Introduction – A Tour, a Text, a Body, a Building, a Model: Some (Fore-)words for the Nineteenth-Century Museum

Those interested in the museums of the long nineteenth century are likely to experience, to rework that old adage, both feast and famine. In the UK alone, from the British Museum to the National Gallery to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the period witnessed the establishment and growth of a number of large, public facing museums whose historical, scientific, and cultural importance only continues to grow. At the same time, in the nooks and crannies as well as the wide open spaces of Georgian and Victorian England, a number of lesser known experiments in early museology, many the products of committed collectors, have largely come and gone. Some of these were popular commercial ventures, such as William Bullock’s London Museum in Piccadilly, which in its later incarnation—the Egyptian Hall—remained a site for ephemeral and exotic entertainments right though the nineteenth century; some, for more carefully “curated” audiences, reflected the professional preoccupations of their creators—John Hunter’s anatomical preparations, John Soane’s evocative architectural fragments—and served both personal and educative functions; and still others occupy spaces somewhere in the middle, such as Du Bourg’s Museum of Cork Models, which offered to a curious public the edifying experience (no pun intended) of a tour through a room full of classical monuments, painstakingly replicated. The topic and title of this special issue, “Recollecting the Nineteenth-Century Museum,” is drawn from a conference held at Ryerson University in Toronto, at which two of the papers it includes saw their first iterations. The broader intentions behind that event, which brought together researchers from university and museum communities, are very much active here: to recollect the museums of the long nineteenth century, and situate them, or at least the ideas and practices that shaped them, in conversation with one another. “Recollecting” implies acts of memory, and research on early museums often involves bringing forgotten institutions, or their overlooked features, back into focus. The point of the exercise, however, is not to “museumify” them in turn, as objects of further collection, but rather to situate them as active agents in expanding fields of inquiry, shaping as well as shaped by emerging bodies of knowledge in the nineteenth century. To that end, it is perhaps not surprising that a pedagogical imperative is central to all of the projects that animate these essays, which are at the same time alert to how museums reflect the state of the nation, and more pointedly, the nation’s knowledge. As an entity that aimed to communicate a rich body of classical and antiquarian knowledge to a diverse public, Richard De Bourg’s Museum of Cork Models makes an excellent starting point. Although its earliest iteration dates from 1776, Rees Arnott-Davies attends to the period from 1802 to its sale in 1819, during which time it was located in London’s Lower Grosvenor Street. His essay uses a print depicting the disposition of cork models in its interior—models of primarily Roman monuments, many in ruin—as a starting point for a “reading” of the museum that unpacks the myriad ways display methods, techniques for reproduction, and for constituting and addressing an audience, were “strategically composed and recomposed” over its long lifetime. Arnott-Davies’s analysis conveys a clear sense of how representations of classical antiquity circulated in London’s ever vibrant exhibitionary culture, and its associated media ecology, while capturing how the display, to survive, needed both to instruct and amuse: to gratify curiosity, offer an experience of the marvellous (which the impressive verisimilitude of De Bourg’s models amply provided), and capitalize on the public’s appetite for intellectual “improvement.” Emma Peacocke’s essay takes up the pedagogic potential of the museum by …