I'm delighted to welcome you to today's this years Milton lecture.
It's now the eighth in what we hope is gradually becoming a very long, very successful tradition.
My name is David Leopold and I teach political theory in the Politics and International Relations Department here in Oxford.
But I'm also a tutor at Mansfield. And my college fellowship, like today's lecture, is named after John Milton.
I'm very pleased to have that association. Milton has many positive connexions for political theorists,
not least he's thought of as a sophisticated advocate of Republican freedom and a powerful defender of free speech.
We should probably admit that Mansfield's own connexions with Milton are a little more indirect, but they are eminently material.
Milton was an inspirational figure to the nonconformists who established the college in the late 19th century.
Those nonconformists viewed him as something of a spiritual and political fellow
traveller who could lend his intellectual authority to their own educational endeavours.
And they built Milton into the very fabric of the college. It is his statue that you can see but are unlikely to be able to make out at least unaided,
high up on the face of the tower, above the entrance door to the original college buildings.
And Milton also stands much more visible. Not least of all, because he's neatly labelled in the stained glass windows of the chapel.
This lecture and my college fellowship are named after Milton at the request of Charles and Carolyn Brock,
the Bronx worked at Mansfield for some 35 years before returning home to the United States.
And they made a huge contribution to menso during that time, not least of all, they played a central role in the college,
actually becoming the kind of friendly and open community that Oxford colleges always say they are but don't always succeed in being.
The musical life of the college in particular, owes a great debt to Carolyn and Charles.
Get the college a practical living demonstration of his conviction that serious learning and having a good time were not mutually exclusive.
It's very typical of them that when they became generous benefactors to Mansfield,
they didn't want their own name given prominence but that of one of their heroes.
Carolyn, sadly, died in 2017, but we had very much hope that Charles and Mary would be with us this year for the Milton Lecture.
Unfortunately, the circumstances of the pandemic have made that impossible.
But we know Charles and Mary are watching. And I want to say that they are both very much in our hearts minds today.
And I will now invite the principal to introduce this year's Milton Lecture.
Thank you. Thank you, David.
My name is Helen Matfield and the principal at Mansfield College, and it is my pleasure really to have three things to do this evening,
partly to thank David for that introduction and for explaining the history and place of the Milton Lecture in our college and our culture,
partly to reiterate his thanks for the emeritus fellow and former chaplain Charles Broch, whom we wish was here in person.
But we do know he is in here, here in spirit and in fact, also on Zoome. So we salute you, Charles.
Thank you. And finally, to welcome Tristram Hunt at this year's Milton Lecturer in this the 150 year anniversary of the repeal of the test at.
In five days on the 16th of June,
it will be exactly 150 years since our first celebrity dinner guest at Mansfield was that great high Anglican and then the sitting prime minister,
William Gladstone, and he came to celebrate the founding of Mansfield College in Oxford as its first dissenting college training college,
then for Congregationalists. I think that journalism would have been pleased, and I hope that he would also have been pleased that other subjects,
including philosophy and politics and literature,
were added to our learning here and that the nonconformist spirit of the college today in a very contemporary sense,
Milton, like the academics and students here, used his considerable talents to think and write and act on the greatest use of the day with poetry,
drama, theology, politics and what was then called pamphleteering to foster the cause of greater freedom in the British Isles.
And of course, that is still in need of defence. So we are proud of our Milton statue as well.
Now, of course, of our Roosevelt statue, Eleanor Roosevelt statue.
And we are proud to have a lecturer named after the great author of our Politicker the great philosophical defence of free speech and Free Thinking,
which is so central to the culture of civil and as David says, friendly challenge and enquiry, which we nurture at Mansfield today.
When Charles Brock founded the Milton Fellowship,
he wanted the Milton Fellows duties to include university teaching and historical and or contemporary
arenas of Milton's interests and organising an annual public lecture on Milton's concerns for today.
And I quote, for example, in philosophy, politics, psychology, poetry, prose plays, Psalmody, Presbyterianism piety,
Physick physics and précis, not paresis or what I first read them, but that's just to name some of the piece, he helpfully added.
So that's quite a lot of pressure. But I am sure that Charles and Mary will agree that the stellar career of our speaker for this year's
Milton Lecture incorporates so much of that interdisciplinary thinking and acting that he aspires to,
if not every single one of those piece. Dr. Tristram Hunt became the director of Victorian Albert Museum in London in February 2017.
Like Milton, he was formerly a member of parliament and Tristram's case for Stoke-On-Trent Central
and he served as the Labour Party's shadow secretary of state for education.
He has a first class degree in history from Trinity College, Cambridge,
and also took his doctorate in Cambridge on Civic thought in Britain between 1820 and 1860.
