Ford Madox Brown: The Manchester murals and the matter of history 9781526142443

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Ford Madox Brown

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Ford Madox Brown The Manchester murals and the matter of history

Colin Trodd

Manchester University Press



Copyright © Colin Trodd 2022 The right of Colin Trodd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 4243 6 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not ­guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover: Detail from Ford Madox Brown, John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, A.D. 1753, 1888–90. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images.

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In memory of Paul Barlow

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The beautiful appearance of the dream-worlds, in creating which everyman is a perfect artist, is the prerequisite of all plastic art. Friedrich Nietzsche Artistic activity, when it represents the human figure, is often first of all the pressure of causality reproducing once again the surface of things themselves. Aby Warburg There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Walter Benjamin We live surrounded by possibility, not mere presence. In the prison of mere presence we could not even move nor even breathe. Ernst Bloch [A]ctual events are nowise so simply related to each other as parent and offspring are; every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events, prior or contemporaneous, and all will in its turn combine with others to give birth to new: it is an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements. Thomas Carlyle History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the mind, yet drive man on with a blind force. F. M. Powicke

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Contents



List of plates viii List of figuresx Acknowledgementsxii Abbreviationsxiv

Introduction

1

Part I: A working life 1 Ford Madox Brown and the historical imagination

31

2 The making of Ford Madox Brown

74

Part II: History embodied 3 Manchester, mythos, murals

127

4 The endless periphery

161

5 Manchester made modern

186



Afterword: the last of Ford Madox Brown

215



Select bibliography224 Index236

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Plates

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

Ford Madox Brown, The Romans building a fort at Mancenion, A.D. 80, 1880. Wall painting, Gambier process of spirit fresco, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. Ford Madox Brown, The Baptism of Edwin, A.D. 627, 1879. Wall painting, Gambier process of spirit fresco, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. Ford Madox Brown, The Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester, A.D. 910, 1881. Wall painting, Gambier process of spirit fresco, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. Ford Madox Brown, The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in Manchester, A.D. 1363, 1882. Wall painting, Gambier process of spirit fresco, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. Ford Madox Brown, The Trial of Wyclif, A.D. 1377, 1885–86. Wall painting, Gambier process of spirit fresco, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. Ford Madox Brown, The Proclamation Regarding Weights and Measures, A.D. 1556, 1883–84. Wall painting, Gambier process of spirit fresco, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. Ford Madox Brown, Crabtree Watching the Transit of Venus, A.D. 1639, 1882–83. Wall painting, Gambier process of spirit fresco, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images.

viii

List of plates

  8

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  9

10

11

12

Ford Madox Brown, Chetham’s Life Dream, A.D. 1640, 1886. Oil on canvas, attached to the wall by the marouflé process, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/ Bridgeman Images. Ford Madox Brown, Bradshaw’s Defence of Manchester, A.D. 1642, 1893. Oil on canvas, attached to the wall by the marouflé ­process, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. Ford Madox Brown, John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, A.D. 1753, 1888–90. Oil on canvas, attached to the wall by the marouflé process, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. Ford Madox Brown, The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal, A.D. 1761, 1891–92. Oil on canvas, attached to the wall by the marouflé process, 146 × 318 cm. The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. Ford Madox Brown, Dalton Collecting Marsh-Fire Gas, 1887. Oil on canvas, attached to the wall by the marouflé process, 146 × 318 cm The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall. © Manchester Art Gallery/ Bridgeman Images.

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Figures

0.1 Ford Madox Brown, Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, 1877. Oil on canvas. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. 8 0.2 Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852–65. Oil on canvas. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. 13 1.1 Ford Madox Brown, Self Portrait, 1875. Reproduction of oil painting in Ford Madox Brown. A Record of his Life and Work, 1896. Private collection. 33 1.2 Book cover designed by Walter Crane; Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work, 1896. Private collection.35 1.3 Ford Madox Brown, Charles Rowley, 1885. Reproduction of oil painting in Charles Rowley, Fifty Years of Work Without Wages, 1911. Private collection. 51 1.4 Frederic Leighton, half-size monochrome cartoon for the spirit fresco Arts of Industry as Applied to War, 1870–72. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 54 2.1 Ford Madox Brown, King Lear, 1843–44. Reproduction of drawing in Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown. A Record of his Life and Work. 1896. Private collection. 78 2.2 Reproduction of woodcut in W. J. Linton, Bob Thin or The Poorhouse Fugitive, 1845. Private collection. 86 2.3 Robert Seymour (‘Shortshanks’), The March of Intellect, 1829. Hand-coloured etching. Reproduced by Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 91 2.4 Ford Madox Brown, Spirit of Justice, 1844–45. Pencil, ­watercolour and bodycolour. © Manchester Art Gallery/ Bridgeman Images. 100

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List of figures

2.5 Ford Madox Brown, The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror (Willelmus Conquistator), 1844–61. Oil on canvas. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images. 106 3.1 Walter Crane, Charles Rowley as Hope. Reproduction of sketch in Charles Rowley, Fifty Years of Work Without Wages, 1911. Private collection.137 4.1 William Hogarth, The Enraged Musician, 1741. Engraving. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 164 5.1 George Cruikshank, Tremendous Sacrifice!, 1847. Reproduction of print in Our Own Times (1847). Private collection.  195

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Acknowledgements

I first encountered Ford Madox Brown’s Manchester murals during my studies as an undergraduate at the University of Sussex, where I took an inspiring course on Victorian painting run by Marcia Pointon. Since then, my thoughts on Brown and Victorian culture have been coloured by equally productive conversations with friends and colleagues. When I was a postgraduate, Jonathan Bignell, André Bywater, Gareth Cronin, Jonathan Harris and Lewis Johnson provided plenty of intellectual fireworks; at Open University A102 summer schools, Mike Glenday, Ian Merillees, Bob Priest and Ian Spring were thrillingly incisive opponents of the official OU view that Brown was a witless exponent of The Dominant Ideology Thesis; at Sunderland University, David Amigoni, Stephanie Brown, Jack Dawson, Paul Marris, Dick Rainer and Stephen Watson made me rethink many aspects of Victorian culture and society; at conferences, Dinah Birch, Gavin Budge, J. B. Bullen, Emma Chambers, Martin Hewitt, Sam Smiles, Julian Treuherz, Paul Usherwood and Alastair Wright offered helpful comments on papers related to this project. More recently, during my time at the University of Manchester, I have benefited from fruitful exchanges with Bryan Biggs, Colin Cruise, Paul Dobraszczyk, Doug Field, Duncan Forbes, Gordon Fyfe, Stella Halkyard, Emma Loosley, Brian Maidment, Rebecca Milner, David Morris, Martin Myrone, David O’Connor, Matthew Potter, Mike Saunders, Alison Smith, Nick Tromans, Luke Uglow, Hannah Williamson, Vicky Whitfield and Janet Woolf. It goes without saying that any scholar working on Brown’s murals in Manchester Town Hall must acknowledge the extraordinary work of Mary Bennett and Julian Treuherz, both of whom confirm that much of the best work on Victorian art is produced by researchers working outside a university system dominated by the Research Excellence Framework and its toxic swim lanes. Julie Sheldon has been inspirational. She read each successive draft of the manuscript, improved the work beyond measure and listened, with extraordinary patience, to my Gogol-like justifications for epic digressions, obscure Jamesian pronouncements – and a huge amount of other ridiculous stuff. xii

Acknowledgements

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As I hope is demonstrated at numerous points in this text, I owe an enormous intellectual debt to the late Paul Barlow, by far the most talented commentator on Victorian art of the last forty years. It seems appropriate, then, to end my acknowledgements by referring to the overwhelming importance of his scholarship and by conceding that much of the thinking in this book is little more than a sideshow within a sideshow of his brilliant publications and legendary (and unrecorded) public lectures.

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Abbreviations

The following short references have been used for sources referred to often in the notes: FMB The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, V. Surtees (ed.) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). FMBBL Ford Madox Brown Letters, British Library. FMBV&A  MSL/1995/ Ford Madox Brown Papers, British Art Library, V&A. FMH Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896). JR The Works of John Ruskin (eds), Cook E. T and Alexander Weddeburn (39 vols, London: George Allen, 1903–12). JT Julian Treuherz, Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011). JTFMB  Julian Treuherz, ‘Ford Madox Brown and the Manchester murals’, in J. Archer (ed.), Art and Architecture in Victorian Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 162–207. MB Mary Bennett, Ford Madox Brown: A Catalogue Raisonné (2 vols, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). MLHLMCLM Manchester Local History Library, Manchester Central Library, Manchester. PB  Paul Barlow, ‘Local Disturbances: Ford Madox Brown and the Problem of the Manchester Murals’, in E. Harding (ed.), Re-Framing the Pre-Raphaelites (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 81–98. TC  The Works of Thomas Carlyle, H. D. Traill (ed.) (30 vols, London: Chapman & Hall, 1896–1901).

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Introduction

One can study only what one has first dreamed about.1 Energy is eternal delight … Eternity is in love with the Productions of Time.2 As we go backwards the familiar outlines become blurred; the ideas become fluid, and instead of the simple we find the indefinite.3

This study of the murals in the Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall (1878–93) argues that Ford Madox Brown’s programme was a uniquely ambitious attempt to reimagine the historical character of human culture in nineteenth-century British painting. In broad terms, the book sets out to identify the matrix of ideas within which work on the project was conducted. The central claim of Part I is that the nature of Brown’s intellectual preoccupations has not been fully appreciated. Here I introduce and explain a set of critical terms – the ‘Eye of History’, ‘Life Dream’, ‘everyday vision’, ‘gusto’, ‘activist art’ – that appear in the Part II. One aim of this conceptual arrangement is to understand why Brown distinguished between public history, the realm of sanctified facts, and quotidian history, the domain of common humanity. A series of extensive case studies begins with Chapter 3. There, and in the two chapters that follow it, I argue that Brown created the Manchester murals to challenge normative descriptions of History Painting, where the image is a description of the ideality of forms. Part II of the book, which examines all twelve works in the cycle, presents Brown’s teeming world as a manifestation of a cognitive style that favoured chaotic accretions and cobbled-together parts over and above structured wholes and rationalised compositions. In bald terms, then, this book has been designed to contribute to our understanding of Brown’s theory and practice of art by proposing that the eruptive nature of the Manchester murals confirms the distinctiveness of his vision of history as dynamic movement and unequal social exchange.4 The book provides an interpretation of the predominating critical pattern of the cycle rather than isolated readings of selected panels within the cycle. 1

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Ford Madox Brown

I present the Manchester murals as important examples of Brown’s interest in the history of the machinery for public action, which he characterised as the struggle between popular sovereignty and systems of social authority. My starting position is that Brown’s works are the outcomes of a creative imagination drawn to signs of disturbance in social and cultural situations. By spotlighting the radical nature of Brown’s historical vision, I want to stress that his works were argumentative in nature: the viewer is confronted with a juddering, ever-moving world where stitched-together spaces are expressive of struggle and conflict between social agents.5 It goes without saying that the academic theory of correlation – the belief that the main pictorial elements must cohere – does not pertain to Brown’s convoluted and rumbustious murals. Ford Madox Hueffer, his grandson, referred to some of these matters in his brilliant biography, where he noted that regularity and unity – important compositional markers in the language of traditional History Painting – do not feature in Brown’s exuberant art.6 For Hueffer, ‘[Brown’s] work was never suave, never quite complete; but it was vigorous and honest to the end, always instinct with a noble feeling for style … His incompleteness was always personal, and that is surely no small deodand, in an age whose general tendency is towards mechanical finish.’7 This sentiment – that artistic ‘incompleteness’ was a way of registering that the world was unfinished – is congruent with the view put forward by Harold Rathbone, Brown’s last pupil. According to Rathbone, Brown was a master of ‘dramatic force and poetic intensity’; and so, ‘despite … occasional eccentricities of manner’, he ‘occupied the same plane as Shakespeare … and Hogarth’.8 The challenge, as described by these commentators, is to orientate the viewer to the dynamic disorderliness in Brown’s world of verve, improvisation and human imperfection. Brown’s signature achievement, in other words, was to create a tenaciously singular art that stood in a purely adversarial relation to the dicta and customs of standard academic discourse and practice. If these insights into Brown’s critical model are not sufficient, we have only to consider his attitude to the representation of the past. It is essential to my argument to show that the Manchester murals pivot away from dominant articulations of history. First is the cyclical model, where history is conceived within a moral-equilibrium framework: barbarism is replaced by civic virtue, which is replaced by conquest, which is replaced by luxury and corruption. Second is the developmental model, where history is conceived as continuous incremental social change: pastoralism, feudalism and then commercialism. Third comes the idea that the character of a subject is a localised example of any one formal element within a general typology. Brown’s vision of history is at odds with the set-up of these interpretations, as is indicated in his treatment of subject matter. His focus is on the intermixed worldliness of everyday life. His bodies, like the spaces that surround them, signal disturbance and unruliness. His style is elastic, his forms curvilinear. The Romans building a fort at Mancenion, A.D. 80 (1880) (Plate 1), The Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester, A.D. 910 2

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Introduction

(1881) (Plate 3) and The Proclamation Regarding Weights and Measures, A.D. 1556 (1883–84) (Plate 6), show awkward and jumbled situations where things are messed up or where hierarchies are questioned. Nothing, they seem to imply, is real unless it is made through struggle. By proposing this explanatory framework I set out to locate Brown’s mural programme within the vast complexity of Victorian culture and society before determining how and why he approached history as something at once personal and collective. Along the way, I relate Brown’s broader critical interests to the cognate belief systems of Victorian artists and social commentators, many of whom proposed that culture should be renewed through new public platforms utilising the common stimuli of modern social life.9 This arrangement enables me to explain Brown’s abiding concern to mutualise experience and to create moments where individuals are made to emphasise the interconnectedness of the social world. The Brown encountered in the following pages sees history through the prism of social relations and never positions himself as the master of a synoptic system above the quotidian fray. In making these large proposals, therefore, this project opens the way for a long-overdue assessment of the relationship between historical vision and plastic thinking in late ­nineteenth-century British art and culture.10 Distilled into a simple phrase, Brown’s works attempt to sensitise the viewer to forces that are not visible in academic History Painting or orthodox cultural criticism.11 His subject was the vitality and complexity of the human world. William Michael Rossetti, his son-in-law, noted that Brown had ‘a wide interest in men and things … an interest which, being real and personal, neither disdains this subsidiary familiar element, nor forces the amplified dignified element into artificial and bloodless pomposity’.12 If Rossetti set out to understand why Brown filled his works with common human matter, then another reaction meant spotlighting how he offered new angles of social vision. For Richard Muther, the distinguished German Art Historian, Brown’s ‘figures stand out stiff and like card kings, without fluency of line or rounded and generalized beauty’. And if he makes ‘no attempt to dilute what is ugly’, this is because he wanted to envisage the ‘intense fullness of life’.13 Muther’s line of thought was part of a larger story about how cultural radicalism meant responding to the deadening standardisation of modern life, a topic tackled in Chapters 1 and 2.14 It is worth noting that Rossetti and Muther recognised that Brown’s art departed from conventional wisdom about composition, which stressed the critical importance of balance and unity. The value of their readings can be summarised without taking me away from my main task, which is to provide an overview of methods and frameworks. For instance, their understanding of pictorial invention encourages the researcher to reconsider the dynamics of Brown’s career without confounding it with generalised narratives about the genesis, development and subsequent fragmentation of Pre-Raphaelitism, surely the most over-determined subject in the vast historiography of Victorian 3

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Ford Madox Brown

art history. Then again, Rossetti and Muther provide a useful critical framework for attempting to recover the medium in which Brown’s thinking about history and human sociality moved. To state the second point in another way, the Manchester murals should be related to the political imagination of the period.15 No one encountering this rather tired-looking statement will need to be told that similar formulations have been made by other auditors, many of whom believe that Brown’s panels were analogues of other ventures designed to celebrate the political and cultural achievements of the ‘heroic urban bourgeoisie’.16 My point is different, however. Brown’s thoughts on art, culture and public life are far too idiosyncratic to be reduced to the formulae of bourgeois liberal individualism and its vision of continual material progress via competition and manufacturing industry. To insist that the Manchester murals endorse the view that ‘economic materialism’ is ‘the foundation of culture’, or that they valorise the ‘origins of liberal institutional society’, is to distort their meaning.17 Over the course of this study, I demonstrate that Brown associated social value with something more than profit-making. Nowhere in the mural cycle do we find any support for the liberal vision of the self-generating distributional justice of markets.18 Neither did Brown support the neo-orthodox proposition that modern History Painting produced a synoptic account of the emergence of the nation state through the development of trade and technology, or that it provided a record of the political legitimation of the business classes through subjects illustrative of the rise of contract-based civil and governmental life.19 From Brown’s perspective, traditional History Painting was nothing more than the hypostatisation of aristocratic and bourgeois-liberal modes of sovereignty. Just as the Manchester murals challenge the liberal view of society, so they respond to a common problem in nineteenth-century political thought: how is individual human life reproduced in social relationships? This question, which focuses on how subjects make sense of the situations in which they live, relates to two recurring themes in Brown’s productions: an interest in the connection between the individual and group consciousness; and the association of representation with the vivid materiality of the world.20 These and related matters featured in the art of William Hogarth and William Blake – Brown’s great precursors – both of whom set out to find new, albeit vastly different, expressions of animacy in the world.21 Like Hogarth and Blake, Brown defined art as humanised vision of history, an approach which did not collapse human activity into human economic activity. All three artists were knowing, active subjects concerned with exploring the worldliness of art as a channel for communicating human vitality and individual autonomy. Once this is understood, it becomes possible to see that Brown’s modelling of Manchester was his way of imagining an activist version of history where liberty meant more than the model of continual social progress outlined in discourses of liberalism. The purpose of the murals, I argue, was to redirect debate about History Painting by aligning it with many of the matters Brown encountered in daily life. This notion, where the 4

