Excellent? Hmmm. Much though I love the Dickens House museum in Broadstairs, no, I wouldn't call it excellent.
My father was known to all as The Aged P, my insufferably clever nephew as The Infant Phenomenon, and my mother is much given to muttering in times of crisis: "I should wash him, said Mr Dick." We were brought up to revere Dickens.
In Broadstairs there is something endearingly ramshackle about the museum, as in many small local enterprises. On a chilly winter afternoon visitors are greeted with slightly surprised delight. Some objects are labelled in fading, peeling typescript, and many have no labels at all.
The house is a little shabby, but absolutely crammed with stuff: treasures, such as the writing slope Dickens toured with in the States, and a jolly assortment of Victorian bits and bobs like a superior car boot sale.
Dickens would have loved it, just as he loved the original house and Miss Mary Pearson, the fierce old lady he watched shoot out her front door, weapon in hand, to belabour donkey boys who strayed across her lawn: Miss Betsey Trotwood was born in the twinkle of Miss Pearson's hearth brush.
I would call the museum charming, entertaining, even inspiring - but I couldn't call it excellent, a subject on which an ear corroding amount of cant is currently being spoken.
Every museum and arts conference I've attended recently has banged on about excellence. We're for it, apparently. We seek out excellence with the enthusiasm of the bloodhounds tracking Magwitch, and when we find it, we embrace and fund it.
But most good things aren't excellent. Obviously many Museums Journal readers are, but me, I'd say I have days approaching adequacy, but I am not excellent. What is to happen to the merely jolly good, in the relentless pursuit of excellence?
We're off soon to two pantomimes, one in London, one in Dublin: I don't expect either will be remotely excellent, but I do expect to have a whale of a time. Here's wishing everyone a sufficiently good Christmas: excellence we'll worry about next year.
My father was known to all as The Aged P, my insufferably clever nephew as The Infant Phenomenon, and my mother is much given to muttering in times of crisis: "I should wash him, said Mr Dick." We were brought up to revere Dickens.
In Broadstairs there is something endearingly ramshackle about the museum, as in many small local enterprises. On a chilly winter afternoon visitors are greeted with slightly surprised delight. Some objects are labelled in fading, peeling typescript, and many have no labels at all.
The house is a little shabby, but absolutely crammed with stuff: treasures, such as the writing slope Dickens toured with in the States, and a jolly assortment of Victorian bits and bobs like a superior car boot sale.
Dickens would have loved it, just as he loved the original house and Miss Mary Pearson, the fierce old lady he watched shoot out her front door, weapon in hand, to belabour donkey boys who strayed across her lawn: Miss Betsey Trotwood was born in the twinkle of Miss Pearson's hearth brush.
I would call the museum charming, entertaining, even inspiring - but I couldn't call it excellent, a subject on which an ear corroding amount of cant is currently being spoken.
Every museum and arts conference I've attended recently has banged on about excellence. We're for it, apparently. We seek out excellence with the enthusiasm of the bloodhounds tracking Magwitch, and when we find it, we embrace and fund it.
But most good things aren't excellent. Obviously many Museums Journal readers are, but me, I'd say I have days approaching adequacy, but I am not excellent. What is to happen to the merely jolly good, in the relentless pursuit of excellence?
We're off soon to two pantomimes, one in London, one in Dublin: I don't expect either will be remotely excellent, but I do expect to have a whale of a time. Here's wishing everyone a sufficiently good Christmas: excellence we'll worry about next year.
