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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.
1 Prologue: the Manchester Natural History Society Like many large European collections, the origins of the Manchester Museum are to be found in a private cabinet: that of John Leigh Philips (1761–1814; see figure 1.1). Philips was involved in textile manufacturing as a partner in his family-based firm, and served in the First Battalion of the Manchester and Salford Volunteers as Lieutenant Colonel.1 The range of objects gathered by Philips and his contemporaries in the eighteenth-century provinces cannot be categorised using modern disciplinary parameters. He
4 Acquisition: collecting networks and the museum The Manchester Museum was based on the collections of the Manchester Natural History Society. Very soon after the transfer to Owens College, however, this founding collection made up only a fraction of the specimens housed within the Museum. Elsewhere, the Sloane collection at the British Museum and General Pitt Rivers’s material at the University of Oxford accounted for only a tiny proportion of the museums they seeded. This chapter explores how the rest of the collection came to be in the Manchester Museum
cultures. 1 In large part that is because the collections are based on those of the Manchester Natural History Society. Like many other learned societies and proto-museums of this type, the Manchester society received donations of Egyptian objects. In 1825, two cotton merchant brothers named Robert and William Garnett bequeathed a wrapped mummy and two coffins belonging to an ancient Egyptian of unknown gender (later identified as a woman named ‘Asroni’ or ‘Asru’) ( Fig 9 ). 2 In common with many similar procedures undertaken
27 The evolution of imaging ancient Egyptian animal mummies at the University of Manchester, 1972–2014 Lidija M. McKnight and Stephanie Atherton-Woolham The Manchester Museum Mummy Project, established by Professor Rosalie David in 1972, pioneered the study of ancient Egyptian mummified remains using a multi-disciplinary approach. As Keeper of the Manchester Museum’s Egyptology collection, David set out to understand the lives of the mummified individuals, whose remains became part of the collection following its establishment as the Manchester Natural History
follow, is distinct in interesting ways. The Manchester Museum opened as distinctions were being drawn between different sciences by men like Thomas Huxley, biologist, statesman and champion of Charles Darwin. Huxley’s protégé, the geologist William Boyd Dawkins, was the first curator of the Manchester Museum, appointed by Owens College to transfer and arrange the collections of the Manchester Natural History Society (MNHS) that the College had acquired in 1868. Chapter 1 is devoted to the story of the Society and its collections, the Victorian prologue to the main
Century Britain. 30 Based on a limited knowledge of the hieroglyphic script, by 1834 she had been characterised in a guidebook to Manchester Natural History Society collections as a ‘maid of honour in the court of the 20th Pharaoh.’ 31 Similar Nineteenth Century descriptions still persist in some displays. To cite just one example, a Ptolemaic female mummy in the Telangana State Museum in Hydrabad, India, is labelled with a colonial-era description, without evidence, as ‘Princess Naishu, daughter of the sixth Pharaoh
god Amun during the twenty-fifth dynasty in ancient Egypt, and possibly lived in Luxor. While Asru had a life in ancient Egypt, her physical afterlife is spent in Manchester, England. 33 She was taken to the city in 1825 and donated to the collection of the then Manchester Natural History Society by Robert and William Garnett. She was unwrapped there, and her wrappings are now completely gone. 34 In 1868, when the collection
the core of the Manchester Museum were accessed principally by the members of the Manchester Natural History Society, up to 30,000 visits were made annually from the 1830s. In the mid-century, as discussed in chapter 1, the Society also sought to attract ‘working classes and the young people of the district’.3 By the 1860s, however, these numbers had dwindled, and there is no evidence that the citizenry of Manchester missed the collections as they sat in the Owens College attic for twenty years after the transfer from the Natural History Society. And yet the late
Television, ‘From the North: Granada presents [the Manchester Museum]’, television recording, 29 March 1968. MMRs (1896–1940); T. Ashton, Visits to the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society (Manchester: Manchester Museum, 1857); Tattersall, General Guide. MMRs (1965–77); J. Whitworth, The Cannon Aquarium (Marple: Heap, 1968). Rader and Cain, ‘From natural history to science’. MMCM vol. 5 (24 March 1947); MMRs (1946–47), (1962–64); R. M. C. Eagar, ‘The moon in a geological gallery’, Museums Journal, 64 (1964), 132–7. Eagar in geology (over four decades); John