Science Museums in Transition: Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America

By Carin Berkowitz and Bernard Lightman

The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public—was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading naturalists, curators, and popular showmen were debating both how to display their knowledge and how and whether they should profit from scientific work; and when ideals of nationalism, class politics, and democracy were permeating the museum's walls.

Contributors examine a constellation of people, spaces, display practices, experiences, and politics that worked not only to define the museum, but to shape public science and scientific knowledge. Taken together, the chapters in this volume span the Atlantic, exploring private and public museums, short and long-term exhibitions, and museums built for entertainment, education, and research, and in turn raise a host of important questions, about expertise, and about who speaks for nature and for history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9780822982753

Book preview

Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Bernard Lightman, Editor

Science Museums in Transition

Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America

Edited by

Carin Berkowitz and Bernard Lightman

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2017, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4475-1

ISBN 10: 0-8229-4475-8

Cover art: A watercolor view from the southeast by George Scharf of the Royal College of Surgeons in London during rebuilding in 1834. Special Collections RCSSC/P 408. Courtesy of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

Cover design by Melissa Dias-Mandoly

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8275-3 (electronic)

Dedicated to Carin’s children, Celia and Theo,

and Bernie’s children, Ilana and Matthew,

with love

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Carin Berkowitz and Bernard Lightman

Part I. Sites of Miscellaneity

1. Science in Regent’s Park: The Colosseum

Bernard Lightman

2. The Permissive Precincts of Barnum’s and Goodrich’s Museums of Miscellaneity: Lessons in Knowing Nature for New Learners

Katherine Pandora

Part II. Display and Expertise

3. This Post Mortem Palace: Accommodating the Hunterian Museum

Samuel J. M. M. Alberti

4. Sight and Sites: The National Repository and the Politics of Seeing in Early Nineteenth-Century England

Iwan Rhys Morus

Part III. The Scientist-Showman

5. A Lecture on Locust Street: Morton, Tyndall, Pepper, and the Construction of Scientific Reputation

Jeremy Brooker

6. Albert Koch’s Hydrarchos Craze: Credibility, Identity, and Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Natural History

Lukas Rieppel

Part IV. The National Museum

7. A Nursery of Living Thoughts: G. Brown Goode’s Vision for a National Museum in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States

Pamela M. Henson

8. Botany Behind Glass: The Vegetable Kingdom on Display at Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany

Caroline Cornish

Part V. The Research Museum

9. The Endless Frontier: Joseph Leidy and the Collaborative Work of Natural History in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

Carin Berkowitz

10. Academic Collections: Teaching and Exhibition on Nineteenth-Century American Campuses

Sally Gregory Kohlstedt

Afterword: Steps to the Encyclopedic Museum

John Tresch

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Preface

This volume emerged out of discussions at a conference on Curators, Popularizers, and Showmen: Science in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Exhibitions and Museums, which took place at the Chemical Heritage Foundation on May 21–23, 2015. The conference papers raised a series of questions: What is a museum? What made a museum? What were its precursors and what were comparable institutions? How do museums from two very different social and political contexts—those of America and Britain—compare? In this volume we look at the consolidation of the state and its archives, at the establishment of professional control over popular science education by trained scientists, and at notions of display and place that came to be understood as typifying museums. We also look at books, shows, and entertainers, at expositions and research spaces, at aspects of museum history that are not always central in historical narrative. We address the question What is a museum? by looking at the people who make up a museum, at its practices, and at its spaces, and tracing them backward, starting anachronistically but looking as expansively as possible. As a result, all of these chapters are to some extent about expertise: Who got to define what a museum was? Who could claim authorship in ordering nature? Or, in some cases, who could profit from doing so? Answers range from the natural philosopher to the collector, the showman, the expert, and the nation itself.

Individual proprietors reigned over small museums in the first half of the century, both in the United States and in Britain. Museums like Barnum’s American Museum and the Colosseum, both discussed in this collection, were identifiable as the product of a single, shaping influence, as were exhibits and shows by men such as John Henry Pepper, Samuel Morton, and Albert Koch, all of whom built careers making science entertaining to the masses. Perhaps the singular viewpoint represented in such displays and shows has caused them to be written out of museum history—they don’t look like modern museums, crafted by many to be voiceless—or perhaps it was because the men who ran them also stood to profit by them. The commercial focus of a museum, like that of scientific knowledge, has become increasingly obscured, regarded as a source of illegitimacy.

