• Home
  • Events
  • Exhibitions
  • Fortune and Folly in 1720
  • Empire of the Imagination

Items in Empire of the Imagination

  • designed to appear as scattered papers on a desk are depictions of traders crowding streets and coffee houses. There is also a playing card, a poem entitled: Bubble Poem and a copy of the London Gazette

    Empire of the Imagination Introduction

  • Men in three cornered hats and suits of the time period clamor in a square, throwing stock shares while a large ledger stands in the center announcing prices

    The Wind-Buyers, Who for Wind, Lose Money and Goods, and Ruin Their Wives and Children

  • designed to appear as scattered papers on a desk are depictions of traders crowding streets and coffee houses. There is also a playing card, a poem entitled: Bubble Poem and a copy of the London Gazette

    The Bubblers Medley

  • a hectic street scene showing the vices of the Quincampoix -- France's stock trading center

    Rue Quincampoix in the Year 1720

  • a tent-sized jesters cap protects dealers haggling prices and also keeps out the poor and downtrodden

    Flora’s Fools Cap

  • a relatively tattered and extremely primitive bill on plain, unbleached paper

    French royal banknote, 100 livres Tournois

  • Handwritten note on half sheet of paper that entitles Mr. Grigsby to three percent of the profits of Newton's South Sea shares

    Isaac Newton pay order

  • Alexander Pope gives Lady Montagu terrible investment advice

  • written in script, with a wax seal at the bottom and a printed coat of arms at the top depicting a filigree surrounded globe with Fortuna on one side and a trader on the other

    Power of Attorney signed by a South Sea Company shareholder

  • designed to appear as scattered papers on a desk are depictions of traders crowding streets and coffee houses. There is also a playing card, a poem entitled: Bubble Poem and a copy of the London Gazette

    Empire of the Imagination