12. Making Sense of the Museum

The scene shifts to Saull’s talks in his museum, which even the clergy evidently attended, causing them to bolster their anti-socialist geological advice to ordinands. But the museum impressed a reporter from Thackeray’s National Standard. Saull, the indicted blasphemer, lacking education or ‘character’, now found his free museum of rich fossil merchandise providing his credentials of “taste, learning, and liberality”, in the reporter’s words. The hack left an account of Saull’s accompanying ‘evolutionary’ lecture, but admitted that without it the museum would have made little sense. Saull’s geology was designed to be integral to Owenite education, and the establishment of countrywide socialist schools, delivering a science-based education for children, is discussed. These schools were innovative and responsive, such that new fads (in particular the Owenite T. Symmonds Mackintosh’s “Electrical Theory of the Universe”, itself comprehensive, anti-Newtonian, and with a large dose of geology) could be quickly accommodated.