After the Exhibitionary Complex: Museum Histories and the Future of the Victorian Past

Museums are, unquestionably, among the most Victorian of institutions, monuments to their age and "master pattern[s]" of its cultural logics. ¹ Their edifices provide living tributes to the nineteenth-century projects of liberal reform, urban government, and imperial engagement. Their holdings offer lasting reminders of the Victorian preoccupations with collection and classification. It is only fitting, therefore, that scholars working across the disciplines that comprise Victorian studies—including English, history, and art history—have found museums and other nineteenth-century spectacles to be welcome portals for investigating and reconsidering the nineteenth-century past. The books under review in this essay are no exception. They address a number of museum types and provide a range of interpretive possibilities. Their authors take as their foci collections that are metropolitan and provincial, artistic and scientific, lasting and ephemeral, not to mention global and local. They employ museums to enlarge our understandings of Victorian epistemologies, institutions, and empires. By so doing, they suggest future directions for the study of the Victorian past, but they also build upon a robust line of inquiry into nineteenth-century museums and visual culture that dates back to the 1970s.

Two seminal works published nearly thirty years ago put visual culture and its institutions squarely on the map of Victorian studies. Richard Altick's The Shows of London (1978) chronicled the spectacles of the early-nineteenth-century capital, which included panoramas, waxworks, and human showcases. These heady pleasures, Altick argued, achieved their "grand climax" at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which subsequently gave way to a more staid museum culture devoted to rational recreation (456). Altick's was a highly prescient investigation of visual culture before the visual turn and of imperial culture before the imperial turn. Equally important was Janet Minihan's The Nationalization of Culture (1977), which addressed the growing role of a reforming state as a guarantor for this more solemn and purposeful museum landscape. Minihan's study represented cultural history in advance of the cultural turn. It also provided a model for recent studies of the arts as expressions of political culture.

These works predated the arrival, approximately fifteen years ago, of a professedly "new" museology. This was an enterprise invigorated by museum professionals who had become frustrated by an "old" museology that had favored the study of internal museum practices over broader museum purposes (see, for example, Vergo). This matter of the social uses of museums also caught the attention of scholars in the humanities, who found museums to be ideal sites for understanding the institutional politics of nationalism (see McClellan; Pointon; Sherman and Rogoff; Duncan). From this scholarship emerged an understanding that the birth of the art museum coincided with, and even helped to facilitate, the rise of the nation-state. To arrive at this point, scholars in history, art history, and cultural studies built upon the work of Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach. In an influential 1980 essay, Duncan and Wallach framed museum-going as a civic ritual that naturalized the democratic nation-state. As Andrew McClellan later suggested, this development was at its most dramatic in France, where the Louvre emerged as a public museum fitting for a republican people during the Revolution. To aid its course, the museum introduced a national and historical chronology for paintings...