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05 August 2025

Egypt and the Victorian Tourist Exhibition

Visitors to our summer exhibition can explore Ancient Egypt as Alexander Peckover and friends saw it while travelling on their steamship Zuleika up the Nile in 1865.

Among the treasures on display are Alexander's lively letters home, describing the journey and stops in detail just as he experienced them, and early photographs bought on the tourist trail showing the monuments as they were then.

Objects from the Museum's Egyptian collection are the inspiration for workshops and other events at the Museum throughout August 2025 for families and young people. Many of them were bought by Alexander on his travels on behalf of or given to members of his family.

They include beautiful faience (coloured glaze, often blue-green) amulets or charms which would accompany an Egyptian through life and into the tomb, canopic jars to hold the internal organs of the deceased, shabti figures, scarabs, carved gravestones and curios. Some of the objects are not all they seem and are in fact Victorian fakes.

At 35 and newly widowed, Alexander was persuaded by his four younger friends to join them on the Grand Tour of Europe which had started to take in Egypt; one of the most popular destinations since Egyptomania gripped the West after Napoleon's campaign to the country at the turn of the century.

Alexander's letters cover every aspect of his Nile trip from observations on the ship, described as 'cosy' and 'snug', the ship's company of 21, including ship's captain, pilot, dragoman, cook and ten sailors, carefully noted details of a newly-cleared out temple site, botany, geography, architecture, encounters with sunburn and 'noxious animals' in his berth.

In a letter to his father he writes:”My meditations were disturbed by a scorpion being brought me, and all the way to Memnonium the population ran after me flourishing pointed sticks, on each of which was a scorpion, in my face.”

Photo - Egyptian Clogs