Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Talia Schaffer (review)

The work of handicrafting in Victorian literature tends to be read (when read at all) as a mode of characterization illustrating such gendered values as obedience or patience. Even less critical attention has been paid to the products of this labor, the penwipers and embroidery that litter Victorian fiction. Talia Schaffer’s Novel Craft cogently demonstrates that such oversights impoverish our understanding of a deeply significant cultural phenomenon whose attendant belief systems richly inform the mid-Victorian novel. In taking up this apparently quiet corner of nineteenth-century culture, she has made an invaluable contribution to the field of thing theory. Novel Craft performs three related and equally crucial tasks: it theorizes what Schaffer names the “craft paradigm,” or the values that craft was understood to embody (4); provides a brief but erudite social history of nineteenth-century craft; and, through sustained and intricate analyses of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), and Margaret Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior (1876), reveals precisely why this context is indispensable.

Schaffer defines the craft paradigm as a constellation of ideas about “representation, production, consumption, value and beauty that underlies a great deal of mid- Victorian creative work” (4). This paradigm conceives of craft as a popular practice that both inculcates and displays feminized middle-class virtues, particularly “management, thrift, industry, and ornamental talent” (5). Craft’s deep cultural resonances allowed it to stand for “a complexly allusive and enabling form of writing” that could itself make domestic handicraft signify, at different moments, aristocratic leisure or industrious middle-classness, an alignment with or opposition to industrial production, a modern outlook or an attachment to history and tradition, and a means of contesting the values of the credit economy (58). While Schaffer’s baseline definition of domestic handicraft as “anything made by hand, at home” encompasses crafts made by men, her analysis reflects the highly gendered nature of a paradigm that blurred the boundaries of labor and leisure yet was frequently deployed by novelists to critique emergent economic practices (15).

From a twenty-first-century perspective, much Victorian handicraft appears absurd, as Schaffer cheerfully concedes; far from attempting to solicit our admiration of handcrafted objects, she revels in their oddness. Crafters preserved, transformed, and imitated natural objects, which they “gilded, shellacked, wrapped in foil, dipped in wax, pierced, glued together, wrapped in fabric” (31); they decorated picture frames with fruit pits and made sequins from fish scales; they purchased cheap commodities to “wrap, glue, spangle, or paint” (8). Who might not object to such pursuits? Yet while progressive women from Mary Lamb to Frances Power Cobbe critiqued the tyranny of so-called women’s work, the received conception of craft that underpins our aesthetic disdain—craft as the timeless, flawless product of a master’s hand—did not precede the craft paradigm. Rather, it emerged in the 1850s, when Design Reform and its successor, the Arts and Crafts movement, gained prominence by vilifying domestic handicraft and opposing it to newly-coined aesthetic values that have since “become internalized” (179).

To the degree that we read domestic handicraft on its detractors’ terms, Schaffer argues, we misread its literary significance. Chapter 1 serves as a corrective history, tracing domestic handicraft’s emergence, explicating its cultural functions and most popular forms, and charting its decline as the worldview it supports succumbs to cultural attack and economic change. Devoting a separate chapter to Victorian handicraft’s history allows Schaffer to produce a more comprehensive and fully theorized account than the contours of her four novels might permit, but more importantly, it clears a space and provides a point of reference for extended close readings that elucidate the craft paradigm’s centrality to the mid-Victorian cultural imaginary even as they recapitulate its rise and fall. In chapter 2, Schaffer demonstrates how Cranford’s ornamental candlelighters, made by Matty from...