Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, and: Work: Ford Madox Brown's Painting and Victorian Life, and: Unpicking Gender: The Social Construction of Gender in the Lancashire Cotton Weaving Industry, 1880–1914 (review)

As all of the studies considered here show, the purpose and meaning of work was undergoing rapid transformation in Victorian Britain, a shift which impacted on class and gender identities and their social and cultural representation. The perspectives of work that were produced by workers, employers, writers and artists were multilayered and highly spatialized, moving between the representation of ideals and the recording of work practices. These three books explore the significance of labour in representations of work and gender. Barringer and Walker consider the production of images of male labour whilst Schwarzkopf's study focuses on the experience of work for the cotton weavers of Lancashire and its relationship to gender and identity.

Barringer's book is the most interdisciplinary in sources and methods. He positions his work as a 'social history of art', one which rejects the polarity of context and formal analysis. The result is a study that uses the concept of work imaginatively to explore the relationship between art and labour, the content of visual sources and the meanings they reflect and construct. Barringer's study is informed by Marxist approaches; he states that a focus on the body of the working man enables him to put class back at the heart of the art-historical analysis albeit in a way that acknowledges the interplay of race and gender as well as politics, religion and regional identities (14). As he notes at the outset, the ideological importance of the gospel of work has been long acknowledged by historians but the representation of work as ethical and aesthetic in images of the male labouring body has received little attention. In his appreciation of the 'complexities and fragilities' in images of men at work, Barringer traces struggles over the meaning of work and the ability of artists to represent this meaning (2).

Through a series of five case studies Barringer investigates the representation of labour in visual culture and considers the social and personal context in which they were produced. An analysis of images is interwoven with the stories artists produced about their own labour and alongside wider debates about men and work. Barringer's openingcase study begins, unsurprisingly, with a detailed investigation of Ford Madox Brown's Work which is presented as a direct intervention into mid-century debates about labour. In Work the meaning of labour is displayed in the body of the labourers as physically hard yet undertaken lustily – the ideal expression of Christian masculinity in which a burden is undertaken for the benefit of mankind. But Barringer also shows how the artist presents his own labour as exemplary through the technical detail of the painting, the references it contains to contemporary concerns and debates and in Madox Brown's anxiety to record the amount of work he put into the painting. Similar themes are addressed in a second case study on the work of John Linnell who produced images of agricultural labour and, like Madox Brown, carefully recorded his own production process. In an analysis informed by social context, Barringer argues that debates about the Corn Laws madethe rural labourer a problematic figure with the power to disrupt the aesthetic merit of landscape painting through associations with the brutalizing nature of agricultural work and the constant presence of poverty. Both case studies show how the rendering of labour in art, these attempts to capture the materiality of the world, reveal anxieties about the nature of work and the artist's ability to demonstrate his...