Collection, Exhibition and Evolution: The Romantic Museum.

In the evolutionary pre-history of the modern museum, the eclectic collections of the Romantic period tend to fall somewhere in between the early modern curiosity cabinet, the encyclopaedic enlightenment museum and the orderly public institutions of the later 19th century. This essay explores the place of the Romantic museum in that narrative and the usefulness of evolution as a metaphor for museum history, specifically in relation to questions of orderliness and the visual in the popular reception of museums in the period and in Darwin's engagement of those topics in On the Origin of Species (1859). A variety of late 18th-century and early 19th-century examples, and an eclectic cast of characters, are foregrounded: from the Duchess of Portland and her copious collections, to Rackstrow's museum of morbid curiosities, Sir Ashton Lever's Holophusikon (devoted largely to natural history) and the surgeon John Hunter's anatomical specimens. In these cases and others, the associative and imaginative capacities of the viewer are called upon to 'make sense' of the latent (dis)orderliness of things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]