ABSTRACT
On 17 May 1899, Queen Victoria, making her last public appearance, laid the foundation stone for a magnificent extension to the South Kensington Museum. This chapter argues that key social, political and aesthetic developments of the period find expression in the history of the museum. Speaking in very broad terms, the mid-Victorian period can surely still be seen as a moment of ascendancy for middle-class interests. Henry Cole, a quintessential mid-Victorian figure, born in 1808, looms large in this chapter in his later role as the first director, or 'general superintendent' of the South Kensington Museum. The display of colonial objects at South Kensington, culminating in 1886 with the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, marks the dominance of a protectionist and imperialist attitude. In many ways the character of the South Kensington Museum was closer to the Great Exhibition's extraordinary melange of the commercial and didactic than it was to the great art museum into which it was eventually transformed.