He's been a special adviser to the Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury, an associate fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at King's College,
Cambridge, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Where I gather he remodelled government almost single handedly,
and Tristram's also presented a range of radio and television programmes for the BBC and Channel four and written a number of books,
including the award winning biography, The Frock Coated Communist,
The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels and most recently, 10 Cities That Made an empire.
Tristram has lectured on British and international culture all over the world,
and I am truly delighted and honoured to have him here at Mansfield tonight,
finally having postponed the lecture from last year for inevitable reasons.
So welcome, Tristram, to give our 2020 one lecture.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed.
It's an enormous pleasure to be at Mansfield College to deliver this year's Milton Lecture.
This is a college dedicated to the freedom which education imparts very much within the Tonin tradition.
And this college has long been an agent, Oxford's leading agent of social mobility.
So it's a privilege to be here this evening. Give me the liberty to no to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
So John Milton, in our politica, his great rallying cry against state censorship in Milton's conception of negative freedoms, freedom from tyranny,
censorship, manipulation and exploitation, we still hear the contemporary relevance of the great poet,
writer and civil servant civic Republican vision.
His impassioned defence of liberty continues to bear significance,
his words increasingly salient amid the rising tides of populism, nationalism and manifest intolerances.
Today, it more and more folds to institutions like museums, along with a free media business, universities,
faith bodies and civil society to preserve the ecology of democracy and the hybridity of contemporary civic life.
At the Victorian Albert Museum, Milton Stately portrait can be found across our collections, as can many visual references to his literary works.
Most famously, of course, the works by Blake illustrating Paradise Lost, Milton's great epic poem,
Blake representing Satan and his accomplices as beautiful in appearance based on figures of classical sculpture.
But against the wretched backdrop of the covid-19 global pandemic and the suspension
of even our basic freedoms movement association and our ability to conduct business,
Milton's words have found new meaning during these unprecedented peacetime lockdowns.
Our perceptions of liberty and the lack of it are all the more apparent.
In the cultural sector, enforced closures in the fight against the virus have blocked the role that museums are so keen to provide,
human contact, reflection, communal space and connexion to community and place are essential to our mission.
The Victorian Albert Museum is an institution inherently tied to the values of freedom and democracy.
The themes I wish to explore this evening, the Vienna is founding principles to make works of art available to all,
to educate and to inspire good design have fostered a strongly democratic ethos that leads our endeavours to this day.
Our buildings are open and free to wander, and through our exhibitions, research, publications and education programmes,
we aim to show 5000 years of human ingenuity, to spark the imagination of today's designers, artists and creators.
And when we look at the origins of the Victorian Albert Museum, I always like to return to the works of a man who got three.
Simple. Collections and public monuments are the true teachers of a free people, so said Samper,
the architect, Democrat and social reformer, when making the case for the South Kensington Museum.
Later, the VRA in the mid 19th century,
Simper had fled to Britain after the failure of the 1848 49 continental revolutions and found refuge in Prince Albert's court at Kensington Palace.
And he was part of this circle of radicals thinking about the pathway to democracy during the course
of the 19th century and passionately believed that museums and public monuments alongside mechanics,
institutes, universities, public parks, had this essential role in the education,
as they put it, of all future masters as the transition to a democratic society.
Much of sampas vision, which then flowed through to good Prince Albert,
was itself heavily indebted to the founders of Berlin's museum Cityscape Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt,
who, with enlightenment confidence, first championed this democratic conception of public education.
Albert, who frequently wrote to the Humboldt's who very rarely wrote but wanted to translate the HUMBOLDT'S an idea of art and science,
humanities and technology onto British soil as part of his own cultural battle against
what he regarded as the philistine backward Anglican elite of the British ruling classes.
After the international success of London's 1851 Great Exhibition, which once again Albert's idea vast profits, gave him the opportunity to do so.
So south of Kensington Palace, the Gardens of Brompton became Prince Albert's own Berlin style Museum Island.
What we call today, Albert Topolice,
complete with a similarly ambitious range of cultural institutions from the Imperial Institute to the South Kensington Museum to,
in time, the Royal Albert Hall. Gottfried Simper, along with the other emigres surrounding the Prince consort,
would help Albert shake the civic vision of this his new museum, education reform.
Mike Mansfield College lay at the heart of this mission for the South Kensington Museum, was not going to be a traditional museum,
a gallery for connoisseurs, but rather a place for the wider public where collections with proper instruction and debate paint.
This museum was pioneering the first devoted to decorative applied or industrial art,
together with the HUMBOLDT'S philosophy of access and improvement.
And that found a ready echo in the South Kensington Museum's commitment to popularise its collections.
