Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism by Ruth Hoberman (review)

Evocative of contemporary films set amidst the roped-off and glass-encased exhibits of a museum while the protagonist darts in and out of darkened rooms, attempting to solve a mystery, regardless of how trivial it may be, Ruth Hoberman’s Museum Trouble opens with the fascinating anecdote about John Tempest Dawson, an elderly man who murdered his wife and then shot himself in the middle of the Arctic Room at the National Portrait Gallery in 1909 (1-2). Hoberman’s study presents an infinitely readable examination of turn-of-the-century museum culture and its relation to developing Edwardian literary trends and British national identity. She argues that “turn-of-the-century writers saw the museum encounter as an opportunity to think about issues that interested them: to dramatize moments of introspection in the life of a character; to explore the nature of aesthetic experience; and to explore the relation between individuals and such larger forces as the state, the past, and those other cultures whose artifacts are on display” (7). In the subsequent six chapters, Hoberman illustrates the role of the museum in the works of Edwardian writers such as (but not limited to) Henry James, Vernon Lee, H. Rider Haggard, E. M. Forster, Guy Thorne, M. R. James, G. K. Chesterton, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, as she blends both high- and lowbrow literary pursuits to uncover the importance of the museum in the early twentieth century.

For her purposes, Hoberman draws a distinction between Edwardian artistic production and modernism, preferring “to rescue the Edwardian period from disappearing into a ‘long’ modernism” (20). She notes that, in so doing, she is able to examine how events tied to Edward VII’s reign led to considerations of the museum and its relationship to aesthetics, identity politics, and the British Empire that remain specific to the time between 1890 and 1914. Early in the introduction, she examines H. M. Bateman’s “The Boy Who Breathed on the Glass in the British Museum: An Ante-Bellum Tragedy”¹ and demonstrates the way museums are both a site of chaos and order wherein patrons are taught to behave and view the well-placed exhibits in a particular fashion while, at the same time, museum guards are continually on the patrol for those violating said behavioral codes—from the child who leans too close to the dinosaur bones to the professional art thief. This tension between order and chaos, then, becomes a rich ground for Edwardian writers who use the museum as a way to test the boundaries of their world views. To facilitate her examination, Hoberman utilizes the theories of Andreas Huyssen, Pierre Bourdieu, and Remy Saisselin,² ultimately suggesting “that turn-of-the-century writers like [H. G.] Wells, [May] Sinclair, Forster, and [Henry] James anticipate in their fiction the insights of Bourdieu and Saisselin, and set crucial fictive scenes in museums as a way of exploring the futility of separating aesthetic from economic and social realms” (9).

Hoberman’s study is exceedingly well researched. In the introduction, she provides details of Edwardian museum culture by drawing upon the consequences of a series of legislative decisions, starting with the 1845 Museum Act. This type of detailed historical and cultural context is carried throughout the book. In chapter 1, “Aesthetic Value in Flux,” Hoberman uses Henry James’s The Golden Bowl as a vehicle for studying the relationship between museums, curators, and the preservation of art in juxtaposition with the decline in income for the aristocracy.³ Chapter 2, “The Mind behind the Museum: Constructing the Art Professional,” looks at another work by James—The Outcry—as Hoberman unpacks issues regarding acquisition, attribution, and design of the museum.⁴ Chapter 3, entitled “Museum Gothic: Objects That ‘Tell,’” tackles the portrayal of the museum visitor by a number of authors, including Henry James, M. R. James, C. Lewis Hind, Guy Boothby, Lee, and Haggard. “Getting...