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finest and fullest exhibits in the old and still-stunning cabinet style – not just a room to showcase the past, but an entire building in its full integrity.’11 Long-term neglect had shifted the Natural History Museum’s purpose from an originally active scientific institution to what is now most often described as a ‘museum of a museum,’ itself an object which preserves the material history of museums. If, as Roland Barthes asserts, objects are never just ‘themselves,’ but are a form of communication, a type of social usage which is added to pure matter,’ then the physical qualities of this museum, its ‘matter,’ are keys to a series of period social usages that were largely erased while the museum languished in civic limbo.12 In order to restore the museum to its correct place in Irish history, it is necessary to disrupt the comfortable mythologies which have come to surround it.
United States, forming webs of scientific exchange through the publication of new research. Irish scientists exchanged specimens and maintained networks of correspondence with international scholars and institutions. The Royal Dublin Society and its museum comprised one of the primary hubs around which scientific activity in Ireland revolved in the nineteenth century. John Wilson Foster, through his work on the place of science in Irish cultural history, has proposed that ‘there are blind spots in our rear-view vision of Irish culture,’ episodes which have been overlooked in the creation of a coherent narrative of national history.16 The Natural History Museum Dublin became one of those blind spots when it was disregarded in favour of the antiquities which became central to the formation of that national narrative.
The trope ‘museum of a museum’ has given rise to a widespread public perception that the Natural History Museum is an unaltered example of a nineteenth-century science museum.13 This mythology was in full force in April 2010, when the museum reopened after another period of refurbishment in the aftermath of the collapse of a stone staircase. During the week it re-opened, press and broadcast accounts were filled with nostalgic reminiscences of childhood hours spent among the specimens, and declarations of affection for the ‘dead zoo.’ Consistently repeated was the notion that the museum had ‘remained virtually unchanged since it was opened in 1857.’14 Cursory examination of historical records shows that this is patently incorrect; in 1857 the ground floor of the museum was unfinished, and the exhibits on the first floor were minimal due to lack of funds to purchase display cases. The entrance was through the front door of Leinster House, with the museum accessed through a connecting curved corridor. The tile floor at ground level was not laid until 1864.15 Many of the handsome wood and glass cases were not built until after 1877. In 1857, it bore only slight resemblance to the museum which stands today.
Museums and natural history
The museum’s current representation as a nostalgic remnant of Dublin’s past obscures the fact that the Natural History Museum was originally built to house then-modern and growing scientific collections which were seen as essential to educational and economic development in Ireland, and which were conceptually situated within the wider developments of science in Europe. Irish scientists such as John Hart, William Kirby Sullivan, Robert Kane and Richard Griffith studied abroad, primarily in Paris, Germany and Scotland, returning to Ireland with the personal connections and scientific methods they had gained. Royal Dublin Society publications, such as the Journal of the Royal Dublin Society, were exchanged for the publications of other learned societies across Europe and into Canada and the
Museums are myth-making enterprises. Their core activities of collecting, preserving and displaying objects conserve the intellectual and material culture of the past. Assembling collections isolates particular objects, lifts them out of their original contexts and marks them out as exemplary and worthy of sustained attention. Curating objects into museum displays organizes them into coherent forms of information, deriving their logic not from the values of their producers, but from the prevailing norms of their institutional stewards. Susan Pearce cites the power of the ‘unique museum mode, the ability to display, to demonstrate, to show the nature of the world and of man within it by arranging the collected material in particular patterns, which reflect, confirm and project the contemporary worldview.’17 Museum objects are deployed to create narratives about the order of the world. Natural history museums occupy a central but complex space within the history and praxis of museums, having developed out of the ethos of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosity. Cabinets were assembled by wealthy collectors in an attempt to contain the sum of human knowledge in one room, and as a means of demonstrating status.18 As the practice of collecting became embedded into the intellectual developments of sixteenth-century Europe, professionals such as apothecaries, gardeners and university men also began to amass collections of natural materials for study; collections shifted from being solely the province of the wealthy into the service of practical science. Divisions between naturalia, objects produced by nature, and artificialia, objects produced by man, were also concretised at this early stage into a dichotomy between nature and art, and ‘[c]ollections of naturalia were formed to support the investigative interests of scholars adumbrating what would be called ‘natural sciences’ in later centuries[.]’19