Meanwhile, what a museum of nature can be expected to show has changed as well: alongside the scrubbing of authorship there developed an expectation that museums should display established truths. Pandora and Rieppel describe a world in which the possible, not the certain, was put on display, with sea monsters and mermaids seeming to fit alongside ideas of evolution and deep time. Brooker’s showmen used illusion to capture the possibilities of technical mastery. Unproven possibilities were supplanted by the established facts and certain possibilities of large institutions and nations when commercial relationships between nature and its products and the inventions of humanity’s ingenuity began to embody real possibility in the publicly oriented museum. Uncertainty was relegated to the safe professional spaces of the university museum or to venues of pure entertainment.

The politics behind those issues then becomes a second layer that unites the pieces in the volume. Questions of who speaks for nature and for history, and to whom they speak, raise further questions of how the speaker disciplines the material into a single, ordered narrative of expansive democracy and manifest destiny, or of empire and greatness, and how he or she disciplines the audience to understand its role as recipient of the constructed narrative. Museums only solidify when they render their audience docile. Thus the evolution of the modern museum as a temple, described by Carla Yanni, is simultaneously a making of its priests and the destroying of counternarratives along with the noise of Yanni’s museological predecessor, the forum.¹

One way that both audiences and materials were tamed was through the ordering forces of grand narratives. Those narratives reinforced a sense of scale that could thrill an audience but that could also put it in its place. We see some early uses of scale to impress in the vertiginous panoramas of the Colosseum, which placed the viewer high above London, but those panoramas, still part of miscellanies, sat alongside the empowering scale of the everyday in the Swiss Cottage. Similarly, in magic lantern illusionists’ shows, ghosts were invoked, violating rules of nature, but the awe of the viewers was temporary, for they knew they were enjoying an illusion. Not so, however, with an individual’s approach to the vast scales of time and size captured in paleontological and evolutionary narratives, or in narratives of geographical conquest, filled with strange plants, people, and animals. There the power of scientists (in the case of evolution) and of nations (in the case of empire) is manifested in the (in principle) unknowability of nature by ordinary men. The museum became a temple when it inspired awe through its buildings and its narratives and, thereby, tamed its spectators. This volume explores the unruly world that existed in the decades just before the museum’s role became settled, before narratives became voiceless and authoritative, and before audiences settled into their new role as malleable museum-going publics.

Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to Abby Collier for her encouragement and support for this project—and to her team at the University of Pittsburgh Press for their help in guiding the book to publication. We also wish to thank the Chemical Heritage Foundation for providing a wonderful setting and support for the Cain Conference out of which this volume grew. Sam Alberti and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt gave us excellent feedback on an earlier version of the introduction. Sally also graciously agreed to contribute a new chapter when we needed it. This book has benefited greatly from the efforts, commitment, and thoughtful discussion of all of its contributors. We are grateful to them all.

Introduction

Carin Berkowitz and Bernard Lightman

Up through the eighteenth century, private collectors amassed collections that included natural objects like rocks, taxidermied animals, handmade artifacts such as tools, and cultural objects from far-off places.¹ Collections, sometimes literal cabinets of curiosities and sometimes whole rooms or houses full of artifacts, were navigated with the help of their owner-collectors. By the early part of the twentieth century, most collections were instead housed in imposing stone structures—public museums devoted to sorting and describing collections in such a way that a visitor could make his or her way through without accompaniment. If this account is one painted with a broad brush, the shift was nonetheless dramatic. And to a very great extent, it took place over the nineteenth century, a period during which exhibitions of collections became public and their purposes were separated into distinct categories.

This volume promises to address and contribute to an evolving scholarship on museums, their exhibitions, their personnel, and their publics by looking at precisely that dynamic period. It does so by building upon themes present elsewhere in the historiography, both by blurring the lines that have been defined by contemporary museums and reified by previous historians and also by drawing out new connections between museums and cultural, social, and political institutions and trends. One line that emerges in this edited volume as particularly porous is the attempt to distinguish between museum and exhibition. By treating museums as permanent exhibitions we have found connections to other forms of display and entertainment simultaneously, making them much more than the history of stately buildings called museums with their purposeful scientific holdings. The constraining focus of this volume, the nineteenth-century English-speaking world, frames these connections.

