Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism

5. The British Museum and the Problem of Knowledge

5 The British Museum and the Problem of Knowledge ‘‘To the English-speaking world,’’ James Barr writes in 1902, ‘‘ ‘The Museum ’ means one Museum, and that is the British.’’1 This was particularly true at the start of the twentieth century, when the British Museum administered not only the building on Great Russell Street but also the Natural History Museum on Cromwell Road in South Kensington. As E. V. Lucas writes in A Wanderer in London, ‘‘The British Museum is the history of the world: in its Bloomsbury galleries the history of civilisation, in its Cromwell Road galleries the history of nature; in Bloomsbury man, in Cromwell Road God.’’2 Patronized by Forster’s Stuart Ansell and Maurice, by Vernon Lee’s Val, and by countless other fictional characters, the British Museum seemed, more than any other museum during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to be, in Sidney Colvin’s words, an ‘‘epitome of the civilization of the world.’’3 As such, the British Museum exemplified what Thomas Richards has called the ‘‘imperial archive’’: the ‘‘knowledge producing institutions’’ at the ‘‘administrative core of the Empire’’ enacting a fantasy of control over information , peoples, and colonies through the compilation of knowledge.4 This fantasy of control is evident in the museum’s embrace of Darwinian evolution as a structuring principle and the related assumption that the world is knowable through study of its physical manifestations; and in popular depictions of the British Museum Reading Room as a kind of imperial beehive, in which diligent knowledge-gatherers serve the cause of empire. Richards suggests that this ‘‘myth of a unified archive’’ assumed that knowledge could be ‘‘at once positive and comprehensive’’—seen as raw data, ‘‘little pieces of fact,’’ he calls them, but also as potentially unifiable—and he reads The British Museum and the Problem of Knowledge 135 turn-of-the-century fiction by Stoker, Kipling, Wells, and Childers as reinforcing this fantasy of a ‘‘British monopoly over knowledge.’’5 London Town, an 1883 children’s book by Felix Leigh, supports Richards ’s account of how the museum was supposed to function: as a wondrous array of disparate information that nonetheless fosters a sense of coherence . A poem entitled ‘‘In the British Museum’’ evokes a space filled with weird juxtapositions: If you want to see all sorts of wonderful things, Stuffed crocodiles, mammoths, and sloths, Hairy ducks with four feet, and fishes with wings, Fat beetles, and strange spotted moths; And enormous winged bulls with long beards, carved in stone, Dug up from Assyria’s sand, And old blackened mummies as dry as a bone, Discovered in Egypt’s lone land, And beautiful statues from Greece and from Rome, And other fine things without end,— You will find you can see half the world here at home, If a day in this place you will spend.6 Joining objects of scientific, archeological, historical, and aesthetic scholarship , the poem emphasizes their resistance to order by using words such as ‘‘wonderful,’’ ‘‘strange,’’ ‘‘enormous,’’ ‘‘old,’’ and ‘‘beautiful.’’ But the museum manages to contain all these things, providing a ‘‘home’’ that contains ‘‘half the world.’’ The chaotic jumble of displayed objects, in other words, serves to reinforce rather than undermine our sense of the museum as a well-regulated space. And most important, the museum allows us to see: its artifacts are windows on the world, the museum offering knowledge at once ‘‘positive’’ and ‘‘comprehensive,’’ to use Richards’s words. Or, in the words of a 1909 article in the Saturday Review, ‘‘The standard has been, as it ought to be, to make the Museum an educational instrument which should teach the eyes of the onlooker—and put the monuments in such a light as to make them an open book, accessible to the scholar and the student, and easily comprehensible to the masses.’’7 136 The British Museum and the Problem of Knowledge The half-day spent ‘‘at home’’ in the British Museum, then, not only provides access to ‘‘half the world’’; it also fits the world’s myriad cultural productions into a coherent conceptual framework. Museologists have convincingly described the pervasive impact of evolution on late nineteenthcentury museums, and the mutually sustaining interplay of evolutionary and colonialist models in museum design. The alliance between museums and the task of colonial administration was, by 1900, long-standing and overt. ‘‘You are all closely connected with one...