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Nick Prior
43. The South Kensington Museum was opened in 1857 and offered extended opening
hours to maximize working-class attendance. Its success is indicated by the recording of
over 15 million visits between 1857 and 1883, nearly half of which were made in the
evenings, the most popular time for working-class visitors: Altick, Shows of London.
44. Paul Greenhalgh, “Education, Entertainment and Politics: Lessons from the Great
International Exhibitions,” in Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museology (London: Reaktion,
1989).
45. Antonio Gramsci, Selections of Cultural Writings, edited by G. Forgacs and G. Smith
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 258.
46. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, p. 8.
47. Henry Cole, quoted in Simon Tait, Palaces of Discovery: The Changing World of
Britain’s Museums (London: Quiller, 1989), p. 9.
48. It is no accident that the fear of popular disorder attended the wake of unsettlement
on the continent, the rise of working-class movements and the semantic shift in the word
“mass” to connote “mob” and “unruly crowd”: Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary
of Culture and Society (London: Croom Helm, 1976).
49. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, p. 95.
50. Ibid., p. 47.
51. Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938), reprinted in Richard LeGates and
Frederic Stout (eds), The City Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 189–97.
52. Greenhalgh, “Education, Entertainment and Politics”; Peter Bailey, Leisure and
Class in Victorian England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
53. Altick, Shows of London; Georg Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in
On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald Levine (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1971).
54. Seth Koven, “The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing,” in
Sherman and Rogoff (eds), Museum Culture, pp. 22–48.
55. Ibid., p. 38.
56. Trodd, “Culture, Class, City.”
57. Colin Trodd, “Being Seen: Looking at the National Gallery in Mid-Victorian
London,” unpublished conference paper, ESRC Museum and Society Seminar, University
of Keele, 1998, p. 13.
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