Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain

Apollo, July, 2005 by Christiana Payne

Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain

Tim Barringer Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art By Yale University Press, 40 [pounds sterling]/$65

ISBN 0 30 010380 8

Wide ranging and thought-provoking, This new study of The visual imagery of work in mid-Victorian England repays close 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 modern prosperity, while for influential thinkers, such as Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, it was a moral and religious duty, an essential defence against poverty, 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 very word 'labour', with its overtones of toil and travail, became a proud badge of identity for a newly-formed political party at the end of the century; for women, however, it continued to refer primarily to childbirth. In our own time, Britain's long-hours culture is blamed on the continuing legacy of the Victorian Protestant work ethic; the country is governed by the Labour party; and women's work, arguably, is still undervalued. This is a subject, therefore, which can hardly fail to arouse interest on a variety of levels. The ideas and images discussed in Tim Barringer's readable and beautifully illustrated book have a resonance far beyond the specific period it covers.

The title is neat but a little misleading. The 'men at work' are both labourers and artists: 'art and labour' refers both to the representation of the male labouring body, and to the labour of the artist/craftsman. However, the chronological scope 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 out that his coverage is not comprehensive, offering paradigmatic case studies rather than aiming at completeness. As he acknowledges in a footnote, England and India are included but not Scotland or Australia; agricultural and industrial labour but not textiles or fisheries. There is potential here for further research.

More controversially, the book 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 out, there have been specialised studies of the iconography of women's work. Nevertheless, there would be scope for a comprehensive, systematic study 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 recent past, the representation of labour has polarised art historians, attracting those of a Marxist persuasion but being ignored by many from the opposite camp. Barringer's book, with its thorough scholarship and balanced approach, offers a way out of this impasse. His style 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 concept, but in relation to the complex definitions of the time rather than the monolithic categories favoured by 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 book. Barringer reminds us of its full title - the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations--and also of its role 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 presented a contrast to displays in which machines were dominant and labourers absent. Observers were both attracted and repelled by the spectacle. Ruskin refused to visit the exhibition, and began to write 'The Nature of Gothic'; John Linnell responded by moving out of London for good, to paint scenes of pre-mechanised agriculture.

A year later, Ford Madox Brown began his painting Work, the subject of Barringer's first chapter. This is a much-discussed painting, but it is richly contextualised here with reference 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 echoes in the harvest scenes discussed in the second chapter, which is followed by 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 movement in industrial Lancashire.