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Henry Christy (26 July 1810 – 4 May 1865) was an English banker and collector, who left his substantial collections to the
British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It documen ...
.


Early life

Christy was born at Kingston upon Thames, the second son of
William Miller Christy William Miller Christy (1778–1858) was an English Quaker hat and textile manufacturer, known also as a banker. He is credited with the invention of the penny receipt-stamp. Life He was the second son of Miller Christy (1748–1820) and Ann Ri ...
of Woodbines, a Quaker banker who started out in hat manufacture with interests in
Stockport Stockport is a town and borough in Greater Manchester, England, south-east of Manchester, south-west of Ashton-under-Lyne and north of Macclesfield. The River Goyt and Tame merge to create the River Mersey here. Most of the town is withi ...
, before becoming a financier. Trained to business by his father, Henry Christy became a partner in the house of Christy & Co. in
Gracechurch Street Gracechurch Street is a main road in the City of London, the historic and financial centre of London, which is designated the A1213. It is home to a number of shops, restaurants, and offices and has an entrance to Leadenhall Market, a covered ...
, and succeeded his father as a director of the London Joint-Stock Bank. He was still a board member of the bank at the end of his life, despite other activities. Henry contributed to the success of the family firm, known as W. M. Christy & Sons Ltd. once his father took it over. Samples of textiles he brought home from the Ottoman Empire provided the idea for looped cotton towelling, taken up by his brother Richard, and amenable to mechanical manufacture with a technique devised by an employee. Christy also innovated with woven silk rather than
beaver Beavers are large, semiaquatic rodents in the genus ''Castor'' native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere. There are two extant species: the North American beaver (''Castor canadensis'') and the Eurasian beaver (''C. fiber''). Beavers are ...
for the manufacture of top hats.


Interests

Christy was a philanthropist, active in the Great Famine and other causes. With other Quakers Christy took the approach of buying seeds for other vegetable crops, to reduce the potato
monoculture In agriculture, monoculture is the practice of growing one crop species in a field at a time. Monoculture is widely used in intensive farming and in organic farming: both a 1,000-hectare/ acre cornfield and a 10-ha/acre field of organic kale ...
. With committee members Robert Forster and Samuel Fox, he also lobbied the government for practical help in improving Irish fisheries. He was one of the founders of the
Aborigines' Protection Society The Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) was an international human rights organisation founded in 1837,
...
. In 1857 he visited, with
Lord Althorp John Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl Spencer, (30 May 1782 – 1 October 1845), styled Viscount Althorp from 1783 to 1834, was a British statesman. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne from 1830 to 1834. Due to his ...
and John W. Probyn, the Elgin settlement of free blacks in Ontario, writing afterwards to its founder
William King William King may refer to: Arts * Willie King (1943–2009), American blues guitarist and singer *William King (author) (born 1959), British science fiction author and game designer, also known as Bill King *William King (artist) (1925–2015), Am ...
, and giving money. He was also a committee member of the
British and Foreign School Society The British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) offers charitable aid to educational projects in the UK and around the world by funding schools, other charities and educational bodies. It was significant in the history of education in England, suppor ...
. Christy was also involved in numerous learned societies. He belonged to both the Ethnological Society of London and the
Anthropological Society of London The Anthropological Society of London (ASL) was a short-lived organisation of the 1860s whose founders aimed to furnish scientific evidence for white supremacy which they construed in terms of polygenism. It was founded in 1863 by Richard Francis ...
, representing different strands arising from early
ethnology Ethnology (from the grc-gre, ἔθνος, meaning 'nation') is an academic field that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology). ...
. He became a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1856, and joined the Geological Society in 1858. He took part in both the archaeological societies of the period, and the Royal Geographical Society. He was also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and sponsored the application for membership there of Augustus Lane Fox (later Pitt Rivers), the other major British collector of the time in the ethnographic field.


