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Manchester Museum Object Biography By Samuel Williams The Manchester Museum is an esteemed institution whose roots extend back to an early 1800s cabinet of curiosity, and through its life, it has developed to become the world-renowned establishment that it is today. In this essay, I plan to discuss the numerous social changes and interactions that have led to this development, and resulted in its international status. This is an important piece of work as all too often the focus of museums is on the objects held within, whilst the institutions and buildings themselves are left unconsidered. Therefore, with my study I am keen to display the intricate nature of the Manchester Museum’s history, and the fascinating social interactions and ideologies that have gone into its creation and growth, and thus hopefully encourage further publicity of the ignored lives of such institutions which have become cemented parts of today’s society. To this end, I am going to utilise the method of an object biography to tell the story of the Manchester Museum, for reasons I shall explain at the start of my thesis. I will then begin by setting out the context that crucially facilitated the birth of the establishment. Following on from this, I will briefly show the early history of the Museum institution, as this is equally important in its expansion. I will then finally delve into the analysis of the many different elements that ultimately made the Museum what it is today, such as class struggles, differing ideas of its purpose and layout, as well as the impressive architecture of the Museum, as it is all too important to remember the materiality of the building. All of these aspects of the Museum’s history are seemingly unconnected, however, they have become inextricably intertwined, and I aim to display this intricate linkage whilst allocating them individual areas in my thesis for means of legibility. In order to assist my analysis, I have consulted Sam Alberti’s detailed work on the Manchester Museum, as well as Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian study on museums in general. I have also trawled the archives of the Manchester Natural History Society and Manchester Museum, and interviewed the Manchester Museum’s Curator of Community Exhibitions, Andrea Winn, in order to learn more about, and discuss the details of the Museum’s history. ‘As people and objects gather time, movement and change, they are constantly transformed, and these transformations of person and object are tied up with each other’ (Godson and Marshall, 1999: 169). This, according to Godson and Marshall, is the central idea of objects having lives, hence why they require biographies to be written about them. The use of an object biography is therefore vital in investigating a subject such as the Manchester Museum, as social interactions were, and still are crucial in its on-going development. Hoskins’ (1998) work in Sumba, Indonesia with the Kodi found that she ‘could not collect the histories of objects and life histories of persons separately’ (Hoskins, 1998: 2), displaying the importance that objects and buildings play within our lives, so much so that they become inseparably intertwined. This is demonstrated by her study of the metaphor of a ‘green bottle’, which came to ‘[associate] a new form of mechanical violence with the absolute destructiveness of Western consumer objects’ (Hoskins, 1998: 162), showing how objects can become laced with
meaning through social construction, and that such ideas can be used to represent whole societies. Again, this proves that an object biography is the most effective way to study the Museum, as the institution and building itself have come to represent the context within which it was facilitated; it draws together all the social and political circumstances surrounding its birth, as well as those of its development. These are integral to it, and it wouldn’t be the same without them. In the 19th^ Century, Manchester was at the centre of global cotton trade. ‘90 per cent of Britain’s cotton industry was concentrated in the smoky Manchester region’ (Mosley, 2001: 2), and consequently, the city amassed a great wealth and became a hugely industrial area, with the sobriquet ‘Cottonopolis’. The industrial focus of the city led to a vast influx of people coming to work in the mills and warehouses, resulting in the renowned opinion of Manchester as ‘the chimney of the world’ (Mosley, 2001: 21). A large concentration of people living and working in crowded and unhygienic areas was the perfect backdrop for class struggle, proved by the fact that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto here in 1847, with the expectation that a working class revolution was imminent. Not only was there a struggle with the lower classes, but also with the upper classes and landed gentry of England, who ‘looked down on the new money of the industrialists, but very soon began to realise that actually, this … was a force to be reckoned with’ (Winn, 2016). This resulted in the new middle class of Manchester striving to prove their sophistication through development, with a famous example being the Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. In five months, this grandiose structure, opened by Queen Victoria and filled with thousands of statues and works of art, received 1.5 million visitors, and thus it achieved its aim – ‘Manchester’s place as a cultural centre was confirmed’ (Kidd, 1993 : 77 ). The Art Treasures Exhibition, however, was a very unique structure; ‘Grecian and Gothic monuments alike emphasised the cultural sophistication of Manchester’s elite’ (Alberti, 2009: 13), as they contrasted with their industrial setting. This environment of class struggle and industrial revolution all fed into the birth of the Museum. In 1814, a manufacturer in the cotton business named John Leigh Philips died, and his cabinet of curiosity was sold to Thomas Heywood Robinson. Along with nine other merchants, Robinson then used this collection to form the base of the Manchester Natural History Society. As their collections grew, the Society raised money to build their own premises, and 1835, they opened their own museum on Peter Street, an area that was ‘giving way to institutions that would comprise the cultural counterpoint to the industrial city’ (Alberti, 2009: 13). Even at this early stage, the positioning of the Museum clearly demonstrates the enriching nature intended for the institution, as it was clearly part of a plan to civilise the working class population. This was displayed by the Natural History Society’s decision to change their rules of access to collections, now allowing children, Figure 1: The Art Treasures Exhibition (Source: Manchester Archives Plus)