The nineteenth century saw the museum as we know it, an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public, emerge from a much broader mix of places, objects, and performers on which it drew. The juxtaposition of Britain and the United States—between an old world and a new one, an established empire and an emerging one, a country where social stratifications were treated as transparent, native, and accepted and one in which social stratifications were obscured or denied—allows us to examine the ways in which nationalism, politics, and social structures were embodied in attempts to display natural knowledge. We see the comparison of related but distinct national trajectories of these two countries as providing a context in which relationships of museums and exhibitions to broader social and political worlds can be explored. Chapters like those by Iwan Morus, Caroline Cornish, Pamela Henson, and Carin Berkowitz, for instance, all describe the ways in which ideals of nationalism or empire, class politics, or democracy permeated the museum’s walls.

This collection is not exhaustive or even systematic but, rather, suggestive, providing examinations of idiosyncratic institutions and figures in an attempt to sketch out a broader trajectory. While this collection is organized thematically as one means of highlighting important ideas shared by different chapters, in this introduction we suggest additional possibilities for connection—and other arguments and contributions to be found across the chapters. We hope that readers will bring all of these connections, as well as their own, to the pieces contained here.

Museums in the History of Science

Until recently, the scholarship on scientific exhibitions and museums followed two separate tracks. One of the most influential books on exhibitions was published almost forty years ago: Richard Altick’s Shows of London (1978) dealt with public nontheatrical entertainments or exhibitions. He defined exhibitions as displays of pictures, objects, or living creatures, including human beings, that people as a rule paid to see. Altick’s book is a gold mine of information on waxworks, wondrous machines, panoramas, dioramas, and freak shows. Although Altick limited his analysis to London, he claimed that Londoners’ tastes in exhibitions were similar to those of people living in the provinces.² He also argued that mass taste remained remarkably constant from about 1600 to the mid-nineteenth century, but that in the second half of the century the public became interested in drama and new forms of stage entertainment such as the music hall. Many earlier kinds of spectacular entertainment surviving only on the periphery of London as vestiges of an outdated popular culture were being replaced by a more staid museum culture devoted to rational recreation. As the focal point of London shows symbolically moved from Leicester Square to South Kensington, Altick declared, the age of exhibitions was succeeded by the age of public museums.³ For Altick, the age of spectacle reached its climax at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Subsequent scholars working on nineteenth-century exhibitions agreed that the Great Exhibition was significant.⁴ But they have also explored the successor to the Great Exhibition, which reopened at Sydenham in 1854, as well as the series of international fairs that followed, including the Paris Exposition Universelle (1889), the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893), and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in St. Louis (1904).⁵

Recent scholars have also investigated broader facets of scientific exhibitions, including less well-known sites, displays of living humans, and the role of performativity. In the edited volume Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship the contributors move away from major museums and international exhibitions to focus on regional, smaller, and often obscure venues. Like Altick, they deal with magic lantern shows, lectures, electrical experiments, panoramas, spiritualist séances, freak shows, demonstrations of natural magic, the conversaziones of scientific societies, and Egyptian mummy unwrappings. However, instead of insisting on Altick’s concept of a widely shared mass taste, the contributors point toward the uniqueness of each site. Each of them had its own particular space, strategy and language of display, the editors insist, as well as drawing on and being contextualized by the showmanship of other forms of popular entertainment.⁶