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Introduction

world is seen as social organism, provides an introductory context for looking at Brown’s version of Manchester, where he emphasises different iterations of craft society and civic impulse, not economic development culminating in political liberalism and industrial society. All things considered, Brown had no material interest in producing a history of the realisation of a free market economy, nor do any of his murals put forward the view that industrial life gives human history a sense of cohesion or direction. For Brown, History Painting is presented as a site of irregularity and conflict, a space where figures are brought together to illustrate opposing values. In approaching History Painting in this manner, he cast the artist as the figure who sees into life past and present. As he saw it, history could not be represented through the means of the pictorial tableau. Instead, he set out to produce a composite or intermixed art, a pictorial world where expressiveness is an attribute of common humanity, and where rhetoric is an attribute of social elites.22 History Painting is inscribed into an argument about representing the difference between raw experience and social conventions. This, precisely, is Sidney Colvin’s view of Brown’s art. Colvin, one of the most insightful commentators of the 1870s and 1880s, caught the dramaturgy of Brown’s aesthetic very effectively when he identified him as a prototype for the modern artist: ‘Mr Brown is one of the most acute and imaginative of pictorial realists, whose great preoccupation is to represent a scene – if he has seen it, as it was – if he has imagined it, as it might have been … He has the most vivid apprehension of external fact, and an equally vivid apprehension of spiritual processes.’23 At this point it is worth saying a few words about the physical appearance of the Manchester murals. They are, in the main, somewhat cumbrous. At the same time, they depict a world entanglingly alive and rich in eruptive potential. Additionally, they facilitate an understanding of history as struggle and conflict, as seen in The Trial of Wyclif, A.D. 1377 (1885–86) (Plate 5), John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, A.D. 1753 (1888–90) (Plate 10) and The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal, A.D. 1761 (1891–92 (Plate 11). Here, and in other panels, the historical subject is inserted into a world brimming with disjunctive details. Thus, typically, Brown exploits the narrow horizontal format of the panels to focus on situations where figures are aligned or misaligned with popular energies. For Brown, then, the image was a reworking of work and effort in history, not a vehicle for the projection of verisimilitude nor a platform for the display of didacticism. The Manchester murals do not persuade through the provision of polite forms; instead, they provide the viewer with the opportunity to become a participant in protean expressions of life.24 In any case, the point of this description is that it engages with one of the key features of Brown’s pictorial logic: his spectator is presented with raw and unbalanced situations, not polished and completed compositions. I suspect that by the time Brown came to Manchester he had realised that the traditional model of History Painting, where compositional stability depends on the coordination of all plastic elements, was not a profitable way of looking 5

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Ford Madox Brown

at and representing historical life. He wanted artworks to engage with source material and to confirm that lived experience meant movement of one kind or another. This explains why he brings many of his figures into intimate contact with the viewer, and why some of the Manchester murals register shifting viewpoints. At the same time, he was drawn to the vision of history as vitalised drama and imaginative energy, a set of social and political spaces in which different versions of human identity are generated, promoted – and contested. Coming yet closer to another theme of my book, Brown’s critical ambitions did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. For instance, the model of culture outlined in the murals recalls Thomas Carlyle’s attitude to looking into the past, which meant attending to the struggle between energy and order. These critical models of seeing have their corollary in the strand of Romanticism pioneered by Blake, and extended by John Ruskin and William Morris, for whom human growth was explained in terms of the revelations engendered by work-craft, not technological development.25 Thus far I have stressed some of the complicating factors in Brown’s relationship with culture, history and politics. At this point, however, I want to consider how these topics have been treated by historians of Victorian art. For some commentators, Brown’s contributions to the art world were shaped or determined by impersonal and largely negative forces. For the most part, proponents of this model, which I will call ideological, have postulated that his works converged with many of the general practices of industrial society. Conversely, proponents of another type of thought, which I will call cultural, are inclined to distance Brown from the theorems associated with mainstream Victorian cultural life. For the most part, advocates of this line of thought question the claim that verism explains the nature and complexity of an art practice that attended to unruliness and unevenness in the human world.26 One of the many merits of the cultural account is that it stresses the intricacy of Brown’s works and the scale of his ambition for modern painting. This form of investigation acknowledges the importance of the material conditions in which Brown worked, but it disputes the idea that his paintings should be viewed as the products of a wider economic system. Furthermore, by recognising that Brown reflected on the nature of representation it avoids treating painting as little more than a passive medium for the display of the critical power of the modern-day academic.27 It points to the fact that the historical subject has the capacity to be something more than an individual who must stand in a position of appropriation in relation to a public sphere dominated by the power of capital and market forces. It is a form of thinking that generates crucial questions: Why do these works look like this? What do they tell us about Brown’s motivations and intentions? How should we understand their copiousness? Put another way, the cultural model amounts to a strong statement in favour of the inherent meaningfulness of Brown’s project as cultural agent.28 This study recognises the intrinsic strengths of this form of historiography but notes that its agenda has not been fully realised. It provides an account 6

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Introduction

of what the Manchester murals contributed to debates about the relationship between historical representation and social criticism. It considers why Brown associated culture with common existence, and how this social perception relates to some aspects of the internal dynamic of his designs. Furthermore, as it sets out to contribute to the critical history of Victorian culture, it will have to say something about the antagonistic nature of Brown’s model of painting. All the same, the starting point for this reappraisal of the Manchester murals must be a detailed account of some of the limitations of the ideological model. The ideological model associates the Victorian artist with the reproduction of external values and meanings. From this perspective, Brown was unable to liberate himself from hegemonal forces since he offered no resistance to ­market-driven modernity. This attitude can be characterised as a discourse of critical failure where the artist, complicit with the commercialisation of the aesthetic sphere, inhabits the world by embodying a condition of critical exhaustion. In some of the more extreme versions of this doctrine, the artist is little more than a self-depleting entity; there are no significant forces with which the subject can collaborate, or to which he or she can appeal. As implied, this framework imposes a distorting perspective on Brown’s art, since it cannot begin to explain why he thought painting could function as a critical practice addressing social and cultural problems. It is time to move from the summary observations just given to the provision of a relevant case study, one which reveals the central problem of the ideological model. It is an example, we are told, of ‘the willingness of a Victorian artist to replicate his own work slavishly for a fee’.29 The painting in question is Brown’s Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois (1877) (Figure 0.1). The writer, David Phillips, the curator of an Arts Council exhibition held in 1986, continues in the same vein: ‘The texture of the paint, which never had much chance in the face of Brown’s laborious search for truth to detail, is exceptionally dry and tortured.’30 Note the process here: the painting is synonymous with mechanisation, the reduction of work to a condition of deadening manufacture. If this view is correct, then the defining characteristic of Brown’s mindset was the unprincipled and insatiable pursuit of financial profit, since the ‘search for truth’ would be no more than a mechanism for monetising painting.31 In fact, the reverse is true, as noted in The Times’s obituary, which recognised that Brown ‘painted not for money, or even fame’.32 Nor should it be forgotten that Brown was inspired by the account of the organisation of modern social life proposed in Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843), where what is called the ‘Gospel of Mammonism’ is described in lacerating terms: ‘We call it a Society; and go about professing openly … separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due Laws-of-war, named “fair competition” and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.’33 The appeal of such a vision to Brown is unsurprising, for he never subscribed to the theory of economic individualism. Immediately, however, we are drawn to ask: what 7

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Ford Madox Brown

Figure 0.1  Ford Madox Brown, Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, 1877

other aspects of Carlyle’s reading of British history and society are relevant to a discussion of Brown’s art? In what follows, I want to pay sustained attention to Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, an extraordinarily spiky and intricate image in which the viewer encounters many of the critical features Brown developed in the Manchester mural cycle. Brown’s painting remodels an established cultural form, the solitary subject set within community life, to create the impression that Cromwell’s unusual presence indicates his experience of trying to shape historical forces. To put the point in another way, as in the writings of Carlyle, Brown’s nearest cultural homologue – and from whom he took this subject – the viewer is given a moment of raw turbulence, not a smooth episode from the period of the Protectorate.34 Agitated and full of nervous energy, the restless Cromwell inserts himself into an image defined by the trappings of state power. This vital figure, of ‘almost colossal proportions’, is at once the axial point, a place where all things converge, and a point of disturbance who struggles to direct the contents of his experience to John Milton and Andrew Marvell, the obedient scribes in the background.35 Like Carlyle, Brown presents us with a group of people who are in the process of realising that they cannot direct the energies of the world. On top of 8

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Introduction

this, the vast-conceiving Cromwell, who wants to reshape Europe, belongs to a community of one. Behind Cromwell, we see a map of the region where the besieged Protestants of the Vaudois lived. In front of Cromwell, Brown includes a copy of his Declaration inviting the people of England and Wales to fast in support of their beleaguered allies. Brown isolates his figures from the lifeworld of state power by pushing them to the edges of the pictorial field. Cromwell may stab the map, but he cannot change history. Nor can he successfully control his environment: the light cast on the wall, made to resemble a thought cloud emanating from his head, indicates this is a situation where signs do not generate real-world effects. Brown attempts to ‘socialise’ Cromwell; in the course of doing so, he places him at the periphery of the social system of governance. In consequence, Cromwell’s worldview is subsumed by a raw and unstable pictorial world. He is, in this respect, an affirmation of Brown’s concern with the representation of the relationship between individual mentality and graphic vitality. In whatever way we engage with the spatial structure of Brown’s unusual design, we are forced to acknowledge that Cromwell inhabits an enclosed space at once close-to-hand and unsettling.36 These pictorial characteristics, in fact, confirm Brown’s uncompromising attitude to the operational nature of the art world. Far from surrendering himself to the world of money, Brown set out to make a confrontational or activist art, to make what Hueffer called ‘violent emotion’ the subject of historical representation.37 In this regard, Cromwell Protector of the Vaudois is akin to what George Eliot called ‘exhaustive argumentative perception’: it shows a figure struggling to engender social wholeness through a combination of intense inwardness and emphatic individualism.38 Rather like Carlyle, for whom the unmoored Cromwell was an ‘inarticulate prophet … who could not speak’, Brown’s angular Lord Protector is an incongruous form struggling to become a logical pattern, a coherent manifestation of interior energy.39 Cromwell’s fate, the viewer is led to suppose, is to be suspended in a position between self and society, to point in the direction of a process of transformation he cannot perform. To put it another way, human life and the social order, as seen by Brown and Carlyle, required a set of powers against which they could be measured. It followed, then, that both writing and painting were expressions of conflict, attempts to understand and uncover how confusion exists within the world.40 In the account I have presented, Cromwell is a vehicle for projecting an image of common, not elite, culture. His strange and uncomfortable position – thrusting into the right flank of the image – provides a sense of figural presence. To press the point home, Brown makes Cromwell the medium for the expression of the idea that the painted image is continuous with the material appearance of objects and bodies in the real world. That Cromwell’s physicality is a sign of an innovative approach to pictorial design is confirmed when we recall that standard discourses on History Painting stressed the importance of planimetric pictorial composition, a cooperation of the surface parts. By contrast, Brown’s energised and defiant Cromwell, who embodies internalised action, emphasises 9

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Ford Madox Brown

the awkwardness of the experience of being in the world. As will be discovered in Chapters 1 and 2, this interest in eruptive situations and attitudes suggests what Carlyle called the ‘Eye of History’, an act of collaborative looking between reader and author designed to resist the mimetic features of traditional historical discourse. To abridge a complex matter, the ‘Eye of History’ relates to Brown’s method of cultural analysis, which starts by acknowledging the human complexity of historical situations. Whatever way we consider Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, it is evident that Brown’s unconventional Lord Protector is designed to make his audience speculate on how the elements of life relate to each other. On the one hand, Cromwell’s physicality affirms his status as a figure of civil authority and source of political sovereignty. On the other hand, history tells us that this specific rehearsal of power politics led to nothing. Characteristically, Brown eschews many of the conventional methods of academic composition by transforming Cromwell into an agent of jagged authenticity, a subject set aside on the edge of his own world. This critical attitude is amplified through the orchestration of plastic elements: the pictorial surface, charged with energy, denotes the struggle between subjects and the social forces that would organise them. An additional observation is relevant to this capsule summary of the painting. If Brown’s Cromwell is the eruption of energy into life – the incarnation of forces seeking release from conventions of linear design and compositional order – then this interest in raw activity can be conceptualised by invoking the term grotesque. Briefly stated, this concept was used by a variety of important commentators including Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Carlyle and Ruskin, for whom it was a way of illustrating the discordant nature of the powers at work in social and cultural modernity.41 From their point of view, the grotesque, predicated on the idea of the fierce, restless exuberance of nature, described forms and processes that embodied struggle. The grotesque pointed to a dimension of modern existence in which the constructed world of appearances and the world of sensuous life were conflated. Which means, in short, the grotesque was a way of relaying the experience of existence as violent change through the development of an intermixed aesthetic.42 The peculiar confluence of the ‘Eye of History’ and the grotesque is the origin of the critical power of Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois. By emphasising these features it is possible to correct the conventional storyline, where Victorian painting is dismissed as inert, calcified and repetitive middle-brow stuff generated by status-hungry artists for middle-class consumers unsure of their own cultural identity.43 My narrative proposes that too much attention has been given to the thesis that Victorian painting was conditioned by bourgeois society.44 For example, Phillips’s approach, which gained in popularity during the era of ‘new art history’, retreats from any engagement with Brown’s conception of the subject of modern art because Phillips needs to believe that Brown’s art is captured by the bourgeois psyche. From this perspective, Brown exists within the substratum of creativity, and so, in identifying painting with 10

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Introduction

the need mechanically to transcribe visual information, he becomes an organisational being rather than a cultural agent. In urging us to see things in this way, Phillips turns Brown into a representative of what he most despised about Victorian society: the rootless, selfish, unfettered pursuit of profit maximisation and the general marketisation of human experience. The credibility of this school of thought, where Brown’s art is folded into a broader category named Victorian philistinism, is called into question when we consider how and why Brown set out to be a socially engaged subject. Naturally, this means taking seriously the proposition that not all modes of ­nineteenth-century socialisation were repressive. One advantage of this approach is that it recognises the complex relationship between creativity, work and the commercial aspect of the Victorian art world. Another is that it encourages the researcher to question the verities of the ideological model, where Brown’s art is treated as a localised version of the atrophy of authentic experience within capitalist production and commercialised culture.45 Of course, to get this formulation under control, we need to address the question Phillips avoids: why did Brown replicate Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois? Without going into too much detail, it is evident that he wanted to reconfigure History Painting along the same lines as models of nationhood put forward by post-Chartist radicals, many of whom swerved away from post-Restoration accounts of national identity.46 From Brown’s perspective, Cromwell – the incarnation of the common voice and oppositional culture – mattered.47 Hueffer is surely right to affirm that Cromwell’s ‘virile personality exercised a strong influence’ on Brown’s mind.48 As Brown imagined it, this raw and vital example of the fusion of populism and radicalism was an inflection point in British history. Brown’s Diary informs us that Cromwell was a ‘great man’, an interpretation shared by fellow radicals who aimed to create an activist iconography of nationhood based on popular rights, social energies and the interests of the producing classes.49 These considerations, which are rooted in the idea of a common politics of culture, are immensely significant when we reflect on how Brown’s sense of social being coloured his actions as an artist. This process of critical engagement starts with the recognition that Brown conceptualised creativity in terms of the expressiveness of labour. Cultural life meant the experience of work and the experience of work opened the subject to the possibility of the ownership of the things produced by labour. In turn, by reflecting on his belief system, it becomes possible to take seriously the idea of agency: how Brown engaged with the institutions of the Victorian art world; why he developed certain patterns of work; and how he generated specific critical instruments to deal with emergent social and patronal domains. The replica, I want to suggest, was one example of Brown’s wish to give physical expression to imaginative experience. This does not mean it was the defining feature of his aesthetic. It did mean that he could use it to perpetuate a vision of common culture. It also meant that he had a critical technology for promoting his cultural authority by questioning the conviction that images lose value through multiplication. Seen in these terms, 11

