Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves Read online

  Collecting was by no means confined to the home, however. Alongside the growing number of private collectors was a developing habit of public collecting. The new galleries at South Kensington were part of an emerging network of museums across the country. Inextricably associated with education and enlightenment, with order and stability and self-improvement, these offered a perfect outlet for both civic pride and visible philanthropy. Many wealthy and influential Victorians saw it as nothing less than a public duty to provide spacious, airy galleries where people could learn about art and science, and to construct imposing and stately buildings that reflected the confidence and affluence of their communities. Public collecting was active and fashionable.

  Establishing a museum sent a clear message about the aspirations of a town, and the apparent generosity and farsightedness of its leading inhabitants. Those with an eye for boosting local dignity and their own reputations found museums an effective way of securing positive publicity and public support: in Sunderland, the Museum and Library, opened in 1879 by US President Ulysses S. Grant, was largely the work of Robert Cameron, a Member of Parliament, Justice of the Peace and temperance campaigner; in Exeter, it was two MPs, Sir Stafford Northcote of Pynes and Richard Sommers Gard, who proposed and developed the plans for the city’s Albert Memorial Museum. All over the country, those with an interest in municipal matters and affairs of state began to look at ways of developing and displaying public collections that would entertain and inform, and before long a web of museums started to grow across industrial towns and expanding cities, offering more and more people the opportunity to see precious and fascinating things.

  Despite their sudden high profile, the emerging museums did not appear completely out of the blue. Many were an extension of local associations such as Mechanics’ Institutes and Literary and Philosophical Societies, established early in the century to encourage and facilitate the research, discussion and display of disciplines as diverse as geology, anatomy and phrenology, shipbuilding, mine engineering, painting and foreign languages. Mechanics’ Institutes varied according to local traditions but, although they ostensibly catered for the working classes, many soon became a means for aspirational white-collar workers to advance themselves while also acting as meeting places for the middle class: the Manchester Guardian claimed in 1849 that of the thirty-two Mechanics’ Institutes in Lancashire and Cheshire only four had any working-class support.7 One of the results of this membership profile was an increasing number of exhibitions. No longer confined to providing practical instruction for workers, a number of committees turned their attention to the arts. In 1839, Leeds Mechanics’ Institute organized an exhibition of ‘arts and manufactures’, while in 1848 Huddersfield described its effort as ‘a polytechnic exhibition on a small scale . . . of pictures and other works of Art and objects of curiosity and interest’.8 Perhaps the most actively enthusiastic of the Institutes was Manchester’s, which organized five exhibitions, the first from December 1837 to February 1838, and the last finishing in the spring of 1845. These eclectic displays included everything from models of steam engines, ships and public buildings, to paintings, phrenology and geological specimens but the first exhibition was typical in also featuring over 400 examples ‘of beautiful manufactures and of Superior workmanship in the Arts’.

  By the 1830s and 1840s, most industrial centres, many smaller towns and even some rural villages had a Mechanics’ Institute, generally offering a range of lectures, exhibitions, libraries and specialist classes. The network flourished so rapidly that by 1850 there were over 700 Institutes, boasting more than half a million members.9 Alongside them, many larger cities also had established Literary and Philosophical Societies, often with roots in the eighteenth century. Combining elements of the academic society and the gentleman’s club, they mainly drew their members from among the educated and the influential. But they were not divorced from practical progress and by the 1830s many had evolved into hybrids representing utilitarian, even industrial, interests, while retaining an air of genteel debate. They produced further opportunities for provincial displays, and some even formed collections, often based on a core of natural history objects, with rooms set aside to show everything from prints and paintings to stuffed birds: Newcastle Lit and Phil, for example, opened a special ‘Museum Room’ in 1826 to display the collection of books, manuscripts, prints and natural history specimens which had originally formed the private museum of Marmaduke Tunstall at his home at Wycliffe Hall near Bernard Castle in County Durham, and which the Society had purchased in 1822.

  The newly developing museums fitted comfortably into this tradition of public learning and debate and increasingly took the next steps in creating and caring for collections. They were part of a general movement towards improving education in general, and art education in particular, with a focus on allowing ordinary people access to extraordinary things. In 1835, when he was asked by the Government Select Committee how to improve the knowledge of art among the general public, Gustav Waagen replied that better public understanding depended on ‘accessible collections. . . giving people the opportunity of seeing the most beautiful objects’.10 By the mid-century, John Ruskin was again making a public case for places where visitors could experience the finest works of art. ‘Art’, he asserted in his 1859 lecture ‘The Two Paths’, ‘is always helpful and beneficent to mankind, full of comfort, strength and salvation’ and his writing indicated a growing and ambitious realization that public access to art could be linked to an improved understanding of everything from social structures to economics, as well as engendering better skills, work habits, personal conduct and even morals. ‘A museum,’ Ruskin claimed, ‘is. . . primarily a place of education. . . teaching people what they do not know. . . teaching them to behave as they do not behave.’11

