Of course, interaction with “the public” was more than an abstract idea in the sense that the
museum was, in principle, open to visitors from the very beginning on. What archival sources
reveal about these visitors and what they experienced on a visit to Teylers Museum is the
topic of the following section.
I ll Open AH Hours: Public Accessibility of Teylers Museum 1780-1840
1. The Tourist Trap
The first railway connection in the Netherlands was inaugurated in 1839. From that point on,
steam engines ran between Haarlem and Amsterdam, immensely speeding up travel between
these two towns. One can be pretty sure that van Marum would have been ecstatic about this
newest development. He had already tried to obtain a model of Boulton and Watt’s steam
engine on his trip to England in 1790, and some thirty years later he was still lamenting the
fact that his efforts had not been successful, stating that the steam engine was “the most
excellent and useful machine that has been devised by human ingenuity”.147 Alas, he did not
live to see the establishment of a railway network in the Netherlands: he passed away in 1837.
In some way it is almost symbolic that van Marum passed away so soon before he could have
taken a train to Amsterdam: it drives home the point that van Marum belonged to an era of
travel that was rapidly drawing to a close by the time he grew old.
As in every other country at the time, it is hard to underestimate the changes brought about by
the establishment and rapid expansion of the Dutch railway network. Less than ten years after
the first trains had rolled into Haarlem for instance, a guidebook was published providing
information on the landscape surrounding Haarlem. It was aimed at
“the Inhabitants of Rotterdam, Schiedam, Delft and other towns located close to the Holland
Railway, who might now wish to make a one-day trip to Haarlem and to stay there for about
twelve hours”.148
Ironically, the immediate impact for Teylers Museum of the establishment of the rail network
appears to have been minimal. It is not, for example, mentioned in the guidebook from which
the quote is taken. The aim of the daytrips suggested in this book was to escape city life, and
spend time in the countryside. Haarlem itself was therefore not recommended to its readers.
“het voortreffelijkste en nuttigste werktuig gewis, hetgeen door het menschelijk vernuft is uitgedacht”;
Martinus van Marum: “De Geschiedenis van de oprigting van Teyler’s Museum”, 1823-1833, Haarlem, NHA,
Archief van Marum, vol. 529, nr. 9, fol. 34.
“de Inwoners van Rotterdam, Schiedam, Delft en andere zieh in de nabijheid des HOLLANDSCHEN
SPOORWEG bevindende plaatsen, die thans op éénen dag uit en thuis, een uitstapje naar Haarlems dreven
zouden wenschen te doen, en aldaar omtrent twaalf uren vertoeven”: Wegwijzer in Haarlems Omstreken
(Haarlem: Erven F. Bohn, 1848), 1.
But on a more general level, and in the long term, the railway’s effects were of course huge.
And here, the guidebook can help to illustrate some of the developments.
The entire concept of “leisure time”, for instance, would not have been understood at the end
of the 18th century. Let alone the idea of “tourism”. The late 18th century was still the era of
the Grand Tour: young members of the nobility and others who could afford it would spend a
year or more travelling Europe^- Italy was the destination of choice for most — in what
amounted to a sort of self-exploratory exercise. Mass tourism on the other hand only emerged
towards the end of the 19th century, brought about by a combination of larger sections of the
population earning “time off’ and travel becoming easier, faster, and more affordable.
All this inevitably had an impact on the public role of museums. Put simply, museums could
only become tourist attractions once there were tourists.
That there were no tourists during van Marum’s active period at Teylers Museum and, on a
more general level, just how different travel was from what we know today during the early
decades of Teylers Museum’s history, is important to keep in mind when assessing the
museum’s public role during this period. For one, it has implications for the museum’s
accessibility, i.e. who could actually come to visit it. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly,
it can serve as a reminder of just how profound the changes to society and the average
citizen’s outlook on life were that were brought about around the turn of the century. Both
these points, in turn, are important to take into account when trying to shed some light on the
question of who visited the museum, and what brought visitors there, i.e. what these visitors’
expectations were and what they hoped to gain from a visit to the museum.
There are a number of sources that one can draw upon in trying to find answers to these
questions. Firstly, there are the rules and regulations that were put in place for visitors by the
trustees and van Marum. Secondly, there are the museum’s visitor’s books: as from 1789,
every visitor was asked to sign his name upon visiting the museum and record where he came
from. Unfortunately however from a historian’s perspective, very few visitors included their
occupation, and if the signatures themselves are decipherable, the signees are often hard to
identify. Finally, there are travel reports published by visitors upon their return home. They
can be particularly revealing because they not only contain the author s personal experiences,
but often doubled as guidebooks for future travellers. Impersonal guidebooks such as those
published by Baedeker or the one that was quoted above only came up around the middle of
the 19th century. About a dozen reports covering the first forty years of the museums’ history
have been found.
2. Open Office
It was already mentioned in the previous chapter that in principle Teylers Museum was open
to the public from the very beginning on. This seems to have been a real priority of the