A more usual approach for historians of science has been to focus not on the popular tastes and crowds studied by Altick but on aspects of the large, well-known natural history museums such as the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.⁷ Here the emphasis is often on significant nineteenth-century museum curators such as Louis Agassiz and Richard Owen. Mary Winsor, for instance, suggests that Agassiz’s Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, founded in 1859, was designed by Agassiz to be a fortress against evolution, illustrating patterns of organic similarity as shown by morphology, embryology, palaeontology, and geographic distribution. This arrangement was intended to lead the visitor to admire the Creator. This was different from the plan of many other natural history museums, which also displayed collections in accordance with the beliefs of their main curators, often guarding against evolution by exhibiting the delicate beauty of a butterfly’s wings or other illustrations of design in accordance with Oxbridge natural theology.⁸ Owen was the curator of the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, superintendent of the Department of Natural History at the British Museum, and founder of the Museum of Natural History. For him, in contrast to Agassiz, museums were meant to illustrate the principles of Oxford natural theology and German idealism. Nicolaas Rupke argues that Owen’s career, which lasted from 1827 to 1883, coincided with the age of museums, the period in which most of Britain’s great museums were founded.⁹

It should be noted that Rupke’s periodization differs significantly from Altick’s contention that the age of exhibitions gave way to the age of museums in the middle of the nineteenth century. The chapters in this collection are more in line with Rupke’s periodization, which suggests that museums and exhibitions flourished at the same time, shaping each other in the process. Stately public museums and their experts emerged out of this period of coexistence, becoming standard only at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. As Samuel Alberti has recently pointed out, while museums were founded in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, their architectural history and the history of their audiences suggests that building expansion coincident with an uptick in visitors and, relatedly, increasingly frequent exhibitions and fairs, all came later, during the period of 1880–1930.¹⁰ The age of museums (if we take their periodization in the broadest way possible and include the period 1850–1930) was also an age of great change in science, of course. Darwinism helped to justify long-held taxonomies of species. Railroads brought natural specimens across vast distances. Industry changed the way humans interacted with the natural world. All of these changes were embodied and displayed in exhibitions and museums.

More recent studies have shifted attention away from individuals and single institutions toward the materiality of museums (whether in the collections or the buildings in which those collections are housed), the invisible technicians who worked alongside the eminent scientists, and the role of museums in the pursuit of international status and in the construction of national and regional identity. Steven Conn has detailed the ways in which the most famous American museums, built in the second half of the nineteenth century, attempted to describe and categorize the entire world, looking to the objects themselves as a source of knowledge, and in the process helping to shape American intellectual history.¹¹ Alberti has pointed to what we can learn from examining the trajectories, or biographies, of common specimens and the relationships they form with people and other objects.¹² Both Sophie Forgan and Carla Yanni have argued persuasively that if we take into account the architecture of museums we can discover how ideologies are encoded into their structure.¹³ The chapters by Cornish and Henson in this collection both contribute to this literature by analyzing the ideological function of museum displays, while Alberti’s study of the Manchester Museum attends to the museum’s invisible technicians.¹⁴

The national and international dimensions of museums have also been explored in recent scholarship. Science museums can be dynamic forces for promoting national self-consciousness. Kohlstedt insists that in its first fifty years the Smithsonian Institution drew on the scientific exploration of the American West to establish its reputation as a leading natural history museum while at the same time contributing to the formation of the American identity.¹⁵ And elsewhere, Kohlstedt has shown how a new breed of professional museum administrators recognized the importance of collaboration with their counterparts across the Atlantic. She analyzes the 1889 tour of major museums in Britain and northern Europe made by Otis T. Mason, curator of anthropology at the US National Museum.¹⁶ The collection of essays in this volume builds on this scholarship and explores national and international themes by examining both North American and British museums and by investigating how displays of nature were entangled with issues of national identity, empire, and imperialism.

Alberti locates the origins of this new scholarship in the emerging field of museum studies in the 1990s, when earlier progressive historiographic accounts were replaced by investigations of the multiple genealogies of collecting and collections, variously informed by structuralism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism: Museums were cast as political instruments, machines for making meaning and imposing particular behaviours on their visitors. These approaches have been developed and refined by art historians, cultural theorists, and anthropologists and historians of science.¹⁷ In adopting these approaches, historians have treated museums as sites for the production of knowledge similar to laboratories, lecture halls, and the field and as locations for the consumption of knowledge similar to the theatre, the concert hall, the garden, and mass media.

