“Old things belonging to the nation”: Forster, Antiquities and the Queer Museum

Abstract

In an essay of 1920, “The Objects” (later republished as “For the Museum’s Sake”), Forster confronted the colonialist attitudes of the British Museum curator Wallis Budge (1857–1934) as expressed in his memoirs. This paper discusses Forster’s attitude toward national museums and their antiquities in this essay and in Maurice, and it suggests that Budge’s memoirs may have influenced the later, 1932, version of the novel. Forster’s nuanced and critical view of heritage has subsequently proved influential for a BM project on LGBTQ+ world history.

Keywords

• maurice
• merchant ivory films
• british museum
• lgbt history
• queer museology