So right from the beginning of the South Kensington Museum, it had this different ethos which Henry Cole, the first director, was so passionate about.
So the Vienna was the first to have a restaurant and cafe so that you could have an enjoyable day out at the museum.
Nothing is more tiring and going to a museum. So you could rest and die in wonderful rooms than designed by William Morris, by Gamble, by Poynter.
And here you see on the left of the museum was also the first to introduce gaslighted into the
galleries so that working people were able to come and see and enjoy the museum after work.
So there had this democratic ideal connected to it, and the museum was amongst the first to introduce labels on the objects.
So you didn't need to buy a catalogue again that had this strongly democratic ethos at the heart of it.
From the beginning, Henry Cole said the whole museum should be like a book with its pages always open and never shut.
Some 40 years after the museum had opened and it becomes in 1899, it moved from being the South Kensington Museum to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Victoria herself wanted it. Could just the museum, but was a court is convinced it should be the Victoria and Albert Museum.
She lays the foundation stone, still dressed in black, still mourning Albert's death.
And as she does, she says, I trust it. The museum will remain for ages a monument of discerning liberty and a source of refinement and progress.
Over the centuries, we have striven to remain true to this democratic vision to make our collections more available to more people,
to increase the number diversity of our audiences, to widen public access and social inclusion,
to engage more fully with neighbouring communities and to improve well-being.
What is more, what I hope to show this evening is that the Vienna's collections reveal ceaseless narratives,
championing this almost Newtonian course of discerning liberty.
But as a museum board of the imperial moment in the mid 19th centuries, with collections amassed from across the British Empire and beyond,
we should be clear from the start that the Vienna is a repository for countless artefacts of bondage and servitude,
dispersed throughout the collections of objects that systematically represent the absence of liberty.
The significant cultural riches extracted by the East India Company from South Asia objects
seised during British military campaigns in Africa and Asia during the 19th century,
and the vestiges of vast collections once owned by absentee slave owners whose wealth
was rooted in the exploitation of enslaved people from a 19th century mindset,
the civilising agendas of colonial authorities often justified the burgeoning and violent expansion of European interests across Africa,
Asia and the Caribbean. Behind this mask of moral necessity, the imperial administration sought to advance economic interests across the colonies,
as my colleague Gus Casely Hayford eloquently explains in a very different perspective to the humble in Enlightenment legacy quotes.
These men who defined the Enlightenment, constructed its hierarchies and categories.
These intellectuals who laid out the framework of modern law, morality and its identified metaphysics looked upon Africa,
a well populated and varied cultured continent and saw in its peoples nothing.
Avoid a cultural tabula rasa, silence. It made colonialism and the imposition of Western cultural norms seem like a kindness.
And as we wrestle today with thinking about the role of museums in the creation of the architecture of the intellectual architecture of enlightenment,
we know that part of the practise of colonialism was also the act of collecting.
So here we see some beautiful wonders from Ethiopia, which entered the collection in 1872.
These are the Magdala treasures which came to South Kensington following the so-called Aposhian campaign.
Have-not have remained in the collection since to secure the release of British hostages imprisoned by the Ethiopian temperature drops.
Second Lieutenant General Robert Napier gathered together Expeditionary Force of 13000 British and Indian troops in April 1868.
The forces reached Magdala, storming the fortress and securing the release of the hostages, but then culminating in the emperor's suicide.
The British then took with them hundreds of artefacts looted from the fortress, which could be auctioned off to raise money for the military.
Part of the usual process. And so many of these campaigns under the stewardship of Richard Holmes, a manuscript curator at the British Museum,
many objects made their way back to England, where they were initially purchased by the Treasury and then distributed across different collections.
Until recently, these violent histories were rarely acknowledged.
Museum labelling traditionally foregrounded the filigreed, the material history, the design history, the craftsmanship.
But today, the public is justly curious about how objects were quiet and who they belonged to and where they came from.
So to mark the fifth anniversary of the siege, a battle of Magdala.
In twenty eighteen, we opened our Magdala 1868 display spanning textiles,
photography and metalwork, developed in conjunction with Diaspora communities in the UK,
as well as a result in deep conversations with the Ethiopian embassy about how these objects should be shared in the future.
The display a more successfully to place these objects in context by focussing on the run up to the battle and its controversial aftermath.
And we included Gladstone has already been mentioned this phenomenal quotation from
Gladstone from the eighteen seventies saying these items should be returned to Ethiopia.
And that was the debate already in the late 19th century before covid.
We also opened a new display of Ashanti gold weights from modern day Ghana objects seised during the third Anglo Ashanti war of 1874.
As being a curator, Angus Patterson explains the gold was not taken simply for its financial value by removing the regalia from the Ashanti court.
