Animal Displays, Gender, Race, and Pedagogy at Liverpool Museum, Circa 1880–1920

This chapter examines animal displays at Liverpool Museum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how these interacted with school curricula. It argues that displays of birds and mammals emphasized femininity, domesticity, and the nuclear family, operating in tandem with anthropological galleries’ promotion of white supremacy. It considers the lessons and discourses schoolchildren were exposed to at Liverpool Museum, identifying a symbiosis between museology and pedagogy during James Granville Legge’s tenure as Liverpool City Council’s Director of Education. Liverpool schools adopted an object-centred, haptic curriculum that confirmed ideological messages about gender, class, race, and empire disseminated by the city museum. The chapter concludes by using historical photographs to critique the racist, sexist, and heteronormative legacies of natural history museums.