ภาพคอลเลกชันของโลเวตต์The Lovett collection

Lovett (July 1852 – 1933) was chief cashier at a City of London branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland and did his collecting on foot, on walks around London, Sussex and Surrey. He grew alpine plants in seashells and swapped them for charms with the people he met — which is to say the collection has a price, and the price was a plant.

He gave objects to the Pitt Rivers Museum between 1896 and 1911, lectured at schools and societies, joined the Folklore Society in 1900, and set out a case for a national folk museum in the Museums Journal in March 1906. His major book, "Magic in Modern London", came out through the Folklore Society in 1925. In 1914 he showed over 500 dolls at the National Museum of Wales, meaning to give adults "a scientific history of the doll, from the standpoints of ethnography and folklore". His donations are now spread across the Cuming Museum in Southwark, the Pitt Rivers, the V&A Museum of Childhood and the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh.

He corresponded with Henry Wellcome, and curated "Folklore of London" at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in 1916. From 6 October 2011 to 26 February 2012 the Wellcome Collection showed many of his amulets again, in an exhibition called "Charmed Life: The solace of objects", alongside films and medals by the artist and curator Felicity Powell.

Inference — what makes the pictures worth a record of their own is the note beside each object. Most amulet photography shows a thing; Lovett's shows a thing plus a claimant — a cab driver, a shop girl, a soldier's mother — which is the exact pairing this atlas asks every record for. Not all of his theories held: his reading of the Arthur's Seat coffin dolls as substitute burials for sailors lost at sea is not supported by recent scholarship.

The objects are held across several UK collections; the Wellcome Collection publishes an article on them with images, and has been openly licensing its digitised holdings since well before 2020. The Wellcome has also stated, in 2021, that Henry Wellcome's own collecting was shaped by colonialism and that many objects bought at auction carry no documentation of how they were acquired. Lovett's London charms are among the few things in that building whose collector wrote down where each one came from.