As one walks down Oxford Road, the central artery of the University of Manchester’s campus, the imposing Gothic revival structure of the Manchester Museum creates a powerful impression of the ambitions of Victorian science. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti’s Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum goes inside Alfred Waterhouse’s building to interrogate the history of the institution as seen through the display of its specimens. In so doing, Alberti’s stated aim is to overlay a traditional approach to museology—that of focusing on a single institution—with an examination of the political and cultural forces at work. For Alberti, the Manchester Museum deserves such scrutiny because of its triple identity as a university, municipal, and cross-disciplinary collection (2). Nature and Culture will be a useful resource for historians of science and historians of museums alike.

Alberti’s methodology results in an essentially two-part book with the first three chapters devoted to the history of the collection organized around the theme of the book’s title: the former, “nature,” is a reference to the museum’s natural history collections, and the latter, “culture,” those considered ethnographic or anthropological. The three chapters that constitute the second part of the volume examine how the museum functioned as elucidated through the objects that were acquired, preserved, and shown to both general audiences and experts. In this second section of the book, Alberti acknowledges his debt to “object biographers” (5), such as the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai whose The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986) has become an essential text for scholars of both fine art and ethnographic museums. However, Alberti distinguishes his own approach to objects. While Appadurai and others are more interested in the path that brought the objects to museums, that is, their history before entering a museum’s collection, Alberti states that he will focus on how museum practices impact an understanding of those objects.

That the physical surrounds and institutional structure influence a visitor’s understanding of the contents of a museum is clear from the early history of the Manchester Museum, which began as the collection of the Manchester Natural History Society (MNHS). In Alberti’s short first chapter, which he calls a “prologue” (10), readers learn that the original core of the MNHS’s collection was derived from the private assemblage of the Manchester textile manufacturer John Leigh Philips (1761–1814). In detailing how a personal, idiosyncratic collection came under the purview of a new, more public—though similarly whimsical—institution, Alberti briefly touches upon the broader cultural milieu of early nineteenth-century Manchester. A city identified with cotton manufacturing and radical politics, the establishment of organizations such as the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and the Royal Manchester Institution provided spaces for Manchester’s elite to pursue cultural activities. The MNHS signaled its alliance with these older societies in erecting its building in a classical idiom on Peter Street close to them in both style and location. Opened in May 1835, the MNHS nevertheless restricted visitors to members and their guests. Gradually access widened to include the working-class members of the Manchester Mechanics Institution (18). Even so, the economics of maintaining and acquiring additional specimens proved untenable, and the society was dissolved in January 1868 to be taken over by Owens College, the forerunner of the University of Manchester. According to Alberti, the significance of this move reflects the broader trajectory in the pursuit of scientific research over the course of the nineteenth century. Thus, in the same way that the collections formed by wealthy amateurs were now under the control of professionals, science itself was institutionalized (24).

The “nature” of Alberti’s title is the focus of his second chapter, in which he examines the layout and supervision of the paleontology, zoology, and botanical collections. First overseen by paleontologist William Boyd Dawkins, the exhibits were arranged chronologically, which Alberti notes differed from the “taxonomic system” of the British Museum’s Natural History division, conceptualized by Richard Owen (32). However, a theme throughout the chapter is how Dawkins’s approach was contested almost from the beginning and especially when the curatorial emphasis shifted to zoology, the predominant area of curatorial expertise for four decades (34–35). By far the greatest challenge to the Manchester Museum, however, was the emergence of the disciplines of life science—genetics and geophysics—that did not rely upon the specimens preserved in the collections (40–41). The physical manifestation of this development was in the new scientific buildings erected across Oxford Road in the 1950s. According to Alberti, it was this separation from the Manchester Museum of the university departments devoted to life sciences that precipitated a shift in the museum’s targeted audience. Rather than members of the university community as the central focus of the collections, members of the wider Manchester community were the ones whom then-director David Owen believed to be the museum’s primary constituency. Alberti sees in the more popular exhibits, such as the opening of the Herbert Graham Cannon Aquarium in 1964, evidence of this new relationship to a broader public (49). He takes the reader to the end of the twentieth century in this chapter; however, in a chronological backtracking he returns to the closing decades of the prior century in his following chapter, a consideration of the “cultural” departments of the Manchester Museum: archaeology, Egyptology, and anthropology.

