Transformative Beauty is a study of the founding and early years of three great municipal museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester. Rather than treat each civic history independently, Woodson-Boulton has organized the book into a series of comparative analyses of key moments and issues shared across all three institutions. The result is both a richly detailed account of each museum and an important larger argument about the Victorian understanding of art as an amelioration of the conditions of industrial capitalism, particularly the alienating effects of wage labor and urbanization.

Woodson-Boulton tracks a series of questions across the histories of the three museums, including the debates over their establishment, the question of Sunday opening hours for working-class visitors, their collecting practices, their educational programs, and their transformation in the later nineteenth century as ideals of “art for art's sake” gained greater cultural potency. Her careful attention to local politics, personalities, and histories is a major strength of the work, and she moves fluidly between descriptions of local nuances and discussions of larger patterns. Several overarching themes link the different sections of the book, most notably the tension between the belief that museums play a critical role in improving the lives of the public and the desire to have an art museum as a source of civic pride, and the strain that changing aesthetic standards of the later nineteenth century put on museums' sense of purpose. Rather than summarize each chapter in turn, I want here to take up two of Woodson-Boulton's larger arguments in more detail to explore the implications of her work for the study of Victorian exhibition culture.

One of the author's most intriguing conclusions is her argument that art museums became categorized as a kind of domestic space. In her consideration of the debates over Sunday opening hours, Woodson-Boulton traces the argument that because working classes were not able to enjoy a personal art collection in their homes on the Sabbath as the middle classes could, museums should be open to serve as a “public home,” providing an alternative to the “public house” (54). This conception of the museum as a domesticated public space is a provocative and significant addition to current understandings of Victorian exhibition culture. To what extent did this metaphor carry over into the architecture, furnishings, and installation practices of museums? How did it relate to the emerging norms of commercial art galleries, many of which also relied on a domestic idiom? In Woodson-Boulton's account, the idea of the museum as domestic space was often mobilized around the question of unmarried working men living in lodging houses: did civic authority (of male city councilors and philanthropists) then become a substitute for the role of the wife and family? Might this metaphor help explain the increasing identification of the arts with the feminine sphere over the course of the nineteenth century?

Another overarching argument of the book is that the museum movement was fundamentally shaped by a new Victorian aesthetics that privileged “art as experience” (83) over more art-historical frames of interpretation, such as attention to formal qualities of a work of art or its place within national schools or stylistic traditions. She is calling attention to an important aspect of Victorian aesthetics, but this formulation is somewhat imprecise. Defined as a belief that the function of art was to give the viewer “the direct apprehension of subject matter” (86), it is sometimes described in Albertian terms, likening paintings to “windows onto nature” (85), and sometimes in terms of an “emphasis on ‘readability,’ subject and narrative” (85). The first alludes to a much larger framework of mimesis that governed much of Western painting from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century; the second seems to describe a certain type of painting, what the Victorians called “subject-pictures,” or pictures that told a story. Conflating the two modes of realism makes it difficult to capture the nuances of Victorian debates about the relative importance of naturalism, choice of subject matter, narrative legibility, and morality. As a result, the account of the relationship between Victorian aesthetics and museum practices offered here sometimes seems one-dimensional. For example, many of the paintings discussed in the chapter on museums' educational practices are precisely the kind of deliberately nonnarrative or, in Victorian terms, “subject-less,” paintings such as Albert Moore's A Summer Night (1884–90) or John Everett Millais's Autumn Leaves (1856) that the earlier discussion of collecting policies suggests these museums would not be interested in. In one sense, this is precisely Woodson-Boulton's point, and her discussion of these pictures allows her to highlight the ways museums' educational materials worked to emphasize the narrative qualities of even these works, revealing the class assumptions underlying their aesthetic distinctions. But more discussion of the specific decisions to acquire these works might have revealed how these different understandings of art's purpose were understood and debated at the time these paintings were made and, in some cases years later, entered museum collections. Such discussion might also bring the question of the market into play. Museums' collecting practices were shaped not only by their aesthetic preferences but also by the availability of work and the vagaries of art-historical reputation. For example, as the Pre-Raphaelites became part of a nationalist art-historical canon in the later nineteenth century, their works may have appealed to museums for their art-historical importance as much as, or even more than, for their style or subject matter.

Woodson-Boulton's book is an important contribution to the fields of history, museum studies, and art history. It advances current scholarly conversations about the exhibition culture of Britain more broadly, offering a long overdue look at provincial institutions to counterbalance the priority given to London in many such studies. Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool were ahead of London in establishing civic museums of contemporary art, and their practices offer insight into and context for innovations in museum practice and in commercial galleries across Great Britain. The author also engages with contemporary discussions of the social purposes of art, played out in debates over arts funding and education. The book concludes with a call to “fully utilize the museums we have inherited” (174), an important reminder in this age when, once again, the tensions between the ideal of the museum as educational and the allure of the museum as status symbol and entertainment pose challenges to museums' continued existence and vitality.