The importance of museums as civic institutions in the nineteenth century has been repeatedly emphasized by historians. During this “golden age” of museum building, the Free Museums Act (1845) allowed municipalities of over ten thousand individuals to adopt a rate (1/2d. on the pound) in order to support a free public museum. In this book, Kate Hill examines several museums founded or funded under this act, discussing their administration, displays, and use by visitors.

Cultural studies literature, led most recently by Tony Bennett, has closely examined the role of museums in relationships of power and governance. Hill's study, while objecting to Bennett's claims for the museum as civilizer of the working classes, amply demonstrates the links between the provision of civic governance and the provision of “culture” in the form of the museum. The book is part of a series titled “Historical Urban Studies,” which includes books on urban planning, public health, demographics, and local government. Hill's book fits well among this list, not least of all because many of the same individuals were often responsible for providing both practical and cultural amenities within a town. In the minds of their promoters, a museum could be as important in cultivating a healthy and civilized town as a hospital or a courtroom.

Hill's aim is to show that municipal museums cannot be treated as identical to their metropolitan counterparts, on which much museum history has been based. Municipal museums were more affected by local concerns and reflect the character of the towns and people who supported them. A museum, she remarks, “may be seen as a public story which towns, and primarily the middle classes, told about themselves” (15). Hill sets out to investigate exactly what this story was, who wrote it, and for whom. She is critical of authors who have based their answers to these questions on rhetoric alone and duly produces material describing not ideal, but actual museums. In the process, Hill has embraced a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches, including analyzing architecture and display techniques, elucidating visitor and patron demographics, tracing the sources of collections, and examining the politics of museum governance. While this is admirable, it occasionally sacrifices depth for breadth.

An overlarge portion of this book is devoted to discussing context and current literature. Thus, we do not really reach the evidence for her argument until the fifty-third page of a book that is only 174 pages (including notes and bibliography). This is unfortunate, as it is obvious that Hill has amassed a great deal of information relating to the characters of each of the museums she discusses. This is most apparent in the two chapters focusing on museum objects and their display. Hill has traced the origins of several collections and provides information about the types of collections each museum received and their donors. She observes the tendency of certain localities (Liverpool) to attract systematic collections and others (Preston) to attract those of a souvenir or fetishistic nature. This seems an important point, but unfortunately it is simply attributed to the “very local and unspecialised donor base” (x) in Preston. While this is likely to be true, it would be interesting to know how curators attempted to reinterpret these collections for public purposes or whether the form of the local museum and the habits of local collectors influenced each other in any way.

Another striking feature of each museum Hill examines is the relatively small range of individuals who were responsible for the bulk of the collections. Because of municipal museums’ precarious financial status, a donor could have significant influence. Indeed, one is struck by the way in which the “public” museums were only marginally more public than the private cabinets that they had largely replaced. In many cases, they were simply substantial private collections rehoused in public premises. Hill's evidence that their use was primarily for the middle classes even further reduces their claims to being “public.” Instead, they became places in which the rising middle-class elite could unite “the best traditions of aristocratic patronage with modern notions of universality, democracy and education for all” (57).

In order to understand the ways in which the audience was addressed in the museum, Hill analyses their layouts and displays. Bennett has used the term “disciplinary” to describe museum layouts that forced visitors along a prescribed path, rather than allowing them to wander at will. Hill claims that such an overt attempt to control visitors is not apparent in the layouts of the municipal museums she studies. This claim is well-supported by floor plans and by diagrams showing possible paths through the museum. In addition some interesting points regarding the evolutionary character of the displays are raised. Hill points out that a narrative of progressive development is often followed, even if not overtly so, with zoological exhibits leading naturally into exhibits of “primitive” peoples and on through Western civilization. The influence of the various departments, particularly the natural history department, on the conception of the others is striking. Hill highlights the transition from a focus on collecting scientific specimens into ethnographic and art objects, each approached with a classificatory scheme.

To close the circle of understanding the municipal museum, a discussion of visitors is important. Unfortunately, evidence of their reactions to and use of the museums is, as Hill admits, scarce. Thus this chapter makes use of the accounts of curators and middle-class museum supporters showing that, despite a policy of inclusion and a professed interest in educating the working classes, the municipal museum most often served the middle classes. Only the introduction of Sunday or evening openings really allowed the working classes to visit museums, and these reforms were adopted with great reluctance. Hill shows that those working-class visitors who did attend often used the museum in ways which their middle- and upper-middle-class patrons disapproved of. This account is not nearly as rich as the previous two chapters, and further information would be required to draw any significant conclusions.

This book should certainly be of interest to historians of the nineteenth-century town in that it demonstrates the extent to which the character of a town and of its leaders can be found in the development of the local museum. Museologists and historians of science interested in museums will welcome the new perspective that this book offers in comparison with the large body of research on metropolitan institutions. Each of the museums discussed seems to offer opportunity for further study, and it may be hoped that other authors will be inspired to probe the rich repository of town life that the municipal museum clearly is.