This paper is a sortie into a relatively unexplored aspect of the 'Atomic Age'. It grew out of work on the 1951 Festival of Britain, in which science, and atoms in particular, were explained to visitors by means of clever images and analogies. These leaned heavily on well-known images of Alice in Wonderland-Alice who was curious, who asked questions, who drank from the bottle marked 'Drink me' and grew first very small, then very tall. This seemed to be an ingenious example of the representation of atomic science, with its emphasis on the extraordinarily small nature of atoms and the unimaginably powerful application in the atomic bomb. Representations, as we know, have the power to affix meaning to objects and concepts, giving them a 'reality' in individual and collective lives. 1 However, the question of what those meanings are, how they are achieved, how they are transcribed from author-to designer or visualiser-to audience, is by no means straightforward. Obviously we have to pay close attention to the visual conventions and tropes which are employed. But while there were indeed many significant images in exhibitions and museum displays, what is also apparent in this immediate postwar period is a lack of visuality, and a reliance on old-established textual representations. This is in part due to the special circumstances of Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. A Labour Government under Clement Attlee swept to victory in the first peacetime election with an agenda of radical social democratic change. However, first of all there were shortages of just about everything, and rationing was not finally abandoned until 1954, though by the end of the 1940s the supply of most items had eased. Film was strictly rationed (all film stock had to be imported from the US), paper supplies likewise, so that books were printed on cheap and nasty paper, with few illustrations if any, with covers using crude blocks of colour to brighten them up. 2
Biography and geography do not always sit easily together in historical narrative. With a few notable exceptions, due weight is rarely given to the significance of territorial features in tales of talented individuals. Biographers perhaps play down the untidy contingencies of civic, institutional and domestic spaces in order to present a historiographically coherent portrait of their subject. However, once the vicissitudes of environment and everyday life are taken into account, the identity and accomplishments of the ‘great individual’ begin to merge inextricably with the vagaries of local politics and fluid socio-cultural alliances. For a figure with as formidable a posthumous reputation as T. H. Huxley, such a deconstruction might, at first, seem mundane and of little scholarly value. Yet there is considerable evidence that Huxley was not always successful in his efforts to gain power and influence within the many and varied sites of his working environments. Careful scrutiny of such evidence will show new perspectives on Huxley's complex career in Victorian London. It will also document problems in the construction of the South Kensington suburb as a credible site and fruitful resource for Huxley's remarkably diverse activities in education and science.
From the late eighteenth century onwards, urban life underwent increasingly rapid change as towns outgrew their limits, industries polluted their skies and rivers, and a host of new types of building appeared to cater for new needs and activities. Not only did towns look different, but, as Thomas Markus has said, ‘they also ‘felt’ different in the organization of the spaces they contained.’ Buildings which housed scientific activities—the learned societies, literary and philosophical societies, professional institutes, mechanics institutes, and by the end of the century the new civic universities—were one manifestation of this different ‘feeling’. These were quite new types of building, and we should therefore expect them to give us valuable information about the development of science, about ‘images’ of science and the meaning of those images, as well as the actual practice of science.
A building is a dogma, a machine is an idea.Victor Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize Victor Hugo's remark links the material and the intellectual with Gallic succinctness and certainty, although one should not take such literary aphorisms too literally. 1 It has however a nice resonance if one is examining the location of scientific knowledge in specific types of building where machines and mechanisms and their display had a significant role. For if the construction of much knowledge itself was 'museological', as John Pickstone argues, then it is appropriate to examine the sites where that construction evolved and became fixed. This paper examines some of the spatial and architectural characteristics of the museum in nineteenth-century Britain and its relation to the making and communication of scientific knowledge. The argument will concern a number of interrelated questions: the shape ofthose architectural spaces that we call museums and changes in access that opened up museums to new groups of people; the relationship of private research to public exhibition in the communication and promotion of knowledge; and how the display of collections signalled a shift in role in the face of new pedagogical regimes in the later nineteenth century which were above all laboratory based.There are in any case many good reasons for a reassessment of the museum's role in relation to the practice and advancement of scientific activity. We tend to accept a history of museums, originating in cabinets of curiosities and princely collections, developing into the universal survey museum, and leading in a relatively unproblematic way to the great national collections oftoday and a host of specialist and provincial collections. This genealogy is extended in the case of science and technology museums to include trade fairs and shows, most notably the Great Exhibition, as well as displays and exhibitions in mechanics' institutes and public galleries.' Richard Altick has given a splendid account of the wonderful variety of such shows.' Together with the activities of literary and philosophical societies, these formed part of a rich scientific culture, both provincial and metropolitan. More recently there has been a shift in the focus of current writing about museums, which has concentrated on audiences, on how displays are constituted and on what meanings they might hold for their audiences.
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