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Ford Madox Brown

the replica operated within a discursive system of communication, at the centre of which was the definition of the artist as social actor and owner and director of labour. With this in mind, it is time to move closer to offering an appraisal of Brown’s relationship with the Victorian art world. From the very beginning, he defined art as a technique of imaginative production which related to wider social technologies of knowledge. At no time was he motivated by the need to churn out replicas to satisfy the non-cognitive needs of the market. There was an internal consistency and coherency among the parts of his career. We see this when his dealings with critics, collectors, agents, dealers, exhibition bodies, art institutions and cultural administrators are taken into consideration. Another example is the idea of replication as an instrument that allowed the artist to imagine a cultural programme by which he or she might prosper within a self-sufficient art world. On this reckoning, the replica affirmed the organic connection between life and work. It is in consequence a mistake to view Brown as a figure whose significance is determined by the operational logic of the Victorian art market. If Phillips’s thesis were an isolated case it would clearly be wrong to draw any general conclusions. Yet, it is well known, of course, that other commentators have favoured his kind of thinking, where paintings are manufactured to satisfy the material needs of the control group at the centre of the Victorian art world. In considering this matter we need look no further than a landmark essay by Albert Boime, who argued that Brown’s most famous painting, Work (1852–65) (Figure 0.2), another example of replication, followed the ‘middle-ofthe road solutions’ to social unrest put forward by middle-class reformers. From Boime’s point of view, Brown’s concept of social reality expressed the economic mentality of Victorian liberalism articulated by the business middle classes.50 But there is a wider point here, which bears on the development of Boime’s argument. For instance, he proposes that Brown, unprepared to confront the tensions within industrial capitalism, was unable to recognise the truth conferred on industrialised work by Marx and Engels, and so he did not follow their argument ‘for a return to authentic human relationships based on spontaneity and fulfilling work’.51 In truth, the opposite is the case, since Brown recapitulated the interests of the early, Romantic-leaning, Marx, whose theory of culture was concerned with the critical potential of human vitality. A serious difficulty with Boime’s reading is that he treats Brown as a metonym for the alleged ideological weakness of the Victorian art world: Work cannot account for the reality of human alienation behind the façade of economic rationality. It is worth pointing out that Boime believes it was possible for some agents to see beyond the distortions of the Victorian social order: the factory proletariat had the capacity to become autonomous subjects because they had the potential to plan their work and ‘control’ what he calls, somewhat mysteriously, ‘the finished product’.52 Such, then, is the view of politics proposed by Boime. What he fails to appreciate is that although Brown was not, in the 1850s, aware of the structural 12

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Figure 0.2  Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852–65

13

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Ford Madox Brown

significance of the factory system to matters of class identity, he did appreciate the critical value of a hybrid aesthetic to a political consideration of the details of modern social life.53 In consequence, he set out to immerse his viewers in stitched-together places and the plasticity of mundane situations. In short: the convincing power of his vision of work depends on a belief that the grotesque could represent modernity as a set of multiple, aberrant forces, a condition of fragmentation without disintegration.54 Brown’s identification of human creativity with the messiness and struggle of constellated situations is ignored by Boime, who drains Work of its critical complexity. Hence, it ‘seems half-heatedly done and without real commitment’. In his view, the ‘self-conscious’ composition prevents Work from ‘resolving itself as an integrated concept … It is also anti-genre in its stilted, synthetic approach and its pretence to encyclopaedic thoroughness … It reflects [a] climate of confusion’. That is, it could find no way of incorporating the standpoint of the ‘new industrial workers – their informed position of class conflict’ or ‘their intention to control all the conditions of the workplace’.55 Boime continues: [Brown’s] attempt to assemble a kind of pictorial taxonomy … has resulted in a composite-like composition whose individual components fail to unite … The dense, claustrophobic assemblage of types is reminiscent … of illustrational pictures which contain numbered parts in a diagrammatic sequence … Despite … hints at social injustice, [it] seems halfheartedly-done and without real ­commitment … [the] highly self-conscious composition … prevents it from resolving itself as an integrated concept. [The picture is] stilted and synthetic … [it] reflects the climate of confusion [in which it was made] … [Brown] accepted the bourgeois order as absolute and final … His static and confused composition is the pictorial equivalent of the very social conflicts and contradictions common to the period and which Marx disclosed in his critique … While his meticulous objectivity parallels Marx’s scientific approach, it lacks a comprehensive set of ideas.56

Although the evidence in support of this reasoning is vanishingly thin, it relates to Boime’s larger thesis, where Brown’s version of realism becomes a kind of pathology inhibiting his capacity to see the true nature of social relations within capitalist modernity. Boime’s reading, and it can be multiplied many times, uses the rhetoric of failure to dismiss Work as an instrument of a ‘bourgeois order’, which rested on the economic rationality of the factory system.57 There are several serious problems with his mode of reasoning. For a start, Victorian London, the location of Work, was a finishing-centre for consumer goods, not an industrial centre like the towns in the northwest of England.58 Then again, in the period when Brown produced Work, what we take to be the dominant features of industrial capitalism were not universally recognised or understood. Some saw industrialisation as a passing phase in the history of the British economic life, while others pushed it into the background.59 In J. S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), the standard mid-Victorian tome on the subject, the circumstances of wealth 14

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Introduction

production are explained in terms of land, agriculture, trade and finance – there is little or no interest in factory industry in a multi-volume treatise dedicated to explaining the peculiar features of the British economic system.60 Another problem is that it is illogical to assume that Brown’s interest in working-class culture is invalidated because he was not interested in concentrating on the factory workforce, a point given added weight when it is realised that Arnold Toynbee, one of the great critics of industrialisation, introduced the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ as late as 1884, after which it became the consolidating feature in readings of social modernity for economic historians.61 Moreover, it is historically inaccurate to imply that the politics of labour can be collapsed into the politics of industrial labour, since this ignores the fact that leading figures within Chartism and other radical organisations tended to be craft workers or middle-class professionals, not factory operatives.62 Lastly, Boime’s thesis fails to take into consideration the development of Brown’s ideas about work, social organisation and political power.63 Had Brown conceived and executed Work in the 1870s and the 1880s – when he supported unionisation and strike action, and recognised the exploitative nature of the relationship between capital and labour through his knowledge of the mechanised factory system – it would have looked very different to the painting, begun in 1852 and completed in 1865, which is artisanal in outlook.64 Not surprisingly, therefore, Brown’s critics show no interest in testing a premise by facts and observations. Instead, as they rely on simplistic binary alternatives, what purports to be historical truth is detached from the world of cultural agency. We see this at work in Boime’s reading which contends that Brown’s theoretical framework is superseded by the scientific system of Marxism: Brown does not belong to the critical elect because his ponderous and confused thought cannot compete with the revelations of historical materialism practised by Marx and Engels. Similarly, Phillips implies that Brown’s art is no more than the replication of instrumental social relations in a pictorial setting. Both commentators nullify Brown’s creativity by making him the impersonal purveyor of pseudo-painting, the muddled and stultified stuff generated by non-expressive cultural labour for the non-cognitive needs of the market. In one way or another, Brown is unable to offer any resistance to the predominating character of industrial society, which conflated the idea of progress with the reality of the prosperity of the bourgeoise. The point of this exegetical exercise has been to illustrate how Boime and Phillips confirm the narrowness of the ideological account of Victorian art, which, by precluding proper consideration of the aesthetic imagination, reduces the historical understanding of painting to what we expect an artist should be doing or thinking in certain contexts. This results in a caricature of Brown’s critical concerns. Brown, it seems to me, would not understand Boime’s association of the discourse of ‘Industrial Revolution’ with the 1850s and early 1860s, nor could he accept the account of what Phillips said he was doing with replication.65 Note, too, that numerous commentators have developed versions of the 15

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Ford Madox Brown

Boime-Phillips idée fixe when codifying the nature of the Manchester murals. One proposes that Brown’s panels conform to a ‘Whiggish story of development’. A second discovers ‘a very carefully ordered … and teleological view of history … defined by a sense of the linear order of time’. Another believes that they illustrate ‘the rise and progress of Manchester … [a] celebration of the ties between ancient and recent history, especially in [the] inclusion of Anglo-Saxon, medieval and Civil War Subjects’. Still another is convinced that they constitute a ‘deliberate attempt to re-order and rehabilitate Manchester’s image so that it fitted better with the aspirations of the urban middle class’.66 At this stage it must be observed that these assertions, where Brown is little more than a mouthpiece of the Corporation of Manchester, cannot account for, nor explain, the specific features of his engagement with the social order, nor can they supply a coherent model of the relationship between human motivation and creative effort.67 In summary, this fanciful literature conflates what is historically homologous – Brown lived in a period of economic liberalism – with a critical homology – Brown’s paintings express the value system of Victorian liberalism. To elaborate fully a response to this body of criticism, where Brown is a supine careerist catering for the needs of the middle classes, returns us to the larger point about his experience of the material organisation of cultural production in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Brown’s creation of a culture of the replica was an entirely reasonable and sensible experiential response to the peculiarities of the London art world.68 Simply put, the British art system was unlike the continental art world where many artists were supported by networks of state patronage. Successive generations of British artists bemoaned the lack of national or municipal commissions and what was perceived to be the inability of orders within the British state to encourage a national culture of painting. By the mid-1840s, when Brown came back to Britain from his studies in France and Belgium, these reflections had solidified into direct attacks on the operational rationality of the Royal Academy, the most prestigious and powerful institution of its kind in Britain. Brown never became a member of this elite organisation and did not benefit from its support, encouragement or patronage.69 To be sure, being a semi-marginal artist with a limited income, he was obliged to be quick-witted and endlessly creative in responding to the commercial pressures of an art world dominated by this body and its ideological surrogates.70 The replica is an example of such creativity, since it allowed him to actualise the idea of the expressiveness of labour and to offer a dynamic and developmental vision of the social world. The implications of this final observation are significant for the problem of understanding the specific social and critical circumstances of Brown’s artistic production. By retaining control over certain designs, Brown was offering a vision of how his labour might remain relatively free in a market economy which, in many instances, reduced the artist to a supplier of generic consumer goods, a point made with great relish in one of his many letters to Frederic Shields, where he notes that the ‘curious thing to notice in [the Royal Academy 16

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Introduction

exhibition] is how all the works are for sale … whether by R.A’.s or others, for sale, and prices, of course, pitilessly gibbeted in the catalogue. Alas the day! … I think … the fashion for buying pictures … is dying out. It never was a genuine taste, and now people are ashamed of being sold by dealers, without having any taste to buy fine things for themselves.’71 Far from capitulating to a world of monopoly contracts and market forces, Brown made clear his desire to take responsibility for the conditions in which his works were created and distributed. Consequently, replication was, as conceived by Brown, a creative solution to a marketised system of art production in which providers were obliged to compete for attention from suppliers and customers (dealers, agents, advisers, critics and patrons). Nor was this creativity restricted to the early part of his career. Replication became an important aspect of his art practice in subsequent decades, as demonstrated by the reproduction for private sale of seven of the twelve Manchester murals.72 Replication meant imagining a situation where Brown could exercise some control over the production, distribution and consumption of his works. To think in these terms was to define independence by recourse to the idea of the master craftsman, the figure who aims to orchestrate the development and supply of artefacts. This sentiment – where the artist must struggle to assert authority over the things he or she wants to produce, to ascribe value for them – was an important aspect of Brown’s artistic character, since it encouraged him to believe that he could make an active way in the social world. All in all, the conflation of replication with the control of the production process allowed him to imagine improving the material framework of the art market and to assert the rights of expressive labour over the power of capital. When set within this broader network of beliefs and practices it becomes possible to understand that Brown’s attitude to replication was a matter of inclination and judgement: it supported his idea of ownership of cultural creativity. Rather like D. G. Rossetti – whose letters are peppered with all sorts of derogatory references to collectors and would-be patrons – Brown was acutely aware of the material organisation of the art market.73 He was convinced that it was full of middlemen, predatory rentiers or fundholders looking to exploit the primary creator by controlling access to certain spaces within the art world. These disagreeable figures were monopolists or, more accurately, ‘rent-seekers’, since they existed to profit from the experiences and innovations of others rather than to undertake valuable activities themselves.74 That is to say, Brown’s investment in replication, the expressiveness of labour and the idea of the master craftsman provide a partial explanation for his understanding of modern British art, which was coloured by his attitude to Hogarth and Blake, both of whom he identified as spiritual kin.75 Like Rossetti, Blake and Hogarth provided Brown with symbols of struggle, movement and hope: the transformation of an institutional art market into a collaborative art world where freedom meant controlling the experience of work–time. We see here, in the confluence of theories of cultural reconstruction and critical change, confirmation of Brown’s 17

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Ford Madox Brown

status as a market disruptor, someone who contested the prevailing idea of the monetisation of value and the impersonal exchange relationships at the heart of capitalism. What all of this really involved, then, was the shaping of culture as affirmation of human productive activity, not a crass affirmation of the reality of the cash nexus. For Brown, the idea of cultural labour belonged to a larger story about how the critical imagination might contribute to the production of a new social order. Real understanding of Brown’s art, I have indicated, comes with perspective. Accordingly, let me conclude with a few comments on the scope and organisation of this study. Chapter 1 addresses the critical and conceptual conditions in which Brown developed the Manchester murals, paying specific attention to how these works respond to debates about social experience and collective life. It explains how Brown made use of Carlyle’s theory of historical representation when identifying painting with the transmission of living human expression and goes on to explore why he contested the model of social life and nationhood in academic History Painting. Chapter 2, which broadens the argument, begins with a lengthy consideration of some of the external reasons for the development of Brown’s critical interests. It provides a detailed picture of Brown’s understanding of and engagement with Victorian society. It pays close attention to Brown’s connections with national culture and popular radicalism, and considers his affinities with the Foggo brothers, W. J. Linton and other overlooked radical artists from the 1830s and 1840s. It examines his Diary, which is filled with important discussions of art, politics and society. The concluding part of the chapter attempts to show how melodrama provides a meaningful critical context for explaining the social-activist aesthetic evident in Spirit of Justice (1844–45) (Figure 2.4), Brown’s most inventive early design. When seen together, these chapters confirm the main thrust of the introduction: to separate Brown from ideas of linear history and economic triumphalism, as outlined in Victorian liberalism. The modest goal of Chapters 3, 4 and 5 is to complicate the existing view of the composition and purpose of Brown’s murals. Where Chapters 1 and 2 follow a thematic structure, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 correspond to the historical sequence of the twelve panels in Manchester Town Hall. In this second part of the book, I propose that Brown’s panels can be elucidated by reconnecting them with a broader network of beliefs and ideas in circulation between 1878 and 1893. Among the many issues addressed in these chapters is how the murals provide a vision of the distinctive pathology of British historical life, and the extent to which this attitude is derived from Romantic discourse, which equated modernity with the victory of a culture of possessive individualism over the tradition of community life. In short, this part of the book considers how the model of human wealth outlined by Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, and then continued by Morris and other members of the Arts and Crafts Movement, relates to Brown’s murals, which give attention to human relationships, social trust and the transformation of inner life. The Afterword provides a brief discussion 18

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Introduction

of the social, cultural and literary settings in which Brown was discussed from 1888 until 1910. Over the course of this book, I advance the claim that Brown was motivated by a desire to replace the formal balance of academic composition with constellated situations indicative of the quiddity of historical life and the upheavals and instabilities of the modern world. It follows that each chapter is designed to illustrate how Brown’s social and intellectual attitudes affected his artistic practice in the period between 1878 and 1893. My intention in writing this book has been to increase knowledge about Brown by attending to the material circumstances of his productions, and by resisting the temptation to reduce artist and artworks to ahistorical ideal types. Furthermore, moving the murals into the centre of a discussion of Brown’s career indicates the prevalence of certain habits of thought, one of which is the use of painting as an open-ended exploration of the relationship between human experience and social reality. In sum, I hope this study will contribute to critical interpretations of late Victorian art as well as to broader comparative discussions of the period. Notes  1 G. Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 22.  2 W. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in D. V. Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), pp. 34, 36.  3 F. W. Maitland, Doomsday Book and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), p. 9.  4 I use the term ‘murals’, although seven of the twelve panels used the pseudo-fresco Gambier Perry method, which meant combining colours with copal varnish, wax and gum, and the other five panels were oil on canvas.  5 It should be noted that this vigorously independent approach to pictorial design, where the image is associated with expressive intensity and chaotic abundance, may provide a critical context for John Ruskin’s well-known dislike of Brown’s works. See, for instance, Ruskin’s influential approach to composition throughout all five volumes of Modern Painters (1843–60), in which it functions as a modality of hospitality. See also, The Stones of Venice, where what Ruskin calls ‘reciprocal interference’ operates as sign of pictorial fellowship (henceforth JR, vol. 11, p. 24).  6 Brown seems to have amplified Alberti’s interest in the liveliness, movement and action of the image at the expense of Alberti’s comments on grace and dignity, which subsequent theorists on painting took to be the controlling principles of ­pictorial composition and expression. See L. B. Alberti, On Painting [1435], trans. Cecil Grayson (London; Penguin, 1971), pp. 70–5. Alberti’s treatise, first translated into English in 1726, was sufficiently flexible to attract the attention of naturalistic and academic schools of thought. For instance, the claim that mastery of istoria was required to become a complete artist could be modulated via the expressive directness of body types in William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) and the theory of central form proposed by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses (1769–90). 19