Britain had stripped the Asante rulers of their symbols of government and denied them their authority to govern.
And again, whilst historically these items might have been presented primarily as a source of inspiration for design students and Goldsmith's,
we now explain that place within a different history of imperial trophy hunting and inevitably
how the South Kensington Museum was enveloped in some of these exercises of colonial violence.
Another such untold legacy relates to the vast object collections amassed by absentee
slave owners who use their wealth rooted in the exploitation of enslaved people to help
reshape so much of 19th century Britain found across the length and breadth of the
country and the incredible work of the use of UCL on all this has been transformational.
The aristocrats, the members of Parliament, the clergymen, the colleges, the collectors, the connoisseurs enriched through West India trade.
One such figure was rough, but now the loyal member of Parliament and owner inheritor of three plantations in Jamaica and almost 600 enslaved people,
he had opposed the prohibition of the slave trade. But by the time of abolition 1834, many estates had already been sold.
However, Bernell still possessed his plantations and was eventually awarded almost 12000 pounds
in compensation upon his death in 1850 for his enormous collection of metalwork,
cloth, ceramics and miniatures became available for sale.
Some 730 items, a few are pictured here, were purchased from the Bernell collection by the curators of the South Kensington Museum.
And again, whilst traditionally we would look simply to the design history of these objects.
Now we explore also the nature of the wealth behind them and reflect upon that accordingly.
But the VLA is also a landscape of liberty and an almost millstone in ideal can be traced through its collections.
And let us begin then. With Renaissance Florence associated in European tradition so closely with ideals of common good and liberty,
this was quite the city where the love of liberty was the most general and the most constant in every class or the cultivation
of the understanding was carried the furthest and where enlightenment of mind soonest appeared in the improvement of the laws.
According to the 18th century lawyer, politician and collector Great Liverpudlian William Rostker, Renaissance Florence is flourishing.
Cultural life, humanist tradition, scholarship and artistic production was,
of course, intimately connected to the patronage, to the patronage of the cheese,
the great mercantile bankers and pioneers of modern finance, Michelangelo being amongst the many beneficiaries of Medici finance.
Instances of Mortdecai wealth and the dynasties politically adept preparation of the Folland Florentin ideal of liberty are found across the VLA,
sadly, all in plaster casts rather than the originals, but nonetheless are found right through the museum, not just in our cost courts.
A plaster copy of Donatello's Bronze of the young David with the head of Goliath at his feet,
commissioned by Cosimo WDC in the early 15th century, as the leading citizen of Florence,
the banker again commissioned Donatello to create the bronze sculpture of Judith with the severed head of Holofernes in around fourteen sixty,
a centrepiece for the Garden of the Palace. Its 1893 cost now stands with the Venice mediaeval Renaissance Gallery.
David with the head of Goliath by virtue from about fourteen seventy five, was another documented.
Medici commissioned a cast after the Bronze Original is found inside the Viennese plaster cast Quartz Judith,
symbolically recognised across the Renaissance City the virtue of liberty overcoming a tyranny.
This cycle of sculptures successfully incinerated the cheese as defenders of Florentine liberty, consciously diffusing the accused.
The accusations of autocracy that always surrounded the fairly autocratic Mateschitz.
But the Vienna Galleries show how Florentine Liberty Libertas was an incredibly fluid notion able to be appropriated by
multiple factions following a French invasion in the late 15th century and botched negotiations with the invading monarch.
The Medici were expelled from Florence in fourteen ninety four.
Soon after, the republic would reclaim the civic expression of liberty,
refashioning the newly found freedom in contrast to what was regarded as the tyrannical Medici rule,
this marble cantorial singing gallery housed inside the Vienna's Rafaelle court or sculpture by Daniel in around fourteen ninety five,
the coat of arms with the Florentine Lily and the word Libertas makes it certain that
it was commissioned by the Republic of Florence after the expulsion of the Louvre.
But of course it is the plaster cast copy of Michelangelo's David produced from one of the most famous objects in the history of art that
has been a favourite with all visitors since its arrival as a gift from the Duke of Tuscany to Queen Victoria in the mid 19th century,
taking pride of place in the cars courts, the figure of David is a symbol of towering strength,
depicting the biblical hero before he was to slay Goliath and of course, at the Vienna.
We then had to create the fig leaf in front of the delicate parts, as the Victorians would expect.
Michelangelo's original was first installed in the Piazza Della Senora in 15 004 outside the seat of government in Florence.
This was a potent location for Renaissance Florence,
replacing the Medici commissioned Judith that stood there before Michelangelo's art was an integral part of the city's social and political fabric,
and his David stood as an allegory of Florentine civic virtues triumphing over tyranny.
