ABSTRACT
In his Principles of Museum Administration , published in 1895, George Brown Goode, Director of the U.S. National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, argued that the furtherance of what he referred to as ‘the . . . Museum idea’ would be inseparable from the museum’s ongoing association ‘with the continuance of modern civilisation, by means of which those sources of enjoyment which were formerly accessible to the rich only, are now, more and more, placed in the possession and ownership of all the people (an adaptation of what Jevons has called “the principle of the multiplication of utility”), with the result that objects which were formerly accessible only to the wealthy, and seen by a very small number of people each year, are now held in common ownership and enjoyed by hundreds of thousands’ (Brown Goode, 1895: 72). In thus proposing a programmeme for the museum’s future development, Goode also provided that programmeme with a philosophical anchorage in that tradition of radical social reform which had its roots in English utilitarianism.