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 7 Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896) (hereafter FMH), p. 422.  8 See H. Rathbone, Appendix A, ‘Ford Madox Brown as Teacher’, in FMH, p. 431.  9 That Brown understood what this entailed is evident from his many observations on the self-marketising nature of the artist as ‘showman’ within the conditions of social modernity. See, for instance, F. M. Brown, ‘Historic Art’, Universal Review (September–December 1888), 52–5; and FMH, p. 45. 10 For an excellent introduction to this matter, see P. Barlow, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s Grotesque Conceits’, in C. Trodd, P. Barlow and D. Amigoni (eds), Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 37–55. 11 The civil servant and academic W. J. Courthope provided a particularly lucid account of the academic model of representation with its reference points in Burke’s conflation of social custom, national memory and Whig historicism: ‘[The artist] creates not the subject matter of his art, which he finds already existing … in the mind of the nation … [Since the artist] cannot form his conception in the sphere of imagination pure and simple, [he cannot] give to his creation that extension and proportion which is indispensable to any great ideal whole. Moreover, by basing poetry solely on the analysis of his own impressions, he necessarily deprives the art of its ancient social influence … he can have no guarantee that a record of his individual experience will have power to arouse in the minds of his hearers those universal associations of which the great masters of verse appeal.’ W. J. Courthope, The Liberal Movement in English Literature (London: John Murray, 1885), pp. 187–8. 12 W. M. Rossetti, ‘Ford Madox Brown: Characteristics’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, New Series, 1 (1886), 52. 13 R. Muther, The History of Modern Painting (London: Henry & Co., 1896), vol. 2, pp. 582–4. 14 S. Colvin, ‘Ford Madox Brown’, in J. Beavington Atkinson et al., English Painters of the Present Day (London: Seeley, Jackson & Halliday, 1871), pp. 32–6; and D. S. MacColl, ‘Madox Brown’, Saturday Review (20 February 1897), 191–2. See also, C. Trodd and J. Sheldon, ‘Introduction: Ford Madox Brown and the Victorian Imagination’, in C. Trodd and J. Sheldon (eds), Visual Culture in Britain, 15:3 (2014), 227–38. MacColl became more critical of Brown in subsequent notices. 15 The present section elaborates on issues discussed in C. Trodd, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Cultural Experience and the Promise of the Replica’, in J. F. Codell (ed.), Victorian Artists’ Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 94–107. 16 A phrase used by Tristram Hunt in Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London: Phoenix, 2004), p. 133. Elsewhere, at p. 246, Hunt manages to convince himself that Brown’s murals exemplify the gospel of free trade expressed in the decorative iconography of Manchester Town Hall: ‘[The] unashamed approach to Manchester’s commercial identity crescendos with the Ford Madox Brown frescoes decorating the Great Hall. Brown had no compunction in championing the history of the cotton trade, industrial mechanisation and economic growth.’ See also, A. Thirlwell, ‘Vieux Fordy: Death of a Modern Man’, in T. Sidey (ed.), Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite (London: D. Giles Ltd, 2008), p. 13, who asserts that Brown produced ‘twelve murals … celebrating the history of “Cottonopolis”, a mighty industrial city’; and J. Paxman, The Victorians (London: BBC Books, 2009), p. 52, who is convinced that the murals represent the values of Manchester’s

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Introduction

‘middle-class elite’. Further examples of this body of thought are cited here and in Chapter 1. 17 As argued by J. F. Codell, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Carlyle, Macauley, Bakhtin: The Pratfalls and Penultimates of History’, Art History, 21:3 (1998), 325; and C. Dellheim, The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 172. In fact, Brown, deeply suspicious of the coupling of culture and economics, formed a committee in 1889 with Frederic Shields, Walter Crane and Herbert Horne to support the native arts of India from the imposition of a market system of production and distribution. 18 Of course, there were other places within the Victorian art world where liberalism was deployed to affirm the importance of markets for cultural development. As Julie Sheldon notes, in an important article, Lady Eastlake and Mrs Grote thought that ‘the British commercial spirit – the celebration of markets and competition, and the appreciation of the laws of labour and capital – validated by modern political economists, constituted the zenith of civilization’. See J. Sheldon, ‘Lady Eastlake and the Characteristics of the Old Masters’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 28 (2019), 6–7. https://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1641/. 19 See, for instance, the murals by Frederic Leighton, William Frederick Yeames, Edwin Austin Abbey and others in The Royal Exchange, London (1895–1920), where the arc of history is articulated in terms of the civilising function of charters, contracts and commerce. 20 See Ford Madox Brown Papers, British Art Library, V&A, MSL 1995/174, Box 45, Lecture II, pp. 29–30, for Brown’s comments on these matters (hereafter FMBV&A). 21 Brown’s interest in these artists may have contributed to Ruskin’s opposition to his work. Ruskin dismissed Hogarth’s art because it was a vision of ‘human character in its lowest and criminal modifications’, before concluding that he ‘laughs at or condemns us’. See Modern Painters I [1843], and Academy Notes [1859] in The Works of John Ruskin, E. T. Cook and Alexander Weddeburn (eds) (London: George Allen, 1903–12). vol. 1, p. 205 and vol. 14, p. 223. Ruskin’s attitude to Blake was much more tortured and complex. Nonetheless, he concluded that Blake, an exponent of lysergic art, was ‘full of wild creeds and somewhat diseased in brain … The impression that his drawings once made is fast, and justly, fading away … [Apart from the] … majestic series of designs from the book of Job … [he produced] nothing for his life’s work but coarsely iridescent sketches of enigmatic dream.’ See Modern Painters, III [1856], The Eagle’s Nest [1872], and Ariadne Florentina [1872], in JR, vol. 5, p. 323 and vol. 22, pp. 138 and 470. 22 As Hueffer notes (FMH, p. 417), Brown created pictures of ‘combined details’. 23 Colvin, ‘Ford Madox Brown’, in Beavington Atkinson et al., English Painters, p. 36. 24 Brown amplified this matter by deploying a low viewpoint throughout the mural programme. 25 According to Brown, Blake ‘worked hard every day … his only pleasure his visions’. See MSL 1995/174, Box 45, Lecture II, p. 102, FMBV&A. 26 See, for instance, J. Treuherz, Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011), p. 188 (henceforth JT), who notes Brown’s preference for the ‘crowded image’ as a means of conveying the ‘confusion … of modern urban life’; and K. Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park, PA: The

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Ford Madox Brown

Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 35, who he points out that ‘[t]he world in Brown’s pictures is not one-dimensional, absolute, or simple. It is muddied and various’. 27 What might be called theory narcissism, a condition where the critic/analyst, by dint of eupsychian longings, is granted complete power over the art object, has become a standard operational procedure in many forms of academic discourse since the 1980s. See, for instance, J. Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 144, where she argues that the critic, who is ‘powerfully superior to the work of art’, has the ‘ability to divine and analyze that which the art work is not able to express’. This well-entrenched belief, where the artwork is granted ‘meaning’ in and through the performance of ‘criticism’, reduces interpretation to a condition of self-reflection, a critical arc from which history and the historical imagination are removed. When preparing this text, another example of this idée fixe took place in the Manchester Art Gallery, where curators felt obliged to declare that John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) had been removed from public display because the painting denigrated women and upheld the male gaze. In truth, the work, by a gay artist, represents Hylas, a gay figure from Greek mythology, being lured away from his lover, Heracles, by naked female sirens, all of whom resemble the royal youth. That is, Waterhouse engages with late nineteenth-century debates about the spiritual-evolutionary-cultural wish for a third sex combining the most radiant features of male and female subjects. 28 The late Paul Barlow, whose exacting scholarship is noted throughout this study, was the most brilliant exponent of this school of thought. 29 D. Phillips, Don’t Trust the Label: An Exhibition of Fakes, Imitations and the Real Thing (London: The Arts Council, 1986), p. 39. The subtext here is that Brown’s painting is a form of self-fakery, since the other exhibits were chosen to illustrate the difference between original artworks, imitations and forgeries. 30 Phillips, Don’t Trust the Label, p. 39. Phillips repeats the standard modernist trope that Victorian painting suppresses the critical energies of the aesthetic imagination. See, for example, J. B. Manson, who dismissed G. F. Watts as a joyless, prodding prefect of moralised painting in Hours in the Tate Gallery (London: Duckworth, 1926), pp. 90–4. 31 See the catalogue accompanying For King or Parliament?, an exhibition held at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 21 October–18 November 1978, which may have coloured Phillips’s argument. The anonymous curator claims, at pp. 7 and 4, that ‘19th Century artists painted pictures from the Civil War because cultural and financial reasons made them do so’. There was, we are told, ‘a vacuum at the centre of almost all the works’. 32 The Times (7 October 1893), as noted by A. Thirlwell, Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown (London: Pimlico, 2011), p. 249. 33 Carlyle, Past and Present [1843], in, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill (London: Chapman & Hall, 1896–1901), vol. 10, pp. 148–9 (hereafter TC). 34 Hueffer captures this aspect of Brown’s mentality: ‘I cannot help thinking that amongst a people so deeply moved by “figures” as is ours … Brown’s position, apart from his work, should have been to some extent that of Dr. Johnson or even of Carlyle.’ FMH, p. 398. 35 FMH, p. 312.

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Introduction

36 This may explain why one contemporary critic complained that ‘the colouring is a forced and unpleasant strength, and the execution has no charm. Even the draughtsmanship … seems to lack any sign of delicacy or refinement.’ Anon., ‘Exhibition of Pictures at the Royal Institution’, Manchester Guardian (11 September 1878), in M. Bennett, Ford Madox Brown: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), vol. 1, p. 280 (hereafter MB), p. 280. 37 FMH, p. 312. 38 G. Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–72] (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1874), book 6, chapter 58, p. 440. 39 Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship [1841], in TC, vol. 5, pp. 217–18: ‘Poor Cromwell, – great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet; Prophet who could not speak. Rude, confused, struggling to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his wild sincerity … Consider him. An outer hull of chaotic confusion, visions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almost semi-madness; and yet such a clear determinate man’s-energy working in the heart of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight and fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria, unformed black of darkness … Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted; the wide element of mournful black enveloping him – wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic man; a man with his whole soul seeing, and struggling to see.’ 40 Rossetti may have been alluding to this when he pointed out to Lady Ashburton that Brown was ‘one of the greatest painters living anywhere, though the intensity of expression in his works places them beyond the appreciation of commonplace people.’ See W. E. Fredeman et al. (eds), The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002–), vol. 5, p. 59. 41 See Trodd, Barlow and Amigoni, ‘Introduction’, in C. Trodd, P. Barlow and D. Amigoni (eds), Victorian Culture, pp. 1–20. 42 Ruskin’s personal dislike of Brown may explain why he chose to identify Dante Gabriel Rossetti and G. F. Watts as modern exponents of this important critical idiom. 43 ‘[The Pre-Raphaelites were a] mawkish, melodramatic and cliched bunch. Devoured by the new-monied industrialists of Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, their work duly ended up in the provincial-city art galleries. And quite frankly, they are welcome to them.’ A. Smart, ‘Pre Raphael Light’, Sunday Telegraph (25 September 2011), p. 20. 44 With one highly important exception: Paul Barlow reviewed this matter in numerous brilliant works, including ‘Fear and Loathing of the Academic, or Just What is it That Makes the Avant-Garde so Different, so Appealing?’, in R. C. Denis and C. Trodd (eds), Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 15–32; ‘Millais, Manet and Modernity’, in D. Peters Corbett and L. Perry (eds), English Art, 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 49–63; and P. Barlow, Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). As indicated at various points in my study, Barlow’s dazzlingly sustained readings of Victorian art remain unsurpassed. 45 Similar perceptions are common in popular accounts of Victorian painting: ‘The first few rooms of [Painters’ paintings] see painting as a glorious conversation between the greats, whose works mingle and play off each other with mutual and electric

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Ford Madox Brown

creativity … This is great until you reach the Victorians. I can see why GF Watts and Lord Leighton are here. These rich Victorian artists collected great art that ended up in the National Gallery. But who cares?’ J. Jones, ‘A Private View – the Masters’ Personal Master Works’, Guardian (22 June 2016), p. 11. Elsewhere, Victorian art is little more than a paint-by-numbers version of social realism. Hence, John Crace, in a parody of Jeremy Paxman’s popular The Victorians (2009), imagines that the ‘mysterious appearance of the Manchester Murals by Archibald Fentiman Banksy in 1849 opened people’s eyes to the dreadful conditions in which many of the new urban working class were living’. See J. Crace, ‘The Victorians’, Guardian, G2 (17 February 2009), p. 19. 46 See B. Worden, ‘Victorian Cromwell’, in Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 243–63. 47 The critical thinking behind this matter is summarised by T. W. Mason, ‘Nineteenthcentury Cromwell’, Past and Present, 40 (1968), 187–91, who reviews how ­anti-establishment versions of Cromwell came into being in the age of mass publication and mass visual culture. See also, E. Morris, ‘Nineteenth Century Paintings and Sculptures of Cromwell’, The Wordsworth Circle, 25:3 (1993), 173–92; and The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. V. Surtees (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981) (hereafter FMB), 9 and 15 September 1855, p. 153, where Brown compliments Charles Lucy for his Cromwell Resolving to Refuse the Crown, which was reproduced as a calotype. Brown’s detailed comments on researching Cromwell in June 1856 appear at pp. 176–7. 48 See FMH, p. 311, who points out that Brown planned other subjects relating to the Lord Protector’s career. 49 See FMB, 30 January 1855, p. 120. In the same entry Brown’s republican internationalism is confirmed by these comments on George Washington: ‘A godlike man – a rare example of an unselfish man. If Cromwell was a great man, Washington was a God, spotless, passionless.’ See also, M. C. Finn, After Chartism: Class, and Nation in English Radical Politics 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 13–59. 50 A. Boime, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century’, Arts Magazine (September 1981), 117. 51 Boime, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century’, 121. 52 Boime, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century’, 122. In fact, it should be stressed that Boime’s vision of the self-managing worker is entirely compatible with the conception of the modern ‘activist’ artist proposed by Brown, Morris, Crane, C. R. Ashbee and other leftist figures in the Arts and Crafts Movement. 53 Brown did include the lead works at St Anthony-on-Tyne and a ferry-boat carrying people to the factory in his portrait of James Leathart (1863, 1869). 54 See Trodd, Barlow and Amigoni, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 55 Boime, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century’, 119. 56 Boime, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century’, 119–20. Boime never stops to

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57

58

59

60

61

62 63

64

explain why Brown should have endorsed a critical attitude virtually unknown in the 1850s. For other accounts that in different ways relate to Boime’s thesis, see J. A. Hollander, ‘Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1865): The Irish Question and the Great Famine’, New Hibernian Review, 1 (Spring 1997), 100–19; P. Wood, ‘The Avant-Garde From the July Monarchy to The Second Empire’, in P. Wood (ed.), The Challenge of the Avant-Garde (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 35–55; and T. Nakamura, ‘Bleak House and Brown’s Work: a Gaze Upon the Poor’, Shiron: Essays in English Language and Literature, 39 (2000), 39–65. It is worth pointing out that literary and cultural historians do not feel the need to castigate Victorian poets and novelists for their alleged failure to engage with industrial subjects. Nor should it be forgotten that industrial life is marginalised in many of the most distinctive literary visions of London during the period: see, for instance, Arthur Hugh Clough, To The Great Metropolis (1848), James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night (1880), Oscar Wilde, A Picture of Dorian Grey (1890), and Arthur Symons, London Nights (1895). ‘The economic uncertainty of the period meant that mechanisation presented a distinctly ambiguous face to contemporaries. It was far from clear whether it was a portent of inevitable economic revolution, or but one course of development among several, which might be adopted or rejected, in whole or in part, depending on the nation’s goals and priorities.’ M. Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 2. See J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London: John W. Parker, 1848); Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (London: Rivingtons, 1884). Mill’s best-known and most successful discipline, Henry Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, was introduced to Brown by Sir Charles Dilke, the radical politician and proprietor of The Athenaeum. Brown painted Henry and Millicent Fawcett in 1874. Although not for William Morris, who, on the face of it, was the most revolutionary figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement. See, for instance, W. Morris, ‘A Factory As It Might Be’, Justice (17 May 1884), 2. which does not include any reference to the Industrial Revolution. For illuminating accounts of Chartism, see P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1982), pp. 59–64, 313–36; and G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 90–178. It should be stressed that Boime’s criticism of Brown is based on the misrepresentation of Chartism as a proto-Marxist organisation dedicated to control of the production process. In fact, the Chartist critique of the social order was much closer to earlier radical discourses, where the economic practices of the landed classes and sundry monopolists were identified as the means by which the poor were robbed of their natural rights, particularly access to common land. This sentiment, which relates to the vision of customary values in the writings of Paine and Cobbett, was shared by Brown in the 1840s and 1850s. For an important account of the political culture of Chartism, see Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, pp. 17–21. See Brown’s comments on the industrialists in Greater Manchester in Chapters 1 and 5. When working on the second part of the mural scheme, he declared that