It quickly became the municipal symbol of liberty, the republic's ethos of self-government, winning out the hegemony of the Medici.
Florence had reappropriated its history of liberty through Dovid, the Renaissance republics of the 15th century.
Well, reimagined and recast and re embraced during the long 18th century here in Britain as the grand tour took off in the
latter half of the 18th century and the great civilisations of Greece and Rome opened up this history of liberty.
This history of struggle for freedom became more and more influential,
particularly in Great Britain, in an eloquent demonstration of how these neoclassical ideals,
how these civic Republican ideals of freedom become, were transferred to Britain in the seventeen hundreds.
We can, of course, look to Stonehouse and it's remarkable.
Landscaped gardens, 400 acres of 18th century civic Republican fantasy over the course of 30 years from around 1720 Lord Cobblestoned fifth set about
remaking his gardens as a landscape monument to civic Republicanism is one of the earliest additions was the so-called Rotunda,
an open brown pavilion, the ballbuster supported on ionic columns and under the domes to the gilded copy of the Venus de Medici on around Roman altar.
Stow's emblematic landscape was meant to be deducted as well as aesthetic.
The gardens were an exercise in political thought and an exercise in the celebration and exploration of liberty.
The gardens were celebration of those liberties orientated around a political philosophy of patriotism,
which Cobham saw at risk from those connected to Robert Walpole.
This was politics writ large, and so became this great symbol of liberty for big thinkers.
The Elysian Fields, as the as the stone landscape was known, was an area incredibly rich,
that in classical and mythological symbolism pathways they metaphorically of the vice virtue and liberty,
alluded to both the ancient gods and old political aspirations.
But at the heart of it was the temple of British worthies and this account of.
English liberty in an era of growing British identity explored through bust, some of which we have some of the originals celebrating Shakespeare Drak,
Queen Elizabeth, the first Thomas Gresham, an account of liberty made flesh through sculpture.
And, of course, Milton Isdell. Milton sits at the heart of the civic Republican ideal of liberty.
And it was a notion of liberty connected to this idea of patriotism, which was built around a love of country,
but also this terrible fear that the country was always at risk of being undermined.
And at the heart of this notion of danger was a sense that the British idea, the English ideal of liberty, was at risk.
And what Cuba wanted to do at Stowe was to connect this idea of English liberty to this classical
and civic Republican past and also point out how much it was to the land and culture of of Britain.
In the 18th century and in the latter half of the 18th century,
this this idea of patriotism in this increasingly radical idea of patriotism began to grow in terms of political effectiveness,
the newspaper editor and politician John Wilkes proved amongst the most effective propagandist of Patriot politics and Milton defence of freedom.
After criticising George Third in his newspaper, The North Britain,
Wilkes was arrested in seventeen sixty three under a general warrant for seditious libel.
You couldn't have a more kind of melatonin moment to escape prosecution and also some debt.
Wilkes fled to France. The British potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood, a strong supporter of Wilkes, wrote how his exile evoked,
quote, universal disgust here in Staffordshire and is the general topic of every political club in town.
On his return to England, Wilkes was imprisoned, but he continued to exploit, above all, the potent symbol of the Magna Carta,
a great legal bulwark against arbitrary rule and the surety for freedom under the law to great effect by mobilising public support for his cause.
He was even subsequently elected to parliament for Middlesex.
Under Wilkes, the Magna Carta had this new life, a powerful form of propaganda representing the ancient birthright of every subject.
And Hogarth becomes one of the great chroniclers not only of that idea of liberty, thinking of the roast beef of old England and the gates of Calais.
But a strong supporter of Wilkes and the critique, of course, with it here we have a fantastic punchbowl with portraits of John Wilkes and a judge.
And then this work by Josiah Wedgwood.
Who do you see the quill in a very militating way.
You see the quill in Wilkes's hand and a Magna Carta in the background.
And he sends this up to be engraved in Liverpool.
And it sells incredibly well for for for the Wedgwood.
And that was this popular culture, this material culture of liberty, this material culture of patriotism expressed through dress,
through ceramics, through glass, which Wedgwood was a very, very important part of Wedgwood himself.
Mr. Slight, let me let me Wedgwood himself went further in his radical politics and became an ardent supporter of the colonists in America.
And here was an interesting moment in the idea of patriotism,
that you have so many patriots in Britain in the second half of the 18th century
supporting an idea of liberty which involved resistance against the British,
because this notion that the American colonists were fighting for true English liberty and true freedom against the
corruption that was coming from the British government and Wedgwood himself creates this this rattlesnake symbol,
which is then used in America with the phrase Don't tread on me supporting American liberty abroad.
But the. But like the Florentin appropriation and reappropriation of David as a symbol of liberty,
these notions of freedom explored through material culture were incredibly complex.
