The Bethnal Green Museum

By James, Henry

Book Id: WPLBN0000622549
Format Type: PDF eBook
File Size: 20.31 KB
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	The Bethnal Green Museum
Author:	James, Henry
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Literature, Literature & thought, Writing.
Collections:	Blackmask Online Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Blackmask Online


Citation APA MLA Chicago James, H. (n.d.). The Bethnal Green Museum. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.cc/

Description
Excerpt: BETHNAL GREEN is mainly known to Americans who remember their nursery ballad books as the residence of a certain Blind Beggar?s daughter, the details of whose history indeed we confess ourselves to have forgotten. Known by its beggars in the era of primitive poetry, the region has beggary still for its sign and token. Its wretchedness has been so great that, till within a few months past, there may well have been a question whether a blind beggar was not rather a lucky person, and his imperfect consciousness a matter of congratulation. But now there is a premium on good eyesight, for Bethnal Green discerns itself through the thick local atmosphere the unillumined possessor of a Museum and a gallery of pictures,?treasures which all well?dressed London is flocking eastward to behold. Half in charity and (virtually) half in irony, a beautiful art?collection has been planted in the midst of this darkness and squalor,?an experimental lever for the ?elevation of the masses.? The journey to Bethnal Green is a long one, and leads you through an endless labyrinth of ever murkier and dingier alleys and slums, and the Museum, whether intentionally or not, is capitally placed for helping you to feel the characteristic charm of art,?its being an infinite relief and refuge from the pressing miseries of life. That the haggard paupers of Bethnal Green have measured, as yet, its consolatory vastness, we should hesitate to affirm; for though art is an asylum, it is a sort of moated strong?hold, hardly approachable save by some slender bridge?work of primary culture, such as the Bethnal Green mind is little practised in. There are non?paying days at the Museum, as well as days with a sixpenny fee, and on the occasion of our visit the sixpence had excluded the local population, so that we are obliged to repeat from hearsay a graceful legend that the masses, when admitted, exhibit, as one man, a discrimination of which Mr. Ruskin himself might be proud, and observe and admire on the very soundest principles. In the way of plain fact we may say that the building, as it stands, is the first of a projected series of District Museums, to be formed successively of various fragments of the temporary structure at South Kensington, as this great collection is more solidly enclosed; that it was erected toward the close of last year, and opened with great pomp by the Prince of Wales in the following June; and that it immediately derived its present great interest from the munificence of Sir Richard Wallace,?heir of that eccentric amateur the late Marquis of Hertford,?who offered the Museum the temporary use of his various art?treasures, and bad them transported and installed at his own expense. It is with the Marquis of Hertford?s pictures that we are concerned; the collection otherwise consisting of a small Animal Products Department, which we leave to more competent hands, and (rather grimly, under the circumstances) of a group of Food Specimens, neatly encased and labelled,?interesting from a scientific, but slightly irritating from a Bethnal Green, that is, a hungry point of view.

Table of Contents
Table of Contents: The Bethnal Green Museum, 1 -- By Henry James, 1