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.

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

  • 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."
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