoples. In 1852, and again in 1853, he travelled in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The public collections of antiquities at Stockholm and Copenhagen were a revelation to him, and from this time he collected objects from contemporary and prehistoric periods. The year 1856 was devoted to America. Travelling over Canada, the United States, and British Columbia, Christy met Edward Burnett Tylor in Cuba, and they went on together to Mexico, where Christy made many purchases. Their Mexican travels were described by Tylor in his Anahuac (London, 1861).[2]

Plaques in tribute to Edouard Lartet and Henry Christy, Les Eyzies de Tayac, Dordogne, France.

In 1858, the

type sites
.

Death

In April 1865, Christy left England with a small party of geologists to examine some caves which had recently been discovered in Belgium, near Dinant. While at work he caught a severe cold. A subsequent journey with M. and Mme. Lartet to La Palisse brought on inflammation of the lungs, of which he died on 4 May 1865.[2]

Collections and legacy

By his will, Christy bequeathed his collections of modern objects to the nation; his archaeological collection went to the nation, but with the finds from excavations in France to be shared with the French

A. W. Franks, until 1884. The young Charles Hercules Read, later Franks's successor as Keeper at the British Museum, was based there doing the cataloguing, in his first work for the museum. In that year the removal of the natural history department to South Kensington made room for the collection at the British Museum.[17][2]

Christy had a partial catalogue of his collections made in 1862, by

Comptes rendus (29 February 1864) and Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London (21 June 1864). They referred mainly to the "reindeer period", as the time of the cavemen in southern France then came to be styled. Christy's funding contributed to the discovery of Cro-Magnon man in 1868 in a cave near Les Eyzies. An account of the explorations appeared in a half-finished book left by Christy, entitled Reliquiae Aquitanicae, being contributions to the Archaeology and Paleontology of Périgord and the adjacent provinces of Southern France; this was completed by Christy's executors, first by Lartet and, after his death in 1870, by Thomas Rupert Jones.[2]

References

  1. ^ Humphrey Lloyd. The Quaker Lloyds in the Industrial Revolution 1660–1860 (2006), p. 285; Google Books.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Harrison 1887.
  3. ^ The Bankers' Magazine, and journal of the money market (1865), p. 180; archive.org.
  4. ^ John Rylands University Library- Papers of W.M. Christy & Sons Ltd
  5. ^ Jonathan C. H. King, First Peoples, First Contacts: native peoples of North America (1999), p. 218; Google Books.
  6. ISBN 978-0-7735-0959-7
    . Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  7. ISBN 978-0-7735-0959-7
    . Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  8. JSTOR 3014240
    .
  9. ISBN 978-0-252-03183-0
    .
  10. JSTOR 60211083. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help
    )
  11. JSTOR 2799027
    .
  12. ^ Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London (1855-63), p. v; archive.org.
  13. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/5375. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  14. ^ Andrew L. Christenson, Tracing Archaeology's Past: the historiography of archaeology (1989), pp. 158–9; Google Books.
  15. ^ Mark Bowden, Pitt Rivers: the life and archaeological work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, DCL, FRS, FSA (1991), p. 48; Google Books.
  16. ^ Acquisition note, British Museum
  17. ^ a b Christy Fund, British Museum, accessed August 2010
  18. ^ British Museum, biography of Christy.

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Harrison, William Jerome (1887). "Christy, Henry". In Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 10. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 295–296.

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Christy, Henry".
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