Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display, and: On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (review)

Abstract

Though the monumental structure which gave its name to Crystal Palace in South London was destroyed by fire in 1937, visitors to the site can still encounter the giant dinosaurs constructed there from mountains of brick and plaster for Richard Owen in 1853. Both the volumes under review record the dinner held for twenty-one scientists inside the Iguanadon on 31 December 1853 and pictured in the Illustrated London News a week later. For Barbara Black as for Carla Yanni, this unexpected simulacrum of the prehistoric holds a special place in the visual culture and imaginative geography of Victorian England, a fulcrum of scientific ideas, modern techniques of display and construction, and theatrical showmanship. For Black, "such an anatomy of spectacle marks an entryway into the Victorian museum and its promised ecstasy" (24). For Yanni, it offers only a grotesque premonition of the eventual architectural glory of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington built to Alfred Waterhouse's design, of which Owen was the first director, and from one of whose pediments a relief sculpture of a pterodactyl glares angrily over the Cromwell Road. In the aftermath of a generation of Foucauldian studies in which the museum appeared a dreary replica of those other repressive apparatuses of power, the prison and the mental hospital, it is a pleasure to welcome works premised on both the essential modernity and the radical unfamiliarity of the Victorian museum. Most of all, vividly inscribed in both volumes are the strange satisfactions of the museum for the Victorian visitor, the "resonance and wonder" detected by Stephen Greenblatt in collections of an earlier period, which are so essential to an understanding of these curious institutions whose outer form survives, but whose inner life has changed out of all recognition.