“We are too easily misled into thinking of the museum as a mere curiosity shop,” said William Folwell in his inaugural lecture as he became the president of the University of Minnesota in 1868. Creating a museum for this new state university was high on his agenda, and the highs and lows of the resulting institution are among the histories explored in Berkowitz and Lightman’s edited volume, Science Museums in Transition: Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America. It is full of such pithy quotations and pertinent reference points, making clear how the origins of universal museums in the 19th century might teach us lessons today.
Stemming from conference papers, the 10 essays address the question of what a museum is by “looking at the people who make up a museum, at its practices, and at its spaces”. Running through the book is the central premise that museums should be viewed as part of the museologist Tony Bennett’s idea of an “exhibitionary complex”, where mechanics’ institutes, printed miscellanies, gardens, surgical collections, fine art institutions and lectures all sat alongside the museum in how contemporaries understood science. The authors compare such contexts in the UK and US to address issues of expertise versus commercialisation, and truth versus wonder.
The case studies would make avid museum-goers wish for a time machine. Who could resist the chance to visit London’s Colosseum – which was based on Rome’s Pantheon and built in Regent’s Park in the 1830s – which housed a painted panorama of the capital, a kaleidoscope and greenhouses, alongside live musical entertainment? Or the opportunity to witness one of Henry Morton’s lectures on light in Philadelphia in the 1860s, which included effects from magic lanterns and live experiments? My favourite case study is Albert Koch’s colossal sea serpent skeleton, Hydrarchos, which he toured around the US and Europe in the 1840s before selling it to the King of Prussia.
Some authors draw lessons from historical subjects. Katherine Pandora looks at two Americans – PT Barnum and Samuel Griswold Goodrich – who helped establish science within a miscellany of subjects that made the latest discoveries accessible to a broad audience. She says this heterogeneous approach to scientific knowledge encouraged visitors to select their own narratives, a process that is useful for understanding engagement in the internet age.
Iwan Rys Morus also addresses questions about who has the right to choose what is presented in museums. He considers the history of the National Repository, intended as an annual exhibition of inventions and skills to make the latest technology visible to the public. This clashed with codes of practice on artisanal knowledge, where practical expertise needed to be protected, not shared. In a phrase apt for museums that are tackling their colonial past, Morus points out that “transparency in the wrong hands could look like misappropriation – rather than a display – of knowledge”.
The most compelling character is George Brown Goode, the first director of the United States National Museum Building, which opened in 1881 and was an early incarnation of the Smithsonian museums now in Washington DC. Goode saw a role for object collections in providing informal education for a wide audience. He placed rare emphasis on being open to all and on displaying a wide range of subjects. In Goode we see the origins of the modern museum, with his focus on ever-changing displays and attention to the balance between object and information. We might think his ambition for “instructive labels, each illustrated by well-selected specimens” boring, but few would disagree that “a finished museum was a dead museum”.
In these rich studies of 19th- century exhibitionary impulse, Berkowitz and Lightman show that the history of museums and collecting still has lessons for us.
Katy Barrett is the curator of art collections at the Science Museum in London
Stemming from conference papers, the 10 essays address the question of what a museum is by “looking at the people who make up a museum, at its practices, and at its spaces”. Running through the book is the central premise that museums should be viewed as part of the museologist Tony Bennett’s idea of an “exhibitionary complex”, where mechanics’ institutes, printed miscellanies, gardens, surgical collections, fine art institutions and lectures all sat alongside the museum in how contemporaries understood science. The authors compare such contexts in the UK and US to address issues of expertise versus commercialisation, and truth versus wonder.
The case studies would make avid museum-goers wish for a time machine. Who could resist the chance to visit London’s Colosseum – which was based on Rome’s Pantheon and built in Regent’s Park in the 1830s – which housed a painted panorama of the capital, a kaleidoscope and greenhouses, alongside live musical entertainment? Or the opportunity to witness one of Henry Morton’s lectures on light in Philadelphia in the 1860s, which included effects from magic lanterns and live experiments? My favourite case study is Albert Koch’s colossal sea serpent skeleton, Hydrarchos, which he toured around the US and Europe in the 1840s before selling it to the King of Prussia.
Some authors draw lessons from historical subjects. Katherine Pandora looks at two Americans – PT Barnum and Samuel Griswold Goodrich – who helped establish science within a miscellany of subjects that made the latest discoveries accessible to a broad audience. She says this heterogeneous approach to scientific knowledge encouraged visitors to select their own narratives, a process that is useful for understanding engagement in the internet age.
Iwan Rys Morus also addresses questions about who has the right to choose what is presented in museums. He considers the history of the National Repository, intended as an annual exhibition of inventions and skills to make the latest technology visible to the public. This clashed with codes of practice on artisanal knowledge, where practical expertise needed to be protected, not shared. In a phrase apt for museums that are tackling their colonial past, Morus points out that “transparency in the wrong hands could look like misappropriation – rather than a display – of knowledge”.
The most compelling character is George Brown Goode, the first director of the United States National Museum Building, which opened in 1881 and was an early incarnation of the Smithsonian museums now in Washington DC. Goode saw a role for object collections in providing informal education for a wide audience. He placed rare emphasis on being open to all and on displaying a wide range of subjects. In Goode we see the origins of the modern museum, with his focus on ever-changing displays and attention to the balance between object and information. We might think his ambition for “instructive labels, each illustrated by well-selected specimens” boring, but few would disagree that “a finished museum was a dead museum”.
In these rich studies of 19th- century exhibitionary impulse, Berkowitz and Lightman show that the history of museums and collecting still has lessons for us.
Katy Barrett is the curator of art collections at the Science Museum in London