Banks, Sarah Sophia, 1744-1818

Sarah Sophia Banks was born on 28 October 1744 at 30 Argyll Street in Soho, London to William Banks, the Member of Parliament for Grampound, and his wife Sarah. Sarah Sophia spent much of her childhood and teenage years on the family's estate at Revesby Abby, Lincolnshire, where she and her brother, Sir Joseph, grew up collecting antiquities and objects of natural history. Sarah Sophia collected predominately man-made materials, including printed ephemera, coins, tokens, and medals from around the world, while her brother's collections focused on specimens of natural history.

Sir Joseph Banks accompanied Captain James Cook on the Endeavor Voyage to the Pacific. Sarah Sophia corresponded with him regularly during his travel (1768-1771) and when he returned she helped him organize the natural specimens he collected. After Sir Joseph married Lady Dorothea Banks, he invited Sarah Sopia to live with them at 32 Soho Square in 1777. Sir Joseph's work as the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and as President of the Royal Society (from 1778 until his death in 1820) provided Sarah Sophia access to scientific and scholarly circles that were otherwsie closed to women. She "discussed questions of plant biology with her brother..." and "...influenced him greatly." Many "of her ideas made their way into his writings [and she] also provided valuable support by recopying and editing the entire manuscript of Banks' Newfoundland voyage (published 1766)."

Sarah Sophia was ridiculed for her antiquated style of dress and her intellectual curiosity, which scholars have argued would have garned praise had she been a man. She was highly selective in her collecting practice and made inquiries to locate objects, like ephemeral halfpenny ballands. She also exchanged many items with other interested collectors. Her interest in the ephemeral--coins, medals, broadsheets, newspaper clippings, visiting cards, engravings, advertisements and playbills--provide an historically invaluable window into the social world of the elite society in which the Banks siblings moved.

Sarah Sophia documented her collection thoroughly, organizing it taxonomically and systematically. A favourite method of organisation was the scrapbook, which reflected contemporary creations of anthologies and lexica for publication.

Her collections, amounting to more than 30,000 objects, were presented to the British Museum upon her death in September 1818 by Lady Dorothea Banks. The curators at the British Museum donated 2000 out of the 9,000 coins, medals, and tokens to the Royal Mint Museum and a portion of her books and printed ephemera to the British Library. A scholar noted that "the gift of Sarah Sophia’s collection to the British Museum was the largest and most varied collection of printed ephemera the museum had ever accepted. That it was a woman's collection rendered its acquisition all the more remarkable."