Table of Contents

Preface
Chronology
Introduction

Part One: From Collection to Museum
1. Private Collections
2. Towards a Public Art Collection
3. The Public in the Museum

Part Two: Rationalizing the National Collections
4. Art and the National Gallery
5. Natural History and the British Museum
6. Pedagogy: South Kensington and the Provinces
7. Reform and Psychology of Museum Attendance
8. From Wonders to Signs: Anthropology and Archeology
9. Exhibiting India

Glossary of Frequently Cited Collectors and Collections
Contributors and Witnesses
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index

About the Author

Jonah Siegel Siegel is Professor of English at Rutgers University and President of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. He is the author of Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition and Desire & Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art.

Reviews

"This deftly selected anthology provides striking insights into the debates about the formation of museum collections, their social mission, class address, and their relationship to the state and empire in nineteenth-century Britain. These texts, many of them previously inaccessible, reveal in vivid language the discursive and political struggles surrounding the difficult birth of the museum in the world's first industrial nation. Today's museum curators and
visitors are the heirs to these controversies-many of them still unresolved."-Tim Barringer, Yale University
"[This] illuminating anthology . . . provide[s] a vivid insight into the social and political forces that shaped museums as cultural venues. A valuable addition to the growing body of literature that documents the great 'Age of the Museum.'"-Brendan Moore, British Museum Magazine