Art versus industry? New perspectives on visual and industrial cultures in nineteenth-century Britain ed. by Kate Nichols, Rebecca Wade, and Gabriel Williams (review)

The title of this book, Art versus industry? New perspectives on visual and industrial cultures in nineteenth-century Britain, deliberately invokes the emphatic rhetorical strategies of John Ruskin and William Morris in their theorizing of the conflict between the aesthetics and politics of making craft objects, and the commercial imperatives of industrial mass production. Ruskin and Morris famously referred back to the social history and morality of the handmade to oppose industrialization, which they believed to be a powerfully dehumanizing force that denied workers any creativity or satisfaction. But the title adds a crucial qualifying question mark to suggest that such a crudely drawn opposition or divide, despite its many attractions for subsequent Marxist writers from Francis Klingender to Raymond Williams, underplays the ways in which art practitioners discussed and engaged with the potential contradictions of making products in a highly industrialized late nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, the discourse that has emerged to shape this discussion is seen here as over-concerned with questions of class, a preoccupation that both "fails to acknowledge the complexity" of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat and "almost entirely obscures critical questions of gender, religion and empire" (4). This book, instead, aims to reinstate the experiences and "stories of nineteenth-century arts and crafts practitioners," "many of whom hail from already marginalised groups: women, the elderly, the working and lower middle classes, the colonised," back into an extended narrative of craft production in the late nineteenth century (5). Lara Kriegel makes this project explicit in her account of the "feminine world of rescue and revival, agency and alienation, and labour and loss" that characterized the declining lace industry at this time: "The archive that their effort created allows us to move our discussions of design reform beyond the dichotomy of art versus industry and into uncharted registers.… The handicraft revival did not only involve questions of aesthetics and economy, or even of nation and history, but ultimately, of affect and memory too" (24). In addition to these concerns, the authors gathered together in this book also show a continuing awareness of technological change and its impact on the processes of manufacture.

In some of the book's chapters, the stories that are invoked to contest, modify, or sophisticate any crude narrative of the clashes between the aesthetic and the functional can be described in relatively straightforward and readily visible ways. The debates and practices surrounding the designing of metalwork for lighting, for example, here discussed by Graeme Gooday and Abigail Harrison Moore, are complicated by the gendered nature of the contemporary understanding of domestic space. Thus the narrative of a gradual victory of well-designed functional brackets and shades in an Arts and Crafts tradition over elaborately decorative products is represented as distinct from an underlying counter-discussion of a feminized vision of quietly lit and restrained, though highly decorative, drawing and living rooms. Other issues discussed here bring into play a much more complex pattern of competing interests as in Renate Dohmen's account of the 1883 to 1884 Calcutta International Exhibition. Celebrated by the Indian colonial government for its scale, popularity, and financial success, a view cautiously shared by some recent scholars, Dohmen carefully analyzes what she calls the "jostling" over interpretations of the event between five competing interests: the native population, the Indian government, the relatively liberal Viceroy Lord Ripon, local British residents, and the colonial administration based in London (200). Rather than a successful World Fair that attracted international attention, Dohmen argues, the Calcutta International Exhibition was constrained by its colonial locale and focus into a more localized "native-centric" event that demonstrated the difficulties of creating world fairs in a colonial setting (202). Such difficulties can be characterized by the different perspectives held in settler and subject colonies and by the colonial ascription...