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. 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). In 1858, the
antiquity of man The discovery of human antiquity was a major achievement of science in the middle of the 19th century, and the foundation of scientific paleoanthropology. The antiquity of man, human antiquity, or in simpler language the age of the human race, are ...
was proved by the discoveries of
Boucher de Perthes Boucher may refer to: * Boucher (surname), a family name (including a list of people with that name) * Boucher Manufacturing Company, an American toy company *'' R. v. Boucher'', a 1951 Supreme Court of Canada decision that overturned a conviction ...
on flint implements in France; Christy joined the Geological Society that year. He went with the French palæontologist Edouard Lartet in the examination of the caves along the valley of the Vézère, a tributary of the
Dordogne Dordogne ( , or ; ; oc, Dordonha ) is a large rural department in Southwestern France, with its prefecture in Périgueux. Located in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region roughly half-way between the Loire Valley and the Pyrenees, it is named ...
, in the south of France. Remains are embedded in the
stalagmites A stalagmite (, ; from the Greek , from , "dropping, trickling") is a type of rock formation that rises from the floor of a cave due to the accumulation of material deposited on the floor from ceiling drippings. Stalagmites are typically co ...
of these caves. Thousands of specimens were obtained, some of them being added to Christy's collection. The sites they investigated included Le Moustier, the
Abri de la Madeleine The archaeological site Abri de la Madeleine (Magdalene Shelter) is a rock shelter under an overhanging cliff situated near Tursac, in the Dordogne ''département'' of the Aquitaine Région of South-Western France. It represents the type site of ...
, both important
type sites In archaeology, a type site is the site used to define a particular archaeological culture or other typological unit, which is often named after it. For example, discoveries at La Tène and Hallstatt led scholars to divide the European Iron Ag ...
.


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 Dinant () is a city and municipality of Wallonia located in the province of Namur, Belgium. On the shores of river Meuse, in the Ardennes, it lies south-east of Brussels, south-east of Charleroi and south of the city of Namur. Dinant is si ...
. 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.


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 Musée d'Archéologie Nationale, which was to get the most important pieces. He also left £5000 which established the Christy fund that allowed the British Museum to purchase many more artefacts;Christy Fund
British Museum, accessed August 2010
with a sum of money to be applied to public exhibition. As there was then no spare room at the British Museum, the trustees secured the suite of rooms at 103 Victoria Street, London SW (in which Christy himself had lived) and here the collection was exhibited, under the care of A. W. Franks, until 1884. The young
Charles Hercules Read Sir Charles Hercules Read (6 July 1857 – 11 February 1929) was a British archaeologist and curator who became Keeper of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography at the British Museum, and President of the Society of Antiquaries of L ...
, 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. Christy had a partial catalogue of his collections made in 1862, by Carl Ludvig Steinhauer.British Museum, biography of Christy.
/ref> In 1864 he wrote an account of the work which was being carried out at his expense in the Vézère Valley; these notices appeared in the '' 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 Early European modern humans (EEMH), or Cro-Magnons, were the first early modern humans (''Homo sapiens'') to settle in Europe, migrating from Western Asia, continuously occupying the continent possibly from as early as 56,800 years ago. They i ...
man in 1868 in a cave near
Les Eyzies Les Eyzies (; oc, Las Aisiás) is a commune in the Dordogne department in Nouvelle-Aquitaine in southwestern France. It was established on 1 January 2019 by merger of the former communes of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil (the seat), Manaurie Ma ...
. 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 Thomas Rupert Jones FRS (1 October 181913 April 1911) was a British geologist and palaeontologist. Biography Jones was born on 1 October 1819 in Cheapside, London, the son of John Jones, silk merchant, and his wife Rhoda (née Burberry) Jones o ...
.


References

Attribution


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Christy, Henry English archaeologists English palaeontologists 1810 births 1865 deaths British Mesoamericanists Historians of Mesoamerican art 19th-century Mesoamericanists People associated with the British Museum Fellows of the Geological Society of London Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society Fellows of the Royal Entomological Society Fellows of the Linnean Society of London Deaths from lung disease