Like the book and the scientific periodical, the museum has become simultaneously an object of research and a resource for it: a palimpsest of scientific and cultural activity and a treasure house of objects, each with its own biography – a case already well made by the author in an important Focus section on ‘Museums and the history of science’ (Isis (2005) 96, pp. 559–571). Moreover, as Jim Bennett, writing from the perspective of ‘historians of science who ply their trade in museums’, reminds us there, the museum gallery offers ‘a public platform for the history of science’ with which we would be wise to engage (Isis (2005) 96, pp. 602–608). Here, the institution, no longer the subject of either deferential study or postcolonial angst, but a provincial ‘prism’ through which to view and interrogate broader cultural developments, slips into the subtitle.

Samuel Alberti unerringly demonstrates what a rich prospect such a prism can offer. As for platforms, few look as precarious as that depicted on the cover of this excellent monograph: ‘an unidentified man (probably the taxidermist Harry Brazenor) riding the newly installed sperm whale, 1898’. The skeleton of the whale, suspended from the rafters by a tangle of ropes and pulleys, is being manoeuvred into place by an expressionless man, in flat cap and shirt-sleeves, perched on its beak; above, two be-capped boys peer cheekily through the railings; below, the museum's collection of antlers is already spilling onto every spare piece of wall. It is not only an eye-catching image (one of many), but also a pertinent introduction to several of the book's major themes. Although necessarily a study of objects and their journeys to and through the museum, Nature and Culture is above all else an analysis of human agency: Alberti's subjects are the generations of unsung subalterns and visitors as much as the directors, curators, and donors who have left more obvious marks. Their mundane but highly skilled routines of cleaning, conserving and cataloguing and their memories of mummies, moon-rock and terrifying porters are integral, but too often neglected, elements of any museum's history.

In the first half of the book it is the directors and other decision-makers who predominate, as Alberti maps the topography of knowledge they first constructed and then constantly reconfigured during the hundred years from the Manchester Museum's opening on its Oxford Road site in 1890. Two decades earlier, the newly founded Owens College had taken control of the collections of the struggling Manchester Natural History Society and the (more robust) Manchester Geological Society, and appointed the palaeontologist and archaeologist William Boyd Dawkins as curator. In collaboration with the architect, Alfred Waterhouse, Dawkins tried to build his conception of nature as a linear progress ‘into the very fabric’ of the monumental, neo-Gothic building, just as Richard Owen had done with Waterhouse at the British Museum (Natural History). Dawkins's conception and consequent arrangement was, however, very different from South Kensington's encyclopedic galleries of comparative anatomy which branched off a central hall. In Manchester, the visitor would be routed through a series of relatively sparse galleries arranged in evolutionary sequence, based initially on chronology and then on (decreasing) complexity of form: from geology on the ground floor to the archaeology of human prehistory, thence to ‘a systematic survey of the Animal Kingdom’ which, on the third floor, finally reached invertebrates – and ‘almost an afterthought’, as was too often the case, botany (pp. 32–33). Dawkins's successors – for the next four decades all zoologists – would find it difficult to redesign this unusually coherent vision which, in more than one sense, had been set in stone. But that did not prevent them trying, and the history of their successes and frustrations (by a host of practical and contingent factors) makes fascinating reading: over time, the coherence fragmented and disappeared.

Central to Alberti's analysis is the development of scientific disciplines and the construction of boundaries between them through the medium of material culture. While zoology would topple geology from the pinnacle of the museum's intellectual hierarchy by directorial diktat, it would in turn be sidelined by developments largely beyond the museum's control. Intellectual shifts in the life sciences which increasingly privileged laboratory-based subjects eventually made its natural-history collections redundant. The final act in this dislocation of pedagogy from the collections came in the 1950s when the university rebuilt its science departments on the other side of Oxford Road but rejected the museum's pleas to participate in their removal and expansion. Significantly, Alberti observes, curators and professors stopped sharing a tea-room. Meanwhile, the founders’ policy of an exclusive focus on natural history and prehistoric cultures (fossils and flints) had soon been disrupted by the Museum Committee's inability to resist a wealthy donor's egyptology collection, sweetened as it was by funds for a dedicated new building. This opened the door, in the 1920s, to the addition of significant classical and oriental archaeological and ethnological collections, thereby catering to the popular fascination with Egyptian and classical excavations and helping to promote archaeology and anthropology as distinct subjects in the university.

The university's ‘loss’ was the city's gain. Since 1891 the museum had been partly funded by Manchester Corporation, and after the war it revitalized its displays to attract a bigger public audience from the city and surrounding region. Not only did this mean more imaginative displays of objects, improved labelling, illustrated guidebooks, lectures and ‘blockbuster’ temporary exhibitions, but the museum also found ways to involve more volunteers and (fortunately for the historian) commissioned a programme of visitor research. None of this was without its tensions, exacerbated by major changes in museum practice that inevitably affected Manchester. These included professionalization, which initially had the doleful consequence of turning the museum (apart from secretarial and cleaning staff) into an all-male preserve, and reorganization around specialist functions such as conservation, design and education.

As Alberti remarks, the Manchester Museum was unique, but by no means ‘unique in its uniqueness’ (p. 2). Consequently, to achieve the comprehensive history of UK museums in the twentieth century which he advocates, we shall need equally sophisticated and insightful histories of many more unique collections of objects and people.