The Emergence of the Modern Museum

Jonah Siegel Siegel is Professor of English at Rutgers University and President of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. He is the author of Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition and Desire & Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art.

• PREFACE; CHRONOLOGY; INTRODUCTION; PART ONE: FROM COLLECTION TO MUSEUM; PART TWO: RATIONALIZING THE NATIONAL COLLECTIONS; GLOSSARY OF FREQUENTLY CITED COLLECTORS AND COLLECTIONS; CONTRIBUTORS AND WITNESSES; SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING; INDEX

This deftly selected anthology provides striking insights into the debates about the formation of museum collections, their social mission, class address, and their relationship to the state and empire in nineteenth-century Britain. These texts, many of them previously inaccessible, reveal in vivid language the discursive and political struggles surrounding the difficult birth of the museum in the world's first industrial nation. Today's museum curators and visitors are the heirs to these controversies-many of them still unresolved.