Jordan Kistler, The British Public and the British Museum: Shaping and Sharing Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2026) viii + 307 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781399523752
In the early 1920s, George McCready Price visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York and he did not like what he saw. As the country’s premier young-Earth creationist, Price was bound to reject the many evolution-focused exhibits, but he was especially disgusted with the ‘serial but artificial arrangement’ by which reconstructed fossil ape and hominin skulls had been laid out in a row to demonstrate human evolution. Given that he believed the evolutionary connections demonstrated were arbitrary nonsense, the disdainful Fundamentalist geologist argued that you ‘might just as well schematize or arrange in serial order samples of the houses of New York or Boston, and claim that such a series illustrates the evolution of the American house’.[1]
Price, then, would have appreciated those sections of The British Public and the British Museum that explore the insidious powers of serial display techniques. This is a timely and often highly original book (and whatever else Price would have thought of it need not concern us here). Rightly noting that scholars of nineteenth-century literature tend to discuss museums ‘in the abstract’ (2) – and sometimes far too abstractly – Kistler focuses on the ever-politicised life of one particular museum, the British Museum (BM), starting when the Robert Smirke building began construction in the 1820s and ending around the time of the opening of the Natural History Museum in 1881. Kistler draws principally from a large corpus of newspaper articles on the BM, foregrounding commentary on the museum rather than institutional history, woven together with related readings of selected literary classics that critiqued or contributed to the ideals of Victorian museology.
One of the book’s main targets is the lingering spectre of Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian reading of the nineteenth-century museum as a panopticon of indoctrination and social control. Kistler instead argues for ‘a radical reinstatement of the public – and particularly the working classes – as active stakeholders’ in the museum’s policymaking (4). Indeed, the early chapters of Kistler’s monograph act as a sober corrective to any facile assumption that the BM was intended to, or could, act as a didactic opium of the masses. Chapter 2 is among the best, detailing the protracted debates over Sunday openings, without which working publics had few opportunities to set foot in the museum (a situation with which many of their social superiors were quite satisfied). Kistler shows how the better-known efforts of middle-class campaigners for expanded access were ‘accompanied by grassroots activism from the working classes themselves’ (93), who were by no means the agency-free objects of middle-class benevolence.
Chapters 5 and 6, too, are topical and largely convincing examinations of how the BM, its commentariat, and its visiting publics sought to absorb much of the rest of the world’s valuable antiquities into the emergent category of British heritage. These chapters include relevant discussions of the early novels of H. Rider Haggard, where, in parallel terms, European protagonists are framed as the true heirs and sufficiently qualified appreciators of ancient (African) civilisations. Throughout, it is fascinating to see the BM routinely scrutinised in newspapers across the UK, from surprising interest in relatively minor Bloomsbury proceedings to outbursts about public money being misspent in the museum metropole.
However, in some of the book’s most intriguing and original arguments I wished for more connective tissue. Chapter 1 makes the claim that alleged working-class preference for the BM’s natural history specimens over its more art-focused collections led to a denigration in status of the former, and played a role in the ultimate decision to separate ‘nature’ from ‘culture’. Although focusing on newspapers and publics avoids the risk of penning a drily conservative institutional history, it also means that it is hard to establish claims like these on a firm footing. Without indicating how the BM’s trustees, superintendents, keepers, and so on made their decisions, links in the chain are missing; if nothing else, we needed more of a sense of how these claims relate to Richard Owen’s well-known ambitions for London’s natural history collections. On the face of it, the strong form of Kistler’s argument is hard to square with the massive and growing cultural authority of natural science in this period. Given the over 65,000 news articles examined, some limited statistical overview of the prevalence of these comments about natural history and class – and more attention to the kinds of periodicals they appeared in – might have helped to put the phenomenon described in perspective.
There are some similar issues in Chapter 3. This chapter explores how the BM invoked notions of ‘singular, stable, absolute truth’ (129) inherent in its objects, a bond ‘between the signifier and the signified’ that, under scrutiny, ‘broke down’ and led to public distrust (131). But it is not thoroughly established that the museum’s displays were indeed constructed with such elevated ideals in mind, nor that semiotic crises were regular outcomes. Two of the chapter’s strongest examples of the latter – Charles Fellows’s accusation that the BM had modified his Lycian artefacts to make them look more picturesquely Greek, and its purchase of Thomas Hawkins’s spectacular but artfully augmented fossil saurians – are rushed through too quickly, when we might have gained from more sustained discussion.
Chapter 4, too, attends to narratives of display, arguing that, from the mid-century, the progress-oriented structures of ‘the Bildungsroman were imported into the Museum through its use of serial arrangement’ techniques (157). The topic of the genres and forms of museum display is an important one. As in the rest of the book, the discussion contains powerful readings, such as a persuasive analysis of Richard Westmacott’s symbolic 1851 pediment and its serial progress narrative, but also discussions of classic literary texts that bear a rather ‘abstract’ relationship to the topic of BM itself, as Kistler justly criticises in the works of some of her predecessors. Ultimately, on the evidence provided, readers are likely to be left thinking that the BM and the Bildungsroman participated in shared visions of historicism and developmentalism, rather than that the museum itself tangibly ‘imported’ structural ideas from this genre of novel.
Extra groundwork might have helped to make some of these striking but not always convincing claims more concrete. For one, readers would have benefited from more familiarisation with the basic floorplan of the BM’s Smirke building, and how it was navigated; for another, additional in-depth examples of what the display strategies discussed looked like in plain terms may have contextualised Victorian commentators’ diverse responses. For example, what route would the Illuminated Magazine journalist have had to take to fuel their rhapsodising on the ecstasy and the agony of ‘the manifold forms and hues of the shells, the crystals and minerals’, ‘the varieties – elegant, eccentric, or loathsome – of the insect tribes’ and ‘the pandemonium of strange fishes, lizards, snakes, alligators, crocodile’ (26)?
Despite these latter criticisms, it is refreshing to see new research on a topic that has seen too little attention from literature and science scholars. Kistler constructs a path for moving suggestively through galleries, newspapers, periodicals, and fiction in search of the ways many-headed museums are given narrative form and sociocultural import. She also shows that the BM’s current politicisation is no recent phenomenon. As the book’s Conclusion makes clear, few – very few – of the dilemmas of class, empire, heritage, and meaning-making that faced this contested ‘public’ museum in the nineteenth century have truly gone away. Instead, they have simply become neo-Victorian.
Richard Fallon, University of Cambridge
[1] George McCready Price, The New Geology: A Textbook for Colleges, Normal Schools, and Training Schools; and for the General Reader (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1923), 694.