  In 1845, a Museums Act was passed by Parliament, allowing borough councils to raise up to a halfpenny on the rates to go towards funding these emerging museums. This was followed five years later by a Public Libraries and Museums Act. Some towns acted promptly: Warrington opened a rates-funded museum in 1848, and the town council in Colchester agreed in April 1846 to provide a place ‘for the deposit of articles of antiquity or curiosity’, although it was not until 1860 that a building was finally opened to the public.12 By the middle of the 1880s, Exeter, Nottingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Sheffield, Aberdeen, Leeds, Sunderland and Preston had all taken up the challenge, and so important did a museum become to municipal identity that there was fierce competition to see who would be quickest to create the biggest and best. As museums came to be seen as a symbol of modernity and sophistication, no town of any size wanted to be left behind, and the press fuelled the competition, reporting on efforts nationwide and judging one achievement against another. In 1878, the citizens of Nottingham must have glowed with delight at praise from the Magazine of Art: J. C. Robinson’s native town had, it suggested, ‘at a single stride, outstripped all the towns in the U-K- in the race to provide themselves with local museums’.13

  The new museums were, as we have seen at South Kensington, a way of making concrete philosophical discussions about art and culture. Throughout Europe, there was a drive to develop museums, as politicians, reformers and critics each attempted to prove their point. In Germany, especially, there was a concerted campaign to establish collections in the major cities. For Gustav Waagen, this was ‘to advance the spiritual education of the nation through the experience of beauty’, but for many of his colleagues the emphasis was on education: ‘systematically arranged collections should be for the instruction of the Volk and the advancement of scholarly work’, maintained Hermann Grimm, another high-profile German art historian.14 In France, still rebuilding after the Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, the focus was also on creating resources for public instruction, and during the 1860s the displays at the Louvre were redesigned to accommodate increased labelling, explanatory materials and guidebooks, further emphasizing its distance from
the exclusive habits of its royal past.

  This didactic impulse was part of the ongoing desire to make art generally more accessible, and to include all classes in a richer cultural life. A state museum opened in Berlin, for example, as early as 1830, with the intention of creating an opportunity for ‘the general public’ to experience art ‘without regard to social status or education’.15 But this kind of rhetoric tended to mask other, more complex, underlying factors. In Britain, the impulse to educate the masses, and to use museums as a tool for education, was, as Ruskin had asserted, also about changing behaviour. As early as 1834, a government select committee established to investigate ‘vices of intoxication among the labouring classes’ recommended museums as one solution to public drunkenness. And in the wake of the 1832 Representation of the People Act, commonly known as the Reform Act – with the 1867 Reform Act further extending the franchise to the urban working class – establishment discomfort about the widening of the right to vote provided another impetus to develop museums. If people were going to be allowed to vote, then they needed to be instructed in the ‘right’ things, and the choice and arrangement of collections provided one way of moulding attitudes. The emerging museums grew out of a desire for moral authority and universal order as much as from pedagogic fervour or a commitment to beauty. They were a way of organizing people, enforcing norms of behaviour and driving home approved messages.

  By the Victorian mid-century, there was a growing middleclass fear that increasing leisure time would, undirected, encourage the working classes to crime. In 1860, the opening of Manchester’s free libraries, for example, was heralded by Chambers Journal as an effective solution for preventing unrest: ‘As it is almost certain that the progress of civilization will produce more and more leisure to the human race,’ it explained, ‘it becomes a subject of the first importance to provide means for occupying that leisure in moral and intellectual progress.’16 Museums fitted the bill as neatly as libraries. In his 1862 manifesto for a national museum of natural history, Robert Owen, industrialist and reformer, argued that the development of more museums could effectively counter revolutionary impulses, while the opening of the Nottingham Museum in 1872 was lauded for its wholesome and regulatory effect. It was, claimed The Builder, ‘an important addition to the educational and refining influences. . . by the means by which those who labour may be lifted upward and at least deprived of their present excuse for merely sensual enjoyments’, a respectable alternative to ‘the gin-palace and drinking-saloon. . . in which elevation, not degradation, shall result’.17

  The philanthropic impulse to provide for ‘those who labour’ was always complicated. It tended to submerge questions about power and status, and to fudge issues of common access and exclusivity. This was particularly true of the creation of smaller collections by well-meaning individuals which occupied a grey area between the public and private. They were often established specifically with public access in mind. Visitors – in particular, the working classes – were given generous admittance and were often allowed a much more intimate relationship to the objects than in the larger museums. But the objects still belonged to the private collector and, harking back to the Wunderkammer tradition of the past, the rooms of marvels were clearly stamped with his character. Although some of these collections in time became the foundation of more genuinely public museums, at the outset they showed how private and public collecting were still in the process of divergence during the nineteenth century, leaving plenty of room for confusion.