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Ford Madox Brown

‘socialism will do much to check the upholstery, soft-cushioned, cabinet gallery, selfish plutocratic littleness of art’. See Brown, ‘Historic Art’, 52. 65 It is worth distinguishing between the self-defining phrase ‘industrial revolution’ and the concept of ‘the Industrial Revolution’. The first expression relates to Mill, Principles of Political Economy, in which it makes one fleeting appearance; Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England [1845], published in New York in 1887, where it pops up as an unexplained generic term on five occasions; and K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [1867–83] (London: Penguin Books, 1976) where it is mentioned twice in volume 1, not at all in volume 2 and once in volume 3. The second expression is applicable to Toynbee’s Lectures on the Industrial Revolution, where ‘the Industrial Revolution’ exists as a fully worked out theory of social and economic transformation at pp. 27–32, 85–105. 66 T. Hulme, After the Shock City: Urban Culture and the Making of Modern Citizenship (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer and Royal Historical Society, 2019), p. 110; J. Davis, ‘The Anachronic Middle Ages: Public Art, Cultural Memory and the Medievalist Imagination’, in K. Fugelso et al. (eds), Medievalism and Modernity (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), p. 144; A. Inglis, ‘The Empire of Art’, in M. Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 589; and M. Crinson, ‘Manchester and the “Hypocritical Plan”: Architecture, Shopping and Identity in the Industrial City’, in C. Ehland (ed.), Thinking North: Textures of Identity in the North of England (Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York, 2007), p. 198. 67 Davis goes so far as to claim that Brown’s murals ‘offer a corporate view of history’, before reaching the mysterious conclusion that they ‘record a personal history of illness and old age’. See Davis, ‘The Anachronic Middle Ages’, p. 144. 68 In FMH, p. 57, Hueffer states that Brown’s replication habit began in this period. He implies, at pp. 159, 207, 228–9, 232, 234, 243, 262–3, that replication was one way in which Brown tried to resist the disciplinary authority of the art market. Brown continued this practice until the end of his career, as noted in FMH, p. 337, where Brown informs Shields that his replica of Romans ‘will offer greater opportunities for sale’ than a ‘cumbersome’ cartoon. 69 According to Hueffer, Brown was ‘scarcely able to mention an Academician, as such, without the addition of an abusive epithet’. See FMH, p. 248. When informed about the plans to hold a posthumous exhibition of D. G. Rossetti’s works at the Royal Academy, Brown let rip: ‘I am glad to be away from London, and the horrible fiasco of the Royal Academy swooping down on poor Gabriel’s work as they have. It lends a new terror to death. One satisfaction is that they will never be able to borrow off these walls.’ See FMH, p. 363. 70 As Hueffer points out (FMH, p. 58), Brown’s ‘whole makings until he reached the age of thirty scarcely totalled more than 200I.’ Later in his career Brown was buoyed by a sideline in what might be called corporate portraiture: see, for example, J. O. Riches, Esq. (1874), presented to the Ocean Steamship Company, and Joseph Allot, Esq. (1874), presented to a building society. 71 See FMH, p. 368. By contrast Prince Albert went out of his way to inform the Royal Academicians that they stood firm against the appalling commodification of art: ‘The works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale, are becoming articles of trade, following as such the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion; and public and even private patronage is swayed by their tyrannical influence. It is, then, to an

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Introduction

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73

74

75

institution like this, gentlemen, that we must look for a counterpoise to these evils.’ [Prince Albert], The Principal Speeches and Addresses of his Royal Highness, The Prince Consort (London: John Murray, 1862), pp. 129–30. See MB, vol. 1, pp. 281–336, who notes, at p. 319, how Brown tried to enlist the support of his friend F. G. Stephens, the art critic of the Athenaeum, in getting a publishing firm to buy the copyright for The Trial of Wyclif. Rossetti’s vision of the Victorian patron as status-obsessed addict comes across in a letter to Brown that identifies James Leathart as a ‘victim of art’. Rossetti goes on to assert, ‘Who knows that he may not even pair with Plint as a twin lamb on the altar of sacrifice!’ Note, too, that Brown could be tart when dealing with Frederick Craven, one of his most important patrons in the 1870s: ‘you must remember that this commission is the outcome of three bargains, abrogated to suit your convenience, all of which pictures you had full opportunity of seeing before agreeing to.’ Hueffer observed that Brown was ‘rough and ready’ with Thomas Plint, who commissioned Work, and he that ‘repeatedly damaged his prospects by resenting over-hastily and answering unguardedly slights that were frequently imagined.’ See FMH, pp. 162, 265, 175, 176. It is worth noting that many Victorian radicals shared Brown’s perception of the Royal Academy as a rent-seeking corporation when they argued that it manipulated and distorted the market for painting. For more on the history of this critical attitude, see C. Trodd, ‘The Authority of Art; Cultural criticism and the idea of the Royal Academy in mid-Victorian Britain’, Art History, 20:1 (1997), 3–22. MSL 1995/174, Box 45, ‘Lectures on Art’, II, pp. 48, 81, 94–102. FMBV&A.

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Part I

A working life

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• 1 • Ford Madox Brown and the historical imagination

What a miserable sad thing it is to be fit for painting only & nothing else.1 The [Manchester] series as a whole … is singularly instinct with … Brown’s personality … [and] full of sympathy with human life.2 All History is an imprisoned Epic, nay an imprisoned Psalm and Prophecy … the highest Shakespeare producible is properly the fittest Historian producible.3

Ford Madox Brown’s murals in the Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall (1878–93) are without doubt the most important public artworks of their day.4 These twelve designs, remarkable exercises in the making of historical vision, were semi-forgotten by academics until the 1980s, partly because of Brown’s unusually muscular conception of what History Painting should set out to achieve.5 From Brown’s perspective, History Painting was an exercise in understanding how individuals and groups interact with the forces that would shape them. To a degree, this explains the idiosyncratic nature of his own productions. For instance, in many paintings the traditional articulation of action, based on the principle of rationally ordered groups, sub-groups and planes, is replaced by a system of pictorial cross-currents where individuals form awkward combinations, unstable configurations or whirling abridgements of what seem to be bigger social situations or civic gatherings. In part, no doubt, these displays of plastic and bodily exuberance confirm Brown’s concern with the representation of agency in everyday life and what people do when they are brought into contact with representatives of the political establishment. This interest in the representation of human vitality cannot be restricted to what took place in the 1870s and beyond. In fact, Brown’s aggressively physical style is noticeable in designs from the mid-1840s. Works such as Spirit of Justice (1844–5) and The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror (Willelmus Conquistator) (1844–61) depict situations where the body is shaped by conflict. For Brown, history, properly conceived, required the recognition of 31

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Part I: A working life

different points of view, not the validation of the vantage point of social elites. Reanimating the past meant being receptive to different patterns of existence, he argued, and so, ‘to endeavour after unity is to injure the subject & not illustrate it’.6 The point was to see into history rather than to master it. On this reading, History Painting meant digging into the raw and impure stuff of human content; it meant seeing imbalance and confusion in the world; and it meant entertaining the idea that history might amount to the unfolding of associational culture. For reasons that will become obvious when individual murals are studied in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, Brown was fascinated by the jostling actuality of historical life. Each of the panels depict the changing conditions in which subjects are made part of collective situations and communities of experience. It is the case, then, that this first chapter aims, through careful examination of pictorial, cultural and historical evidence, to outline Brown’s critical attitude and, in light of these findings, to consider why he associated painting with the need to forge a common politics, thus preparing the way for Chapter 2, where these points are related to broader issues of cultural practice, social organisation and expressions of mutuality. To fully understand Brown’s attitude to historical representation, two preliminary remarks are necessary. The first entails saying something about Brown’s general outlook and personality. We know that he had extraordinary energy and drive (Figure 1.1). Nonetheless, his family history would have given him a sense of the precarious nature of the ‘professional classes’: his grandfather was a famous, but unsuccessful, medic; his father – a purser in the Royal Navy – was dead by the time the artist was twenty. Furthermore, like Thomas Carlyle, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris – all three of whom influenced his thinking about history and society – Brown never separated intellectual from physical work. His prolonged engagement with these important figures encouraged the idea that culture was a public activity and that it should address the tensions at the heart of modern society. Although Brown displayed no desire to promote his career by cultivating contacts with leading mainstream artists or prominent art dealers, he was, as noted by Ford Madox Hueffer – his biographer and grandson – cosmopolitan, forceful and gregarious: [He] spoke French and Italian with great fluency, and something of Flemish, and had more of the tone and associations of a foreign than an English painter; his English talk, however, was thoroughly native, not interlarded with foreign words or idioms … His uniform intonation and slow utterance were also a subject of remark, these being the more noticeable as his discourse was full of strong opinions, telling anecdote, and lively point. He was indeed a very amusing and, when he liked, an excellent talker, having a large range of ­subject-matter; he was also a good narrator, and would tell you the story of a novel with great precision and at ample length.7

Hueffer goes on to declare that Brown was a ‘creature of impulse’, before concluding with these first-hand observations about character and temperament: 32

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Ford Madox Brown and the historical imagination

Figure 1.1  Ford Madox Brown, Self Portrait, 1875

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‘To any one in an inferior position, any one humble or needy, he was elaborately polite; to anyone whom he suspected of patronising him he was capable of being hastily and singularly disagreeable’.8 The second point to make is that the Manchester mural scheme departs from conventional History Painting, a tradition of representation that allows for a detached observation of a rational whole. In briefest terms, Brown’s works frustrate ideas of coordination, integration and totality, the homogenising effects generated by Reynoldsian formalism, the dominant critical idiom in the production and reception of British History Painting from 1770 until 1900.9 That is, he showed no interest in perpetuating a system in which composition was defined as consistency of morphology. Instead he conceived the structuring of the image in terms of surface energy.10 Throughout the scheme, pictorial design is equated with the expression of jagged rhythm and acrobatic or darting movement. As shall become evident, when each mural is examined in detail, these processes confirm that Brown was always suspicious of the idea that the best art derives its strength from subservience to the dicta of academic art theory.11 The direction taken by Brown’s art is consistent with the undermining of the standard model, where History Painting operates at a level beyond ­quotidian nature. For Brown, historical representation meant active subjects and everyday vision, not generic subjects and synoptic vision.12 In a letter written to the art critic Harry Quilter, Brown explained that his ‘designs were poetic in intention. My subjects, indeed, are all chosen from this point of view – because they do not represent a very trite allegory … I have no wish to be classed as an historical painter chronicling events dully.’13 In his landmark biography (Figure 1.2), Hueffer affirmed that Brown was an innovator ‘protesting against existing traditions, having … arrived at [his] conclusions by means of independent study and experience’.14 It comes as no surprise, then, that in Brown’s art the popular classes and the labouring poor are not beholden to higher powers. From Brown’s position, the common people – the collective term for the creators of an everyday culture derived from free human activity – were more important than standard representatives of polite society, the ideal types encountered in mainstream historical paintings. In short, the common people were associated with an organic life that could not be mastered. Brown’s belief that the standard model of History Painting was inadequate for his critical needs may explain why the murals encountered more than their fair share of critical resistance and misunderstanding from the business-minded types who ran the Corporation of Manchester. The cost-conscious figures involved in the commission may have determined that Brown’s programme was subject to the principles of rationality and accountability associated with other forms of public administration.15 At any event, they imposed strict financial limits on the scheme. At one key moment in the production of the works, Brown petitioned the Corporation with these words:

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Figure 1.2 Book cover designed by Walter Crane; Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work, 1896

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It is quite impossible for me to carry them out in the time I had originally reckoned on … This result I attribute partly to the nature of the subjects selected, which being historic require so much research and care in composing them and partly the elongated shapes and positions (so near the eye of the spectator) of the panels themselves requiring them to be filled up from the bottom to top with figures executed with all the finish of easel works.16

His entirely reasonable request for additional funding was refused, and so Brown went on to complain that the financial terms of the contract were ‘disastrously unfortunate … for me’, a truth confirmed by Charles Rowley, his biggest ally within the Corporation, who noted that the original contract had been calculated on a ‘pauper rate’.17 To paraphrase the late Paul Barlow, the best-informed and most perspicacious commentator on Victorian painting, many of Brown’s detractors, wanted the panels to be lapidary versions of the documents located in standard historical archives, not self-sufficient objects derived from an independent review of the topics included within the scheme.18 Exactly the same kind of attitude is evident in official discussions of the project. Representatives of the Corporation, many of whom confounded historical development with wealth production, required scenes celebrating social stability and political authority alongside representations of technological change and physical power. Inevitably, one focus of interest was to align the mural programme with a popular national vision which saw Manchester as the great prodigy of the age, evidence of the glorious distinctiveness of British development, and confirmation of the idea that rationality in history is recognised when it is incarnated in material processes and social institutions.19 As shown later in this chapter, these representatives of commercial society wanted their murals to be pedagogical rather than polemical. Brown never endorsed this form of thinking, where competition is identified as the truth of social organisation. Nor was he indifferent to the economic conflict between factory workers and the northern employer class. On one occasion, he informed his friend and fellow-artist Frederic Shields of his thoughts on the wage-cutting procedures of the industrial magnates in Greater Manchester: ‘the manufacturers look upon a good broad margin of starving workmen as the necessary accompaniment of cheap labour’.20 Earlier, when told that he had been commissioned to paint all twelve panels, he felt obliged to lament that this constituted ‘only five years more exile in this place’.21 Elsewhere, he stated, ‘I have refused the Mayor’s dinner, and I could show you half a dozen invitations to dinner with the best people, which we have recently refused.’22 Brown seems to have identified the commissioners of the project as agents of the industrial bourgeoisie. We see this in his dealings with the all-important Decorations Sub-Committee, where he complained about the exclusion of the Lancashire Cotton Famine and the Peterloo Massacre from the final sequence of the mural programme – topics illustrating structural inequalities of capitalism, working-class resistance to wage-cutting, and the use of overproduction and 36

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unemployment as economic weapons by industrialists.23 Seen in this light, it can be argued that Brown’s vision of the end point of the scheme – a social activist account of the conditions of industrial life – was blocked because the most powerful figures at the Corporation of Manchester understood he would not comply with their ideological perception of the relationship between economic development and social liberty. Whatever the case, Brown was unimpressed by the bureaucratic nature of the commission. In 1878 he felt obliged to inform Shields, at that point the co-partner on the project, about the hyperbolic needs of their civic patrons: yesterday a voluminous packet came stamped Corporation of Manchester. Don’t be alarmed; I have mastered it all, and have answered both [Abel] Heywood [the Mayor of Manchester] and the Committee Clerk. The first named with the slightest perception of banter, which I find is the only way to deal with him. To read his letter – which I do not send on to you, for it would drive you mad – one would suppose he wished us to write out eighty-four lists of all our twelve subjects over again, plus alternate ones and incidental remarks of an agreeable nature for the edification of the members of the Corporation.24

An uncompromising attitude to the injunctions of a bureaucratic elite obsessed by the wisdom of managerial systems is one of Brown’s most endearing character traits.25 His dealings with leading representatives of the Corporation reveal the workings of a mind opposed to the hubristic rationalism of commissioners, politicians and businessmen. We catch a glimpse of this attitude in one of his many letters to Shields: ‘This place [Manchester] certainly does not improve by length of acquaintance … and cotton does not become livelier, at least in the market; whatever its condition may be on the townspeople’s backs I can’t say.’26 Brown, prepared to turn his private thoughts into public actions, threatened to go on strike and sell panels to private patrons in later disputes over the terms and conditions for the production and execution of the final set of murals.27 Seen as a whole, Brown’s jolting murals reject the logical adhesives of popular liberalism and its concept of social improvement: the vision of Britishness as the steady march of liberties, entrepreneurial endeavours, practical innovations and skills; the identification of commercial life as the Good Life; the naming of the industrial bourgeoisie and the comfortable classes as heroes of the historical process. To Brown, such triumphalism was untenable, as indicated in this sardonic observation about the machinery of state-sanctioned participatory sovereignty: ‘One subject they would have wished me to paint at Manchester was the opening of the Town Hall itself, with portraits of eighty members of the council, and with a procession of 40,000 people.’28 As he saw it, the purpose of the mural project was to complicate the relationship between art, social power and the public sphere. This attitude relates to the distinctive argument put forward by Carlyle about the heuristic value of historical subjects. Carlyle assumed that historical representation was a matter of recovering human vitality.29 Likewise, Brown wanted to dig deep into the past, to recover the idioms, 37

