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

Despite the title, Kriegel’s ambitious book deals with the South Kensington Museum from its founding to its later incarnation as the V&A. Museums are a rich and complex resource; Kriegel brings histories of labor and design education together with current debates in museum studies. She aims to locate this museum within the concerns of market capitalism, industrialization, and democratization; her topics include taste making, empire (at least, British India), consumerism, and international tourism. This sometimes difficult mix is held together by artisanal concerns. With a lively narrative style, Kriegel marshals an impressive array of archival and periodical sources to reveal relationships between the museum; the British government’s initial concerns with design education, trade, and national taste; the empowering of artisanal designers; and the museum’s changing identities. Her visual resources include printed patterns and such products as calicos, chintzes, and wallpapers. The book has interest for museum studies, design education, and labor history.

The book opens strongly. Industrial rivalry with France, where design education and trade exhibitions were well established, and copyright protection for patterns provoked the establishment of the Government School of Design. Kriegel has a talent for telling a good story; she punctuates this potentially dry subject with lively debates between high art and trade needs, often involving accusations of “design piracy.” Issues of artisan and empire emerge with the 1851 Great Exhibition, in which the first hints of the vogue for hand-made wares from India appeared. The Exhibition led to the Museum of Ornamental Art from which the South Kensington Museum derived.

The museum’s founding ethos of improving taste conflicted with democratization; manufactures and consumers were reluctant to have taste imposed on them from above. Ironically, Henry Cole’s desire to improve the spectacle of British taste and the visual lenses of British designers resulted in the popular but short-lived Gallery of False Principles. When taste became an issue touching morality, empire, consumption, and trade, social reformers like economist F. J. Prouting challenged elite didacticism as offensive to Englishness, Protestantism, liberty, and commerce.

The book’s main problem, apparent in its title, is its tendency to fixate on specific areas of interest in its mixing of current controversies with historical ideas. Kriegel critiques a currently fashionable trope that views the museum as a vehicle of “consensual surveillance,” but she might have provided more nuanced accounts of museum history that join cultural history with art history and an understanding of visual intelligence.¹

As tools of democratic governance, museums had models of regulatory gaze that lay outside the European courts.² In modernizing cultures, increasingly complex ways of seeing evolved to suit economic, cultural, and social needs, apparent in public and private museums.³ Dutch arts of describing had promoted visual skills and trained eyes since the seventeenth century, and British artisanal manufacturers, such as Josiah Wedgwood, had used private collections to commercial effect.⁴ Goldgar’s discussion of founding debates about representation, democratization, taxation, and access at the British Museum deserve wider recognition, as does Conn’s discussion of the importance of an object-based epistemology in the Victorian collecting ethos.⁵

A broader vision of London’s cultural geography would have explained why the museum moved to South Kensington; Britain, like other capital cities, created cultural spaces. That a satellite museum in the East End was established for working men suggests the importance of zoning as well as a recognition that workers were worth cultivating. Kriegel demonstrates how the South Kensington Museum had evolved to become a tourist destination by 1880. She misses the irony, however, in her use of Moncure Conway, an American, to exemplify the tourist assessment of the museum. As a representation of Empire, had the museum not succeeded in holding even former parts of the Empire in its collective gaze? Kriegel’s are far from the last words on the V&A, but she makes a stimulating addition to our...