Natural history, ethnography and private collecting: the legacy of Frederic William Lucas (1842–1932)

Frederic William Lucas (1842–1932) was a solicitor, collector, author and Fellow of the Zoological Society of London and the Linnean Society of London. He exemplifies a collector of means with access to suppliers, and a deep and enduring interest in his collection interests. Despite the size and diversity of his zoological and ethnographic collection, Lucas has received little scholarly attention. His self-funded private museum included over 1,200 vertebrate specimens including the skulls of large game animals and articulated skeletons of domesticated mammals. There are also over 600 items of ethnographic material, together with some human remains. Over the period from 1909 to 1925 Lucas donated almost the entirety of his collection to the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery and the Booth Museum of Natural History, Brighton. Information about Lucas and the material he amassed is meagre and dispersed. However, examination of his collection and its associated archive together with what can be gleaned from other sources about Lucas and the social and intellectual environment in which he circulated, provides a useful means of advancing understanding of not only late nineteenth and early twentieth-century private collectors of natural history and ethnography, but also the provincial museums that received their collections.