‘Millionaire Shopping’ Published Today – Meet the Author on 07 October

/by

Millionaire Shopping is the first full, detailed and original account of the huge and unstoppable collecting and artistic patronage of Alfred Morrison (1821-1897) of Fonthill House. From 25 September it can be accessed and downloaded for free at Millionaire Shopping | UCL Press We are delighted to welcome the editor and one of the principal authors, Professor Caroline Dakers, to give her second Teulon Porter Memorial Lecture at 7.30p.m. on Tuesday 07 October at Shaftesbury Town Hall. This is free to members of the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society, and open to interested members of the public on payment of £7 at the door. Caroline previously delivered the TPM lecture in October 2016 when she revealed a fascinating range of knowledge of the movers and shakers who have resided in the Fonthill area, anticipating her 2018 book Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History. Our speaker has further engagements in London on 09 October and New York on 15 October, so we are privileged to feature so early on her itinerary, and grateful for the following synopsis:

The life of Alfred Morrison (1821-1897), the eccentric landowner of Fonthill. After travelling across North America and failing to get elected to Parliament, Morrison inherited a million from his merchant father (the equivalent of about 60 million today) and set about forming one of the most extraordinary collections of art and decorative objects in the country. He was obsessed with famous men and women, for example, acquiring letters by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Admiral Nelson and Jane Austen, and portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and Medici princes. Examples of Chinese porcelain looted from the Imperial Palace in Pekin and displayed in his dining room at Fonthill now sell for millions of pounds.

Caroline will talk about his life, from his early experiences of slavery in the southern states of America to his improving the Fonthill estate, building cottages and breeding prize-winning sheep. What do we now think of his taste? Was his very much younger wife Mabel, daughter of the rector of Wilton, merely another of his treasures? What happened to the collections after his death?