Playing to the gallery

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On 24th May 1683, Britain’s first museum, the Ashmolean, opened its doors in Oxford. Divided into three parts, it contained rooms for undergraduate lectures, a laboratory and a miscellaneous collection of specimens and cultural artefacts. Such “collections” had always been considered the preserve of an elite possessing the leisure, taste and education profitably to contemplate them—displaying one to the general public was a radically progressive notion, even though this “public” meant respectable commoners able to afford the admission. Primarily, the museum was intended for research and scholarly taxonomy; the word “museum” itself…