As far as modern writing goes, museums have got a bad press. If a novelist compares some institution to a museum, this is usually less than complimentary. In the second episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, for instance, Mr Garrett Deasy is headmaster of a school in Dalkey and a narrow-gauge Orange loyalist who believes that history is over, because the British empire is secure across the world. It soon emerges that Mr Deasy has a very limited view of his role; ‘to learn, one must be humble’, he tells Stephen Dedalus, ‘but life is the great teacher’. Yet the establishment he directs seems less devoted to the education of its boys – leading forth their essential natures – than to mere schooling. Everything is done by copying – the boys copy sums off the board but do not understand them; they recite a Roman History lesson by rote but miss its point – that Pyrrhus had won a battle but at a cost too great to be borne. Joyce uses the scene to capture the mimicry inherent in the colonial mission which turns natives into copycats and teachers into imitators of distant power-elites.

Mr Deasy is – or thinks he is – a Christian. He says that history is moving towards one great goal, the manifestation of God. Like the social theorist Karl Marx or the evolutionist Charles Darwin, he believes that it is going along a straight line towards a definite, discernible conclusion, and Joyce is quite mischievous in the way he links the teleology of Marxism and Darwinism to that of Christianity, as if they were but obverse sides of the same coin.