Publications:
The Royal Ontario Museum: A Prehistory, 1830-1914
By J. Lynne Teather
University of Toronto Natural History Museum, circa 1880.
PUBLICATION OVERVIEW
As the Royal Ontario Museum prepares to open its Renaissance ROM addition, this volume invites a reassessment of the ROM’s formation history, and, after nearly 100 years of successful existence a rethinking of its social promise. The ROM’s legislative start in 1912 built on decades of museum activities in Toronto, without which it might not have succeeded. Its national-imperial perspective trumped competing museums visions of the day to give Toronto its version of the Louvre, Victoria and Albert, Natural History, British or Metropolitan Museum, all in one. This work presents an in-depth study of the complex background story of this premier Canadian museum that involves many more museum stories of the province dating back to the 1830s.
Although the work deals with the museums on the campus of the University of Toronto and sister colleges, it also invokes the larger history of museums, both in Canada and abroad, providing new insight into the role of museums in nineteenth century Canada, especially in Ontario and Toronto. Telling a story of the many museum efforts in the city and province from 1830 to 1914, the book lays out a the many museum making efforts of individuals, groups, institutes and governments ranging from Thomas Barnett’s Niagara Falls Museum (started in Kingston 1827) to the Province of Ontario’s 1857 Educational Museum by Egerton Ryerson, from the formation of the University of Toronto’s natural History and Geological Museums opened 1860 (burned 1890) to the 1900 Art Museum of Toronto. Included are the early museum and gallery efforts of the Ontario Historical Society, many local museums in Ontario, the Women’s Canadian Historical Society and the Women’s Canadian Art Association and their impact on creating the cultural initiatives of the day. The work draws on extensive archival records, diaries, professional literature and a vast body of other sources to treat an as yet little known deeper history of the Ontario’s museum history that provided the milieu for the ROM’s creation.
This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of museum studies, cultural studies as it moves the orthodox Canadian history of museums back many decades to show how important they were in the roster of the first civic institutions of a settler society. In treating the seriously underdeveloped subject of Canadian museum history, especially of Ontario, it will stimulate many more museum stories, here to fore overlooked. Most of all it will be of interest to anyone considering the evolution of the museum ideas as a social and civic force, and through this historical reassessment, its possible futures.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lynne Teather is associate professor of in the Museum Studies Program, University of Toronto, where she has been teaching since 1980. She holds the first doctoral degree in Museum Studies from Leicester University and the Ontario Association of Merit. She has studied and consulted for museums in Canada and abroad.