But perhaps the most important development in recent scholarship has been the study of science museums and science exhibitions in relation to each other, which has made possible the approach we are following in this volume. Important in this context is Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum, a good example of the new scholarship of the 1990s. Here he extends Foucault’s reflections on the panopticon to public institutions of display. We are, however, more interested in Bennett’s concept of the exhibitionary complex, which encouraged scholars to think of museums and exhibitions as part of a larger entity sharing similar characteristics. He explicitly grouped the British Museum, as well as other museums, together with more temporary and dramatic exhibitions, such as the Great Exhibition and Wyld’s Great Globe.¹⁸ At one point he refers to Shows of London, and remarks that the shift of emphasis from surveillance to spectacle evident in the Great Exhibition and museums of the period could be detected easily with only a cursory glance at all of the exhibitions dealt with by Altick.¹⁹

Whatever may be said of Bennett’s Foucauldian analysis of the museum (a theoretical approach we do not adopt here), the advantage of his concept of the museum complex is clear: it deals with both museums and exhibitions as sites of scientific display that developed simultaneously. This means following objects, exhibitors, and theories both within the walls of museums and beyond them, considering not only static displays but, crucially, the performances and theatrical settings that brought knowledge to life. Physics and chemistry, while at times represented in natural history museums, relied centrally on performances to reach wide audiences. In his contribution to Science in the Marketplace, Morus has argued that performances—making science and its products visible, pulling in the crowds and amazing them with nature’s wonders—were part and parcel of the business of making science and its products real to their audiences.²⁰ Morus examines the technologies of display used most widely in scientific performances, such as oxyhydrogen microscopes and gigantic electrical machines. These technologies not only produced spectacular effects, they also generated authority for those scientists who could control them with skill.²¹

In her Peoples on Parade, Sadiah Qureshi has drawn our attention to exhibitions of living foreign humans, often colonized peoples who were imported to perform songs, dances, and other ceremonies supposedly in the service of anthropological science. Qureshi argues that the staged quality of these performances turned natives into professional savages.²² These human displays were at their most popular following the Great Exhibition. By the 1880s foreign peoples were displayed by the hundreds, housed on-site in supposedly authentic native villages. In order to track the development of this form of cheap mass entertainment, Qureshi visits a variety of exhibition venues and international fairs.²³ Likewise, in her contribution to the volume on Evolution and Victorian Culture, Qureshi has taken her argument a step further. She discusses how world’s fairs were instrumental in publicly exhibiting evolutionary theories.²⁴ Evolutionary narratives and exhibits of people from far-off lands may have provided entertainment, but they also helped to create a sense of hierarchies of civilization and to legitimate imperialism of the sort that was on display at the Smithsonian or at Kew Gardens (as discussed in this collection). Anthropological and ethnological museum collections, whether the National Museum in Washington or the Pitt-Rivers in Oxford, likewise realized many of the messages of these sensational exhibitions in a permanent form. If the museum can be grouped with these variable sites of production, performance, and consumption of science and entertainment, including the Shows of London (and of New York, Philadelphia, and other cities), it is a relatively small step to include exhibitions with these diverse scientific places and spaces.

Although Alberti asserts that museums reached their apogee in status as a site for the production and consumption of natural knowledge from the 1850s to about 1930, museums were important scientific sites even before the middle of the nineteenth century.²⁵ Both the already mentioned collections—Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship and Science in the Marketplace—treat museums and exhibitions as members of the same family of institutions.²⁶ The authors provided new insights into such themes as performativity and the experiences of audiences in both types of institutions. In this volume we begin to explore more deliberately what museums and exhibitions shared in common. So, for example, take the issue of their proprietary status. In his piece on the spectrum of modes of ownership adopted by British museums in the nineteenth century, Alberti has shown that the categories public and private were fluid and contingent.²⁷ Can the same be said about public and private exhibitions? In fact, comparative studies of museums and exhibitions open up a wide range of important questions, many of which we have tried to address in this book.

