Animated History: In which I discuss interactive museums and express gratitude that I don’t wear 1700s undergarments.

Museums in Britain bring history to life. 

I’ve been to a decent number of museums in America, but I haven’t seen many that offer interactive exhibits.  Here, however, it’s completely not a surprise to find interactive displays within the midst of informative plaques and archaic artifacts.  Be it offering visitors period dress to try on, paper and pen to compose their own sonnet, or facsimiles of old books to thumb through and scan for changes between middle and modern English, British museums desire to engage with their audience, to animate history in a way that two-dimensional displays sometimes cannot.

Now, before I get too far into this post, I want to say that I do not intend to bash more traditional museums without interactive displays.  Visiting the Art Institute of Chicago at age seventeen was one of the happiest days in my life (George Seurat, anyone?), and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve gone to the Met for an afternoon just to relax and breathe in ancient Egyptian or Greek art.  There is something valuable in the act of being a witness, in standing in the presence of history, in directly observing what most people perhaps only see in a book or on their computer monitor.  But I believe there is also something valuable to being immersed in that art or history. 

Dr. Samuel Johnson’s house, the former residence of the London writer and lexicographer, has been transformed into a museum that offers both traditional and nontraditional exhibits.  The house contains much of Dr. Johnson’s original furniture, books, and belongings for visitors to admire – and it also contains five period dress outfits for visitors to try on, two giant replicas of Johnson’s original dictionary for visitors to read, and a smattering of books that Johnson himself owned (in their modern editions) for visitors to peruse.  To walk through a preserved house is to observe; to engage in that house is to participate actively history.

It could be argued that I’m overstating my point.  Does the fact that I’ve now read portions of Johnson’s original dictionary mean that I fully grasp what it was like to read the first comprehension English dictionary in 1755?  No, it doesn’t.  Or does the fact that I’ve now tried on panniers and bustles mean that I fully understand what it was like to be a woman in the 18^th century?  Of course not.  But being able to live out both of these actions, even (unavoidably) within my modern era, helps me gain a better perspective on these lives from the past.  Book nerd though I am, I know that there is only so much I can glean from text.  And there is only so much that I can glean from interactive museum exhibitions, too.  But maybe by triangulating the two, as so many British museums are doing, people of this era can reach a better understanding of those eras gone by.

Because let me tell you, getting to try on all those women’s clothes has made me respect women of the 18^th and 19^th centuries so much more than I ever have before – those undergarments are terrible.  Like I-am-wearing-a-portable-prison-of-fabric-and-wire terrible.

[image of a replication of Johnson's dictionary, taken by me inside Dr. Johnson's house]