ABSTRACT
Scattered throughout Britain are numerous small museums which focus on ‘life gone by’ in this or that area, island or village. Their subject matter is mostly the everyday life, at home and at work, of ‘ordinary folk’. This chapter argues that the collection and display of objects in museums, including museums of everyday life, far from being disconnected from the world of commodities, is intimately connected to it and plays an important role in its symbolic mediation. Museums of everyday life, and museums more generally, typically contain objects, often in great numbers. While ‘biographical objects’ age along with their owners, and ‘public commodities’ remain ‘youthful’, according to Hoskins and Morin, museum objects have previously aged as part of everyday lives but in the museum come to a temporal standstill. In museums of everyday life, then, objects are to some extent contrasted with the relationships that are stereotypically regarded as characteristic of ‘public commodities’.
