Black 2000

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Barbara J. Black. On Exhibit: Victorians and their Museums. Charlottesville: U of Virginia Press, 2000. Print.

Intro

  • 1 the "Victorian appetite for the built environment" most proudly displayed in the Official Catalog of the Great Exhibition (1851)
    • l/u this source
    • pride in building, engineering, "English constructive power"
  • 2 Robert Kerr English Gentleman's House -- domestic space emulating S Kensington Museum, "a building fantasy for an age that saw all previous centuries and styles as its legacy, an age in which all the world was a museum"
    • Victorian modernity, also probably indebted to shift in historical consciousness traced by Underwood 2013
  • 4-5 In a sense, one may perceive the museum as an impulse or a spirit that infused the are and many of its projects: the triple-decker novel; collected works; encyclopedias and dictionaries; and phenomena as ordinary as keepsakes, dollhouses, and rock collections or a theory as cataclysmic as Darwin's panoramic evolutionism. Great and small, these system-building projects involved compilation, organization, and display -- the three activities fundamental to museum work.
  • method: cultural studies and lit analysis with urban cultural studies
  • 6 good list of foundational museological texts
  • Mayhew wrote a novel about the Great Exhibition, 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Cursty Sandboys
  • Darwin, Advice to Collectors
  • 8 "museums and modernity are inextricable" -- the sense that they're about constructing a future as much as a past
  • 9 "Victorian culture was a museum culture brought to fruition by key political events and social and cultural forces" incl. imperialism and tourism, scientific advances, "nationalist commitment to improved public taste through mass education," growth of middle class, bourgeois fetishism and commodity culture
  • she opposes a museum as a public space and an archive as a closed one but I don't know if I'd go that far
  • 11 Bataille's relation of the museum and the guillotine: the sense of a museum as a method of social control at least of taste
  • 12 link of the S Kensington museum to empire, "Britain's imperial obligation to collect in order to exhibit"
  • 15 Like museology, Victorian positivism and Darwinism represent a response of control and order to the specter of chaos.
    • Darwin uses a museum metaphor in Origin: the earth's crust isn't a "well-filled museum" but science can become one; also the collector in Lord Jim (Conrad, 1900)

Ch 1 The Museum Crowd

  • mostly theoretical readings of museums in c20: a space of suspicion and of enthusiasm
  • 22 [Owens and other scientists dining inside a massive iguanadon in 1853] ...the conquest central to the museum enterprise: through acts of collecting, humankind eviscerates the other and arrogates the seats of life and the mind unto itself.
    • this and the Bataille feel overly suspicious
  • the self initially collects out of a curiosity for an other...yet possession ultimately empowers the self because the very act of collecting demystifies the unknown.
  • 23 ...Whenever humans collect and exhibit, they appropriate the ruins of other times, species, and cultures in order to ensure the survival and transcendence of their own. As Christine Boyer has stated, "to save the past, to turn it inside out, is simultaneously to rescue the present from alienation, boredom, and distraction," for, to quote Roland Barthes, "invention is never a neural idea."
  • 26 Foucault - libraries and museums as heterotopia, the "indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile space," "a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well-arranged as ours is messy, ill-constructed, and jumbled. "
  • 31 ...the museum offered a vision of the world to scale, a 1-to-1 correspondence between unknown reality and culturally generated representation.... The museum both opens up the world and contracts it by assimilating it under one aegis.
  • 32 S Kensington Museum goal to foster "national culture" with a focus on "Fine Art Applied to Industry" (Henry Cole and Prince Albert, respectively)
  • 33 a "circulating museum" in second half of c19, its collections traveling to museums in the north
  • 35ff rehearsing Foucauldian critiques of museum space along with Bataille, Baudrillard and then Adorno writing about Valery and Proust on museums: "Modernizing the past does it much violence and littkecfiid. But to renounce radically the possibility of experiencing the traditional would be to capitulate to barbarism out of devotion to culture," embracing the ambiguity of the museum (41-2, "Valery Proust Museum")
  • 44 Benedict Anderson: in the museum one witnesses "political inheriting at work"
  • 44 Hardy "Fiddler of the Reels": the Great Exhibition as a "precipice in time," a "sudden bringing together of ancient and modern in absolute contact"

Ch 3 The Museum Comes Home

  • museal values and practices entering domestic space and the representation of house-museums in fiction
  • 67 Sir John Soane's Museum -- Shakespeare recess -- Soane emblematic of the early c19 craze for collecting and displaying (68)
  • he pub a "catalogic tour" of his house, last ed 1836
  • 71 This utopian impulse to turn every house into a museum rather than a castle is the final realization of the ever-expanding c19 disssmination of aristocratic and church art.
  • 72 "democratized luxuries [post French Revolution]" and the industrial revolution driving Victorian bourgeois collecting
  • collecting eclecticism as opposed to the simplicity of Morris Arts and Crafts
  • 76 As the home became more clearly connected to respectability, the importance of the best room or the front room -- the standard spaces for collection and exhibition -- intensified.
  • The representation of house-museums in Victorian narrative is as multivalent as was their real-life utility.
  • house museums and domestic collecting in vic fiction
  • Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1848)
    • 79 preoccupation with houses owed to generic descent from Bildungsroman and gothic novel
    • 80 museal red room at Gateshead, even more so Thornfiel, esp third floor description of "a shrine of memory" -- connectes to Freedgood 2006 discussion of furniture
    • 81 motif of Rochester as traveller and master of the exotic
    • 82 Gubar/Gilbert'a psychosexual Reading of conflict btwn jane and bertha "softens the politicized gender critique located at the novel's center in the interstices between husband and wife, collector and collected, the colonialist and the colonized," Thornfield is "Bronte's depiction of the great house of the English countryside, as well as the power structure based on property both home and abroad it represents, in dereliction."
  • (Father and Son, Gosse)
  • Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865)
    • 91 the many heaps of OMF, where hoarding and sifting are undertaken in desperate anticipation, expose a citizenry in dark mimicry of the collecting and rearticulating central to the museum's enterprise.
    • when Wegg reads to Boffin from Kirby's Wonderful and Scientific Museum about house museums
      • l/u for body stories
    • 92ff arguing for Venus's centrality to the plot and as an eclectic alternative to Podsnappery
    • 93 "Like his client the museum, Mr. Venus pursues a profession based on parts and wholes." So synecdoche already his and the museum's material figural mode
    • 95 Venus "holds province" over the body as articulator and animator
      • Dickens's essay "Owens's Museum" l/u: Museum as restorative "fight[ing] against the fracture of existence in an urban, industrial, and globalized world"
  • 97 Loss motivates collecting, acquiring, and hoarding. Disorder and randomness prompt organizing and cataloging[.]

