In 1871 Heinrich Schliemann announced his discovery of the mythical city of Troy, previously known only through the writings of Homer, at the site of Hisarlık in modern Turkey. From 1877 to 1881 a selection of the finds, including Schliemann's so-called treasure of Priam, were exhibited at London's South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum). This volume, which extends the final chapter of B.'s Ph.D. thesis into five beautifully illustrated and immensely readable parts, explores the vision of Troy encountered at the temporary exhibition. It considers how contemporary audiences negotiated Schliemann's objects alongside readings of Homer's Iliad and their pre-existing expectations of the heroic past. It also shows how the site of Troy became key in debating ‘the central questions of nineteenth-century archaeology: imagining European origins; exploring the roots of religion and myth; tracing the beginnings of art; and questioning dating systems’ (p. 5). Although much ink has already been spilled over Schliemann and the site of Troy, B.'s contribution nevertheless fills a gap by highlighting the impact of this seldom-studied temporary exhibition.

The first part of B.'s volume is contextual and motivational in nature. It introduces the character of Schliemann and his excavations, before arguing that Troy is an apt case study ‘for thinking about what fascinates us about the past and questioning the methods we use to understand it’ (p. 16). In what follows, a gradually expanding view is taken of both the exhibition and its nineteenth-century context. Part 2 examines the exhibition on a micro-scale, reconstructing its layout and displays as well as the rhetorical tactics used by Schliemann to convince his audience of the supposedly ‘neutral and scientific’ evidence that linked his finds to Homer's Troy (p. 58). Although this part features some chapters that are more descriptive (e.g. Chapter 4, which reconstructs the exhibition case by case), these are so engagingly presented that the reader never becomes bored. Some tentative but reasoned suggestions are made about the information given on the (now lost) labels: later, in Chapter 11, B. finds it likely that the human skulls featured in the exhibition were described as ‘Aryan’, given the regularity with which this information was presented in press reports (p. 168). Part 3 looks beyond the four walls of the exhibition, considering its cultural impact on nineteenth-century Britain, as evidenced by the reuse of its material in art, comedy and home design. Part 4 is broader still: it is concerned with wider questions that were of interest to nineteenth-century audiences, on which Schliemann's version of Troy was brought to bear. This includes issues of race science, archaeological chronology and the Homeric Question. Part 5 investigates Schliemann's legacy, discussing how he influenced the ways in which prominent archaeologists like Jane Harrison and Arthur Evans communicated with non-specialist audiences. The book concludes by showing how the exhibition's key notion of contrasting myths with reality is still highly relevant to the ways in which museums attract audiences today.

B.'s volume convincingly achieves its goal of demonstrating how much can be gained from considering temporary exhibitions and is to be commended for its accessible, engaging style, but it is not without weaknesses. The most notable is the absence of a critical discussion of who precisely comprises ‘the public’ to which B. frequently refers. Chapter 2 appropriately problematises Schliemann's assertion that the pre-South Kensington displays of his finds at his home in Athens and at the Athenian Bank were open for ‘“all Athenians”’ to visit (p. 36), but does not explicitly interrogate who likely comprised the ‘broader public’ (p. 38) that was able to access the exhibition in London.

This ‘broader public’ is largely assumed to share uniform views that are directly reflected in contemporary newspaper commentaries. The public's component parts are only analysed when B.'s sources make important distinctions explicit. For instance, in Chapter 9 an article from The Illustrated London News is used to explain the different degrees of scepticism over Schliemann's claims that were deemed appropriate for different viewers. Based on their readings of Homer, male visitors to the exhibition were expected to interrogate the Homeric Question, whereas women were thought to merely enjoy ‘the gleam of the jewellery’ (p. 147) and indulge in fantastical imaginings of Homer's Troy. B. then contextualises this, stating that ‘few [women] had access to the publications and learned societies where the debate about Schliemann was happening’ (p. 148). This statement could have led (but sadly did not) to a deeper discussion of the composition of the exhibition's public audience and how their interpretations of the material might have differed. It is an approach reminiscent of museum visitor studies research, such as R.F. Miles and A.F. Tout, ‘Outline of a Technology for Effective Science Exhibits’, in E. Hooper-Greenhill, The Educational Role of the Museum (1994), where the active role taken by museum users in interpreting objects was acknowledged, but the underpinning conception of a largely undifferentiated ‘public’ remained. B. demonstrates an awareness of subsequent work on the importance of an individual's socio-cultural backgrounds, education and prior experiences on their interpretation of museum objects, likely referring to (although not explicitly referencing) the work of Hooper-Greenhill, but never fully interrogates the idea that the exhibition was ‘open to many interpretive communities’ (p. 8). A dedicated, more critical analysis of who likely formed the exhibition's ‘public’ would have been welcome.

Although not described explicitly as such, B. does discuss a few distinct interpretative communities, which provides some of the most nuanced and stimulating analysis of the volume. Of particular interest is the case study of the North Otago Times, a New Zealand newspaper that B. describes as being unusually appreciative of the ‘freshness and creativity’ (p. 122) of the design of the objects from Troy. This is explained by the fact that a kind of ‘“noble savage”’ (ibid.) narrative surrounding the Trojans was analogous with how contemporary New Zealanders viewed their own indigenous Māori peoples, ‘as a noble, defeated people with the potential for further development’ (p. 123).

While by no means her main focus, another praiseworthy element of B.'s book is the way in which she deals with reproductions, which are key in making arguments about ‘the place of Trojan archaeology in the public imagination’ (p. 99). B. discusses Hews and Co. of Cambridge's pottery replicas of vessels found at Troy, which were marketed towards Victorian ladies, who could paint them to suit their own tastes (pp. 101–2). This convincingly substantiates B.'s argument about how Schliemann's objects did not live up to classical imaginings of how Troy might have looked, driving viewers to incorporate it into contemporary design only in ‘happily anachronistic’ (p. 113) ways. In so doing, B.'s work aligns with the current replication turn in scholarship, showing how replicas contribute to the ‘biographies’ (S.M. Foster et al., ‘The Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Replicas for Object Cultural Biographies’, JVC 19 [2014]) or ‘itineraries’ (R.A. Joyce and S.D. Gillespie, Things in Motion [2015]) of their original objects. However, when discussing Arthur Evans's exhibitions of (albeit heavily restored) copies of finds from Knossos, B. makes the pejorative statement that viewers’ appreciation of their beauty was ‘all the more remarkable’ given their status as reproductions (p. 190). This is more characteristic of traditional assessments of reproductions as objects devoid of aura than of current discourses, which emphasise their potential for evoking meaningful responses as objects in their own right. Nevertheless, this volume is, overall, a useful contribution to scholarship on Schliemann and a highly enjoyable read.