Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery and the Museum in the Eighteenth Century ed. by R. G. W. Anderson, et al. (review)

326 thorship,’’ and the clash between public and private voices. The miscellany reader comes alive in Mr. Smyth’s study— ‘‘like a clumsy swimmer clambering into a pool, all noise and splash.’’ Some of Mr. Smyth’s more perceptive and satisfying conclusions include: ‘‘The edge of the page did not mark a boundary between verse and life, but a place where connections between them were vividly portrayed’’; marginal notes were ‘‘not vacuum but potential plenum’’; printed miscellanies offered ‘‘the anonymous reader the elite discourses of court and, simultaneously,’’stressed ‘‘the need to adapt materials to the reader’s nonelite contexts’’; and ‘‘Textual alteration and fragmentation were not eccentric moments of difference, but defining characteristics of miscellany compilation .’’ The ‘‘most important features’’ of textual development, argues Mr. Smyth, are ‘‘textual malleability, the resistance to authorcentric readings, and the blurring of genres.’’ He moreover suggests that after the Restoration, the ‘‘divide becomes old versus new, rather than Royalist versus Parliamentarian’’ and that whereas ‘‘beer may have been pejoratively linked to Cromwell, the act of drinking was rich with Royalist connotations .’’ Suggesting the book’s strong sense of contemporary history and politics , Mr. Smyth observes that the ‘‘Civil War and its consequences thrust a compelling raison d’être upon printed miscellanies , and they were able to organize themselves as a voice of disenfranchised Royalism.’’ ‘‘Without Royalist defeat in the Civil War,’’ he determines, ‘‘printed miscellanies would probably have appeared , but as looser, more decorous, duplicates of undergraduate wit—with less anger, less consistency of purpose, and . . . less success.’’ As Mr. Smyth notes early in the book, there has been a general ‘‘critical neglect ’’ of these miscellanies, and no ‘‘sustained evaluation’’ of them has appeared since an unpublished doctoral dissertation in 1943. An evaluation now exists—and it is a most excellent effort. John Vance University of Georgia Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery and the Museum in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. G. W. Anderson, M. L. Caygill, A. G. MacGregor and L. Syson. London: The British Museum, 2003. Pp. x ⫹ 195. £35. When the British Museum opened its doors in 1759, it exhibited to the public a jumble of unconnected objects. Because the Museum began as a bequest from Sir Hans Sloane, from its inception it was something of a hybrid: part private collection, part public institution, part natural history museum, part national library . Sloane had left the nation a sizeable collection—over 200,000 articles for the museum and at least 40,000 printed volumes and some 3,000 manuscripts for the library—but as the assemblage of a single individual, it tended to be scattered , spotty, unsystematic, and, reflecting the tastes of the time, a bit top-heavy with monsters, curiosities, and exotic material. The collection quickly grew in bulk, and often indiscriminately. As a national museum, it became the repository (and, in some cases, the dumping ground) for the natural specimens and artifacts that flooded into England because of overseas exploration, trade, and the country’s colonial ventures. The Museum struggled to keep its head above the inundation of new material. At the same time that the scope of the Museum’s holdings was becoming more and more global, knowledge itself was 327 expanding, with the methods of recording , comparison, and analysis that had been developed in the natural sciences beginning to be applied to other fields. But these fields developed at a very uneven rate, and so there was no single, overriding concept that governed collection and display. Thus, the Museum exhibited fossils, plants, and animals to illustrate contemporary notions of the Chain of Being, but it arranged books by the reign in which they were acquired, because, as one of the curators remarked, of ‘‘the pleasing sight which arises from the uniformity of elegant coverings in any considerable sett of books.’’And, because the age believed in the ideal of the polymath, the Museum’s avowed goal was to become an encyclopedia of the whole of human knowledge. The result of such an ambition was inevitable: ‘‘Nothing is in order,’’ remarked a foreign visitor in 1784; ‘‘this assemblage is rather an immense magazine, in which things seem to have been thrown together at random, than a scientific...