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

It has become conventional wisdom to suggest that the museum age began in Britain with the Great Exhibition of 1851, which not only funded the museum complex in South Kensington but also whetted the British public’s appetite for things—particularly collections of things that could act as contained microcosms of the larger world. In Barbara J. Black’s On Exhibit: Victorians and their Museums (2000), an expansive study of Victorian museum culture and the literature that emerged out of and in response to the explosion of museum-building that occurred in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, Black argues that the museum—“as emblem, as historical event, as institution, as image, as practice”—is the “‘master pattern’ that illuminates the ideological workings of Victorian society and literature” ([University of Virginia Press], 4). Between the opening of the National Gallery in 1824 and the opening of the Tate Gallery in 1897 the number of museums in Britain more than quadrupled, and as Black’s study demonstrates, the system-building impulse that drove so many aspects of Victorian culture—as well as the attendant Victorian literary fascination with the breakdown of systems—expressed itself in and expanded exponentially out of the growing cultural influence of the post-Exhibition museum.

Ruth Hoberman’s captivating new book, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism, tells a different story of the museum age, arguing that while the Great Exhibition might have spurred the building of new museums, it wasn’t until the end of the century—roughly 1890—that the novelty of these newly built and ever-growing museums wore off and they truly became part of the general cultural consciousness. As Hoberman writes, “Only when museums were an established part of daily life, taken for granted as government-funded institutions and a fixture of every provincial town, could their impact on ordinary people begin to be gauged and depicted in fiction. And only when their position was secure and the first generation of museum advocates gone, could the subtler fissures and challenges facing the museum movement emerge” (13). Rather than seeing the fin-de-siècle museum as the culmination of the Victorian museum’s golden age, Hoberman instead identifies the increasingly public and conflicted relationship between museums, art, and literature in the years between 1890 and 1914 as an important origin point for the aesthetic philosophies of such modernist writers as W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

Hoberman tells three intertwined stories in Museum Trouble, and does so in compelling and lively prose. The first is a story of art’s fading aura at the end of the nineteenth century as aesthetic value and commercial value became increasingly interchangeable, and as the authority to judge that value became a professional skill rather than a rarefied ability. The second is a story about literature’s anxious relationship to the visual arts and the way the fictional museum object expressed Edwardian writers’ uncertainties about the role of literature in the conception of the self, in the formation of national identity, and in the aesthetic marketplace. And the third is a story of the Edwardian museum itself, a “contested and conflicted site” which, as Hoberman claims, “made visible competing assumptions about aesthetics, value, national identity, and agency” (25). Hoberman convincingly argues that the late Victorian and Edwardian writers who turn to the museum for inspiration—most often Henry James and Vernon Lee, who are the presiding literary spirits of the book, but also E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, M. R. James, H. Rider Haggard, and others—are “proto-modernist” in their use of the museum as a way to explore “the futility of separating aesthetic from economic and social realms” (9). In other words, what distinguishes the museum writers of this period from the Victorians who came before them is their self-aware recognition of the museum as a symbol for the inevitable...