The history of museums of science has been dominated by the emergence of major metropolitan museums such as London's Natural History Museum and the Museum of Natural History in New York. With this collection of essays, editors Carin Berkowitz and Bernard Lightman seek to challenge this emphasis, illuminating the broader “exhibitionary complex” in which science took place. They invite us to blur the line between museums and exhibitions: considering “museums as permanent exhibitions” situates them in a much broader landscape of display and popular entertainment (1). The range of essays in the volume reflects the eclecticism of this Victorian exhibitionary complex. They examine individuals and institutions from the United States and Britain, grouped together in pairs of essays related to five themes. These pairings provide opportunities for comparison and in some cases reveal the transatlantic networks that informed developments in the history of science museums in both countries.
A central argument of the volume is that scholars need to look beyond the traditional setting of the national museum to explore where popular science took place in the mid-nineteenth century. Lightman's illuminating chapter on London's Colosseum focuses on locations with varied exhibits where science was displayed among numerous other subjects, themes, and performances. This chapter is paired through the theme “Sites of Miscelleneity” with Katherine Pandora's examination of the spectacular exhibitions of P. T. Barnum alongside Samuel Griswold Goodrich's juvenile periodical, Robert Merry's Museum, in what she calls the “vernacular sphere of science” (40). Jeremy Brooker's examination of Henry Morton, John Tyndall, and John Henry Pepper, “popularizers of science” (113), vividly describes the fascinating experiments and optical techniques used by these men and the diverse settings in which they established their reputations. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt considers academic collections in campus museums, often neglected sites in spite of the fact that in 1908 two out of three museum collections in North America were in colleges or universities (259). Only one chapter, by Pamela M. Henson on the United States National Museum, focuses on a major national museum, and in this case the focus is how its director, G. Brown Goode, realized his vision of an educational institution for the young democratic nation.
Scientific networks and the museum community within the United States and Britain and its empire are explored in several chapters. Lightman's chapter emphasizes how institutions such as the London Colosseum developed in response to each other and to the intense competition to attract audiences in the Victorian metropolis. Caroline Cornish uses the example of the Economic Botany Museum at Kew Gardens in London in order to “decenter the ‘great men’ in the narrative” and highlight the collaborative nature of creating museum displays and collections (189). In her chapter, Berkowitz seeking to reassert the position of Philadelphia-based John Leidy within the history of science, uses both letters and specimens to emphasize the collaborative, rather than competitive, nature of scientific collecting in the mid-nineteenth century. Only Brooker takes a genuinely transatlantic approach to these networks by considering how Morton, Tyndall, and Pepper negotiated their varied career paths in America in relation to one another and the latter two men's earlier work in Britain.
Many of these examples expose the tensions surrounding the development of popular science in the nineteenth century. In a fascinating study of the checkered and short-lived history of the National Repository, Iwan Rhys Morus shows how this institution, designed to celebrate artisanal knowledge, became the site of tense debate over ownership of technical expertise. These revealing arguments demonstrate how many people questioned some fundamental elements of museum-making, including explanation and transparency, in their wish to protect the power of the inventor and maker. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti's exploration of the design and construction of the Hunterian Museum shows how museum architecture “comprises not only bricks and mortar but also material and social relations” (85) and reveals the numerous compromises and improvisations inherent in museum buildings. Lukas Rieppel reexamines the controversy surrounding Albert Koch, the German showman who brought his “sea serpent” fossil, dubbed the hydrarchos, to New York in 1845 and who was subsequently exposed as a fraud. He uses this example to show how credibility, identity, and the authenticity of specimens were co-constituted and interdependent.
In sum, the volume's individual chapters provide a wealth of case studies and succeed in foregrounding the myriad sites where science was displayed and performed beyond the walls of the specialist museum. The authors adopt numerous approaches, from studies of individuals, displays, objects, and buildings to institutional histories, to deepen our understanding of the history of science on both sides of the Atlantic. Diverse strands from the chapters are necessarily woven together by John Tresch's afterword. He particularly notes how the convergence of science and empire, a lively subject in British scholarship, can inform the interpretation of the history of science in the United States before and after the Civil War, which was likewise influenced by imperial logic and expansion. The British examples are largely focused on London, with fleeting references to relationships between the metropole and regional Britain. When considering questions of nation and empire, these chapters would benefit from considering concurrent developments in Scotland, for example, as explored in Geoffrey Quilley's work. The volume nonetheless offers an original and enlightening set of essays that broaden our ideas of what constituted a “science museum” and situates the celebrated late nineteenth-century institutions in a longer history of exhibition and popular display.