Organizing Our Collection

The volume opens with a section on Sites of Miscellaneity, with pieces by Bernard Lightman and Katherine Pandora on museums as just one space within which the miscellany of science was being presented to popular audiences. In fact, this volume demonstrates that miscellany, rather than being an analyst’s catch-all category for the ill defined, was instead an early nineteenth-century genre, and one that characterized museums, exhibitions, and literature. Lightman’s chapter on the Colosseum in London traces the Regent’s Park institution from its opening in 1829 through to its close almost fifty years later, chronicling its several incarnations and various exhibits that ranged from an aviary to a model Swiss cottage and from natural history specimens to panoramas. Lightman makes clear that while the Colosseum contained what we might recognize as scientific displays, those displays were not treated by the museum’s proprietors or audience as categorically different from other sorts of exhibits that also presented the arts and sciences side by side. Katherine Pandora’s The Permissive Precincts of Barnum’s and Goodrich’s Museums of Miscellaneity describes the even more wide-ranging variety of subjects that made up P. T. Barnum’s American Museum and Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s books, both of which embraced the possible as much as the real but also provided access to fossil specimens and early accounts of theories of evolution. Pandora argues that the genre of miscellany encompassed literature in ways that paralleled museums, helping to redefine the scope of museum studies to include collections and showcases of the textual variety. Together, these two pieces help to expand and blur historiographical categories and to argue for the connectedness of scientific knowledge and scientific museums to other forms of knowledge and display.

Although miscellany characterized displays for the public, those exhibits existed alongside much more specialized institutions built to collect and showcase natural knowledge for experts. The section Display and Expertise reveals the ambiguity and complexity of public venues. The museum was very much a category still in flux, and a range of institutions guided its ultimate trajectory. Samuel Alberti’s chapter on the Royal College of Surgeons makes the argument that the interior and exterior architecture of the museum changed along with the purpose and scope of the museum, embodying shifts in the discipline of surgery and its associated fields of anatomy and physiology. Like Alberti’s chapter, Iwan Morus’s Sight and Sites: The National Repository and the Politics of Seeing in Early Nineteenth-Century England focuses on a particular place whose elements are recognizable as a museum. The National Repository housed scientific inventions, and although it clearly focused on collections demonstrating expertise, Morus describes how its displays also raised the question of whose expertise was on show, by whom, and for whom, questions that became central.

Questions of expertise that plagued Morus’s actors were also at play in less august spaces. In the section on The Scientist-Showman, Jeremy Brooker and Lukas Rieppel describe the encounters of establishment science with science at the margins, science performed by men who attempted to craft identities as scientist-showmen and maintain the legitimacy of their knowledge at the same time that they profited from it. Brooker’s central figures, Henry Morton, John Tyndall, and John Henry Pepper, all magic lantern operators, together form a sort of spectrum of personas available to the scientific lecturer. Morton provided an example for the second two, with Pepper having adopted the showman’s personality and Tyndall becoming recognized as among the scientific establishment’s more powerful figures. Rieppel’s sea monster discoverer, Albert Koch, similarly put on shows for paying audiences, in his case made up of fossils that were treated by some naturalists as legitimate scientific discoveries, by some as the naïve work of a collector but not a scientist, and by some as a fraud. Both Koch and Morton provide excellent examples of the ways in which nineteenth-century showmen and men of science fashioned public personas, self-consciously creating identities and sometimes drawing on the examples of others. The lines delineating science from spectacle had not been indelibly drawn, so personas were often mixed, and the questions of how to display and how and whether to profit from scientific work were, as yet, unsettled.

Scientific expertise and profit from scientific work were core issues within state-sponsored museums, which showcased a nation’s science for its citizens. Scientific work displayed for the good of the nation and its industries forms a common thread linking Pamela Henson’s and Caroline Cornish’s chapters, which form a section on The National Museum. Henson’s chapter on G. Brown Goode and the early years of the Smithsonian Institution’s museum makes clear some of the tensions between comprehensive collecting and an ordered, comprehensible museum—miscellany might have provided interest for a lay audience but it did not necessarily lend itself to depicting nature and her experts as rational. Curators at the Smithsonian did their best to organize the millions of specimens that inundated them, using labeling, storylines, and relationships between raw material and commercial products to tame the overabundance in ways that still allowed them to insist that theirs was an American museum for a democracy. Cornish’s account of Kew Gardens demonstrates that the British were using similar techniques—labeling, functional groupings, illustrated series—to display the potential and the fruits of empire. Displays of economic botany were crafted by a scientific elite but geared toward merchants and artisans. In both cases, the emphasis was on creating an exhibition framework that was deliberately related to scientific insights even as it demonstrated the order of nature.

