Qualla: Wisbech & Fenland Museum

Wisbech & Fenland Museum: Introduction

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1947, the museum committee voted to sell the original manuscript of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. The Charity Commissioners refused to allow it. The manuscript had been bequeathed in 1868 by the Reverend Chauncy Hare Townshend "for the benefit of the town and neighbourhood of Wisbech," with the explicit proviso that it "should never be sold or exchanged but deposited in the same museum for ever." The sale was abandoned. The manuscript remains in Wisbech — which is perhaps fitting for a novel about the impossibility of escaping one's origins.

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Wisbech & Fenland Museum: A Museum Before Its Building

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Wisbech Museum Society was founded in 1835, initially occupying two rooms in a house at 16 Old Market Place. Admission in 1839 cost one shilling. The collections outgrew the space; in 1845 the building was sold; by 1847, a purpose-built museum had been constructed and opened....

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Wisbech & Fenland Museum: What the Walls Hold

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Wisbech and Fenland Museum's collections sprawl across time and geography with the organized enthusiasm of Victorian accumulation. Thomas Clarkson's chest — the one he carried through his decades of abolitionist campaigning, containing 18th-century African textiles, seeds, an...

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Wisbech & Fenland Museum: The Fens in Objects

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The museum's local history collection tells the story of a particular landscape — the Fens — through the tools that shaped it and the industries that defined it. Agricultural implements, drainage equipment, and shooting and fishing gear trace the transformation of waterlogged mar...

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Wisbech & Fenland Museum: Subsidence and Survival

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The museum building has a geological problem: it sits partly over the infilled moat of Wisbech Castle, and the settling of that fill has caused subsidence in the front elevation facing St Peter's Church. The museum was placed on the Heritage at Risk Register in 2018 before receiv...

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