Jordan Kistler is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde, working in the fields of literature and science and museum studies. Her works focuses on the intersections between science and the arts, particularly within museum spaces. Her research advocates for the application of literary criticism to museums, pioneering a new critical approach to exhibition studies, and has been published in world-leading interdisciplinary journals like Museum & Society and Configurations (official publication of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts). Her first monograph, Arthur O’Shaughnessy: A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum (2016) examined the intersections between art and science in the poetry of one naturalist working in the British Museum.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Reconstructing Public Opinion1. Categorising the Museum2. Working-Class Access and the Sunday Question3. Constructing Truth in the Museum4. Reading the Museum: Serial Display5. A National Museum6. Appropriating the Ancient PastConclusion: Museums TodayBibliographyIndex

Kistler challenges many conventional ideas of museum history, demonstrating that public audiences, including the working class, were as impactful in the shaping of the British Museum as were scholars and politicians. This magisterial drawing together of social history, literature, archival studies, museum studies, and the history of science challenges long-held beliefs about the development of the British Museum as a public institution. In telling the story of the wider public and the museum, Kistler shines a light on 19th-century attitudes towards class, education, imperialism, and public spaces that still haunt us today.