Dead Circuses

During the last decade, museum curators have become fascinated with the origins of their institutions, both theoretically and practically. Many have reconstructed in a corner of their galleries a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ to show how their formative collections were arranged and displayed. The new Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum is exceptional only on account of its size – fittingly so, because it is an attempt to transport the visitor back to the birth of the mother of all modern museums. But what is all this backward gazing about? Are these vivid recollections of youth a sign of an approaching end? Have museums outlived their usefulness? Or do museums feel they are in danger of losing their way, and need to go back to their roots to start again?

Ken Arnold takes the second view – but then he is a museum curator with a vested interest in these institutions’ survival. This makes his writing more vivid and more authoritative, but his commitment to museums has to be taken into account when considering the case he makes for their future. Museums didn't exist before the Enlightenment (apart from a brief and extremely indistinct appearance in Ancient Greece and Rome) and they still don't exist in most non-Western cultures. There is nothing that says that museums have to continue to exist. They had a purpose, and as both these books make abundantly clear, that purpose has been served.

The museums that are under consideration here are those that collect material evidence to further our understanding. The museums that are not under consideration are those that collect things to give us pleasure, to move us and delight us, shock us or inspire us. Emotionally moving and entertaining collections of paintings and sculptures, crown jewels and Crown Derby, thumb-screws and racks, finger-bones of saints or medals or dresses worn by the great are still museums as far as the public are concerned. So, too, are collections of reliquaries. Cathedrals display objects – authentic objects they would claim – that have meaning to the people who come to see them. And what museum today can claim their collections do more than that?

Museums – at least the ones that concern us here – used to want to do more than that. They were serious in their youth. They were primarily research institutions, but had an additional duty to make the results of their research available to a wider public. That public was at first a narrow one of like-minded, enquiring spirits. The pioneers of the Enlightenment were, after all, making discoveries that were profoundly disturbing for the Church, who effectively controlled all higher education, and for society as a whole. The museum's ambition to reach a wider public came later, as the ideas of the Enlightenment spread throughout society, and people began to regard education itself as a key means by which society would evolve.

This changing role of museums – instruments of the Enlightenment turning into agents for its dissemination – is the fascinating theme explored by Tony Bennett in his rather confusingly titled Pasts Beyond Memory. The title comes from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Marlowe watches the crowd of natives from the bank.

We glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of the first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories.

Bennett's title sounds neat but means little – the vast majority of pasts are beyond memory – but worse, it's a disservice to his book. It makes it sound as if the book is about the relationship between memory and the past – which could be an interesting theme of great relevance to a historian of museums – when...