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

In the last decade the full-fledged history of goods has taken its place along side the history of people and nations. Intensely aware of the question of where things come from, historians of commodities trace the trade routes of empire and explore the interiors of workshops, parlors, exhibition halls, and museums. These cultural histories, self-conscious products of our own age of consumer capitalism (as well as a very literal materialist inflection on the linguistic turn), also examine the outpouring of commentary in newspapers, journals, books, and prints that created a “discourse” about the value and meaning of accumulating stuff. Lara Kriegel’s Grand Designs brings to this growing historiography a particular concern with understanding how labor and international trade figured in nineteenth-century English debates about design and good taste in the decorative arts.

Kriegel takes issue with historians, and particularly historians of museums and exhibitions, who suggest that the spectacle of empire found in such venues as the Crystal Palace in 1851 or the South Kensington Museum displaced longstanding British fights over the conditions of labor and the status of artisans in the industrializing nation and its colonies. She re-frames the history of the South Kensington (later the Victoria and Albert Museum)–and, indeed, of William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement—by taking debates over the aesthetic and social value of everyday artifacts back to the reform movements of the 1830s. Whereas the Georgian and early Romantic disputes over taste circulated primarily within gentry circles and had as much to do with the appreciation of painting and landscapes (the two intimately linked) as with chairs, fabrics, or silverware, by the 1830s the question of the relation of art to manufacturing gained the attention of merchants, artisans, manufacturers, and statesmen. Indeed, amid investigations of public health and morals and ongoing efforts to suppress radical labor activists, Parliament formed a committee in 1835 to consider the apparent failure of good taste in British manufacturing, particularly when compared to the elegant goods produced by French artisans. Such state attention—prompting the creation of the Government School of Design in 1837 to elevate English craftsmen—conferred cultural capital, Kriegel argues, on the makers of goods and authorized their participation in debates over design and taste for the rest of the century. At the same time, advocates of free trade set limits on how far government could go in promoting aesthetic skills, even for market advantage. In one of her most resonant chapters, Kreigel shows how the demands of some artisans and manufacturers for copyright protections for patterns of cloth, wallpaper, and furniture exposed the tensions between traditional concepts of originality or individual artistic expression, on the one hand, and the new techniques of mechanical reproduction, on the other.

In a rather awkward terminology, Kriegel contrasts the “supply side” approach to enhancing design—by which she means, an approach that focused on educating the makers of goods—to a “demand side” approach, which foregrounds the training of consumers’ taste, and then rejects conventional accounts of their historical succession. The anachronism of her usage aside, Kriegel’s own point is that the advocates of improving taste (and thus strengthening markets) never lost sight of the importance of the producers of goods, and they continued to make those producers visible to the people who attended or read about exhibitions in the decorative arts. Exhibits at the Crystal Palace and the Kensington Museum even recognized the skills of the artisans of India, although with some ambivalence about the place of “traditional” or “primitive” crafts and their luxury goods within modern civilization. By not attending to the visual and discursive representation of labor in exhibitions and the popular commentary that accompanied them, Kriegel argues, other historian have themselves fetishized commodities, implying that relations among things overtook relations among people. In her telling, aesthetic reformers who aimed to democratize good taste in effect introduced a new axis of cultural assimilation that complicated the classic lines of social...