museums

museums. The foundation of museums was an offshoot of the great explosion of knowledge in the early modern period which stemmed from the invention of printing, the voyages of discovery, the new interest in the classical world, and the increase in literacy, and it forms part of the Enlightenment. It is the counterpart of the attempt to classify and explain phenomena which stimulated the publication of encyclopedias and dictionaries, and for years the term museum was used to signify a study or library.

It was not unusual for 16th-cent. rulers to have collections, often of a miscellaneous character, partly because they exchanged so many gifts. In Britain the royal family rarely took the lead, but a number of private citizens were avid collectors. Sir Robert Cotton (d. 1631) concentrated largely on manuscripts but also collected coins and fossils. Sir Walter Cope, his contemporary, had an Indian canoe, an Egyptian mummy, and an African necklace made of teeth. John Tradescant opened his ‘Ark’ at Lambeth, charging sixpence admission, and his son published a catalogue of the curiosities in 1656, claiming a dodo and many non-European plants. A rival commercial collection was Robert Hubert's, near St Paul's, who claimed ‘thousands of other rarities of nature’. This collection, though primarily a museum of oddities, was purchased by the Royal Society, which could not look after it and eventually gave it to the British Museum. Museums long retained their quirky and unusual character and Johnson defined them in the 1750s as ‘repositories of learned curiosities’. Tradescant junior bequeathed his collection to Elias Ashmole, who left it to Oxford University. The Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683 in what is now the Museum of the History of Science, and the general public was admitted on payment. The Balfour collection in Scotland, handed over in 1697 to the University of Edinburgh had a less happy fate, and was neglected and dispersed.

The change from private cabinets to public museums, initiated by the Ashmolean, was continued in 1753 by the foundation of the British Museum. Sir Hans Sloane (d. 1753) had a collection of more than 100,000 specimens, many of them plants from the West Indies, which he had visited. He left it to the nation, and the new museum, supported by a lottery, also incorporated the Harleian and Cottonian collections. Although the public was admitted, it was on a very restricted scale, and the principal librarian in the 19th cent. defended Saturday and Sunday closing on the grounds that it kept out ‘sailors and girls whom they might bring with them’.

A great increase in museums, national and provincial, followed. The National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland was founded in 1780, the Royal Scottish Museum in 1854, the two amalgamating in 1985. The Ulster Museum began in 1831, becoming the national museum in 1961. The National Museum of Wales opened in 1907. The Victoria and Albert Museum (1852) and the Science Museum at South Kensington were part of a great complex triggered by the Great Exhibition of 1851. Most of the national museums have branches: the Science Museum runs the railway museum at York and the Museum of Photography, Film, and TV at Bradford. In addition to the great national museums, municipal museums were founded, assisted by friendly legislation: an Act for encouraging the establishment of museums in large towns (1845) permitted the raising of a halfpenny rate. The Liverpool Museum opened in 1851, the Birmingham Museum in 1885. In the 20th cent. the emphasis was on specialist collections—the National Maritime Museum (1934), the Royal Air Force Museum (1963), and a host of smaller museums devoted to motor cycles, trams, cider, musical instruments, costume, and teddy bears. Museum complexes such as the Ironbridge Trust at Coalbrookdale and open-air museums like Beamish in Co. Durham have proved very successful. After 1945 there was a determined effort to make museums less forbidding, to remove the glass cases and drawers, and to use displays, films, and hands-on working models. Many villages have their own splendidly idiosyncratic local collections, even if they are housed in huts and open only on Tuesday afternoons.

J. A. Cannon