The decision to design the Museum as a civic monument strongly links into Manchester’s intent on displaying their cultural sophistication, influenced heavily by their feeling of superiority as a result of the city’s supremacy in the cotton trade. Such a sense of cultural and global dominance is demonstrated by the design on the ceiling the Great Hall of the town hall, built at the height of the British Empire. On entering the grandiose room, the ceiling lists the names of four countries; Australia, Canada, India and West Indies. Moving through the room, this format continues, listing other countries from the British Empire, such as South Africa, New Zealand and America. On approaching the end of the Hall, the list addresses British cities, such as Leeds, London and Edinburgh, and then finally ends with Manchester and Salford at the end-most point of the room. This design is a clear presentation that Manchester considered itself as the top of this global hierarchy, and as the centre of the British Empire due to their presence as the industrial powerhouse of Britain. Yet again, this municipal feeling of dominance fed into the city’s ambition to demonstrate their cultural value to Britain and the world. The Museum was central to this aim, and it was used as a part of a game of cultural one-upmanship. In the time that building of the Museum began, just under a mile down the road, the Whitworth Institute, comprised of an art gallery and public park, was in development. The City Art Gallery had also just been assigned its civic status in the Town Centre, and Liverpool too showed off their newly built Walker Art Gallery (Alberti, 2009: 23). Keen to best these cultural competitors, Alfred Waterhouse was commissioned once more, and he more than succeeded. Outdoing even his own design of Owens College, ‘[the] museum was even more monumental, with dense tri-partite fenestration and full height buttresses… Steep red pyramidal roofs topped the façade, and a nine- storey tower provided the visual centre-point of the College’ (Alberti, 2009: 23). Using the gothic style that was popular at this time, Waterhouse cemented the Museum as a facet of Manchester’s growing cultural network, and with the addition of a tower, made the Museum visible from all around. The idea that the Museum was built in order to better these other cultural institutions shows the Figure 6: Ceiling of the Grand Hall (Source: Manchester City Council) Figure 7: Manchester Museum Tower (Source: Author)
ambitious nature of the middle class of Manchester, as well as the city’s determination, always striving to be superior. However, the museum was not just the result of a society eager to be culturally superior. It was also born in a time where ‘owners and philanthropists wanted to actually educate the people of Manchester as well, which is where the museums and galleries come in’ (Winn, 2016). This is reflected by the thinking of Thomas Coglan Horsfall who ‘passionately believed in the redemptive power of art’ (Eagles, 2009), and was keen to bring it to the poorest members of society, and use it for an enlightening purpose. This notion was not only related to the Manchester Art Gallery, but also linked to other public exhibitions, namely the Museum. On the exterior, the intention of these philanthropists was to better the lives of their workers, though strongly corresponding with this was also an aim to have an element of control over their work force - ‘if they’re spending time in the museum and getting educated, they’re not spending their time in the pub getting drunk’ (Winn, 2016). This was exactly the reason for the building of public parks and other cultural institutions, and was also the incentive for making entry to places like these free of charge. The current Manchester Museum has never had an entry charge, and this was likely a large motivating factor for that. These institutions were not only used to control what the workforce did in their leisure time, but also played to the Marxist theory of false consciousness, in that it served to distract the workers from their otherwise miserable lives, as they were exploited, living and working in poor, crowded conditions. This shows that the Museum was built not just as a part of a period of cultural improvement of this ambitious industrial city, but also served to keep the working population subdued, in a setting that was ripe for class disputes. This seems a perfect point to segue my analysis into the topic of access to the Museum, which links into that of class struggle around the Museum setting. In the early days of the Manchester Natural History Society, entry was very exclusive; limited to paid gentlemen members, their guests and honorary members, such as scholarly gentlemen (Alberti, 2009: 17). This displays the notion that cultural institutions such as the Museum were originally intended just for higher members of society, and chiefly men. However, in the Society’s rules of 1852, it was noted that ‘[the] Council is empowered to open the Museum and Rooms, to Ladies and Strangers, on payment of One Shilling for each admission’ (MSftPoNH, 1852: 12), as well as schoolchildren, meaning that