Some 13 years of the United States of America had achieved independence.
British sculptor John Deere was commissioned to produce a figurative marble relief depicting Julius Caesar invading Britain.
Now, in our sculpture galleries, the individual who commissioned this was John Penn, British member of parliament,
Justice of the Peace and grandson of the eponymous founder of the American state of Pennsylvania, William Penn.
The relief subject is almost unique in sculpture.
The composition shows a vivid battle scene, the invading Romans being repelled by heroic British forces on the shore of the English Channel.
In the centre, the helmeted figure of Julius Caesar stands commandingly, armed with a shield and spear.
And what's remarkable about this is you have a British member of parliament commissioning a piece of work celebrating the patriotism
of those resisting an invasion for which the American colonists resisting the British as reflected through the classical past.
The bravery of the local populace, overcoming, if only temporarily,
an invading colonial force must have appealed deeply to Penn as Pennsylvania was lost to the Penn family after the revolution,
the London bullpen was nonetheless familiar with the repercussions of a colonial force occupying and being expelled from foreign lands.
But the criticism of America after the American Revolution was that for all of these great exclamations of freedom.
How come slavery stood at the heart of it and as the British built themselves up for this moral campaign against slave trade,
the criticism of America's dependence upon slavery became all the more stark.
And Wedgwood was convinced of the abolitionist case during the 70s and 80s and becomes the one of the, I think,
greatest figure in the material culture of freedom, not because of the production of this incredible medallion with the legend.
Am I not a man and a brother? And this was the symbol of the abolitionist movement in the late 18th century.
This was more like a CND Bad from Extinction Rebellion sticker.
This was the symbol of freedom that Wedgwood produced for free and circulated for free.
And it was, in the best sense virtue, signalling that you signalled your virtue through this use of this material culture.
And he was such an important part of that groundswell of demand for liberty.
I think today you would criticise, understandably, the supplicant figure of the enslaved Africans, the lack of agency within the figure.
But in terms of mobilising opinion in Britain in favour of abolition in the late 18th century,
it was one of the most significant components in that great campaign.
As I hope I've been able to suggest, it's probably no surprise that whether it's in 18th century Britain or 16th century Florence,
Liberty has proved a multifarious concept for each individual as much as each generation,
for each component of the DNA collection, for William Morris, the defining designer,
activist and founding figure in the history of the Victorian Albert Museum.
It was partly the freedom to live amongst beautiful surroundings that was one of life's most
elemental necessities freedom for other than freedom from for the women's social and fiscal union.
The Women's Suffrage Society, established in 1983 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia.
True liberty meant votes for women, and they pursued this unreservedly through their deeds,
not words much, perhaps, of a contemporary extinction rebellion.
Activist groups Liberty refers to urgent international action to combat climate change
without addressing that of freedoms of the future will be will be heavily constrained.
In every instance, creative approaches have been habitually employed to communicate unique political standpoints throughout history.
Those should strive towards greater, more.
Just civil freedoms have so often turned to acts of creativity to help elicit powerful political social change,
though these acts have been defined and redefined for each generation.
The resulting artefacts, images and material culture now stand together as collective evidence of each progressive step.
They speak of the powerful international interrelationship between creativity and liberty.
Those seeking out greater freedoms today continue to enlist art and design in the services of rebellion and resistance.
And we were delighted at the V.A. to take into our collections parts of the extinction rebellion print material.
These antiapartheid posters, designed by David King of the late 70s and mid 80s are a case in point.
The series called for the release of all South African prisoners after reports
of an increase in the number of detainees tortured to death by the police.
As Professor Rick Poynter explains, the posters have an intense visual conviction,
distilling shocking evidence of systemic racism and profound social injustice into graphic memories of great moral urgency.
King's visual activism was remarkable for its cogency,
an impact no other body of work from the time comes close to equalling that feeling of controlled anger and their immense rhetorical punch.
And the Vienna is proud to hold some 30 of these political posters in its collections.
So these are my hope this evening to be able to explore in an introductory manner how the collections of the Victorian Albert
Museum speak to the founding mission of the institution whilst also telling a story both of oppression and of freedom.
Today that history is told,
amid the frank transparency of the museum's sometimes complicit past its place with an enlightenment or colonial practises included with rigour,
scholarship and a culture of transparency.
Our ambition is to encourage a wide exploration of these public holdings and the relationships they embed with freedom.
But let me finish, if I might, on a different point of liberty.
Like universities, museums need to be places for free thought, and today a chauvinistic right seeks increasingly to defend our history,
uniform and singular for what they call WOAK warriors intent on cancelling the past.
And they've pressured culture ministers to connect public funding to what is described as correct thinking.
