Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Rise of Modernism (review)

Museums, it seems, have always been in trouble, the source of trouble, and the scene of trouble. The objects on display, art or otherwise, have histories that are reconfigured by new curatorial discourses that apply an often alien narrative to the objects’ original histories. The consequent ruptures impose order and discipline, not only on museum visitors but also on artists, staff, and museum trustees, as well as on the cultural, political, and economic superstructures that undergird the museum’s contested mission. In the years spanning 1890 to 1914, museums experienced a collision of the Ruskinian emphasis on education and “moral uplift” with the Paterian emphasis on the cultivation of beauty for its own sake. Today this split is still at the core of the museum experience and perhaps behind the continued and continuous troubles that museums face.

Ruth Hoberman’s compelling Museum Trouble reminds us that museums as we know them today are a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1800 the idea of a collection of art and objects that was open to public perusal was simply unknown, but by the end of the century, museums, especially in capital cities, were a central part of urban experience. That they were a “means of constructing and consolidating national identity” is beyond dispute (2). The same can be said for national libraries such as the British Museum Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Library of Congress. This phenomenon, Hoberman convincingly argues, was not only coincident with what we now somewhat uneasily call “literary modernism” but was also a crucial component in its formation.

The evidence that Hoberman summons to make her case evinces a deep familiarity with the periodical press of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Although she only briefly discusses the role of the periodical press itself, she finds examples and arguments in dozens of journals, magazines, and newspapers, such as the Estates Gazette, Chums: An Illustrated Paper for Boys, Fun, Englishwoman’s Review, Punch, Blackwood’s Magazine, and Saturday Review. Students and scholars of the Victorian periodical press will find fascinating material on nearly every page of Museum Trouble. Hoberman weaves together this evidence with remarkable and seamless fluidity.

In the chapter “Aesthetic Value in Flux,” Hoberman shows how the establishment of art journals such as the Connoisseur (1901) and the Burlington Magazine (1903) served to legitimize the discipline of art history as a profession with its own standards and protocols. Unlike the government-run South Kensington Museum, the British Museum and the National Gallery were “administered by boards of trustees—generally aristocrats and wealthy businessmen,” who despite their best intentions knew little about art and museum management. Many trustee-run museums today face similar struggles (12).

Museum Trouble also offers nuanced close readings of Edwardian fiction. Hoberman’s analyses of museum encounters in Henry James’s novels The Golden Bowl (1904) and The Outcry (1911) are particularly strong, but the book’s scope is considerably wider. Some of the material was previously published in different form in Feminist Studies (2002), Victorian Literature and Culture (2003), and Reading Women (2005), the collection of essays edited by Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley. Cultural historians of the late Victorian period, including those not focused on literary studies, will find much to recommend in these pages. Hoberman’s range of scholarship is nothing short of amazing; her notes and bibliography are extensive and worth consulting in themselves. The inclusion of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce in the final chapter, “Museum Dreams,” seems somewhat quick and perfunctory (unlike the treatment of Virginia Woolf in this chapter), but this is such a minor problem that it seems hardly worth noting.

Overall, Museum Trouble is a model of engaged cultural and literary history. Hoberman asks, “What gives art its power, and how should viewers respond to it? What kind of knowledge do museums generate, and what do museumgoers learn?” (10). Answers to these questions were not simple or univocal in the late nineteenth and...