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Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display

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As a rule, when considering whether to buy an academic monograph, I check the endnotes for the introduction for the name of Foucault. If it's there, I don't buy.

I neglected to do this with "Nature's Museums." Foucault is here, but, for a change, architectural historian Carla Yanni and most of the authorities she cites find his categories of space don't fit Victorian natural history museums.

The news is, however, not all good. Yanni is a confessed postmodernist and believer in its theories of science. Basically, that science doesn't exist. That it is "socially constructed" and "gains legitimacy from its local associations."

This is not so, but if it were so, then, if we follow Yanni's examination of the development of four major (and several minor) natural history museums in Great Britain, then she would have hard time explaining why we are not all creationists still. Because creationists, principally Richard Owen, dominated the money-raising, concepts, iconography, choice of exhibits and public face of the museums.

This contradiction is not apparent to Yanni because she misunderstands the outcome of the creationism/evolution contest. She downplays the triumph of Darwinism (which had swept all before it within three years or so, despite what Thomas Kuhn may say about paradigm shifts) and overstates the coexistence of religion and science in Victorian Britain.

True, many, perhaps most, practicing biologists remained Christians and perhaps not merely nominal ones. But Christianity had changed. Darwin forced it to abandon perfectionism and to give up the doctrine of the fixity of species. Paley, cited often here, would not have recognized scientists of the late 19th century as Christians.

Well, so much for the confusions that underlie the analysis. Is there anything interesting left? Not much.

Yanni makes much of a supposed split between artifice and nature, or "God-created" and "man -created," which, according to her, started the century mixed together in collections but ended it each with its own structures, to which architects -- the focus of her interest -- contributed an intellectual framework. This sounds plausible until you compare it with evidence.

Museums, of course, became specialized, but there was and is no particular animus against mixing. The Bishop Museum, contemporaneous with the British Museum (Natural History), which bills itself as the greatest museum in the Pacific, happily combines ethnological, artistic and natural collections. Many state museums, as for example in Virginia and Iowa, do, too. A good example is the Falls of the Ohio museum operated by the state of Indiana at Jeffersonville. And the ultimate refutation -- in origin Victorian, too -- would be what is probably the most popular natural history exhibit in North America (if not the whole world), which combines natural history, art, technology and social history -- the glass flowers at the Agassiz Museum at Harvard University.

There's not much left, even for people who seek out natural history museums and take an interest in their curatorial history. (Which people do. The Peabody, on the opposite side of the wall from the glass flowers, has preserved a whole floor unchanged from the 19th century in order to demonstrate how display practices have changed.)

Science advances on a broad front, and, unlike architecture, it cannot go back. If Huxley rather than Owen had dominated the design of the British museums, which are almost all still in use today, their 21st century uses would not be much different. It may be incongruous that secularized scientists (and tourists) enter the Oxford University Museum through a portal guarded by an angel, but no more so than to see modern-day Christians who no longer believe in, say, the virgin birth, worshipping in churches layered with statues of Mary.

The text of "Nature's Museums" is not long, as the book is copiously illustrated. The illustrations are, however, too small to reveal much. The book might be of some interest to anyone visiting the museums today: the Hunterian, the Edinburgh, the Oxford or the British are examined in detail, with others, like the Dublin, alluded to.

The Hunterian, by the way, also confutes Yanni's theory of museumology. According to her, the explicit science museums did not develop from the "cabinets of wonder" but were novel Victorian establishments, arising from heterogeneous and haphazard collections that were dumped on the universities or nation.

The Hunterian, however, was a thoughtfully amassed collection that included both curiosities and deliberate "preparations," and it was explicitly pedagogical. It also was Georgian, not Victorian.

Furthermore, Yanni is wrong to suggest that the practice of dumping curiosities on the nation was a 19th century innovation. It's true that middle class collectors of the Renaissance, like Worm, kept their collections in their houses (where else?) for themselves, but in classical times, wealthy collectors did what Victorian scientists and patrons did: They put their most spectacular items on display in public buildings. In their case, temples. See my review of Adrienne Mayor's "The First Fossil Hunters."