Meanwhile, a populist left has sought to delegitimize much of the progressive fabric of civil society.
Museums find themselves caught in the crossfire. We're being pressured to embrace our absence of neutrality and to pick a side.
Yet at the very same time, an Ipsos Mori poll as recently revealed that 82 percent of the British public polled express
trust in museum curators up there with scientists and nurses a long way from politicians,
as I used to be. It's an extraordinary statement of public confidence in our cultural institutions
ability to navigate this terrain without museums as sites for civic exchanges.
We see here in our Enlightenment gallery bringing cultures and communities together as a trusted and independent sites.
We will fall victim as civil society to more fake news,
echo chamber righteousness and self regarding identity politics, museums playing in their complicated, difficult role.
An essential task in explaining the crooked timber of humanity through the wonder of material culture and in the process,
I think playing an important role in supporting the cultural ecology of democracy.
If we probably fall short of the Puritan rigour of Milton's civic Republicanism.
I hope that at the BNA we still fulfil Gottfried Simper calling for us to assist in the true teaching of a free people.
Thank you. Thank you, Tristram, for a fascinating and enlightening lecture,
and I have some questions from our online audience and actually the first one kind of starts very conveniently where you left off,
because in a world of online echo chambers, offline echo chambers,
sometimes universities and museums are both needed to provide a space for civic and civil debate.
So the question is, how do you think museums can best do this without being drawn into confected culture wars?
My view is through the kind of.
The scholarship, the rigour, the the engagement with as many audiences as possible, we have a good example on at the moment.
So we have an exhibition we just opened at the V.A. called EPICA Iran.
This is not an easy exhibition to put on for a number of reasons. And there's there's tension within the exhibition about how we engage with the
contemporary authorities in Iran and how we think about the pre 1979 regime in Iran.
And we've had criticism from from both sides that were too lenient on on modern Iran.
And we don't understand the importance of the Shah and the modernisation story of the 1960s and 70s enough.
And yet what we're doing, I think, is doing what we should be,
which is provoking a kind of considered and intelligent conversation around that history,
exploring it in an interesting way through material culture, because tens of thousands of people will come through our doors to see this exhibition.
And because it's taken years and because we work with serious scholars who have thought about this for a long time,
we're really confident in the judgements of those involved in this, which isn't to say they're all totally neutral.
We understand that what brings the biases of preconceptions, but to suggest we can't do it because we necessarily lack all notions of neutrality is,
I think, to undermine the role of museums or universities and the public in the public square.
And I, I almost fear sometimes we're at that place.
So I think I think we should be confident about critical, scholarly and a very public minded interventions.
Yeah, I remember travelling in southern Africa in the late 1990s where there was an acute self-conscious consciousness in the way that museums
of interim redecoration of the South African and South African past and those accused of consciousness in a way that things were curated.
But I wonder if there are any other moments in the earlier history of museums in this country where some of
those debates about the political and cultural sensitivity of particular exhibits have been taken place,
or is this quite a contemporary phenomenon in this country? I mean, I think, you know, there's that recent very brilliant book about thinking about,
as it were, how post-war Germany dealt that dealt with its past,
didn't, and then came to think about it again and thinking about how contemporary America deals with with the Confederate past.
I think these these conversations around the around the past come with each generation.
And and again, that's why this notion of holding history in aspic makes makes no sense to us in the museum world because we are continually putting
things up and taking things down and interpreting and reinterpreting our challenge is always the resource and and time and you know,
the parts of how we think about some of our collections, which we're also keen as a museum to to kind of take forward.
But there's no doubt that now I think you're right that there is a moment around this.
You know, in a sense, it's absolutely wonderful.
People are queuing around the block to go and see a statue of Edward Couston taken down, dumped in a canal, brought back up,
put in a museum to have a conversation around, you know, British history, economic history, Bristol slavery, race relations.
That's what museums should be about. So I'm I think I mean, some of it can get very political and some of it can get quite aggressive.
And I think some of the identity politics really kind of obscures the conversation.
But to have more people engaged in thinking about legacies of the past, their meaning for today is only a good thing.
Yeah. Do you think we're going to move beyond sort of the celebratory and memorialising to the more self consciously reflective images in the future?
Yes, and you see a lot of that in in museums.
But I also stay very strongly true to the founding mission, which was to bring in as many people as possible to the museum.
And so if you've only got, as it were, a kind of what you want to avoid,
I think is a kind of metropolitan culture of a certain strand of curators and a degree of groupthink who put on exhibitions
which pleased themselves and endorsed their own views without either thinking about challenge to those views or thinking.
No, our responsibility is to bring in as many people as possible to think about these issues because we could.
