It is a little known fact that when Oscar Wilde attended Oxford in 1874 he volunteered at the Ashmolean Museum as a room steward in the Cast Gallery. It was there he met General Pitt Rivers and it was an even lesser known fact that he encouraged him to open a museum with his collection on the basis that it was, 'unspeakable and uneatable'. It took 10 years for Pitt Rivers to be convinced of the basic inedibility of his collection and open the museum. Yet Oscar Wilde was given no credit for all the effort.
In later years when in exile it is thought he yearned for his salad days checking displays for excessive humidity levels with his whirling hygrometer. His last recorded words were in fact,
"I could resist everything except condensation."
In the Trinity College archives in Dublin there are early versions of his plays. Lady Windermere's Fan's working title was Lazy Curator's Air Conditioning Unit. Wiser counsel prevailed upon him to change the plot to a case of suspected marital infidelity from an argument between curators over the lux levels on a museum's collection of watercolours.
"We are all in the stores, but some of us are looking more closely at the light levels."
is now more famously remembered as
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."In fact many of his famous witticisms had their museological elements removed to appeal to a wider audience. Lord Alfred Douglas 'Bosie' was in fact the Dr. Watson to Wilde's Sherlock Holmes, writing up his activities and 'improving' them for posterity. I know this because I picked up one of his unpublished notebooks in a charity shop in Paris last week and it jots down Oscar Wilde's original words before Bosie got to work on them.
"All museum managers become like their chair of trustees. That is their tragedy. No curator does that is his"
"Accessioning is a serviceable substitute for wit"
"To love one's collection is the beginning of a lifelong friendship"
"No unethical disposal goes unpunished"
"Museums are far too important ever to talk seriously about"
"Only dull people are brilliant at interpretation"
"There is only one thing worse than being a curator, and that is not being a curator"
"A curator's object is his autobiography, an interpreter's panel is his work of fiction"
"Visitor services is simply the name for our attitude towards people we don't like"
"If one cannot enjoy visiting a museum over and over again, there is no use visiting it at all"
"Object labels are rarely pure and never simple"
"The exhibitions that the world calls immoral are exhibitions that show the world its own shame"
"Museums are meant to be loved, not understood"
"Some museum volunteers cause happiness wherever they go, some whenever they go"
The literary world's gain was the museum world's loss.
