In the evolutionary pre-history of the modern museum, the eclectic collections of the Romantic period tend to fall somewhere in between the early modern curiosity cabinet, the encyclopaedic enlightenment museum and the orderly public institutions of the later 19th century. This essay explores the place of the Romantic museum in that narrative and the usefulness of evolution as a metaphor for museum history, specifically in relation to questions of orderliness and the visual in the popular reception of museums in the period and in Darwin's engagement of those topics in On the Origin of Species (1859). A variety of late 18th-century and early 19th-century examples, and an eclectic cast of characters, are foregrounded: from the Duchess of Portland and her copious collections, to Rackstrow's museum of morbid curiosities, Sir Ashton Lever's Holophusikon (devoted largely to natural history) and the surgeon John Hunter's anatomical specimens. In these cases and others, the associative and imaginative capacities of the viewer are called upon to ‘make sense’ of the latent (dis)orderliness of things.

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收藏，展览与演变：浪漫博物馆

在现代博物馆的进化史前时期，浪漫主义时期的折衷收藏倾向于落入早期的现代好奇心内阁，百科全书的启蒙博物馆和19世纪后期的有序公共机构之间。本文探讨浪漫主义博物馆在叙事中的地位，以及进化作为博物馆历史隐喻的有用性，特别是与该时期博物馆受到大众欢迎时的秩序性和视觉问题以及达尔文对这些主题的参与有关在《物种起源》（1859年）中。展望了18世纪后期和19世纪初的各种例子以及折衷的人物形象：从波特兰公爵夫人及其丰富的收藏品，到拉克斯特罗的病态好奇博物馆，阿什顿·利弗爵士 s Holophusikon（主要致力于自然历史）和外科医生John Hunter的解剖标本。在这些情况和其他情况下，要求观察者具有联想和想象力，以“理解”潜在的（无序）事物秩序。