‘This gigantic Babylon’: science and the University Museum in mid-Victorian Oxford

Professor Robert Fox

The struggle to establish Oxford’s University Museum was a microcosm of the broader movement to promote scientific instruction in mid-Victorian Britain. But the debates in the decade preceding the Museum’s opening in 1860 also reflected both the constraints of a university dominated by the classical languages and theology and its promoters’ distinctive conception of science. The overriding principle, articulated by Charles Daubeny and Henry Acland, was that all the scientific disciplines should be housed under one roof, an arrangement thought appropriate for a syllabus in which specialization was eschewed and physics, chemistry, and biology were all compulsory elements. The result was the design of a single central court surrounded by interconnecting premises for the different sciences. Although the ideal of the oneness of scientific knowledge won general assent, the building’s impracticality soon became apparent. The central court proved costly to heat and light. The glass roof sprang leaks. And, most importantly, a design that gave generous space for lectures, lecture-demonstrations, and the examination of specimens, came to appear old-fashioned as practical classes and specialized research assumed greater prominence in professorial priorities. Physics was the first science to ‘break ranks’, when it moved into the purpose-built Clarendon Laboratory in 1870, but the trend continued, with other laboratories and extensions being built quite independently of the museum. In this way, the initial vision was inexorably watered down, and the balance between the role of the Museum as a home for all aspects of science in Oxford and its role as a museum in the more modern sense - as a place for the display of specimens to both students and the general public - embarked on a pattern of adjustment that has continued to the present.