150
Journal of Museum Ethnography, no.28 (March 2015), pp. 150–172
© Museum Ethnographers Group 2015
‘DRESSED AS A NEW ZEALANDER’,
OR AN ETHNOGRAPHIC MISCHMASCH?
NOTES AND REFLECTIONS ON TWO
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLES DODGSON
(LEWIS CARROLL)
JEREMY COOTE and CHRISTOPHER MORTON
Introduction
For reasons that will become obvious, in September 2012 the University of
Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (hereafter PRM) purchased the photographic
print illustrated here (Figure 1).
1
It is not part of the PRM’s remit to collect
prints of photographs taken by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898)—
better known, of course, as Lewis Carroll; nor could it afford to do so if it
wanted to. In this case, however, there was a particular reason why the print
was of interest. For some of the ‘props’ in the image had been identified as
artefacts that had been in the PRM since 1886 when they were included in
the ‘anthropological’ objects transferred from the Ashmolean Museum to the
University Museum to join the newly arrived Pitt Rivers Collection (see, for
example, Petch 2007: 104). Moreover, at least one of the objects had been
identified as being part of the well-known Forster collection of objects collected
on James Cook’s second famous voyage to the Pacific of 1772–1775 (see, for
example, Coote et al. 2000).
At the time of the purchase, it was thought that this was the only surviving
print of the photograph. However, further research has established that another
print of it (Figure 2) survives in an album held at the University’s Bodleian
Library,
2
along with a print of another photograph (Figure 3) taken during
the same session and featuring some of the same objects and a few others.
For convenience’s sake, we will refer to the photograph from which the print
now held at the PRM was made as A (i.e. Figures 1 and 2), and to the other
photograph as B (Figure 3).
Photograph A has been known to Dodgson scholars for some years, the
other has only recently come to light and has not been published before
now. Unsurprisingly, no previous author has been concerned to identify with
curatorial precision the ‘props’ Dodgson used, or to reflect at any length on