ABSTRACT
When Liverpool public museum opened in 1860, William Ewart MP declared it would have ‘a permanent civilising effect’ on the lower orders of Victorian society. Ewart’s comments epitomised a widespread presumption that museums were instruments for educating and uplifting members of the industrial working class. However, the reality seldom matched the rhetoric. As this chapter demonstrates, nineteenth-century museums in practice remained bastions of middle-class tastes and privilege, with various barriers restricting access to them by other demographic groups – not least the fact that museums tended to remain shut during the hours when working-class adults were likely to be at their place of work. This situation did not go unnoticed or unopposed, though. In the 1880s and 1890s, there was a concerted (and partially successful) public campaign to persuade Liverpool Museum to open during the evenings and on Sundays. The chapter contends that ensuing debates about Sunday/evening openings offer a rare glimpse into the behaviour and lived experiences of working-class visitors who, as Kate Hill has observed, typically remain ‘the great unknown’ for scholars of Victorian museums. In doing so, the analysis documents instances when visitors were seen to circumvent and challenge bourgeois expectations of ideal museumgoers, thereby refining interpretations of museums’ ‘disciplinary’ character forwarded in Tony Bennett’s influential The Birth of the Museum (1995).
