In contrast to France, with its foundation of Champollion’s chair at the Collège de France, and that of Rosellini’s even earlier chair in Tuscany, Egyptology in Britain had been in the doldrums since the second half of the 1820s, with absolutely no government interest to be seen. As the British traveller Orlando Felix* (1790–1860) remarked to the Egyptological artist Joseph Bonomi in 1832, ‘Hieroglyphs are at a discount’, and talking about Egypt could result in ‘being blackballed in the clubs’. As noted in the Introduction, a number of Britons had been working in the field for some years, but their attempts at publishing their material in the UK had met with little success.