New Left Review I/208, November-December 1994

Catherine Hall

Rethinking Imperial Histories: The Reform Act of 1867

In Birmingham, Britain’s second city, the Art Gallery celebrates the civic heritage of a place which became rich in the nineteenth century. [1] This essay is for Gail Lewis. Earlier versions were given at La Trobe University, Melbourne, in London at the Conference on ‘Nation, Empire, Language’, at St Antony’s College Oxford, at the Centre for Theoretical Studies at the University of Essex, at Women’s Studies at Harvard and at the Wenner–Gren symposium in Mijas, Spain on ‘Transnationalism, Nation-State Building and Culture’; I thank all those whose comments have become part of my thinking. Particular thanks to Stuart Hall, Jane Rendall, Keith McClelland, Bill Schwarz and Sally Alexander. This piece is part of a longer ongoing project concerned with rethinking the relation between England and Empire in the nineteenth century. The gallery itself is a beautiful Victorian building. It was a part of the new town centre designed by Joseph Chamberlain, at that time the Liberal mayor of Birmingham, before his later metamorphosis into Tory imperialist. It was designed to stand as witness to the ways in which Birmingham had been transformed from a commercial and industrial mecca to a place of culture. In what is now called Chamberlain Square stood the Town Hall, the Free Library and the Art Gallery. The Town Hall, constructed in the 1830s, is a splendid classical building and was designed to house the town’s Music Festival. It was the site of all major public debates throughout the nineteenth century. Next to the Town Hall was the Free Library, the first free municipal library to be built in the country, following a campaign which focused on the importance of reading and knowledge to any true civic culture. Completing the triangle was the Art Gallery which held Birmingham artefacts—the elaborate brass, iron and silverwork for example—together with paintings which had been mainly collected by well-to-do Birmingham families and given to the Gallery to demonstrate how pride in their city was as important to them as their attachment to private domestic spaces.

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