We tend — i idsely I shall soon argue — to 

 view such - .ability as a sure sign of stag- 

 natioi ii not decrepitude and ruin. Our 

 basic concept of "Victorian"' includes im- 

 ages of soot-blackened buildings, cold in- 

 terior spaces lined with dark wood, chip- 

 ping paint, peeling wallpaper, and shelves 

 of bric-a-brac. In many towns, the classic 

 late- Victorian (Queen Anne) mansions are 

 now either funeral homes or lawyer's of- 

 fices — and neitlier enterprise seems much 

 beloved of late. 



I confess that my first visit to the Dublin 

 Museum of Natural History did nothing to 

 dent this stereotype. I spent a good part of 

 1971, yardstick in hand, measuring the 

 skulls and antlers of Irish elks. I visited the 

 manors of the Marquess of Bath and the 

 Earl of Dunraven, and I measured the mis- 

 treated male of commercialized Bunratty 

 Castle (near Shannon Airport), where be- 

 sotted revelers at the nightly medieval 

 banquet had left the poor fellow with a fat 

 cigar in his jaws and coffee cups on the 

 tines of his antlers. But the best stash of 

 specimens belongs to the museum in 

 Dublin, where the two skeletons can be 

 supplemented with another fifteen heads 

 and horns, mounted high on the walls of 

 the ground floor, one head above each 

 major cabinet. 



The same Dr. O'Riordan greeted me 

 warmly and treated me well; his speci- 

 mens formed the centerpiece of my study 

 (published in the professional journal Evo- 

 lution in 1974, but initially, in a more gen- 

 eral version, as my very first article for this 



magazine in 1973). The specimens were 

 fine, but, oh my, the museum was a dingy 

 place back then. Little light, less comfort, 

 and dust absolutely everywhere. I had to 

 sit on top of the tall cabinets to measure 

 the heads mounted above. There the dust, 

 undisturbed for so many years, had con- 

 gealed into thick layers of grime. I doubt 

 that any living being had been up there 

 with any sort of cleaning device since 

 Leopold Bloom met Stephen Dedalus in 

 Nighttown (or since Molly Malone last 

 sold the sort of staff labeled in the ground 

 floor exhibits as "MoUusca of Ireland"). 



With such memories, I approached my 

 visit in September 1993 with some trepi- 

 dation — for the extrapolated curve of dete- 

 rioration did not lead to happy expecta- 

 tions. I could not have been more joyously 

 surprised. Not one jot or tittle of any ex- 

 hibit has been altered, but all the surround- 

 ings have been restored to their original 

 condition — not just accurately, but lov- 

 ingly as well. An army of brooms has been 

 through the premises (I think of the enor- 

 mous clone constructed by Mickey Mouse 

 in the Sorcerer's Apprentice of Fanta- 

 sia) — and, as my grandmother would 

 surely have said, "you could eat off the 

 floor" (although I never understood why 

 all my older relatives invoked this expres- 

 sion, as I couldn't imagine why anyone 

 would want to try the experiment, how- 

 ever thorough the scrubbing). The glass 

 ceiling has been cleaned, and the light 

 floods through. The dark wood of the cab- 

 inets has been repaired and polished, and 



"My only ambition in life is to become part of the fossil record.' 



the glass now shines. The elaborate cast 

 ironwork has been scraped and decorated 

 in colorful patterns reminiscent of the 

 "painted lady" Victorian houses of San 

 Francisco. The ensemble now exudes 

 pride in its own countenance — and I fi- 

 nally understood, viscerally, the coherent 

 and admirable theory behind a classical 

 Victorian "cabinet" museum of natural 

 history. 



Two factors — one a prejudice, the other 

 a condition — generally debar us from ap- 

 preciating the Victorian aesthetic. First, 

 our smugness about progress leads us to 

 view any contrary vision from the past as 

 barbarous. Thus, when modernism es- 

 poused simple geometries, with unoma- 

 mented and functional spaces, the Victo- 

 rian love of busy exuberance became a 

 focus of pity and derision. (We might 

 praise an old Japanese house for anticipat- 

 ing modem simplicity, but what could we 

 do with a shelf of curios?) In a sense, this 

 dismissal might be viewed as payback, for 

 the Victorians aggressively depicted their 

 own times as the pinnacle of progress and 

 fliey often treated the past with condescen- 

 sion. In any case, our knee-jerk dismissal 

 of fliings Victorian is now fading as the 

 preservationist movement wins more con- 

 verts and as postmodernism brings eclecti- 

 cism and ornament back into architecture 

 and design. 



Second, and more important, our image 

 of Victorian has not been set by the objects 

 themselves, as constructed for their own 

 time, but by their present appearance, usu- 

 ally after a century of neglect and deterio- 

 ration. The situation is almost perverse. I 

 would not, after all, allow my image of 

 "grandfaflier" to be set by the present state 

 of my Papa Joe's remains at his gravesite. 

 Why, then, do we conceptualize "Victo- 

 rian" as a ramshackle building with bro- 

 ken steps, creaking floors, and peeling 

 paint — fit only for the Addams family or 

 as the Halloween haunted house set up by 

 the local Jaycees? 



My first, and keenly revealing, experi- 

 ence with Victorian as Victorians knew the 

 style, divested of a century's overlay in de- 

 terioration, occurred in 1976 when, to cel- 

 ebrate our nation's 200th birthday, the 

 Smithsonian Institution opened a replica 

 of the Philadelphia centennial exposition 

 of 1876. This wonderful exhibition in- 

 cluded plows, pharmaceuticals, imple- 

 ments for house and farm, and, above all, 

 machines and engines, all spanking new, 

 freshly painted, and entirely in working 

 order, with all their wheels, whistles, and 

 hisses. I particularly remember a case of 



14 Natural History 1/94 