Ch 4: Rendezvous at the Museum

  • 101 the museum visit as cultural practice
  • liberalization of museum open hours and free days in mid c19 (British museum most resistant) -- evening hours the idea of Henry Cole at the V&A
  • 102 the networked and modern print culture of museum guidebooks: Cole had train and underground times to S Kensington listed in guides and the one-shilling guidebook had color prints (104)
    • the Popular Handbook to the National Gallery (1888) had details of collecting prices as well as quotations from Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Browning, Tennyson and excerpts from Ruskin (105)
  • 103 From the museum's inception Cole insisted on a library and artisan school, and his oldest innovation was the museum's great refreshment halls, the first museum restaurants in the world. A trip to his museum was to be a day's excursion.
  • 105 museums constructing a community - "the project of amassing knowledge has usually presupposed not only an invisible interconnectedness among forms of knowledge but also a cultural cohesiveness among communities of knowers" (qting Thomas Richards Imperial Archive)
  • 107 pushing against overly correct and corrective c20 accounts of c19 museums
  • 108 Richard Owen Index Museum l/u
  • 109 Time and again, novelists express an affinity with the museum enterprise: in true triple-decker fashion, the museum presents a wide canvas, complete with an abundance of things and characters ordered with a multiplot's mastery.
  • l/u Mieke Bal "Telling Objects"
  • 110 museum is "a cultural construct that poses as the temple of essentialism"
  • Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853)
    • ch 19 picture gallery
    • 112 gallery as site of Lucy's coerced education but also resistance: "The Cleopatra's body - this 'commodity of bulk,' 'that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh' - becomes the site of consumption, and the patriarchal archive has appropriated the body of woman."
    • Lucy's contest within and her contestation against the museum do not raze it but rather challenge the coherence and completeness of the collection. leaving the museum under revision or, better yet, under (re)construction.
  • Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
    • the pivotal scene in the Vatican Museum on Or about 181
    • 115 scene poising antitheses: Dorothea and voluptuous sculpture, D and Casaubon (Eliot uses mussel metaphors for C's work)
    • l/u Alexander Welsh Eliot and Blackmail (discusses information)
    • 116 In a novel that will praise "unhistoric acts," this move beyond the cultural knowledge contained within the archive is imperative. For D the museum visit is one in a series of oppressions she suffers not only at the hands of her husband but at the hands of society.
    • passage about Rome's collections haunting her: "Ruins and basilicas...forgetfulness and degradation."
    • 117 in Villette and Middlemarch "[the authors are] skeptical about the shared assumptions of intellectual inheritance; thus the museum becomes a receptacle for the novel's pessimism about collective life" and a vehicle for romanticism of D and Will's relationship (118)
  • 126 
...like museums, novels often center on acts of intellection and representation, in knowledge -- particularly the pleasure of naming and identifying -- on searches for origins and relations, that is, provenance. Like museums, novels explore a certain sense of the past and the self; Both depend on circumstantial evidence, on physical description of a material world constituted of many subjects and many more objects. Both then order this profusion, committed as they are to visuality and visualizing, to inviting the reader or visitor to visualize a world and comprehend the ties between community and vision. To see and belong...[long quote from Bakhtin ending with] "A man must educate or re-educate himself for life in a world that is, from his point of view, enormous and foreign; he must make it his own, domesticate it."

Ch 5

  • treats museum poems by Tennyson but especially Hardy and DG Rossetti

Ch 6

  • 152 "museum's role in fashioning the imperial male" in Kim and E Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet, enlisting children in Kulturwerk, civilizing the "world contracted" and "the world traversed", self-realization and works building as central to museum and imperial enterprises

Ch 7

  • Galsworthy's The Man of Property, Morris's News from Nowhere, Wells's Time Machine
  • 169 Composed near or after the end of Victoria's reign, these three narratives are what Stephen Arata identifies as "fictions of loss" that use the represented site of the museum to explore the decadence of a society grown shabby, a society that has lived too long and too well.... Signs of abundance readily turned into markers of excess.
  • Morris
    • 180 ...obliteration of the museum's cachet in Nowhere.... In its mission to decontextualize art, the museum pricipates in what Morris saw as the fatal transmogrification at the heart of Victorian society: the cleavage of art from daily life.
    • 181 In his rethinking of cultural values, Morris exposes civilization to be "organized misery"
    • 183 the problem of still facing historical continuity, historical consciousness, in a post-history utopian society

Coda: Freud's Study

  • reading it as a symbol of the discourses she's traced
  • 195 ...the rise of museums cannot be separated from Victorian England's industrial, commercial, and cultural power.
  • 196 And yet also "museums are memorial to loss"
  • Although both monuments and memorials foster and cultivate our collective memory, the labor of memorials is the more somber work of marking crises in memory, crises that form one of modernity's deepest scars.
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