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At the turn of the nineteenth century, museums in Europe and North America were at their largest and most powerful. New buildings were bigger; objects flooded into them, and more people visited them than ever before. The Manchester Museum is an ideal candidate for understanding cultures of display in twentieth-century Britain. It is a treasure trove of some four million priceless objects that are irreplaceable and unique. Like many large European collections, the origins of the Manchester Museum are to be found in a private cabinet: that of John Leigh Philips. This book traces the fate of his cabinet from his death in 1814. The establishment of the Manchester Natural History Society (MNHS) allowed naturalists to carve out a space in Manchester's cultural landscape. The Manchester Museum's development was profoundly affected by the history of the University in which it operated. In January 1868, the Natural History Society formally dissolved, and an interim commission took control of its collections; the Manchester Geological Society transferred its collections the following year. The new collection was to be purely scientific, comprising geology, zoology and botany, with no place for some of the more exotic specimens of the Society. The objects in the collection became part of Manchester's civic identity, bringing with them traces of science, empire and the exotic. Other museological changes were afoot in the 1990s. Natural history collections became key sites for public engagement with environmental issues and biodiversity and more recently as sites for exhibiting art.
city by 1830, Grecian and Gothic monuments alike emphasised the cultural sophistication of Manchester’s elite. As elsewhere in the provinces – such as the royal institutions in Liverpool and Hull – such buildings proclaimed British cities as heirs of ancient and medieval city-states. The MNHS building was to expand further in the middle of the century, as it incorporated the collections of the Manchester Geological Society.18 Founded in 1838, the Geological Society owed its existence to the efforts of Edward W. Binney, then a young solicitor and keen geologist, who
seen, the British Association for the Advancement of Science during its annual meeting in 1887. Especially closely involved in its early years were the Conchological Society of Great Britain and the Manchester Geological Society (after 1904, the Manchester Geological and Mining Society). As the cultural collections grew, so cognate organisations such as the Manchester Egyptian Association (later the Manchester Egyptian and Oriental Society) also became closely involved with the Museum. Staff were well represented in the upper ranks of these organisations: Winifred
single factor, but rather a contingent combination of collections, galleries and personnel. Especially in an institution of the Manchester Museum’s size, the training and individual research interests of curators effected shifts in disciplinary shape as much as any new building. Chapter 4 will assess the role of donors in more detail, but their impact is already clear, for example in the gifts of the Manchester Geological Society and Herbert Graham Cannon. This combination of factors in the mapping of disciplines, and in particular the legacy of material culture, is