Esoteric London

British Museum, Great Russell Street, London, WC1. Photo © Roger Dean 2012

Dickens’s Dictionary of London – Charles Dickens (Jr.), 1879: 

Museum, British, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. Free. With the year 1879 this institution commenced a new era. For a century it was scarcely anything else than a storehouse of the treasures of the ancient world, and the curiosities of science, literature, and art; but today its invaluable accumulations are being brought out and adapted to the uses of age, and the public are invited to profit by the many beautiful lessons they can silently but surely teach.