Page 61 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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where the diorama first flourished, the foremost aim of the natural history
museum was education, whilst elsewhere, she suggests, scientific research took
precedence (Wonders 1993: 9–11). However, Stephen Conn (1998) argues that
in the US at least, the dioramas were symptomatic of the shift of museums
away from a commitment to popular education. Conn says that in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century the museum in the United States was
conceived of as a site of the production of knowledge available to citizens from
all social classes. He links the diorama with the forced retirement of the
museum from involvement in cutting edge research, which by the 1920s had
become the province of the universities. The diorama introduced popular spec-
tacle to the museum, but as science it was in some respects already behind
the times (Conn 1998: 66–71). Even while the first full halls of dioramas were
in production, some museum staff and scientists were concerned that they
were ineffective communicators of modern biology. Scientists were preoccupied
with animal movement and behaviour, which the static dioramas could not
adequately convey (Mitman 1999: 62–4). Also, the dioramas presented natural
history as eminently visible, while biology explored that which cannot be seen
with the naked eye. That the diorama had enormous popular appeal is not
at issue. The question is whether the dioramas represent a shift away from
addressing the museum public as active producers of knowledge, in favour of
addressing them as the recipients of already formed ideas and knowledge.
To understand the popularity of the dioramas, we need to first consider
the popularity of natural history itself. Today, natural history museums seem
popular by museum standards, in that they have high visitor numbers, and
appeal to visitors from less affluent backgrounds. However, this is a different
kind of popularity to that of natural history as a practice during the
nineteenth century. The journalist Lynn Barber (1980) has described the prac-
tice of natural history as extraordinarily classless compared to other Victorian
pursuits. She claims that in Britain, it was participated in by men and some
women from across social classes. Barber argues that working-class participa-
tion was enabled by several factors including the exclusion of natural history
from university curricula, which meant that there was not a professional class
of qualified naturalists. Added to this was the accepted view that it was an
innocent amusement, even a religious one, since the publication in 1800 of
William Paley’s book Natural Theology which presented natural history as a
means of studying ‘God’s design’. Working-class people were tolerated in
natural history because the middle classes considered it a useful distraction
from gambling and drinking, and political activism. Nor were the costs prohibi-
tive; the equipment needed was simple and the study material readily available –
branches such as entomology were especially popular since specimens were small
and easily stored, and there was no need to own a gun. Furthermore, a speedy