Structuring Museums Usefully

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Structuring Museums Usefully
• Samuel J. Redman (bio)

Reed Gochberg. Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. 272 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index.

During the mid-nineteenth century, traveling to Europe was an essential component in finishing an American’s elite education. The Grand Tour typically consisted of visits to Italy, France, and the UK, with guided tours to major cities, including time spent viewing cathedrals and other wonders. Visits to spectacular European museums, too, were deemed an important part of any culturally sophisticated Yankee’s upbringing. Many nineteenth-century travelers considered visits to museums important opportunities to learn about the arts and the natural world. Major European museums were still the envy of American institutions, zealously gathering specimens and other objects for their collections. Many visitors met their experiences in museums with awe and wonder.

Not all visitors were equally impressed by the grand European museums, however. In one episode, an American writer in Saturday Review reflected, “What is the British Museum? Is it, in any real sense of the word, a museum?” The essay further described the museum to be, “chaotic, accidental, and ill-arranged.” Museums and their collections, it seems, had grown so vast and complex as to lose any sense of coherence. The writer concluded of the experience, “A day at the British Museum is like reading a dictionary straight through” (p. 86). Despite their many flaws and limitations, museums came to serve as important centers for research and popular education, bringing various ideas into collision with one another, with important developments for the institutions taking place throughout the nineteenth century. By the century’s end, visitors were pushed toward new ideas and experiences through their encounters at museums. Some turned to their sketchbooks and notepads to document their thoughts, writing about the things they witnessed in museum spaces.

Recent scholarship has expanded our knowledge in this area, building on a field of museum history bursting forth during the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. Much of this scholarship, however, has focused [End Page 221] on the history of these institutions, rather than how visitors to these places experienced museums. Tracing the social and cultural impact of these places proves to be a complicated story. It is a difficult history to chase down, requiring deep and careful reading into wide varieties of disparate source materials.

Visitors, as I have written elsewhere, often leave but shadowy glimpses of museum history; their perspectives and reactions to exhibitions are rarely fully documented. Exhibits were often too dark to photograph visitors moving about the halls. Few guest books are left behind and many journalistic renderings of museum experiences are filtered with the same sensationalist lenses that later made Yellow Journalism famous. Dramatic reviews and writeups sold more papers and likely encouraged more people to visit the museums in question, so historians are sometimes left puzzled about actual visitor sentiments. With direct sources limited to begin with, uncovering the voices of those outside of the mainstream is even more challenging. What was the purpose of all of this chaotic and ill-arranged documentation? What did people think about when they saw it all on display? Whose stories and perspectives are being left out of these histories?

As these same museums were expanding, scientists, museum curators, and collectors simultaneously debated the ideas behind the increasingly popular exhibit spaces, using objects to hash out their theories in real time. Responses to these experiments ranged from fascination to boredom, curiosity to apathy. Museums would not become truly popular, in some ways, until larger natural history museums began to open to the public decades later. In the earlier nineteenth century, however, museums were already becoming enmeshed as a crucial component of U.S. and European cultural life, especially as major urban centers and elite universities celebrated their expanding presence in nineteenth century life. Historian Reed Gochberg demonstrates this by showing how museums in this earlier era inspired different, sometimes clashing, strands of thought from their earliest iterations. She argues that museums in the early nineteenth century were created with the hopes that they might spark ideas and conversations across emergent disciplines. While featuring notable limitations and drawbacks...