  In many cases, these collections existed entirely for their benefit to the visitor: the collector’s pleasure was in the wider good the objects bestowed, rather than in the objects themselves. An interesting example of this was John Ruskin’s experimental collection which he installed in a small cottage museum in Sheffield in 1875. He chose Sheffield as the archetypal industrial city, with a tradition of craftsmanship but with many poor working-class citizens who might benefit from education and cultural enlightenment. Always vociferous in public debates about art, Ruskin’s views often seemed inconsistent: as a collector and critic he espoused the spiritual value of beautiful works, championing the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, for example, but as a social reformer he also firmly believed in the more utilitarian processes of copying, drawing and close observation as a way of improving the life and work of the country’s artisans. He intended the Sheffield museum to be the first of a series of similar teaching collections nationwide (the others never materialized), offering carefully chosen works for study, from prints, drawings and paintings to mineral specimens and coins. Ruskin oversaw the way in which things were displayed with a clear view to making the works as approachable as possible. Visitors were allowed to draw from, or handle, artefacts and the curator was requested by Ruskin to ‘put everything away but what people can see clearly’.18 Admission was free and, in an attempt to make the collection of genuine use to the working men of the city, the building was open until 9 at night and, unusually, from 2 until 6 on Sunday afternoons, as well as by appointment.

  The model worked. Entries in the visitor book show that around two-thirds of the visitors were local, representing almost every district in Sheffield including those deep in the heart of the industrial centre and East End where the metal trades and heavy industries were concentrated. Several visitors became regular, suggesting a programme of study, and several identified themselves as ‘art metal worker’. There was also a stream of female visitors from a range of social classes, from Lady Cunliffe-Owen and her daughter to the illiterate Mary Newbold of Spital Hill and Mrs Hobson of Pitsmoor, who both signed with crosses alongside the curator’s entry of their name.

  The pattern was repeated across the country. The tension between genuinely egalitarian public opening and inherent systemic inequalities may have remained, but museums proved enormously popular on a practical level. Whatever their philosophical basis, a trip to the local museum became fashionable for people from all walks of life. Museums were pleasant places to be, and the collections offered a novel brand of entertainment. The crowds poured in. In Sunderland, loan exhibitions proved so popular that the North Eastern Railway Company laid on special trains, while the original museum building was deemed inadequate for the volume of visitors just fifteen years after its opening in 1879. In Sheffield, a letter to the local paper complained of ‘an invasion of Sheffield roughs of both sexes last Sunday pm. . . some hundreds of the worst played at gymnastics over the seats, and afterwards, with girls at their sides, made a promenade of the galleries’. An exhibition in Nottingham in 1872, ‘showing the application of fine art to industry’, attracted over 2,500 visitors a week, amounting to a total of over 760,000; more than 100,000 visitors admired a special display in Halifax, and the national journals published regular pieces about exhibitions which ‘have attracted much attention on the part of the public having been inspected by tens of thousands’.19

  Behind every public museum project were the private scholars and collectors who made things happen. The money from the Museums Acts could only be used for buying a site or constructing a building – not for acquiring objects for a collection – and so inevitably the creation and expansion of the new museums throughout the Victorian period was as much a personal as a municipal achievement. In a few cases, as at Ruskin’s Sheffield museum, individual benefactors were to the fore, but more frequently private collectors simply made small cumulative contributions to activity in their towns or cities. They were the lifeblood of the system, lending, giving and bequeathing objects, volunteering their knowledge and expertise, and bringing their experienced eye to bear on acquisitions and displays. Just as Robinson had brought together an army of collectors for his 1862 exhibition at South Kensington, so museums up and down the country were turning to individuals to fill the cases. And just as Robinson was overwhelmed by eager contributors, so most local museums found collectors were only too willing to have their names attached to such a respectable municipal venture.

  Unfortunat
ely, this enthusiasm frequently gave an impression of amateurism and muddle. Even though many museums established specialist loan committees to seek out and woo significant local collectors, most found it hard to turn down objects that they were offered on a more ad hoc basis. Not surprisingly, this tended to result in a diverse, and frequently bizarre, mixture of exhibits which often appeared even more confused as a consequence of poor presentation and interpretation. In 1874, a Royal Commission found that ‘the only label attached to nine specimens out of ten is “presented by Mr. or Mrs. So-andso,” the objects of the presentation having been either to cherish a glow of self-satisfaction in the bosom of the donor, or to get rid under the semblance of doing a good action of rubbish that had once been prized, but latterly had stood in the way’.20 Bursting with everything from butterflies and minerals to celebrity memorabilia and poorly executed watercolours, these museums were public testimony to the pervasiveness and irresistibility of collecting – but they also demonstrated the need for studious, focused and devoted collectors who could create something lasting and meaningful.