Although Alberti makes no mention of Matthew Arnold’s essays gathered under the title Culture and Anarchy and first published in The Cornhill Magazine beginning in July 1867 through the following August—the very period in which the Manchester Museum was officially established under the auspices of Owens College—Alberti’s dichotomous title alludes to the Victorian practice of juxtaposing seemingly opposite impulses. While the structure of Alberti’s study suggests the tension inherent in the two competing foci that determined the evolution of the Manchester Museum’s identity, he emphasizes that it was contingent circumstances that had the most powerful impact on the experience and function of the institution. In the original, Dawkins-designed layout, the first evidence of human existence—chipped flints—was displayed within the Pleistocene epoch. Tracing a gradual civilizing trend, axes and pottery were included in cases devoted to the prehistoric period (66). Alberti rightly identifies that the growth of these collections was generated not by curatorial interest but rather because of donor gifts of materials and funds. Most visible was Jesse Haworth’s support of the Egyptian collections. Not only did he donate his share of Flinders Petrie’s expeditions, but he also underwrote the 1913 expansion of the building to house this material (68–71). A further Haworth donation funded the 1927 expansion with the result that after an initial integration under Dawkins, these collections were completely separated from the natural sciences and oriented more toward the humanities.

For all of Alberti’s stated emphasis on the importance of disciplinary differentiation throughout the Manchester Museum’s history, these divisions and how they developed were largely dependent upon the interests and expertise of those tasked with their oversight. Alberti acknowledges this situation and thus devotes much of the final three chapters to the activities of staff members. Although in the introduction he presents this second section as a new approach to understanding objects, in fact, these chapters again center on the human agents who have been introduced in earlier chapters. For example, under the subject of “acquisition,” he considers the five processes by which objects entered the museum: “gift, purchase, fieldwork, exchange and loan” (91). What becomes clear throughout the chapter is that the dependency of the Manchester Museum on donations rather than purchase meant that the collections are reflective of private interests, such as Haworth’s, rather than a rational, overarching campaign. Alberti laments that these donated objects tend to be associated with the collector rather than the more usually anonymous “finders,” observing that “finders were rarely keepers” (112). Alberti purports to examine the relationship of the growth of the collections to Britain’s imperial reach, yet he limits his discussion of this complicated and much-studied phenomenon to a scant two pages (94–95).

For Alberti, his study of the conservation, cataloguing, and display practices of the Manchester Museum’s staff over the course of the twentieth century performs a double duty. Not only does it shed light on activities that took place “behind the scenes” (123), but also “contributes to a constructivist history of science, embedding the study of scientific practice in material culture” (124). While Alberti makes much of the registration process turn-of-the-century director William Evans Hoyle instituted (132), his argument would have gained strength by providing examples of accession cards with an analysis of the information they contained. Similarly, while it is useful to know that “every specimen on display . . . had a label” (141), knowing the content of these labels would allow readers to understand better how the objects were categorized and what the visitors to the museum who are the subject of the final chapter would have read.

The evidence presented shows that overwhelmingly the Manchester Museum was increasingly geared not to university students as a place of specialized learning, but rather to the wider public of the city and the county of Lancashire. Alberti draws upon the expansive records of the museum archives, even if his account is somewhat hampered by the paucity of recorded visitor responses. Given the popularity of the Manchester Museum and its position as an object of civic pride, Alberti might usefully have developed the relationship of the municipality to the museum. As he states, the dual source of funding from both the city and the university resulted in a “curious hybrid character” (191); however, he does not elaborate on why the city council considered the museum worthy of support.

Symbolic of the theme of the importance of human agency in the display of specimens of natural and ethnographic material is the cover image: a man (Alberti speculates that it is Harry Brazenor, the taxidermist) astride the sperm whale hanging from the museum’s rafters. Sleeves rolled up, a cap perched on his head, this figure is not the genteel collector or the learned curator. Rather his exploits, emphasized by the presence of two admirers peering from the balcony above, represent the notion embodied by the Manchester Museum as a whole: that both nature and culture were controlled by man.