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Museums: Leisure between State and Distinction
In Britain, projects like the Great Exhibition of 1851 (the first of many world
fairs in Europe) and the complex of museums subsequently founded around South
Kensington demonstrated a more open and cacophonous regime of leisure. 43 A
general public had been invited to partake of the moral benefits offered by the mix
of amusements, educational displays and trade fair stands at Crystal Palace,
support for which was found in an English social-democratic tradition that willed
the encounter between the masses and higher pleasures. 44 Figures such as John
Stuart Mill, William Morris, and John Ruskin all believed in the transformative
effects of art and the purposeful function of culture in elevating the moral status
of the worker; while reformers such as Joseph Hume argued strenuously for
museums and galleries to widen their accessibility and thereby improve the lives
of the lower orders.
Late-nineteenth-century museums and exhibitions, then, were conceived on
instrumental lines: not only to broaden public education and raise the profile of
British design and manufacturing, but also to specify norms of individual conduct.
Indeed, throughout Europe, as nation-states expanded and sought to extend their
control over society, they increasingly designated norms of individual behavior
by example and enforcement. Increasing daily bonds were forged between citizen
and state in areas such as education, welfare, and policing. States no longer wanted
to merely educate, they needed to govern the populace, particularly that section
of the populace which could pose a threat to their new-found security.
Museums were, to this extent, institutions which fitted neatly into the project of
what Gramsci called the “ethical state” as it sought to “raise the great mass of the
population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which
corresponded to the needs of the productive forces for development.” 45 Like other
“improving” spheres such as libraries and public parks, museums were enlisted as
instruments of social management which, as Bennett has explained, exemplified
a new form of “governmental” power. This aimed “at producing a citizenry which,
rather than needing to be externally and coercively directed, would increasingly
monitor and regulate its own conduct.” 46
Statements on the moral efficacy of museums from the founders of these
institutions constituted the museum as a tool of public enculturation. As “antidotes
to brutality and vice,” as Henry Cole was to put it in 1874, museums were believed
to improve the moral health of the subordinate classes by improving their “inner
selves,” their habits, manners, and beliefs. 47 Hence, the value of rational programmes
of education in science and history museums in the nineteenth century
rested on their promotion of forms of pedagogy and noble feelings. In Britain, a
visit to the museum was considered to be a “rational recreation” which might lift
popular taste, improve the industriousness of the population and help prevent
disorder and rebellion – especially in the wake of Chartism and the Luddite
disturbances of the 1810s. 48
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