The British Museum: The History and Legacy of Britain's Most Famous Public Museum

*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading The British Museum has for centuries been a source of pride for the UK, and for good reason. Writing at the height of the Victorian Era, historian Edward Edwards observed, “In two particulars, more especially, our great National Museum stands distinguished among institutions of its kind. The collections which compose it extend over a wider range than that covered by any other public establishment having a like purpose. And, if we take them as a whole, those collections are also far more conspicuously indebted to the liberality of individual benefactors. In the public degree of which there is elsewhere no example, the British private Museum has been gradually built up by the munificence of open-handed Collectors, rather than by the public means of the Nation, as administered by Parliament, or by the Governments of the day.”