I know that collecting was a popular past time in the Victorian era. Did they have any specific terms/vocabulary used to describe the collections themselves, or even different terms for different types of collections (i.e. collections of beautiful items vs collections of "grotesques")?
You may be thinking of the term bric-à-brac . Is that the word you seek? It appears to have entered the language in the 1830s or 1840s.
OP you might try x-posting to /r/whatstheword