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

Grand Designs is an ambitious, important book that studies the design reform movement of the mid-nineteenth century, giving special attention to questions of industry and labor. It treats a number of areas where design became a contested concept: early official attempts to teach design; arguments over the copyrighting of calico designs; the Great Exhibition (inevitably); and Henry Cole's Museum of Ornamental Art and its descendants, including the Bethnal Green Museum. In doing so Lara Kriegel exploits important sources little known or used by the cultural historian, particularly those surrounding the debate on copyright and calico design. She highlights the centrality of debates around design to all sorts of nineteenth-century preoccupations—such as self-improvement, the nature of the market, and the nature of Englishness or Britishness—and demonstrates how little consensus there was on these issues.

While Kriegel re-examines well-trodden areas of Victorian culture, her research is so thorough and imaginatively conceived that even the chapter on the Great Exhibition adds a new dimension. In that chapter, she underscores the importance given, in writing about the Exhibition, to production as well as consumption and display—"telling tales about production" (90) and about national characteristics as embodied in idealised laborers.

The illustrations of the book are one of its great strengths; it is fantastic, for instance, to have high-quality reproductions of exhibits from the infamous Gallery of False Principles at the museum of Ornamental art. These reproductions (such as Plate 8: chintz fabric with toreador and flowers) are strangely fascinating and contribute to Kriegels impressive discussion of the Gallery of False Principles itself. Other commentators have seen the Gallery either as unimportant or merely as evidence of Coles philistinism and authoritarianism; here, however, it gets the attention it deserves as part of a complex cultural phenomenon.

Given Kriegels emphasis on the cultural geography of museums and design reform, I would have liked to see more on the travelling loan collections of the south Kensington museum; those collections aspired to lead and direct museum provision throughout the country not just through the provision of loan collections but also through evaluation of local museums. although the chapter on the Bethnal Green museum highlights these issues, the national ambitions of the south Kensington museum could have been stressed further.

Of the three concepts in the subtitle, empire is the least developed. Kriegel examines reactions to the artisan production from India displayed at the Great Exhibition (and subsequently at the Museum of Ornamental Art and the South Kensington Museum), and she also studies the subtle tensions generated by international trade (primarily between Britain and India). In contributing to scholarship on the imperial role of the South Kensington Museum, Kriegel aims to shift attention from "the consumption and display of overseas goods to their manufacture and trade" (6). While I'm not convinced she is entirely successful in this, she does richly develop the role of economic changes affecting production, the discursive positions afforded to and developed by producers of various sorts, and the relationship between production and consumption. Thus arguments over copyright and calico design were shaped not only by technical developments but also by the claims of those on both sides of a debate over patriotic moral authority and the true nature of entrepreneurship.

Grand Designs also contributes significantly to the development of cultural history. Kriegel sets out an ambitious stall, arguing that cultural history has tended to neglect the materialist concerns of social history, especially "labor, mechanization, capitalism and skill" (11). Several historians have noted the arbitrary and detached nature of the interpretations cultural history sometimes offers, and Kriegel follows Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Avery Hunt in reintegrating social concerns without returning to a "social determines cultural" approach. Her use of the very "objectness" of design reform's concerns to pin down cultural history is an important development in the historiography of nineteenth-century culture. The claim...