From Greater Britain to Little England

Abstract

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading are seemingly very different institutions. In setting out to link the origins of these two museums, this article situates itself amid the tangled web of connections that existed between folklore, anthropology, and museums in Britain between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. By following a range of human and institutional connections this paper suggests that the different orientation of these two museums and their collections can be related to the ideological shifts that accompanied Britain's movement from an expansionist imperial power in 1860 to an actively decolonizing nation in 1960. In particular, the article relates the two museums to the decline of a discourse of civilization and the rise of folk museums and a salvage paradigm, which accompanied the development of an English national consciousness during the mid-twentieth century.