British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870—1900: Beauty for the People (review)

"When I see a spade," declares Cecily emphatically in the second act of Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest, "I call it a spade." To which Gwendolyn tartly retorts, "I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different." Chances are, neither character had ever done much more with a spade than hear their gardeners mention one, but Wilde had. Whenever examples of real-life action are called for in support of the writer's socialist views, one is informed of his uncharacteristic shovel-handling in support of John Ruskin's efforts to get Oxford undergraduates to dig a flower-edged road through a swamp separating the villages of Upper and Lower Hinskey. Over the years, scholars have written much on Victorian interests in the mutual support of aestheticism and class-based social reform, giving attention to Ruskin, Wilde, and William Morris and, to a lesser extent, Vernon Lee, Walter Pater, Olive Schreiner, and several others. In the majority of these studies, the main subject has been the views that these educated individuals held regarding the relationship between beauty and social development. Beginning with monographs as early as Reginia Gagnier's Idylls of the Marketplace (1986), however, academics have also come increasingly to consider aestheticism's position within the cultural milieu of the urban, middle-class public. These studies have demonstrated that, despite the high-class pretensions seen to characterize British aestheticism since its inception, the Aesthetic Movement was as thoroughly swamped by bourgeois values as was Cecily and Gwendolyn's class-sensitive bickering.

Notwithstanding these scholarly developments, research in the field has continued to address predominantly the works of established authors and artists, while the concept of an aestheticism arising from the middle classes has yet to be fully explored. In British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People, Diana Maltz does much to address this lacuna. Indeed, in a sense she does the subject one better by considering the relationship between aestheticism and those classes categorized as below the petit bourgeoisie. Rather than focus on various writers' views of the role of beauty in everyday life, Maltz enhances our understanding of the urban working classes' relationship to aestheticism. This aim is far more complex and challenging than one might at first expect. The voices of the poor and working classes have rarely been preserved. In addition, the recording of such voices by the likes of Henry Mayhew and Octavia Hill generally resulted in a notable degree of interpretation on the part of the person doing the recording. Moreover, the unmediated documents of Victorian working-class experiences that exist are almost always brief and lacking in self-analytic depth.

As the book's subtitle, Beauty for the People, suggests, Maltz's research similarly offers, perhaps inevitably, more information about individuals who felt they were working "for" the urban working classes than it does about the views held by those members of society themselves. Nevertheless, this monograph makes a useful contribution to Victorian studies in its sustained exploration of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and labour in the minds of those individuals who, rather than self-defining primarily as writers or artists, were more invested in their identities as philanthropists.

Maltz acknowledges the difficulty in maintaining aestheticism's relevance to her study when her discussion moves, as it often does, into the consideration of philanthropists' wishes simply to make the surroundings of poorer people more pleasant. To accommodate the sometimes tenuous connection, she opens with a broad definition of aestheticism that centres on the Pre-Raphaelites, Matthew Arnold, and, especially, Ruskin. Maltz uses Ruskin's aesthetics to define a strongly moral aestheticism that then supports her focus on philanthropy. This model is an accurate representation of Ruskin's views, but it does on occasion encourage the dilution of aestheticism into the more general notion of...