In a startling passage near the beginning of Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Reed Gochberg describes Charles Willson Peale's 1792 proposal to preserve the corpses of the Founding Fathers’ “by the use of powerful antisepticks.” The nation would greatly benefit, Peale assured the American Philosophical Society, if he could “hand down to succeeding generations, the relicks of such great men” (44). If not, portraits would have to do.
One can only imagine what the public might have made of a Benthamized George Washington; Gochberg's lively account of early nineteenth-century museums and their audiences suggests that reactions might have run the gamut. Gochberg places her readers in many familiar destinations—Peale's American Museum, the British Museum, the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology—but peoples them with skeptical observers. “I hate museums,” writes Henry David Thoreau. “They are dead nature collected by dead men.” This did not stop Thoreau “murdering”...