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      Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914
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      Book

      Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914

      DOI link for Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914

      Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914 book

      Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914

      DOI link for Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914

      Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914 book

      ByKate Hill
      Edition 1st Edition
      First Published 2005
      eBook Published 23 December 2016
      Pub. Location London
      Imprint Routledge
      DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315258713
      Pages 192
      eBook ISBN 9781315258713
      Subjects Humanities, Museum and Heritage Studies
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      Hill, K. (2005). Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914 (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315258713

      ABSTRACT

      The nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of museums in towns and cities across Britain. As well as providing a focus for collections of artifacts and a place of educational recreation, this work argues that municipal museums had a further, social role. In a situation of rapid urban growth, allied to social and cultural changes on a scale hitherto unknown, it was inevitable that traditional class and social hierarchies would come under enormous pressure. As a result, urban elites began to look to new methods of controlling and defining the urban environment. One such manifestation of this was the growth of the public museum. In earlier centuries museums were the preserve of learned and respectable minority, yet by the end of the nineteenth century one of the principal rationales of museums was the education, or 'improvement', of the working classes. In the control of museums too there was a corresponding shift away from private aristocratic leadership, toward a middle-class civic directorship and a growing professional body of curators. This work is in part a study of the creation of professional authority and autonomy by museum curators. More importantly though, it is about the stablization of middle-class identities by the end of the nineteenth century around new hierarchies of cultural capital. Public museums were an important factor in constructing the identity and authority of certain groups with access to, and control over, them. By examining urban identities through the cultural lens of the municipal museum, we are able to reconsider and better understand the subtleties of nineteenth-century urban society.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      chapter 1|19 pages

      Introduction: Interpreting Museums

      chapter 2|16 pages

      Negotiating the New Urban Environment

      chapter 3|17 pages

      The Public Museum in the Nineteenth Century

      chapter 4|16 pages

      The Social Characteristics of Municipal Museums

      chapter 5|21 pages

      Reading the Objects

      chapter 6|35 pages

      Decoding the Displays and Layout

      chapter 7|18 pages

      Consuming the Museum: Museum Visitors

      chapter 8|9 pages

      Conclusion

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