Museum Politics in Industrial Britain

Abstract

In this compelling book, Amy Woodson-Boulton tells several stories about cultural institutions in Victorian England's industrial cities. She maps the development of city museums in Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester, clarifying differences and similarities in their strategies for museum creation and collection development. She weaves into these stories additional material relating to class conflicts, John Ruskin's influence and the reasons for the kinds of art collected. Museum promoters argued for art as a public good in often conflicting terms, including the improvement of workers in the industrial North on the one hand, and the exclusive entitlements of the educated classes on the other. Woodson-Boulton also maps late-century changes in curators' professionalization, new art historical methods, and new justifications for art, from the moral to the educational. Woodson-Boulton's introduction surveys Victorian ideas about beauty, art and society in Britain, which lagged behind the earlier development of public museums on the Continent. She begins with Whistler's summary of two conflicting ways of viewing art: looking through a painting to its subject to retrieve moral or narrative content, or looking at a painting to understand its formal properties, brushwork and emotive or intellectual content. Both ways of looking were saturated with cultural, social and political meanings as museums became sites of social control, class conflict and urban identity. Ruskin's view of art as a window onto nature influenced the councilmen and museum administrators of Britain's industrial cities. Woodson-Boulton summarizes Ruskin's contribution to these cities' ‘vibrant cultural debate’ (p. 4), but does not refer to his political economy of art in which he ponders the value of public and private collections.