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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914 (Paperback)
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Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914 (Paperback)
Series: Historical Urban Studies Series
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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