Sarah Sophia Banks: Femininity, Sociability and the Practice of Collecting in Late Georgian England

Sarah Sophia Banks, sister to the botanist and President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, assumed an assertive role as a collector. Her repository, which is now housed in the British Museum and British Library contains a rich assemblage of commercial materials that documents the social urban culture of elite eighteenth and nineteenth-century circles. My dissertation will investigate Sarah Sophia Banks and her paper collections. Sifting through her overabundance of everyday, mass-produced, visual and textual sources, this study examines her elite status and collecting practices. It will also offer a social and art historical analysis of four categories of objects that Sarah Sophia collected: the admission ticket, the trade card, the visitor ticket and ladies’ pocket book imagery. This thesis will demonstrate how her collections embody the many characteristics of a modern and polite Eighteenth-century society.