Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture

by Lara Kriegel
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2007
328 pp., illus. 66 b/w, 8 col. Trade, $84.95; paper, $23.95
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4051-5 ; ISBN: 978-0-8223-4072-0.

Reviewed by Jennifer Ferng
Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology


jferng@mit.edu



The spectacular display of industrial products showcased at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace is familiar to most enthusiasts of nineteenth-century Victorian culture. Using the Great Exhibition as a backdrop to her historical narrative about design reform in Britain, Lara Kriegel restores the significance of labor back to the field of cultural history, highlighting how quotidian tradesmen assisted in shaping the ideological missions of once humble institutions such as the modern-day Victoria & Albert Museum in London’s South Kensington. While these educational and political battles raged within studio classrooms and the halls of Parliament, activist teachers of the fine arts such as Benjamin Robert Haydon and Charles Heath Wilson deliberated over the merits of drawing the human figure and Etruscan vases, jockeying for the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of their students in training. The pursuit of genius, as perceived by one of the protagonists William Dyce of the Government School of Design, was frowned upon, not for its elevation of the individual ego in artistic creation, but for its lack of modesty (and perhaps morality) upon the part of the artist in pursuing the “useless” occupation of being a painter. Torn between remaining common men with ordinary tastes and becoming savants who could be assimilated into the proper world of art, these British artisans serve as reminders of those who brought some of the most important Victorian issues of class, economics, education, and gender to the attention of their middle-class peers as well as to contemporary consumers of decorative ornament.

This study paints a lively picture of how such familiar London institutions of art and design collided with the greater forces of industry and markets, a pointed behind-the-scenes inquiry into some of the more minor figures who played a crucial role in determining Britain’s attitudes towards aesthetic development. Kriegel situates her critique of the Victorian museum as a revision of the “exhibitionary complex,” a concept authored by cultural critic Tony Bennett, who asserts that the museum signified two important ideas — first, that it was an utopian location, devoid of geographic or local contexts, and second, that it transformed its visitors into obedient and passive consumers of visual culture, recalling Michel Foucault’s notion of nineteenth-century liberal reforms managing unrestrained populations enjoying the fruits of democracy. Her critique encourages readers to reconsider the self-fashioning of the working man as the center of these institutions’ desire for expansion into the public sphere. She characterizes each of these episodic chapters — including the machines and commodities at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Henry Cole’s initial endeavor to organize the Museum of Ornamental Art, and his outpost of the South Kensington Museum at Bethnal Green — as a highly conflicted arena, though lacking any of the potential nuances attached to each historical example. The tenuous role of artisans within the industrial regime of Britain is often contrasted with the more professional, stabilized occupations of painters and architects. Each chapter is meticulously researched, demonstrating her historian’s eye for detail and flair for heightened dramatic tensions between the given historical actors and the public’s perception of them. Close evaluations of design journals, newspapers, and firsthand testimonies are provided throughout the book while the visual representations, although equally valuable, could have been analyzed in more depth and instead, are used as additional forms of evidence to support Kriegel’s arguments.

The case of intellectual copyright for calico patterns from 1839-1851 exemplifies how the piracy of design became a questionable art on its own. The protection of domestic woolen and silk trades led to the growth of other fringe trades that copied outlawed Indian cotton fabrics using cylindrical rollers to print multiple pieces of cloth over the course of one day. Kriegel evokes Charles Babbage’s Economy of Machines and Manufactures from 1832 that stated mechanical reproduction often enhanced the value of an original design; this opinion provides a balanced counterpoint to Walter Benjamin’s prominent view of mechanical reproduction as well as a fresh outlook on the classic differences between what was considered an original design and its copy.

The discourse of aesthetics — including components of color, line, pattern, style; methods of fabrication; and artisans’ exterior influences — is, however, subservient to Kriegel’s greater interest in making the production of labor transparent when considering the luxurious Sèvres porcelain of France or the “woven-wind” muslin of India. The market conditions of the nineteenth century are framed as direct influences on the design debates and anxieties that Kriegel discusses; here, the author owes her methodology to such predecessors as Maxine Berg and Leora Auslander, each an economic historian who has respectively argued for the importance of supply-side market goods produced by either commercial tradesmen in Britain or furniture makers in France. The effects of “Empire,” though present as one of the words in the title of book, are lightly touched upon. The orientalism of ethnic imagery, blatantly noted in the Great Exhibition’s classification of India and China’s wares, is explained as a token practice of a British audience who often stereotyped indigenous peoples along with their products, even though many of these foreign goods were far superior in quality than those of Britain.

For those nostalgic for the days when imperialism reigned and the museum was not yet a domineering manifestation, Kriegel’s book casts an interdisciplinary perspective onto the enlightened richness of Victorian design while sidestepping more traditional interpretations that once held these industrial products to be merely rashly conceived and poorly executed.