Number 70, Spring 2018 Recollecting the Nineteenth-Century Museum Guest-edited by Sophie Thomas

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Richard Du Bourg (1738-1826) is a neglected figure in accounts of British antiquarian museum culture. However, for nearly fifty year his ‘museum’, located in exhibition spaces across London, was a key site for public engagement with classical antiquity. Du Bourg’s relief models in cork of Roman, Greek and British monuments and ruins attracted a heterogeneous audience including nobility, merchants, architects, artisans and children. This article focuses on the final iteration of the museum at Lower Grosvenor Street between 1802 and its sale at auction in 1819; shedding new light on the innovative modes of representation and display that were incorporated by Du Bourg into his modelling and exhibition practice, and the forms of sociability fostered by such modes. With a focus on the single surviving illustration of the museum, this article carefully unpacks the layers of historical and cultural meaning sedimented in such two-dimensional images, contributing to methodological debates on the writing of cultural histories through images of and from the past.

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The Oxford University Museum of Natural History appears to be quintessentially Victorian, with its iron-and-glass architecture. It even bears the seal of approval of the great doyen of Victorian taste, John Ruskin (1819-1900). However, this museum also embodies William Paley’s (1743-1805) Romantic-era Christian philosophy of divine design. Paley was the great synthesizer of the tradition of Natural Theology, which held that God’s benevolence and ingenuity could be “read” from nature just as they could from the Bible. I argue that Paley’s influence persisted long after the Romantic era and pervaded the Oxford University Museum (founded 1860) and its program of architectural decoration. To enter the museum, we walk under the arm of the carved angel who holds the book of nature. The teaching and popular writings of the clergyman and geologist William Buckland (1784-1856) also form a bridge between Paley and the Oxford University Museum. Buckland’s pupils included Ruskin and Henry Acland, two of the great advocates of the Oxford University Museum. Buckland’s popular Bridgewater Treatise (1836) exemplifies Natural Theology, and features an imaginary walk through the mineral deposits of Britain. Paralleling this imaginary walk, the Oxford University Museum had columns made from different kinds of British stone. In these ways—and in others that this essay explores—this groundbreaking Victorian building quite literally embodies a much older intellectual heritage.

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Victorian natural history museums (NHMs) incorporated sophisticated theories of literate culture through their architectural, artistic and cultural strategies; these literary gestures were fundamental to science communication in the nineteenth century. Victorian architects looked to the cultural and artistic pasts of classical, medieval and renaissance Europe as inspiration for artistic, cultural and social values: most obviously, in the medievalism of the Gothic Revival. The idea of the “medieval,” or a more generalized mythic past, shaped the development of NHMs that in the nineteenth century were wrestling with the idea of the past in biological science—specifically the idea of an evolutionary past. These two concepts of history—literary-historical and evolutionary-scientific—intersect in critical ways in the Victorian NHM. This paper will explore how Victorian medievalism interprets biological science through the built environment of the NHM, and will explain how these interpretations are essentially literary in nature. We will give special attention to the use of marginal figures in British, European and Canadian museums, specifically the Oxford University Museum (1860), the British Museum (Natural History), London (1881)—now known as the Natural History Museum—and the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna (1889), as well as an Art Deco homage to the Victorian neo-Gothic museum tradition, the Royal Ontario Museum (1914 & 1933). These carved and painted figures of plants and animals were at once part of the museum design and references back to the marginalia of the medieval manuscript. We will explore how this medieval literary motif impacts on nineteenth-century scientific interpretation in the built space of the NHM, with special attention to the depiction of monkey figures in these marginal spaces, and their symbolic function in the larger interpretive framework for understanding evolutionary science and our place in the natural world.

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Closely associated with, and used as a demonstration of the professionalization of medicine, anatomy museums and the bodies they displayed were troubled by associations ranging from the outmoded cabinet of curiosity to quackery. The myriad publications produced by educational anatomy museums foregrounded an ambition to make museums a scientific space, and the human and animal body a scientific subject through material and textual ordering. They intended to educate by placing objects in series that told a specific story, by taxonomising and cataloguing, lecturing and labelling, pinning knowledge both to the body’s material form, and the texts that illuminated it. This use of narrative was not a one-way adoption of literary techniques to legitimize institutions; literary culture frequently borrowed the ordering principles of the museum, mediating both the popular understanding of museum spaces, and the potentially sensational representation of bodies in reportage and fiction. This paper reads the catalogues, guidebooks and specimen representations of the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons, England, alongside its representation in Charles Dickens’s popular periodical Household Words to consider how knowledge is hermeneutically constructed, legitimizing anatomical intermediality and the museum project.