Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain

Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain

Tim Barringer Published for the Paul Mellon midmost point for Studies in British Art by means of Yale University Press, 40 [pound sterling]/$65

ISBN 0 30 010380 8

Wide ranging and thought-provoking, This of recent origin study of The visual imagery of work in mid-Victorian England repays shut up attention.

The theme of work aroused passionate interest in Victorian Britain. In the guise of Industry, work was recognised as the foundation of the country's fresh prosperity, while for influential thinkers, similar as Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, it was a moral and religious what one ought to do an essential defence against need depression and sin. The relative values of manual and intellectual labour--combined, of course, in the work of the artist or craftsman--were hotly debated. The actual word 'labour', with its overtones of toil and travail, became a self-satisfied badge of identity for a newly-formed political party at the extremity of the century; for women however, it continued to direct primarily to childbirth. In our be in possession of time, Britain's long-hours culture is blamed upon the continuing legacy of the Victorian Protestant work ethic; the geographical division is governed by the Labour party; and women's work, arguably, is still undervalued. This is a subdue therefore, which can hardly fail to arouse interest upon a variety of levels. The ideas and images discussed in Tim Barringer's readable and beautifully illustrated work have a resonance far beyond the specific period it covers

The title is neat on the contrary a little misleading. The 'men at work' are one as well as the other labourers and artists: 'art and labour' consigns both to the representation of the male labouring material substance and to the labour of the artist/craftsman. However, the chronological drift of the book is narrower than the title implies. Barringer makes it clear in his introduction that he is dealing with the period between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Ruskin-Whistler trial of 1878 He is also careful to point without that his coverage is not comprehensive, offering paradigmatic case studies rather than aiming at completenes As he acknowledges in a footnote, England and India are included on the other hand not Scotland or Australia; agricultural and industrial labour on the contrary not textiles or fisheries. There is potential here for further research.

More controversially, the work deals with men, but not women or children. For the mid-Victorians, the positive values attributed to labour were, indeed, almost exclusively associated with adult males, and, as Barringer points without there have been specialised studies of the iconography of women's work. Nevertheless, there would be intent for a comprehensive, systematic close attention of the iconography of labour in this period, perhaps in the form of an exhibition, which would bring together images of male, female and child workers.

In the new past, the representation of labour has polarised art historians, attracting those of a Marxist persuasion on the other hand being ignored by many from the opposite camp. Barringer's work with its thorough scholarship and balanced approach, presents a way out of this impasse. His diction of writing is admirably jargon-free, his methodology sophisticated and well-informed. In his lucid and accessible introduction, he describes his aim as 'thick description' rather than chronological narrative. He eschews Foucauldian analysis, reaffirming the importance of the individual, and of an art history 'in which the interpretation of visual images is the central analytical act'. Barringer recognises class as an important conception but in relation to the compound definitions of the time rather than the monolithic categories favoured by means of Marxist theorists. His wide knowledge of the secondary literature, and his extensive research in primary sources, are evident in the copious footnotes, although it is unfortunate that no bibliography is provided.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 functions as the keystone of the work Barringer reminds us of its replete title - the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations--and also of its character in propagating the South Kensington Museum, later to become the Victoria and Albert. Official imagery celebrated male labouring bodies, reapers and blacksmiths; evidence of fine craftsmanship in the Mediaeval and Indian Courts neared a contrast to displays in which machines were dominant and labourers absent. spectators were both attracted and repell by dint of the spectacle. Ruskin refused to visit the exhibition, and began to write 'The Nature of Gothic'; John Linnell answered by moving out of London for beneficial to paint scenes of pre-mechanised agriculture.

A year later, Ford Madox Brown began his painting Work, the make submissive of Barringer's first chapter. This is a much-discussed painting, on the other hand it is richly contextualised here with regard to the writings of Ruskin and Carlyle, as well as the visual sources of Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor and the high-art tradition. Its religious significance--often underplayed in earlier accounts--finds echoe in the harvest exhibitions discussed in the second chapter, which is followed by means of a study of the blacksmith-artist James Sharpies, taking the reader from agricultural to industrial labour, and to the complexities of skilled labour, trade unionism and the co-operative change in industrial Lancashire.