The Collector’s Gaze: Henry Dresser at Manchester Museum

In an era defined by biodiversity loss, there’s growing urgency in how we look at the natural world, and how we remember the ways it was once studied. The recent acquisition of the author’s copy of A History of the Birds of Europe and the accompanying display in the Living Worlds gallery at Manchester Museum brings this tension into sharp focus. 

The illustrations are vivid, with each bird rendered with the precision of scientific observation reflecting author Henry Eeles Dresser’s own ornithological passion. This set of books is widely considered a landmark of Victorian ornithology. It’s an elegant fusion of science and art, bound together with the meticulousness and obsession of collecting. But the story this publication tells is not just one of ornithological passion. It’s also a story of empire, extraction, and the uneasy legacy of collecting.

As museums across the UK and beyond grapple with their colonial inheritances, the acquisition and display of these books highlight important questions around the role of museums in making these tensions visible, rather than burying them beneath glass and gloss.

The Collector and His World

Henry Dresser (1838–1915) was, in his time, one of the most important ornithologists in Europe. Born into a wealthy merchant family with ties to the Baltic timber trade, Dresser spent his formative years in Sweden, Germany, and New Brunswick in Canada, before working in Mexico and Texas during the American Civil War. There, he served as a commercial runner, a go-between moving goods across contested borders and blockades. This role placed him at the fringes of a fractured nation and exposed him to the logistics and risks of operating in imperial spaces.

He eventually settled in London, where he balanced a career in iron and timber with his consuming passion for ornithology.

He began collecting eggs as a teenager and never stopped. Over the course of his life, Dresser amassed around 60,000 bird eggs and more than 10,000 specimen skins. This was a world before digital databases or wildlife photography, so these collections were integral in the foundation of western scientific ornithological knowledge. Ultimately, his goal was encyclopaedic, to document every bird species in the world and map its range with as much precision as possible.

Dresser published more than 100 scientific papers and several monumental books, including A History of the Birds of Europe. He was deeply embedded in the global network of naturalists and collectors that connected scientists, missionaries, trappers, geographers, and hobbyists across the British Empire and beyond. ‘Europe’, as Dresser understood it, extended far beyond today’s political boundaries, as far as Russia, Central Asia, and North Africa. Now we are able to view his practice within the context of the politics and power structures of the time, revealing it to be part of a wider attempt to catalogue, classify, and ultimately control the natural world and the people within it. This was a world where collecting was not neutral, but an extension of power. The definition of where species belonged could also be extended to who had the authority to speak about them.

Beauty and Violence

To stand before Dresser’s magnum opus confronts the audience with a paradox. The illustrations – hand-coloured lithographs by artists like John Gerrard Keulemans, Edward Neale and Joseph Wolf – are arrestingly beautiful. The details evoke wonder and a sense of reverence for nature. But this beauty was built on violence. Most of the birds pictured had been killed purposely so that they could be studied up close. Their deaths were integral to the production of modern scientific ornithological knowledge.

In the nineteenth century, collecting was considered both a scientific necessity and a gentlemanly pursuit. Birds were collected not with cameras or binoculars but with guns. Preserved study skins – birds stuffed with cotton, laid on their backs, labelled and filed in drawers – became the standard format for research. Egg collections, prized for their delicacy and variation, were treated as objects of both science and beauty.

The irony is sharp. Dresser’s work has become invaluable to conservationists tracking species decline, yet the very methods he and his contemporaries used in their study and documentation played a significant role in that loss. As we look back at Dresser’s legacy, we must hold both truths in view – that his collections helped build modern ornithology and that they also contributed to patterns of ecological destruction.

This contradiction prompts critical debate over whether museum objects can be simultaneously treasured and troubling.

Confronting the Past

Manchester Museum is tackling these issues head on. There has been an increasing urgency in recent years, for museums and other collecting institutions to find meaningful ways to start to decolonise their collections.

Many Victorian collections, like Henry Dresser’s, were shaped by the British Empire. While Dresser himself did little fieldwork beyond Europe and North America, he relied heavily on colonial networks and established structures of power to obtain specimens.

Dresser’s story is intertwined with the problematic roots of 19th-century Mancunian wealth, as he was involved in smuggling goods to Southern Confederate states during the American Civil War, in exchange for slave-picked cotton that was used to feed the Lancashire cotton mills. That same sensibility would inform his approach to specimen collecting – opportunistic, networked and deeply embedded in the flows of global power.

For Dresser, the scientific world was still a gentleman’s domain. He operated largely outside of formalised scientific institutions, at a time when amateurs (usually white, wealthy men) dominated fields like ornithology. In this world, collecting, conserving, hunting and protecting were not seen as contradictory. Dresser was an early supporter of what became the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), showing that concern for birds and destructive collecting methods could coexist in the same individual.

This was also a world in which Indigenous knowledge was largely ignored or co-opted. Birds had ecological, spiritual, and cultural meanings long before European collectors arrived. Yet this knowledge was rarely recorded in museums. The scientific lens became the only recognised authority. Birds were stripped of their contexts and recast as specimens, reclassified in Latinised scientific language and arranged in cabinets that reflected European priorities and power.

Legacy in the cabinet

The cabinet is no longer just a site of preservation, it’s a site of reckoning. The legacy of collectors like Dresser does not sit silently in storage, it reverberates. In a time of climate crisis and ecological collapse, decisions about what we choose to keep, how we interpret it and whose voices we centre become more urgent than ever. The legacy in the cabinet is no longer only about what was collected, but why and what stories we now choose to tell.

The acquisition of Dresser’s author’s copy of A History of the Birds of Europe is not just a recovery of historical knowledge, it’s an invitation to ask deeper questions about the inheritance of that knowledge. What does it mean to collect? Who benefits from what is preserved? And how do we reckon with a legacy that is at once scientifically invaluable and ethically entangled?

In viewing Dresser’s work today, the paradox is impossible to ignore. The beauty of the illustrations, the rigour of the science the breadth of the endeavour, all coexisting with the extractive structures that made them possible. Dresser operated within a worldview where the natural world was to be named, catalogued and owned; a mindset that mirrored, and was reinforced by, the colonial ideologies of his time.

Yet he was also a wellspring of curiosity, admiration and wonder. To approach his legacy with honesty is not to condemn the man, but to understand the systems he participated in.

To do so with empathy is to recognise that many of us are still shaped by those same systems including the disciplines of science, museum practice and conservation today.

At Manchester Museum, in partnership with the John Rylands Library, Dresser’s books are not untouchable artefacts. They are being returned to the public sphere, to be studied, questioned and reinterpreted. This shift reflects a broader move across the museum sector, away from the passive display of objects and toward active engagement with the histories they carry.

So, while Dresser’s birds remain fixed in paper and skin, their meanings are not. They are still in flight. Still shaping the way we think about knowledge, power and our place within the natural world. The question now is not just what legacy we’ve inherited, but what legacy we choose to leave.