Collecting authenticity: domestic, familial, and everyday 'old things' in English museums, 1850-1939

Abstract

This article investigates the increasing popularity of domestic objects from the British past in provincial museums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with changing modes of display, which saw mimetic representations of interiors gaining ground over traditional museum displays in glass cases. It argues that this is indicative of new, modern memory practices which invested the historic domestic object with imaginative and associative power, foregrounded the feminine, and asserted a key role for such objects in the formation of authentic identities, both national and individual.

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