[TASMANIAN ABORIGINES; MAORI] Handbill advertising J. W. Reimers’s Anatomical and Ethnological Museum in Saville House, Leicester Square, London. September, 1853.

Never Before Exhibited in London. Saville House, Leicester Square. Open every day. Reimers’s Anatomical & Ethnological Museum, consisting of upwards of Several Hundred Magnificent Preparations in Wax, &c. … Anatomical Figures … Human Brain and Five Sense … Gallery of All Nations … Great Human Family … For Gentlemen Only…. London : J. W. Peel, Printer, 74 New Cut, Lambeth, [1853]. 19 September 1853 (date in ms. lower right), 195 x 115 mm, black on white paper, mounted on old backing sheet; very good.

Rare handbill for the anatomical and ethnological museum owned by London-based German entrepreneur Jacob W. Reimers, a contemporary of Henri Dessort (see below).

The museum was open ‘for gentlemen only’. Reimers’s catalogue, printed in 1853, describes 309 individual exhibits, the majority of which were devoted to all aspects of the human anatomy, including the reproductive organs, the development of the human foetus, delivery by Caesarean section, and the pathology of venereal disease.

Perhaps the most significant section of Reimers’s museum, however, was the ethnological exhibit of 25 waxwork figures, illustrating the Caucasian Race, the Mongolic Family, the Ethiopian Race, the American Family, and the Malay Stem. From the 1853 catalogue we learn that under the latter grouping were included the following: a Māori chief, Te-Kewiti (Te Ruki Kawiti, d.1854?); ‘A native of Malicolo’ (Malekula, New Hebrides); a ‘Papuan of Australia’, ‘perhaps the most degraded of Negro tribes’; and ‘A Tasmanian, ‘… descendant of the Oriental Negroes, but infused with Malay blood, the race is exceedingly low in the scale of humanity, and are at present almost extinct, what few remain delight in navigation and water pursuits, with which they are tolerably familiar.’

The ethnological exhibits themselves, and their descriptions in the catalogue, are identical to those which appear in the various European-language editions of the catalogues of itinerant entrepreneurial showman Henri (Henry) Dessort in the 1850s-60s. There can be little doubt that Dessort acquired them – either directly or indirectly – from Reimers, and also that he then plagiarised the text from Reimers’s 1853 catalogue in his own guidebooks.

Starting in Hamburg around 1850-51, Reimers then came to England and toured his collection through the North and Midlands in 1852-53, before establishing his Anatomical & Ethnological Museum in Saville House in Leicester Square. This was very short-lived, and closed in January 1854; there is no record of Reimers in England after that year, although he was still touring the Continent as late as 1869.