And in a sense, it's easy to put on exhibitions that we agree with and will be lauded for its more challenging as with I think
with Epicor on put on a big exhibition about a difficult subject which gets people to come in and think about it.
Yeah. So you just talked about this responsibility and the kind of the founding ethos of the Varnay to bring in as many people as you can from,
you know, that bringing culture to people, bringing people to culture, I suppose.
And I remember the last time I went to the Vienna not long before the first lockdown,
I walked back to the underground on these amazing Victorian tunnels are echoing with schoolchildren.
I'd just come out of the courts and thinking, these kids going to see Trajan's column or the cast of Trajan's column.
And they were all very excited and it did feel like the museum was doing what it was set up to do.
And we also with a lot of our outreach work here at Mansfield, we take students,
school students to the rivers and the and the university museums here and try to talk to them about how you think about things and culture.
And I just wonder, in your time at the Vienna if there are any or anywhere else, really,
if you think there are any other exhibitions or initiatives for younger audiences that
are particularly succeeded or a particular way of bringing young people to a museum.
I mean, I think we have parodic with us here this evening and the work that Paul and colleagues at the British Museum have done,
you know, utilising those, you know,
whether it's Sutton who or whether it's the kind of there are there are elements in the child's mind and whether it's all of our friends at
the Natural History Museum over the road and the dinosaurs that are instinctively kind of engaging and wonderful and kind of trigger moments.
And we have we have you know, we love nothing more than the kids running through the Vienna.
But actually we make a real difference in the teenage years, I think.
So the children come to be awed by it. And we love the family groups.
But as the teenage years and what we do particularly is try and support design and technology teachers in across English schools.
Part of the founding of the museum was the design school movement, the importance of teaching design.
We've seen this terrifying collapse in creative subjects in state secondary school in the last 15 years, numbers just falling off a cliff.
And so we do a great deal of work through lending objects to regional museums, partnering with local schools,
supporting professional development, curriculum material, being kind of in there.
And amongst that, and my view is always that we when it comes to education,
we put too much pressure on the schools in that historically education was something that schools were apart,
but parents were really important,
church or chapel or trade union or schools or there was a civil society that that helped to support education in its broadest sense.
I think museums are an important part of that.
And I think we all we all understand that now in a way that wasn't necessarily the case 30 or 40 years ago.
And the growth of education departments and David Anderson, who's at Welzel, was a big figure in all this, has been really, really significant.
So I think we should we should be doing more of this and we will be doing more.
One of the things we also have is this fantastic Museum of childhood in Bethnal Green in east London,
which we're transforming at the moment to make it really sparkie for young people.
Yeah, well, I still remember not quite understanding why I couldn't take one thing.
No, I know. It's like it's like a kind of object. Yeah.
But I mean, you obviously the Vienna is our great museum of material culture.
And this has been a time when we have been separated from one another and from things.
And we've been very everything's been mediated through a screen in a way that and
many of us have found quite distressing and I suppose a bit of a deprivation.
But have there been any surprising or positive impact of moving museum audiences online?
Joanna Pantani? I mean, yes, but they've all been outweighed by the negatives.
It so we've done you know, we've transformed our explore the collections facility.
So your way to navigate the collections is really powerful.
We've opened up our BNA Academy, which used to just be if you could get to South Kensington.
Now we do an online course that's absolutely brilliant and we've done online tools of the exhibitions.
We've absolutely pivoted. And I think in the future, museums will have these multiple spaces of the digital will be a really important part of that.
And we've done so much more online.
But I think I think the great wonder of just physically being in front of the objects, being in front of the objects with other people,
and then not that kind of lingering sense, you always have a line that they've got my data and now they're going to tell me to do something else.
And actually at the Vienna you go from. Cost courts to the Korean gallery, to the mediaeval renaissance, to you,
you're not told if you like this, you'll like that there's no kind of algorithmic destiny to it.
You could just enjoy it yourself. And I think that sense of freedom of of of intellectual freedom is really, really important.
So we've we've invested in digital. It's a big part of what we do.
But I still feel the kind of you know, it in a sense is even more important when we see what digital does to everyone,
reads their own news, follows their own people, as it were.
Digital takes us down ever narrower avenues, weirdly.
And museums are just one of those civic spaces where you have to interact with people you don't know,
objects you haven't seen before, and that's healthy. Yeah. Well, Christine,
thank you very much for coming in real life and for sharing online with people who couldn't get here in real life with our current limited capacity.
But it's been brilliant talk,
and I really appreciate the reminder of how important museums are as civic spaces where people can meet and mediate difference.
And I suppose, as John Milton said, love is an important part of the way people met one another.
So museums are places where you can love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart like.
Thank you very much. Thank you.