this was now to become a forum for the mixing of socio-economic groups. This was likely in an effort to reform the ‘lower orders’ of society through fraternising with the higher members of the social hierarchy, leading to the claim that ‘[museums] were … political instruments, machines for making meaning and imposing particular behaviours on their visitors’ (Alberti, 2009: 1 - 2). Such an idea has been thoroughly studied by Bennett (1995: 6), who looks at the museum as place where ‘cultural artefacts [can] be refashioned in ways that … aimed at reshaping general norms of social behaviour,’ and it could be argued that this purpose was very much intended by the middle class creators of the Manchester Museum. Both of these claims are very focussed on the idea of the Museum being used as a stage for the control and modification of the working people of Manchester; a notion very influenced by Foucault, who argued that
the determination and the lengths the Museum went to in order to teach younger generations. The educative purpose of the Museum was not short lived. In fact, it is still very much active today, with a 1979 Policy Review of the Museum (Manchester Museum, 1979: 5) counting their collections as being ‘amongst the most important outside the London national museums’, and highlighting their ‘capacity to educate and interest the general public and visiting schoolchildren.’ The development of this programme of education within the Museum shows a progression from the original institution’s sole intention to control the working population of the city to a genuine interest in teaching its visitors. Today, it contains around 6 million objects, displaying the wonders of natural history, life on Earth, cultures from around the globe, and also informing us about contemporary issues facing the planet, such as climate change (as shown, for example, by Figure 8), and how we can tackle this together (Manchester Museum, 1998). This proves that its educative function is up-to-date and still as effective as an institution as it was at the time of its formation. The architecture and layout of the Manchester Museum is central to all of the issues I have tackled above, as if they were physically fabricated into the foundations of the building. The choice of Alfred Waterhouse as the architect of the Museum was significant, as it was arguably informed largely by his design of Strangeways prison. His idea for the jail was born out of the panopticon design, in which all areas of the prison can be seen from a central hub, encouraging self-regulation as a result of constant surveillance. This was important, as a similar design was desired in the Museum, so that all areas were visible at all times, thus ‘regulating the conduct of their visitors, … in ways that [were] both unobstructive and self-perpetuating’ (Bennett, 1995: 6). This Figure 8: ‘Resources’ case in Living Worlds Gallery (Source: Author) Figure 9: Strangeways ‘Panopticon’ aerial view (Source: David Goddard) Figure 10: Strangeways Interior (Source: DBX Acoustics) Figure 11: Manchester Museum Original Building (Source: Author)
resulted in the original building of the museum having architecture that was identical to that of Strangeways, as demonstrated by Figures 10 and 1 1 , but also in the linear structure of the extensions and galleries, which enables one to see from one end of the museum to the other, in some cases. This displays the material manifestation of Foucault’s idea that power and control are always present, which results in the practice of visitors wandering the galleries predominantly in silence, as we are aware of our constant surveillance and scrutiny. The Museum’s architecture is also vital in it’s role of an educational hub. This is displayed in the opinion of W.A. Grimshaw, who believed that ‘“[the] most important feature of the visits to the museum is the “atmosphere”. The entrance into the “hallowed halls” has an incalculable effect on the children’ (Manchester Museum, 1939: 2). This demonstrates that the Museum building facilitated effective learning for schoolchildren, and therefore was even more effective in achieving its educative aim. Sketches by Thomas Huxley also displayed the aim to have ‘public sections’ and private ‘curator sections’, which would enable ‘the accessibility of all objects contained in the museum to the curator and to scientific students, without interference with the public or by the public’ (Huxley, 1896: 126). This displays the intention of incorporating the educative side of the institution into the architecture of the building; however, this did not seem to come to fruition, showing instead that the Manchester Museum and all of its displays should be equally open to all of its visitors. Such an idea, if anything, displays its educative intent even more so, as it suggests that there was a belief that all of its visitors deserved to be enlightened. The Museum has undergone many changes in display, and the present-day layout is remarkably different from that of its origin, both of which adhere to Bennett’s (1995: 6) suggestion that ‘their visitors’ experiences are realized via their physical movement through an exhibitionary space’, and therefore guided them architecturally through the gallery in a way that was intended by the Museum. In Dawkins’ original design, ‘[the] visitors’ journey began on the ground floor with mineralogy, which was presented as the bedrock, literally, of the Museum and therefore of life on earth’ (Alberti, 2009: 32). From here, they were effectively guided chronologically through stratigraphical time on the ground and first floor, and then ran through the evolution of all sorts of creatures in separate areas of the Museum, such as mammals, reptiles and birds, with a small section designated to botany. However, the contemporary Museum relies Figure 12: Huxley’s sketch displaying public and curator divisions (Source: Manchester Museum Records)
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