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preoccupations, activities and arguments of ordinary communities; to see the past properly meant exploring real and imagined experiences, or what he called ‘life dreams’, as well as customs, documents, material productions, exchangeable commodities and instruments of government. It meant giving space to political and social antagonisms of one kind or another; it meant depicting human spirit rather than competitive spirit; and it meant developing a composite art that, like Carlyle’s writing, tried to bring the viewer into a direct human relation with historical figures.30 It is hardly surprising that Hueffer positioned Brown and Carlyle on the same cultural spectrum, as neither of them adhered to the view that history was governed by typological or stadial principles.31 What Carlyle called the ‘scaffolding of Time’ – the assumption that history was underpinned by immutable laws – had been destroyed by the French Revolution, a rupture in human experience and understanding.32 It followed that the modern artist should challenge the illusory vision of reality supported by conventional historical representations and create a cultural universe mixing fact, feeling and phantasmagoria. This interest in the inner essence of historical life was amplified by Carlyle’s conviction that historical agency was bound up with the thickly textured movements of the human body. Just as the body meant dynamism, action and transformative power, so the historian needed an image of bodily force to achieve any sense of historical accuracy. Put differently, reverence for energy was required to behold what Carlyle called the ‘evanescence of Formed human things … the bodily concrete coloured presence of things’.33 To clarify, these attempts to restore complexity to historical representation by addressing disequilibrium in social life ran counter to conventional thinking about the construction of balanced literary and pictorial compositions. Brown’s prime interest was the representation of bodily life not measured depictions of grand events or what was seen by some as the civilising influence of markets and mechanisation. This provides an insight into the idiosyncratic style of the murals: the repetition of tightly interlocking shapes and barging forms; the overlapping of subjects, objects and planes; the fragmenting of spaces; the plunging viewpoints; the unexpected foreshortening and fracturing of compositional structure; the use of the trellis as rhythmic pattern; and the sense that common figures stand for the unpredictable nature of human life. For Brown, these elements were visual analogues of the exuberance and uncertainty he associated with the process of trying to discover the nature of human presence in a restless world; for his critics, they were evidence of an inability to draw a consistent and cohesive picture of the chosen subject, confirmation of the perversity of images that violated academic standards of beauty, form – and dignity.34 Brown does not fit the stereotype of the mainstream Victorian painter. It is a mistake, then, to characterise his historical paintings as misrepresentations of the components found in orthodox academic History Painting.35 The murals are crucial here, since they bring into focus a key aspect of his vision of painting: the belief that the modern painter should place himself, as Friedrich Nietzsche concisely puts it, ‘in front of life and experience’.36 Nietzsche’s comments, written 38

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a few years before the inception of the Manchester project, summarise Brown’s lifelong desire to associate spectatorial vision with the life of the image. For the designer and architect A. H. Mackmurdo, Brown was drawn to the dynamic variety and vitality of ordinary bodies, and so his images were ‘marked [by a] new human viewpoint towards life’. Brown’s focus was on the raw shapes of human stuff: ‘[he] lives – every part of him – in the world of men and women. He is tight up against the warm flesh and blood of them … His life was an active participation in the majestic drama of human life.’37 Common human energy or gusto, aligned to social humanitarianism, was the real subject of Brown’s demotic vision, Mackmurdo hints. Other commentators used a similar set of terms when arguing that Brown was uninterested in the fixed, stable matrix within which History Painting operated. William Michael Rossetti, for instance, discovered works ‘heaving with energy’.38 George Bernard Shaw proclaimed that ‘[Brown] had vitality enough to find intense enjoyment and inexhaustible interest in the world as it really is, unbeautified, unidealised’. Brown’s paintings, he concluded, were ‘celebrations of the common life’.39 These declarations capture some of the raw kineticism of Brown’s propulsive designs as well as his sharp-sightedness. Likewise, Robert Browning, another important friend and cultural ally, came close to describing Brown’s model of art in his account of the psycho-optical intensity of the modern painter: ‘Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity he has to do; and he digs where he stands … He does not paint pictures and hang them on the walls, but rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes, to see those pictures on them.’40 The primary value of these observations, therefore, lies in the recognition that Brown accorded priority to the close-at-hand; that he depicted bodies agitated by external and internal forces; and that he was disposed to believe that the purpose of painting was to overcome the lacuna between itself and its spectators. In other ways, too, Brown operated from an unconventional standpoint. His composite images propose an immanentist view of the world where energies arise from representatives of everyday life. Some of the subjects in the Manchester murals, such as John Kay, in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle (Plate 10), are wrapped up or swept away by the forces they set in motion; others, such as Humphrey Chetham, in Chetham’s Life Dream, A.D. 1640 (1886) (Plate 8), stand above their milieu, allowing viewers to feel and perceive the ideology from which they spring. Still others, such as the children in the foreground of The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in Manchester, A.D. 1363 (1882) (Plate 4), seem to provide a glimpse of what human wholeness might look like. But Brown went further: the production of everyday vision meant registering the sidelines of life, the subjects and details confirming the beguiling matterof-fact nature of most historical events. As a result, Brown would counter the system of pictorial construction associated with orthodox History Painting by entertaining the idea that no single form of experience defined all the experiences contained within the image.41 39

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These matters relate to one of the key features in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers and Chetham’s Life Dream: the way in which, by placing significant figures at the apex of the angle formed by the picture plane and the plane of work or thought, Brown directs attention to the process by which craft-­mindedness is granted powerful graphic immediacy. In Flemish Weavers, for example, the woman in the foreground is caught within two diagonals: the wooden strut holding up the roof and the rolled textiles. These objects, indirect signs of craft autonomy, frame her; the fragment of a step, resembling a plinth, gives her the trappings of a column, or a figure in a niche. A similar orientation pertains to Chetham’s Life Dream, where the eponymous subject is boxed into the design. Chetham swivels backwards. At the same time, however, he looks over the head of the baby on the bench, to the ungainly child lunging after the ball in the foreground. Here, as in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers, a pictorial system is elaborated through the formal complexities of interlocking objects and surface patterns rather than the centre-periphery orientation and planar structure of conventional History Painting. It is the case, then, that Brown’s subjects are at once individuated characters and intermixed forms. Everyday vision, as practised by Brown, is consistent with his understanding of painting as a site of the imagination which deals with the interweaving of self and social body. These arresting expressions of everyday vision gave him the opportunity to depart from traditional representations of social life. For Brown, the expression of social and pictorial balance was of little value; instead, historical representation meant recovering different types of corporeal wholeness to draw out different visions of self and society. In this respect, Brown’s rejection of the Reynoldsian tradition of the articulate composition is comparable to Carlyle’s rejection of neoclassical history writing. The ‘Eye of History’, an overlooked principle in The French Revolution (1837), stands for a process in which the observer is physically incorporated into the flow of historical life, the interactive patterns of energy whereby different groups, bodies and spaces make the past vivid and vital. The ‘Eye of History’ allowed Carlyle to escape from the vision of historical events as a concatenation of self-contained wholes. It meant a way of seeing into spaces in which people were at odds with one or another, and so offered a kind of situational awareness of how subjects act out intimate relationships of one kind or another.42 It would be hard to overestimate Brown’s admiration for Carlyle.43 All the same, the point here is not so much to stress Brown’s ‘indebtedness’ to Carlyle but rather to affirm that both were fascinated with the idea of the reanimation of the past. The ‘Eye of History’ is Carlyle’s attempt to make the objects of history retinal, to convey a sense of their true corporeal being: ‘The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things; what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in in these often rough embodiments.’44 This in turn relates to the proposal, romanticist in origin, that historical truth is verified through imaginative reconstruction rather than discursive logic. From this perspective, Carlyle thought he was free to translate the idea of the 40

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homogenous historical event into a multiplicity of interlocking social entanglements. Furthermore, it explains why he believed that historical writing should demonstrate that ‘ours is a most fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable … which we can work with, and live amidst, – and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name world.’45 The concept of the ‘Eye of History’ was a means of visualising the phenomenological life of history, since it insisted on the dynamic nature of the pictorial field as the constant rescaling of the relationship between things and situations. Historical vision, articulated in these terms, is a set of vantage points from which to see energy in a material setting. Hence, Carlyle’s predilection for the fluxional and the multiple: these were signs of the energy-centres that would bring the past back to life through the vital power of the human imagination as internal eye. Brown, too, creates his version of the ‘Eye of History’ when identifying painting with the aesthetics of existence. We see this process at work in his modelling of History Painting, which is presented as an arrangement dealing with the inner vitality of an historical event.46 Brown’s graphic system, with its shifting viewpoints and whirling movement, is designed to force the spectator to behold confusion in the world. For these reasons, it does not support the model of pictorial truth, based on consistent ratios and morphologies, at the centre of academic theory and traditional History Painting. In addition, Brown’s plastic thinking is in opposition to an elevated aristocratic vision of history where the collective people are spectators to the display of power, witnesses to the performance of life as conducted by authoritative beings.47 With Brown, public life is expressed via irregular patterns of interaction and exchange between social groups. This is seen in The Baptism of Edwin, A.D. 627 (1879) (Plate 2) and The Trial of Wyclif, A.D. 1377 (1885–86) (Plate 5), both of which exemplify the idea that commonplace experience intrudes into the public realm. Neither image is ‘spectacular’ or ‘grand’ in the conventional sense of conveying absolute authority and control. Pictorial organisation – the absent centre in The Baptism of Edwin and the asymmetrical arrangement of The Trial of Wyclif – is not related to the ceremonial dignity of the monarch and his or her representatives. Sovereign power – a type of power emanating from a central agency which is realised through legal systems, symbolic practices and social customs – is not visualised by Brown.48 In these two pre-modern subjects he is concerned with how people assemble, the play of openness and enclosure, the erosion of barriers between social orders, and the subtle undermining of hierarchies of one form or another. In both situations, then, the world of common feeling and shared experience is given greater priority than the display of state authority. For Brown, there is nothing charismatic about nobility and impersonal power, but there is plenty of magic in everyday culture. Nor should it be forgotten that this elaboration of the active subject equates with Brown’s awareness of the relationship between perception and representation. As Hueffer recalled, ‘It was … Brown’s practice to begin a 41

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painting by putting in the eyes of the central figure. This, he considered, gave him the requisite strength of tone that would be applied to the whole canvas.’ He goes on to stress that, ‘once he had painted in those eyes, he never in any picture altered them, however much he might alter the picture itself. He used them as it were to work up to. Having painted in these eyes, he would begin at the top left-corner of the canvas, and would go on painting downward in a nearly straight line until the picture was finished.’49 This is evidently an application of the ocularcentrism of Carlyle’s ‘Eye of History’ thesis: the ground of the canvas, a surrogate eye, is sign of the continuity of organic life. From Brown’s perspective, true artistic vision has a kind of phenomenological energy that is unreserved and liberating; it wants to capture corporeal life by seeing out of the eyes of the subjects it represents. As a result, he discovers how to live as an artist by understanding that the idea of historical representation is bound up with the search for a vantage point that brings together viewing agent and viewed subject. To confirm the relevance of the ‘Eye of History’ to a consideration of the Manchester mural project, I will restrict myself to one further example. Brown’s application of Carlyle’s critical system is evident in his association of aesthetic experience with the phenomenon of life itself. A striking case is the use of the architectural plan of Manchester in The Romans Building a Fort at Mancenion, A.D. 80 (1880) (Plate 1). The plan, with its symmetrical forms and spaces, describes an urban parallelogram, a model city based on the principle of rationalisation of materials, units and environment, a world transparent to itself, the exact opposite of disorderly modern Manchester. The plan relates to the world of technics, an architectonic version of a human lifeworld where subjects are defined by continuous performance of tasks and duties. Despite this, the native workers, bursting from the base of the design, offer another viewpoint, one where the growth of Manchester is pictured in terms of tremendous eruptions of material power. Brown creates two conflicting pictorial situations from which to see into history: a Roman ‘Eye of History’, the rationalisation of land through the exploitation of raw materials, the development of technology, and the coordination of labour power; and a Brito-Celtic ‘Eye of History’, the identification of organic life with historical energy.50 Another way to draw out the distinctiveness of Brown’s mural programme is to reflect on how his works have been criticised. For some of his contemporaries, Brown was in the grip of pernicious habits of thought and practice. That was the verdict of one member of the Corporation of Manchester, who vented fury at Brown’s The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal, A.D.1761 (1891–92) (Plate 11) before demanding if ‘there was any hope of the refusal of such a burlesque – such a caricature of art on the walls of the Town Hall, or whether it must remain forever, to the discredit of the Council and Manchester … It was one of the most painful things in the way of art he had seen for many a long year.’51 This judgement, based on the assumption that Brown was unable or unwilling to shape and constrain his materials and forms to produce a verisimilar world, 42

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leads to an obvious conclusion: all he could do was to fashion crude, schematic cartoon-like designs. Even sympathetic modern commentators, such as Newman and Watkinson, Brown’s biographers, find multiple levels of failure: ‘As executed, the panels are too small for their setting and inadequately lit. There are inconsistencies of conception, technique and style, with some of the “historic/dramatic” subjects sitting uneasily with the “decorative/anecdotal” ones. A few designs are over complicated.’52 Another commentator complains about ‘flawed’ images, ‘incongruous elements’ and ‘infelicities of scale’.53 This type of objection should be stood on its head since it fails to appreciate the conceptual sophistication of Brown’s scheme. It is my contention that his animated designs set out to complicate common attitudes about history and historical representation. His is a kind of counter-history, or an activist history, where forces and subjects are forever gathering and dispersing – and offering different currents of belief. Attentive to tensions within the social field, he wanted to capture the social reality of subjects as they struggled to become part of the life of history.54 In his effort to achieve this goal, Brown attempted to accommodate the representation of human life with the life of the image, a process in which neither experience nor expression were subordinate to each other. This matter is acknowledged by Barlow, who notes that ‘visual complexity is a defining feature of his style’.55 In saying this, of course, Barlow alludes to the fact that, in rejecting the idea of the pictorial image as self-contained whole, Brown put himself in a position to explore the chaotic powers and actions of historical subjects. Brown’s panels display a fluid world held together by different idioms of human experimentation and resistance. We see cottage industries (The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers) and workshops (John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle), which indicate the social impact of machine technology. Full-scale infrastructural development is confined to the first scene, the ‘creation’ of Manchester by the Romans. The world of manufactures and machine ­production – the world of continuous development through technological improvement – is not a general feature of the murals. The final panel, Dalton Collecting Marsh-Fire Gas (1887) (Plate 12), pictures modern Manchester as a rural space where ‘industrialization seems to have been stopped in its tracks’.56 When seen together, the murals give the appearance of granting greater attention to subjects involving skilled craftspeople and inventors than to newfangled techniques of industrial production. For example, The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers is a celebration of the material value of imported skills, the development of occupational culture and the concomitant creation of cosmopolitan society. Mills, which supported the mechanisation and expansion of the textile industries in the northwest, are not represented in the scheme. Steam power, what economic historians call ‘General Purpose Technology’, is absent from the murals.57 Instead of industrial drivers and labour productivity, then, growth is marked in human terms: empathy and creativity, the development of social skills and the sharing of social experiences. Simply put, innovations of scale, the core reality of nineteenth-­century 43

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industrialisation, do not figure in what might be called Brown’s anti-cyclic vision of history. Brown’s focus on the household or social environment rather than the factory is, on one level, curious. After all, we are familiar with the argument that industrialisation, the rapid restructuring of the work situation and economy through technology, virtually eradicated domestic industry, transforming semi-independent artisans into wage-labourers.58 For many Victorians, modernity meant reshaping the world by the conversion of inventions into high-impact material practices. It meant seeing originality and creativity in terms of economic performance: the efficient management and allocation of raw materials aligned with the development of new products.59 Brown, unmoved by this technocratic vision of human value, mobilised the domestic world as part of a counterargument about the creative power of workshop culture. Furthermore, it helped in the formulation of a visual programme for resisting many of the organisational and ideological concerns put forward by members of the Corporation of Manchester, some of whom had good reasons to support the consolidation of industrial capitalism – and to involve themselves in schemes exalting the idea of industrial civilisation. A brief consideration of the pictorial settings of the murals will complete these historical preliminaries. Brown’s works contain bridges, fortifications, courtrooms; platforms, shop windows, doorsteps; public assemblies, private locations as well as landscapes. These openings and thresholds of one kind or another amplify the sociality of experience. In some cases, the viewer is made aware of obstacles or barriers, points of confrontation, conflict, competition or disturbance (The Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester, A.D. 910 [1881], The Trial of Wyclif, Bradshaw’s Defence of Manchester, A.D. 1642 [1893] and John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle). In other cases, the viewer encounters craft-­mindedness and group rituals (The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers, Chetham’s Life Dream and The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal). Seen in the round, the murals amount to representations of different stages and sites of struggle and emergence, different forms of enclosure, escape and expansion. These gathering places are defined as chunks of action or bands of energy rather than integrated planes. The spatial patterns of everyday life imply historical contingency by affirming the fluid nature of social situations. In parallel, most of the murals spotlight figures involved in sense-making behaviour. Time and again, Brown’s vision of human culture – what people do and how they make meanings – is stressed over and above commercial development, modernisation of production or constitutional matters.60 We catch examples of the modelling of everyday vision in The Romans Building a Fort and The Proclamation Regarding Weights and Measures A.D. 1556, both of which display figures who set out to command the pace of civic life for the purpose of making it more efficient; and both of which depict modernisation as an arrangement of countervailing forces. Work appears to be the vector of rationalisation in the proto-panoramic world of The Romans Building 44