While Cornish and Henson describe large, comprehensive, institutional collections, The Research Museum section’s chapters by Carin Berkowitz and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt explore the history of museums in which collection and research, rather than display to a broad public, were central. Berkowitz’s account of the networks of collaboration and the sharing of specimens among naturalists at private and public natural history museums makes a case for the emergence of a moral economy of mutuality that flourished in the absence of scarcity. This cooperation allowed for the building of American scientific institutions and a network of emerging professionals. Kohlstedt also discusses how museums promoted American science and science education through her account of museums in collegiate settings, moving from private colleges to universities in the Midwest. Demonstrating the link between state-funded surveys and academic disciplinary development, her chapter exphasizes simultaneously the emerging nineteenth-century links between field naturalists and museum professionals working in the laboratory. Both papers reveal the inevitability of dedicated scientific curators needing to shape exhibition materials for a larger, interested public.

Together, then, this collection spans the Atlantic, encompassing private and public museums. It examines both short- and long-term exhibitions, as well as museums built for entertainment, for education, and for research. The contributors demonstrate the amorphousness of now-familiar categories in the nineteenth century and reflect the then-undetermined meaning of museum.

Part I

Sites of Miscellaneity

Chapter 1

Science in Regent’s Park

The Colosseum

Bernard Lightman

On March 15, 1855, the Times (London) reported on a trial that had taken place at the court in Guildhall. A fifteen-year-old boy, Joseph Cleasby, had been charged with robbery by his employer. On the stand Cleasby admitted to breaking open a cashbox and stealing fifteen pounds. When he was asked how he spent the money he replied, In going to different places of amusement at the West-end. The examining official was skeptical. Had he spent all of the money in this way? Cleasby insisted that he had, replying, I went to the Panopticon, the Great Globe, the Diorama, the Colosseum, and the Polytechnic during the day, and at night I went to the theatre. Suspicious that Cleasby had also given some of his ill-gotten gains to companions, the court ordered him to be questioned further by the police.¹ Cleasby’s story illustrates how much the world of science exhibitions appealed to London teenagers. In his testimony to the court Cleasby mentioned three science exhibitions: the Royal Panopticon (1854–1856), the Great Globe (1851–1861), and the Royal Polytechnic Institution (1838–1881). They were considered to be just as entertaining as the theater or a diorama. Even if Cleasby had fabricated the story to protect his friends, he must have thought it would be plausible to the court. The story was only believable if it was widely known that working-class teenagers found the temptations of science to be irresistible.

Shortly after Cleasby had supposedly paid his visits to West End sites of amusement, the Colosseum (1829–1864) was put up for sale and purchased by new owners who intended to integrate more science into its exhibits. Unlike the Polytechnic, the Panopticon, and the Great Globe, the Colosseum was not initially devoted to science. At first, it was known for its fine arts exhibitions. Scholars have paid it relatively little attention. There are only two detailed studies. In his Shows of London, Richard Altick devotes a chapter to the Colosseum, titled A Panorama in a Pleasure Dome.² In this historical overview, Altick portrays the proprietors as struggling to establish an educational institution in the face of insurmountable pressure to offer pure entertainment.³ In his beautifully illustrated but rather short book on the Colosseum, Ralph Hyde focuses primarily on the early years. But this is a period when science played a minor role in its offerings.⁴ Historians of science have largely ignored the Colosseum, perhaps because its status as a science exhibition is not obvious. Indeed, some might argue it was not a science exhibition at all. Here I will contend that, by the middle of the century, the Colosseum should be placed alongside the other important science exhibitions of the period such as the Royal Polytechnic Institution, Wyld’s Globe, and the Panopticon. By considering these venues together, we can better understand how the varied spectacles offered by scientific display fascinated Victorian audiences.

