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

It takes an author of considerable confidence to select for her book cover a pattern of Crystal Palace wallpaper that in the 1850s was judged to be of such irredeemably poor taste that it was exhibited in the Museum of Ornamental Art’s Gallery of False Principles (the Chamber of Horrors). Yet Lara Kriegel lacks neither confidence nor insight as she proposes a significantly new interpretation of the design reform movement from the late 1830s to the early 1870s. Grand Designs convincingly weaves the seemingly separate stories of School of Design curricular debates, copyright extension, the Great Exhibition, the short-lived Museum of Ornamental Arts, and the siting of the South Kensington Museum into a powerful narrative of how laborers and manufacturers shaped mid-Victorian design reform.

During this period the movement’s goals shifted between rehabilitating the public’s decayed aesthetic sensibilities and enhancing the attractiveness of commercial manufactures. The reformers’ premise was that good taste, the foundation of cultural capital, would sustain economic prosperity and market dominance. Seldom-cited periodicals (such as Cassell’s Illustrated Exhibitor, Art Workman, and Bee-Hive) disclose the impassioned arguments of artisans and their employers to improve fabric design for curtains and upholstery, to cure the too-prevalent flaws of wallpapers, and to create carpet patterns of unassailable quality. At the heart of these arguments lay the commercial success of the empire, as well as the socioeconomic aspirations of artisans.

To promote these entangled interests, in 1837 the School of Design was opened pursuant to a parliamentary inquiry into the sinking quality of the industrial arts. Immediately disputes erupted over access to life drawing classes, pitting skilled laborers against academicians and escalating into a fierce contest of class privilege. After a decade of debate, the outcome was to recast design education in favor of the manufacturer. Concurrently, a similar rationale propelled the extension of copyright laws, crafted to deter unrepentant provincial manufacturers from stealing designs from London display windows, but more importantly to help Britain to compete against a rapidly industrializing France.

Of course the grand proposition to elevate aesthetic sensibilities and to showcase the industrial arts was the Great Exhibition of 1851. Focusing on the flourishing print culture surrounding the exhibition, Kriegel describes how it ennobled design and manufacturing and gave a new voice to laborers. Refashioned in print as “valiant producers,” the power of labor to leverage the cultural agenda was soon realized in the pointed objections to the overly didactic displays of good and bad taste at the newly established Museum of Ornamental Arts, as well as in the strident debates over the location of and access to the South Kensington Museum.

Carefully tracing the concerns of labor, Kriegel substantiates her arguments with close readings of a wide range of sources, including contemporary accounts gleaned from well over three dozen different journals, newspapers, and serials. Her conclusions propose a complex story of artisanal skill parlayed into cultural capital and offer a challenging reassessment of the politics of the mid-Victorian design reform movement.