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a Fort. At the same time, however, the commanding officer is not interested in reading the blueprint of Manchester, a logical representation of a self-­contained mechanical whole. For certain, he turns away from the world of technical knowledge, the world of manufactured facts, into the world of private feeling. It is through the appearance of the Romans, apparently, that the idea of social progress is at once introduced and suppressed. By contrast, the ‘primitive’ and the ‘savage’ elements at the margins of the panel refer the viewer to a world instinct with life.61 The chief matter here, of course, is that Brown set out to use vision as an instrument for demonstrating the complexity and unpredictability of history. Brown’s orchestration of vision – his association of the ‘Eye of History’ with fluid, multivalent sight – casts light on how the murals deal with the mechanical transformation of human life. In a few cases, Brown seems to represent the idea of the continuous stream of modest, incremental advances in technology and manufacture through close observation, systematic experiment and mechanical invention. One might plausibly cite William Crabtree and John Kay as examples of this process. Nonetheless, when the entire mural programme is considered, this reading – based on the notion that historical development and social progress are secured by self-reliant, outward-looking subjects – becomes much harder to endorse. The larger point I am trying to establish here is that Brown’s interest in the representation of eruptive subjects occurs throughout the mural programme. This point lends special distinction to his unusual depiction of Kay, a distinguished inventor who is a precursor of the mechanised production of industrial modernity. And yet, in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, the would-be master technologist appears to exist in a state of perpetual disturbance associated with the storm-driven subjects encountered in romantic literature. He does not display any signs of self-command or motivating intelligence, the key characteristics found in standard Victorian discourses on the self-made heroes of entrepreneurial culture.62 In truth, Brown’s Kay enters history as a ‘master’ whose life is disrupted by a failure to realise technological innovation in material form. Note, too, that Kay cannot relate the fact of work to the inner culture of the individual. It is his son who attempts to protect the work loom, to reach out into the world, and so embody social extension and human development. By contrast, for Kay, the fact of invention is detached from the experience of improvement. We might add that Brown uses Kay to spotlight the tussle between facts and feelings; indeed, he is a fact transformed into a feeling, a condition of struggle, or self-struggle, in which the expression of raw human life wins out over technical processes, analytical systems and abstract laws – the conventional means by which facts become material things. Seen like this, Kay is a concatenation of twisted body parts, and bits of clothing. An unbalanced and malfunctioning subject, he seems to be quarrelling or disputing with himself. Kay, a variation on the Carlylean figure fighting to escape from his shadow, points to a world where human relationships take 45

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place within distorted situations and mechanised spaces. He is, in this respect, lost to society, a mere body-thing indicative of the social disruption generated by the industrial machine. It is significant, nonetheless, that this extraordinary depiction of Kay faithfully reflects one strand of industrialisation: the break-up of traditional systems and locations of work. The family unit – the social and economic cog of cottage industries – would be replaced by the factory or the industrial mill with numerous workers. It should not surprise us, therefore, that John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle depicts the dismantling of the domestic tableau, the pictorial analogue of the space of the cottage industry, a process enacted through Kay’s representation as a fungible body. What might be called the anti-tableau is another sign of Brown’s interest in the composite design: it permitted him to replace the self-managing individual with a hotchpotch subject. Consequently, Brown displays a tangled realm where the authority of the creator-father is supplanted by the anarchic wriggle of the adjacent bodies. The human world, diffused into its surroundings, is divided from the material authority of the self-contained world of the machine. So, like many works in Brown’s long career, the aggressively physical style of John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle serves a critical purpose: it affirms that Kay belongs to the distorted significations generated by the mechanisation of the workplace. Once again, it is apparent that Brown’s version of the ‘Eye of History’ allows him to individualise subjects and situations, to cut them free from the normalising procedures and conventions of traditional History Painting. One simple way of indicating the significance of these procedures would be to juxtapose them with related concerns in other murals. Consider, for instance, the way in which it is possible to align the practical and sensuous nature of work with representations of comfort and care. The children in the foreground of The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers (Plate 4) are one example of a process where creativity is socialised. The children, standing apart from the royal procession in the mid-ground and the space of productivity on the right, create a latticed form through the linear rhythm of concatenated hands.63 For Brown, what matters is to find pockets of human company in those historical situations where human energy is set against abstract systems of one kind or another. Here, as in other parts of the scheme, the pulse of life is corporealised, since the hand, a socio-haptic mark, stands for the cohesiveness of human culture as common action. It is telling that The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal (Plate 11) and Dalton (Plate 12), topics associated with industrial and scientific modernity, emphasise hands and hand power. The bargewoman in the foreground of The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal is a particularly wonderful illustration of bodily power, since her self-clasping hands suggest the appearance of another figure obscured by her lunging presence. The bounce and flexibility in this part of the image is continued by the super-buoyant babes, whose pudgy hands are in stark contrast to the all-round puniness of the static and rigid Duke of Bridgewater. To his right, a bolder figure emerges from the crowd, plunges beneath the feet of 46

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the soldiers, and, with hands outstretched, tries to catch a floundering dog. Through these means the ‘Eye of History’ inverts the core-periphery model of academic History Painting to contrast an anonymous representative of the common people, a force of vitality, against the Duke, a stultifying symbol of authority. Likewise, in Dalton, a subject of wonderment and reverie, the flowing hands of the children in the foreground augment Dalton’s steady grasp and gaze. Beneath Dalton, on the plank connecting his space to the children in the foreground, a farm-boy assistant mimics the action of his masters’ hands. Neither here, nor elsewhere in the scheme, do we see the pumps, drills or other types of mechanical equipment central to the industrial process. It is as if the special-purpose tools and the machines that eliminated the need for hand skills hardly exist in the world Brown represents. When they are referenced, they stand for a condition of ‘pure’ or ‘theoretical’ knowledge (Crabtree Watching the Transit of Venus, A.D. 1639 [1882–83]) (Plate 7), or as a sign of the potential danger of ‘applied’ knowledge (John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle) (Plate 12). Brown’s activation of the ‘Eye of History’ was designed to reveal that history is much more than mere hardware. One imagines him saying something like this when dealing with the bureaucrats at the Corporation of Manchester. It is known that he had significant reservations about the official version of the project. After all, he remarked to Shields, ‘What chance remains of a Common Council deciding reasonably on matters of art?’64 One of Brown’s most revealing encounters with The Manchester Council Decorations and Furnishings SubCommittee is recounted in Mills’s biography of Shields: one of the councillors rose and declared that they were all in favour of the last scene representing ‘The Opening of the New Town Hall.’ … Brown whispered furiously to Shields that this meant that the councillors wanted all their portraits painted, and was rising with an angry protest, when Shields pulled his coat-tails and whispered, ‘Shut up, Brown, for goodness’ sake; don’t you see all these old fellows will be dead long before we get to the twelfth cartoon?’65

Brown was iron-willed in his vision of the execution of the project. Yet it must be assumed that he could also be diplomatic in his initial dealings with Town Hall officials and other champions of civic identity and the commercial creed. It would be good to know more about his dealings with Alderman Joseph Thompson, the Ancoats cotton mill owner, bibliophile, and a leading member of the Decorations and Furnishings Sub-Committee.66 Like many representatives of Victorian officialdom, Thompson, a Congregationalist, subscribed to the view that British history meant the combination of civil liberties and political stability. He wanted to localise this vision of national character and achievement; he was ‘most anxious to teach the people that Manchester has a history of which they may be proud … something to brighten the age and quicken the pulse’.67 Thompson, the guiding political force behind the mural scheme, was responsible for managing the long list of possible topics for individual works.68 As he put it, the subjects on the list spotlighted the importance of ‘the 47

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social, industrial and scientific phases of history … scenes of a festive and social nature’.69 We may not know much about their personal relationship, but, on the evidence of the murals, it is hard imagine that Brown supported Thompson’s version of provincial non-conformity. There is passion and colour in Brown’s vision of history and human affairs, and much that quickens the pulse, but the overarching themes of municipal liberalism – prosperity, progress and commercial competition, as defined against the background of economic liberty – would be subject to unrelenting scrutiny throughout his murals. A conspicuous illustration of Brown’s unease with the councillors’ direction of the project is the tussle over the proposed inclusion of the Peterloo Massacre as the subject of the final mural.70 In a long letter to Shields the councillors resemble the smug, egotistical philistines in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), which drew on the factorial system in the northwest of England for its imagery: You will have received a communication from the Decorative Committee to the effect that they have now definitely settled on ‘The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal’ as their twelfth and last subject. I don’t know what caused their extreme tenacity on this head; as far as I could see, it resulted from one of their numbers (who ruled them by reason of a certain preponderancy of nose and chin) having seen somewhere a picture by a local artist, Sheffield, representing ‘a canal at Amsterdam,’ and having been very much struck by this performance, and, as it would appear, not ever having in his life before examined any other picture, he wishes to see something like the work by Sheffield on the walls of the Great Hall. In confirmation of this theory is the fact that he once commissioned a local painter to paint some shooting grounds he owned somewhere, but after paying for the same loyally, almost broke the said local man’s heart by steadily refusing to look at the work simply for the reason that he thought he had done enough in ordering and paying for the same.

Brown goes on to remark: I perceived it was no use standing out, and seeing that it must be long before the canal scene need be begun, I thought it best to let them have their way – after protesting. If it came to the worst I would do it. Thompson gave the strongest reason in favour of the subject, for he said that a quarter share in the same canal had recently fetched 8000I in the market at Liverpool. This was unanswerable.71

It may be implied from the ideological make-up of the local elites involved in commissioning the murals that the programme was designed to celebrate a liberal vision of historical development, one in which progress tended to be measured in terms of urbanisation, technological innovation and economic rationalisation. The merchant, statistician and political economist Patrick Colquhoun offered a version of this highly influential worldview in 1815, one based on the coordination and utilisation of industrial power: ‘it is impossible to contemplate the progress of manufactures in Great Britain within the last thirty years without wonder and astonishment. Its rapidity … exceeds all credibility. The improvement of the steam engines, but above all the facilities afforded 48

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to the great branches of the woollen and cotton manufactories by ingenious machinery, invigorated by capital and skill, are beyond all calculation.’72 As imagined from this position, industrialisation created the conditions for continuous material development and continuous economic growth. Many later commentators concurred with this account of modernisation. For example, the journalist and statistician William Cooke Taylor, author of Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire (1842), eulogised the potency of industrial capitalism: ‘The steam-engine had no precedent, the spinning-jenny is without ancestry, the mule and the power-loom entered on no prepared heritage: they sprang into existence like Minerva from the head of Jupiter.’73 It is not, therefore, surprising that these expressions of wonderment encouraged the belief that industrialisation provided the masses with greater levels of material comfort by reconfiguring institutional arrangements for labour and consumption. This form of thought encouraged many employers to see the factory as a spatial system for creating new types of social consciousness arising from the demands of workplace discipline and punctuality. Manchester would be at once discursive hub and social environment for this powerfully ideological vision of the progressive nature of mechanisation and marketisation. In 1857, twenty-one years before Brown started work on the murals, the Old Town Hall in Manchester hosted a meeting by the Manchester Cotton Supply Association. Lord Stanley, the main speaker, congratulated representatives of this organisation of cotton manufacturers on the increase of their ‘productive powers’, and the number of ‘hands’ employed in their factories and industrial units. His principal conclusion was that industrial growth would lead to ever-greater levels of prosperity and social cohesion. As the official report of his speech put it, ‘Seeing these things, and looking at the present and to the future, he thought it was difficult to predict where the limit would be of the development of British commerce – With our coal and iron, with unlimited supply of capital of industry, and of mechanical skill, it seemed as if these districts of Lancashire were destined to become, what they had been called, “the work-shops of the world”.’74 For liberal-leaning statesmen like Lord Stanley, Manchester was the locus of industrial civilisation: it was the realisation of an economic system where labour time was assigned a rental price; and it was the realisation of a manufacturing system where consumer durables were produced for subjects across the social spectrum.75 John Bright, whose ability to harness Parliament, public meeting and the popular press, would make him one of the most powerful liberals of the age, developed this line of thinking when he used civic events in Leeds and Manchester to declare, in October 1866, that by their engagement with the goods and services generated by commercial society, the common people had become true members of the political nation.76 In September 1877 Bright was the principal guest at the opening of Manchester Town Hall. His speech, which included a long meditative section on the rise and fall of great cities, opened with an exuberant pronouncement: ‘We are here to-night, standing in the centre of a district more wonderful in 49

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some respects than is to be traced out on the map in any other kingdom of the world. The population is extraordinary. It is extraordinary for its interests and its industries, for the amount of its wealth, for the amount of its wages, and for the power which it exercises in its public opinion on and over the public opinion of the nation.’77 Although Bright did not offer any thoughts on Brown’s murals, he felt the need to complain that the actions of trade unions were as deleterious to Britain as the imposition of trade tariffs by other nations.78 These sentiments – where liberalism is identified with self-equilibrating markets, popular commodities, social contracts and capital-owning society – ran against the Tory model, in which British civic identity was dependent upon the authority of traditional customs devoted to the preservation of associational humanity.79 Brown was aware of the social and political effects of the industrial system glossed by Bright. In seeking to understand the nature of Brown’s political convictions and activities, we cannot get very far unless we reflect on his cultural and patronal contacts in Manchester.80 Charles Rowley, a councillor for the New Cross ward in Ancoats, was Brown’s closest supporter at the Corporation of Manchester (Figure 1.3). A frame-maker, art dealer, educationalist and inveterate networker, Rowley was a Ruskinian radical with an abiding interest in the general well-being of the poor. Like his idol, Rowley saw culture as a network of processes, activities and qualities designed to bring about personal and communal change. He was a great admirer of Blake and Morris, both of whom he equated with a craft-based model of cultural life centred on the reality of the multidisciplinary workshop. Rowley, like other followers of Ruskin, correlated the Arts and Crafts Movement with radical cultural politics: it was a set of material practices designed to emphasise the producer’s experience of the quality of expressive labour through the preservation of hand skills; and it was the collective expression of a need to extend creative life into different forms of economic production. Additionally, as a pioneering figure in the development of philanthropic schemes in late Victorian Manchester, Rowley was responsible for organising the programme of art exhibitions, lectures and concerts at the New Islington Hall, which opened in Ancoats in 1877. Operating in partnership with Brown, he established a labour bureau in 1886 which aimed to help the unemployed find properly paid work. In 1889 Rowley formed the Ancoats Brotherhood, an organisation designed to support the educational and cultural interests of the poor.81 Nor should it be forgotten that he acquired an impressive collection of works by Brown on religious and political topics, shared Brown’s interest in Indian culture, and authored art criticism under the pseudonym Roland Gilderoy.82 Brown had other significant contacts in Manchester. C. P. Scott, the legendary editor of the Manchester Guardian, was an important friend and ally. Scott played an active role in Brown’s art career: as a great admirer of Work (Figure 0.2), Brown’s most famous painting, he went on to champion its purchase by the Corporation Art Gallery (Manchester Art Gallery) in 1885; and he recommended that Brown should be commissioned to produce the Manchester 50

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Figure 1.3  Ford Madox Brown, Charles Rowley, 1885

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Jubilee decorations in 1887.83 Brown gave practical support and employment to a joiner, Joseph Waddington, who was arrested at a public meeting on the subject of unemployment in Manchester in April 1886.84 Brown spoke at this event about forming an organisation to offer aid to unemployed workers, and told one of his correspondents that he regarded ‘the question of labour & the unemployed’ as the central problem of modern life.85 His plan for Waddington – he wanted him to become a fellow master craftsman in a firm producing cottage furniture – relates to the cooperative ethos of post-Chartist popular radicalism.86 In this respect it is unsurprising to discover that Ernest Jones, the last leader of the Chartists, was a subject of a lost portrait.87 Thomas Horsfall, a Ruskinian cultural philanthropist, was another important contact, as was the potter William Jones. A. H. Mackmurdo, founder of the Century Guild, became a friend and supporter in the 1880s; so did Edwin Waugh, the Lancashire dialect poet and chronicler of manual workers’ traditions. At the end of the decade the brewer Henry Boddington – head partner of Boddington Brewery, city councillor, and a director of the Manchester Ship Canal, who employed Mackmurdo’s Century Guild to decorate and upholster Pownall Hall, Cheshire, his country residence – became a notable patron.88 Lastly, Walter Crane, who would become director of the Manchester Art School in 1893, called Brown’s murals ‘one of the best, most characteristic, and appropriate pieces of decoration which has been done in our times’.89 Brown’s closest ally in the Manchester art world was Frederic Shields, who at one time was a designated partner in the mural scheme. Shields, a great admirer of Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was a painter, decorative artist and creator of designs for stained glass. Shields played an active role in various clubs and institutions in Manchester, and was instrumental in getting Brown noticed by local politicians responsible for the decoration of the Town Hall.90 As early as 1869, Shields tried his best to secure for Brown the Heywood medal at the Royal Manchester Institute exhibition. Shields believed in Brown’s vision of artistic creativity: the ideal creator should be a master craftsman or art worker, someone with the energy, commitment and skill to oversee all aspects of the production process. Art, to be true to itself, must be free from the institutional order of modern society. It was for this reason that Shields agreed with Brown’s perception of Blake: he was a kindred spirit who, believing in the expressive power of labour, pointed to a world where the independent art-worker combined artistic vision, craft-mindedness and an overarching duty to all elements in the production process.91 The other obvious issue turns on how the murals make sense of the accepted framework of History Painting, a topic developed in detail throughout Chapters 3, 4 and 5. All the same, a couple of preliminary observations concerning Brown’s vision of how subjects inhabit the world can be registered here. The first point to make is that his designs function as concentrations of energy. His is a world made protean again by the intermixing of subjects and environments in images that are either abridged or ultra-detailed. The second 52

