Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (review)

Joseph Bizup's Manufacturing Culture is a book that needed to be written. In its detailed attention to industry's side of the art and industry divide, it offers new and important insights into the proindustrial writings of William Cooke Taylor, Andrew Ure, Edward Baines, Charles Babbage, and the debates over art and its relationship to technology and industrial design in the Art-Journal and Henry Cole's Journal of Design and Manufacture. The bulk of the book traces the rhetoric of manufacturing culture produced by these works—with "manufacturing" functioning here as an adjective rather than a verb—in the period from the factory debates of the 1830s to the Great Exhibition in 1851.

The material Bizup provides is useful; his horizon of engagement with it, however, could be more expansive. Bizup suggests that because his focus "lies with proindustrial appropriations of the language of aesthetic culture," he will not be attending "to such matters as the rise of particular industries, the institution of art education, or even the actual social conditions that accompanied Britain's industrialization" (15). Similarly, although his project is meant as a "contribution to the genealogy of the critical tradition [Raymond] Williams traces in Culture and Society," Bizup chooses not to "provide a comprehensive account of that tradition's engagement with the strains of proindustrial rhetoric" being examined (15). While the former caveat unnecessarily limits the argumentative parameters of studies of rhetoric, the latter takes the wind out of the industrial debate itself, presenting much of the book's proindustrial discourse without the dynamic interlocutors that helped to shape it.

The first four chapters of Manufacturing Culture showcase the variety of rhetorical strategies used by proponents of industry to counter "the polemical power inherent in the Romantic opposition between industry and culture" (4). Chapter 1 examines three classic proindustrial texts—Cooke Taylor's Notes on a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire (1841), Baines's History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), and Ure's Philosophy of Manufactures (1835)—that, as Bizup shows, all depend on Romantic ideas of organic unity in their defenses of the factory system. In different ways, Cooke Taylor, Baine, and Ure present the factory as a "co-operative body," thereby countering tracts critical of the factory system that highlight the degradations to the worker's body. Chapter 2 turns to Babbage's The Economy as well as his lesser-known works to illustrate a completely different defense of industry, one that casts machinery as the embodiment of abstract processes or "beautiful combinations" (65). In Babbage's view, the manufacturer becomes analogous to the mathematician; in the process, physical bodies and sensations are subordinated to an aesthetic of abstract efficiency. While Babbage is best remembered for anticipating the computer, Bizup suggests that this "drive toward abstraction . . . is the true source of Babbage's uncanny modernity" (55). Chapters 3 and 4 work as pendant pieces, drawing a parallel between social reformers' use of "savageness" as a figure for the manufacturing populations, and the demand by artists and designers that manufacturers heed their advice in the aesthetic realm. The idea was to cultivate taste, be it in the workers or the manufacturers, with the aim of linking commercial and social progress. The image of the "savage," Bizup concludes, did not so much resolve the tension between "aesthetic and technical 'progress'" as localize it (14).

The book ends with a chapter on John Ruskin and William Morris as two critics of industrialism who resisted attempts by factory system proponents to link aesthetic and commercial culture. Highlighting the difference between these two approaches, with specific reference to the Journal of Design, Bizup writes, "if Ruskin's calls for reform are grounded in a fundamentally anticapitalist 'feudal socialism,' the Journal of Design 's practical agenda is grounded in a quasi-utopian vision of commercial society in which industrial production and the maintenance of property rights conduce to wealth, improvement, and...