A radical reinstatement of the public in the history of the formation of the ‘modern’ museum.
This book is a timely intervention in the history of museums in Britain. BP’s ongoing sponsorship of the British Museum, the appointment of George Osborne as a trustee and the Museum’s continued resistance to the repatriation of holdings such as the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes have brought questions of the Museum’s funding, leadership and right to the objects in its collection to increased public attention. The book reveals this is not a recent ‘woke’ agenda but rather part of a long history of public resistance and activism enacted through the British Museum. It presents a cultural history of the nineteenth-century British Museum, departing from traditional institutional histories by centring public perception of the museum’s purpose and its uses in society.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reconstructing Public Opinion
1. Categorising the Museum
2. Working-Class Access and the Sunday Question
3. Constructing Truth in the Museum
4. Reading the Museum: Serial Display
5. A National Museum
6. Appropriating the Ancient Past
Conclusion: Museums Today
Bibliography
Index
Jordan Kistler is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde, working in the fields of literature and science and museum studies. Her works focuses on the intersections between science and the arts, particularly within museum spaces. Her research advocates for the application of literary criticism to museums, pioneering a new critical approach to exhibition studies, and has been published in world-leading interdisciplinary journals like Museum & Society and Configurations (official publication of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts). Her first monograph, Arthur OShaughnessy: A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum (2016) examined the intersections between art and science in the poetry of one naturalist working in the British Museum.