The Colosseum was one of those protean institutions that changed its identity whenever a new proprietor took control. During the thirty-five years it was open for business, ownership changed hands at least five times, and three patterns emerge. First, the target audience for the exhibition slowly changed. At first, the Colosseum aimed to attract members of the nobility and gentry, but by the middle of the century it was also seeking to appeal to the middle class and artisans. Second, its thematic focus gradually moved from the fine arts to a combination of science and the arts. This would seem to suggest that the proprietors saw the inclusion of more science as the best strategy for attracting a broader public. Third, throughout its business life, the Colosseum offered its visitors a dizzying series of diverse exhibits. This is what makes it difficult to categorize. Before science became more prominent, the Colosseum was referred to in the periodical press as one of the most luxurious places of resort, an amphitheatre of art and beauty, and one of the profitable places of amusement.⁵ But the most widely used term to describe the Colosseum was exhibition. In 1827 the Times referred to it as a public exhibition, while in 1849 the Morning Chronicle designated it as one of the magnificent metropolitan exhibitions.⁶ The guidebook produced by the proprietors in 1829 also used the term exhibition, though it was an original, singular, and unique exhibition.⁷ An examination of the Colosseum helps us to think about the different types of scientific exhibitions and about their relationship to science museums.

Horner and the Early Years

When the Colosseum first opened its doors for private and public showings, in the middle of January 1829, the periodicals were wildly enthusiastic. The reporter for Pierce Egan’s Weekly Courier referred to the Colosseum as the eighth wonder of the world. There was nothing like the Colosseum in the Metropolis and when it was completely finished it would be unequalled in the world.⁸ A story in the Morning Chronicle was just as positive. The Colosseum was described there as a singular, ingenious, and magnificent place of national amusement.⁹ John Bull reported, this stupendous and magnificent building is at length thrown open to the inspection of the public, and has astonished all who have visited it.¹⁰ The primary feature in the Colosseum, a gigantic panorama of London, is what impressed visitors the most. The centrality of the panorama marked the Colosseum as a fine arts exhibition, and the high admission prices restricted the audience to the well-to-do.

But there was a lengthy and fascinating history predating the openings that had already cast a shadow on the Colosseum’s future. The man responsible for the idea of constructing an enormous panorama of London was Thomas Horner (1785–1844), a surveyor who devised a new method of drawing estate plans that he referred to as panoramic chorometry. Horner claimed that his plans were so accurate they could be transformed into bird’s-eye views of the estates he had depicted. In 1820 he began work on a series of sketches of London as seen from the summit of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Perched precariously in a small observatory cabin near the top of the cathedral, Horner produced a series of detailed sketches with the aid of a telescope. Rowland Stephenson, a wealthy landowner and banker, persuaded Horner to use the sketches to create a gigantic 360-degree panorama. Horner obtained four acres of land from the Crown on a ninety-nine-year lease in the southeast corner of the Regent’s Park. With Stephenson’s financial backing, construction of the Colosseum began in 1824 and was completed by 1826. The artist Edmund Thomas Parris was hired to direct a team of painters to transfer Horner’s sketches to a huge canvas. But completing the painting took much longer than Horner had planned.¹¹ Delays meant increasing costs. In August 1827, the Times explained that the delay was due to the sheer size of the panorama. It was forty times larger than the panoramas to which London audiences were accustomed.¹²

Horner’s financial difficulties worsened at the end of 1828, when it was discovered that Stephenson had been embezzling funds from his bank. On December 29, 1828, the Times reported that a warrant had been issued for Stephenson’s arrest, and that he had suddenly disappeared.¹³ With Stephenson’s whereabouts unknown, Horner met with his friends on January 3, 1829, to explain the situation. Expensive supplies promised by Stephenson had never been delivered. The panorama could be completed in six weeks but sixty thousand pounds sterling were needed. Horner had decided to open the Colosseum to the public in its unfinished state so as to raise the needed capital. The mid-January opening of the Colosseum, despite the positive reviews, was an act of desperation. Although visitors poured into the building during the rest of January and throughout February, Horner’s situation was precarious.¹⁴ On March 15, Bell’s Life reported that the Colosseum had been transferred by Mr. Horner to a Committee of highly respectable gentlemen for the benefit and advantage of all his creditors. Horner was going abroad.¹⁵ Horner left Britain for the United States, never to return. In the meantime Stephenson had also fled to the United States. When he arrived in Savannah in March he was arrested and put in a debtors’ prison