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point is that his vision of social history tends to isolate acts of enterprise and innovation from their social applications. For example, although the murals depict skilled craftspeople – one thinks of the Flemish weavers and Kay – there is not much in the way of material consumption in the scheme. Precision skills are isolated from material outputs; the focus is on thinking, acting or being in the world. The consumer economy – the world that Manchester served through the cotton trade – is sidelined. Mechanisation – the processes by which many of the Mancunian councillors made their considerable fortunes – is pushed into the background. Tool-making and mechanical engineering, key aspects of the industrialisation of work in what is called Greater Manchester, are not given any attention. More important still, because it reflects on Brown’s conception of the social order, we need to ask how he goes about socialising the situations depicted in the murals. The formulation of society in terms of the production and exchange of useful arts and knowledge – one of the nostrums of civic liberalism – is treated in a highly unusual manner by Brown. We get a clearer sense of this when his scheme is compared with an example of civic History Painting by Frederic Leighton. The Arts of Industry as Applied to War (1870–72) (Figure 1.4), painted for the South Kensington Museum, constitutes a synoptic summary of social organisation. ‘Industry’ is but one motif in this display of the conditions in which subjects participate in the historical life of the state. For Leighton, civilisation is rendered through the elegant orchestration of universal values within public settings. Everyday vision, a record of social organisation, is of little concern to him. Instead, controlled opulence is conflated with the pursuit of the good and the beautiful, which are identified as the arts of life. In this combination of Aristotle’s celebration of the polis with Joshua Reynolds’s vision of the superiority of general forms, Leighton provides his viewers with a pageant in which the diffusion of culture and technology confirm that specialisation is a manifestation of human good. Here is the crystallisation of vivid but generalised processes, defined by the appearance and development of public life, not the oikos. As so often with Leighton, one of the most erudite of British artists, these interlocking parallelisms create the impression that he is meditating on the relationship between public virtue and private luxury, a well-established theme in British political sociology. By contrast, Brown’s world of expressive plasticity leads to greater specialisation, not meaningful integration. There is little interest in the treatment of composition via the orchestration of forms within a self-contained whole. Nor is there any sense that he sets out to depict a world of material improvement, prosperity and practical procedures. Technological development creates the conditions for more of the same. The belief in civic and economic progress, the cornerstone of Victorian liberalism, is hard to locate in his mural scheme. True, Brown does include institutions of national life – the church, the monarchy and the legal system spring to mind – but they are vectors of struggle and conflict, not representations of unbroken continuity or stable authority. Nor do the 53

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Figure 1.4 Frederic Leighton, half-size monochrome cartoon for the spirit fresco Arts of Industry as Applied to War, 1870–72

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individual panels contribute to a synoptic view of history. Dalton, the final image in the scheme, a conflation of pastoralism and stasis, is not compatible with the standard liberal view of the industrial city as the summit of historical life. Or consider The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal (Plate 11), a deliberately chaotic vision of human good. The ostensible meaning of the historical event, the development of an important asset market, supported by flows of capital and systems of investment suggestive of growing regional wealth and legitimate commercial opulence, is sidelined in Brown’s carnival-like panel. The best term to describe this unusual pictorial idiom is ‘gusto’, outlined with great panache in William Hazlitt’s famous essay on the subject. According to Hazlitt – whose vision of humanistic Romanticism Brown shared – gusto signals a condition of expressive realism, a form of representation where the subject is ‘sensitive and alive all over’, where ‘the objects in the picture [are] stamped with all the truth of passion’, and where motion becomes a vehicle for transforming beauty into liquid power. The bodies of such subjects were naturally acrobatic, Hazlitt contended, for they confirmed that human life was a product of the nervous system. Gusto meant more than style: it meant complicating the picture of the human world by declaring that, as there was no significant difference between living and inert matter, art should represent dynamic change rather social equilibrium.92 Hazlitt’s reading, in which gusto is a quality belonging to the sensory body, does justice to the fluidity of the world pictured in The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal. Here the richness of life is expressed in terms of felt authenticity of circumstantial reality and imaginative energy arising from this gathering of ordinary folk. Once again, the image is asymmetrical: the Duke of Bridgewater, the embodiment of social and economic power, is pushed into the background. He is little more than a dwarfed effigy, a social footnote, who stands on the margins of a world of common experience and communal life. The canal, a transport system driving employment, trade and technological progress, is more like a vast aquatic playground in a scene commemorating the energies of ordinary people. Even the stage on which the Duke stands is little more than a prop for the staging of a bigger event, the humble drama of everyday vision, embodied by the gigantic babes in the barges. Like Bradshaw’s Defence of Manchester, the play on size, scale and shape is another example of how Brown is concerned with the conditions in which subjects inhabit the image world. One of the distinctive features of Brown’s art is its engagement with the politics of history. For instance, Brown’s interest in the representation of the nobility should be related to his awareness of the tradition of liberal constitutionalism. The first entry in Brown’s fascinating Diary, a meditation on James Mackintosh’s writings on British history, indicates knowledge of civil and contract rights discourse, and thus provides an important context for understanding his conception of social freedom.93 Like many early nineteenth-century reformers, Mackintosh’s model of history involved a consideration of the relationship between state development and the maintenance of national liberties. Nor 55

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should it pass unnoticed that his subtle, post-Burkean reading of the French Revolution as a social response to the distortions in the distribution of power and property chimes with Brown’s vision of the nation as commonwealth, a common treasury which must be yoked to a system supportive of civil equality.94 As will be seen in Chapter 2, Brown went out of his way to identify himself with the radical intelligentsia when making blistering attacks on representatives and institutions of established authority. Something, therefore, should be said at this point about Brown’s attitude to various power groups. In London, he complained about the ‘torpedo’ nature of the aristocracy and other status groups; raged against the patronal stranglehold of the Royal Academy; despaired about the power and influence of emergent cultural managers and administrators; lambasted what he called ‘Herkomerism’, used as a pejorative term for a condition where the artist, a vendor of information, endorsed the marketisation of painting. In consequence, he railed against the machinations of unscrupulous critics, dealers, agents and other exponents of clientelism.95 In Manchester, he was unimpressed by the industrialist councillors on the Decorations and Furnishings Sub-Committee who wanted to appoint a ‘group of nobodies’ to work alongside him and Shields on the Town Hall murals.96 At different times he tussled with representatives of other important interest groups. Brown’s public exchange with the Mancunian antiquarian, historian and city librarian William Axon illustrates his pugnacious character. For Axon, who saw himself as the standard authority on the history of Manchester, the historian was a chronicler or genealogist who built a bridge to the past by creating an archival system based on the distinction between key facts and unimportant incidents. True historical understanding, Axon implied, was rooted in a pleasing combination of important institutional matters and significant social happenings. Just as picturesque events could be transposed into patterns of polite culture and political customs, so a public art scheme should amount to a form of public memory celebrating Manchester’s storied past. Unsurprisingly, then, Axon criticised what he took to be confusions and errors in Brown’s mural cycle. To this end, he pointed out that Edwin was baptised in York, that Wycliffe’s trial took place in London, and that Kay’s workshop was in Bury. What Axon failed to appreciate, however, was that Brown was not interested in his model of historical antiquarianism, which focused on picturesque pageants and customs. Specifically, Brown endorsed a Carlylean vision of history full to the brim with bubbling life. Brown’s choice and treatment of subjects is designed to get his audience to reconsider how the world is lived. He set himself against Axon’s ‘documentary’ model of art, arguing that art should be ‘typical, and calculated to arouse our sympathies for certain great ideas’.97 Or, as he put it, in a lecture of 1879, ‘the fact that historic doubts were sometimes cast on the incidents represented did not invalidate the idea, for it was not the province of art to supply documents’.98 Axon’s reasoning, he hints here, belongs to the prosaic and sterile logic furnished by Carlyle’s ‘Dryasdust’, one of those ‘cause-and-effect 56

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speculators, with whom no wonder remains wonderful, but all things … must be “computed and accounted for”’.99 In opposition to what he perceived to be Axon’s combination of illustrational literalism and excessive and redundant scholarly zeal, Brown’s ‘Eye of History’ model attends to the substructures of the social world.100 That is, Brown belongs to a historiographical and aesthetic tradition in which the purpose of culture is to focus on the praxis of everyday life.101 Unlike more conventional mural schemes, such as William Bell Scott’s works at Wallington Hall (1856–61) or, somewhat earlier, James Barry’s The Progress of Human Culture (1777–84), Brown is not interested in the historical emergence of the rational-technical state. Brown does not illustrate historical progression in and through different stages of existence (hunter-gathering, to grazing, to farming and trading), culminating in the creation of a mature civil society.102 From Brown’s position, human life does not get ‘better’ by ‘realising’ itself in a modern age of ‘social politeness’ and ‘economic liberty’. Nor is there any sense of the measured elegance associated with Reynoldsian History Painting; instead, many of Brown’s figures are contorted, caught awkwardly in hard-edged spaces, embroiled with the confused forms of the world. They jostle for attention in a Hazlittean realm of gusto, a realm defined by prodigious energies and wills. Brown’s purpose in all this is to question the idea that the history of Manchester is the history of the steady, uninterrupted development of industrial and economic skills or social attitudes. In place of monumental history, the record of constant improvements, his spiky, compound images record how the world is lived from an assortment of perspectives. Instead of a conventional memorial code, formed through the interlacing of honour, triumph and heroism, he goes in for the mundane, the vernacular and the down to earth. My point is that by utilising a version of the ‘Eye of History’ Brown rejects the conventional model of representation, where a mural programme is a summation of episodic narratives within a regularised matrix. In Brown’s view, the identification of History Painting with consistencies of morphology – a common enough practice in the theorisations of Reynolds, John Opie, Henry Howard, Charles Eastlake and other leading Royal Academicians – must be put to one side.103 According to Brown, painting gains dynamic power when it directs itself to finding some way of expressing the agonistic nature of life; this attitude explains some of his pictorial quirks, particularly those instances where bodies are fractured or transfigured by grotesque elements. Division takes many forms, of course. In The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers, artisanal craft belongs to one world, the royal ceremonial belongs somewhere else. Here, like other panels, figures are placed in situations designed to encourage critical thinking. On this occasion, the self-managing weavers confirm the authority of a modest domestic world where work and play are combined in unpredictable and irregular patterns of pleasure and experience. They are pictorial analogues of Ruskin’s theory of the noble grotesque, which emphasised intensity of expression rather than smoothness of performance.104 57

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But this is not all. With Brown, some of the critical terms of academic art discourse, adapted from Reynolds and his followers, are deployed to question the tradition they support. Regardless of the emphasis Brown placed on ‘generalised’ rather than ‘documentary’ images, he disavowed Reynoldsian dicta about the relationship between nature and pictorial composition. Time and again, Reynolds states that the painter looks at the world to observe, and then correct, the defective features of materials objects. In his Discourses – the key training manual for successive generations of pupils at the Royal Academy – Reynolds informs the painter that it is necessary to use an extractive model of visual knowledge to get to the position of producing self-contained compositions. Similarly, students are told that social truth is separated from the dross produced by the common world of humanity activity. Thereupon, Reynolds concludes: to be a painter is to produce clear and graceful forms, to put forward ideas free from eccentricity and mysophobia.105 By contrast, Brown rejects the view that observation is indirect or subsidiary, caught within a system of critical granulation devised to separate beauty from ugliness. In the same way as Hazlitt, Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites, Brown equates Reynolds with the entire tradition of post-Renaissance academic culture, a mode of thinking and making in which art had become a second-order expression, a form of phatic communication denuded of proper content or friction. Hence, Brown was disinclined to follow the pictorial procedures of Reynoldsian academicism, where the insertion of subjects into the compositional field is a matter of finding the right flowing equilibrium. Brown suppresses the logic of academic composition by ensuring that his images are charged with irregular patterns of movement and force. For sure, critics of Brown’s works, many of whom were influenced by Reynolds and his followers, felt that his paintings were too vigorous and eclectic in their articulation of form. What they saw as pictorial errors – failures to synthesise expressions into coherent wholes – were, from Brown’s Carlylean perspective, important pictorial devices designed to demonstrate the abundance and diversity of historical life. In consequence, Brown’s figures fight for attention, as if struggle in history is defined in bodily terms. We see this most powerfully in the contorted and compressed figure of Kay, and again in the visionary nature of Chetham’s ‘Life Dream’; the bitter dispute over the Peterloo Massacre, the subject Brown wanted to be the conclusion to his scheme, has robbed us of what may have been another example of this form of social gusto. For Brown, it was an interpretative axiom that struggle took many forms. We see versions of it in thrusting, swirling and disequilibrated designs (The Trial of Wyclif, Crabtree, John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle); and again, in the formal rhythms derived from gestural unity across the picture plane (The Expulsion of The Danes, Chetham’s Life Dream). As my interpolations of Brown’s concerns and interests suggest, the mural programme can be organised into a triadic structure: history as different forms of subjectification; history as different forms of work and cultural belief; and 58

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history as the intersection of individual experience and the whole social field.106 There can be little doubt that Brown wanted to see art through stirring life, an attitude that involved adapting Carlyle’s model of historical writing to painting. Another characteristic Brown imbibed from Carlyle was the conviction that environments are dynamic – pressing in on subjects, interacting with human life, and thus creating specific spatial patterns.107 Defined like this, History Painting, a process of recovering the historical life of the world, is at odds with the conventional belief that the artist compiles bits of information about the past by adhering to a linear system illustrating progress or development. For Brown, what people do – how they live – is the central matter of representation. As his friend F. G. Stephens put it, ‘Incidents are introduced that are not “monumental” according to the traditions of conventional art, but, being thoroughly genuine and expressive … and full of animation and honour, they give a strange force and charm to his paintings.’108 To understand history – which means to discern patterns of human experience across time, and to see how figures interact with everyday settings – required situations in which individuals have an opportunity to internalise their perceptions, to see with the ‘Eye of History’. Although Brown’s historical model is discussed at length in Chapter 2, it is important to conclude this chapter by clarifying how and why he differs from more orthodox exponents of History Painting. With Reynolds, for instance, the touchstone for mainstream writers on the subject, History Painting achieves fruition when the artist gets to the point where he or she can abstract from nature. Thus characterised, History Painting would be related to more prosaic issues by subsequent commentators. As we have seen, Axon took issue with the broadening of the subjects to be covered in Brown’s mural programme. Axon’s antiquarian viewpoint, which draws on a wide spectrum of historical writing, defines the historian as a synoptic surveyor of historical landmarks. The artist, within this tradition, must combine omnivorous research with selective use of sources. This type of scholarship, usefully elucidated by Nietzsche in a text published three years before Brown began work on the mural programme, had its roots in a particular understanding of historical representation. Nietzsche proposed that what he called the antiquarian model of history was problematic for several reasons: The antiquarian sense of a man, a community, a whole people, always possesses an extremely restricted field of vision; most of what exists it does not perceive at all, and the little it does see it sees much too close up and isolated; it cannot relate what it sees to anything else and it therefore accords to each individual thing too great importance … [It is a condition] when historical sense no longer conserves life but mummifies it … Then there appears the … spectacle of a blind rage for collecting, a … racking together of everything that has ever existed.109

This is an excellent description of the unwritten assumption at the heart of Axon’s field of vision: history meant linear evolution and the processes of linear 59

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evolution were illuminated by studying selective materials located in significant archives. From Axon’s point of view, the true historian, who pieces together the facts that authenticate historical systems, was bound to find Brown’s research amateurish, slipshod – and pernicious. Brown’s attitude to historical representation was different, however. In his view, history is a treasure trove of human possibilities, not a continuous record of constitutional or social development. Events are porous and unstable: to picture their full concrete nature is to attend to things that fringe them. The student of history, in Brown’s Carlylean account of the matter, is not interested in mastering or systematising the past; instead, his or her job is to see how particular values, experiences and creations command attention when they flare into being in specific social and environmental settings. It is time to develop a remark made earlier: Brown is the kind of painter who is interested in the history of culture, as mediated by notions of experience, vision and imagination. What he does is to explore how, why and under what conditions people create, individually and collectively, life dreams. To this end, he imagines a form of History Painting which sets out to see history as the history of human presence. Which is to say, he separates the post-Renaissance codification of History Painting, characterised as ‘pedantic incapacity’ and ‘insipid trash’, from an interest in picturing how the world is lived.110 Viewed in this light, Brown’s pictorial idiom is designed to draw attention to the organisation of social and cultural categories. Consider, for instance, the figure of Chetham, a seventeenth-century cloth merchant, financier, and a foundational figure in the mythos of Mancunian entrepreneurship and economic adaptability. When seen from Axon’s perspective, Chetham encapsulates the power of money markets and the development of the textile industry. For Brown, however, Chetham authorises a different set of practices and values. Wherefore, in Chetham’s Life Dream (Plate 8), we note the programmatic activities on the left of the panel, where social training takes the form of creating a world of acquiescence. By contrast, Chetham, who appears on the opposite side of the panel, belongs to the world by living in a future where everyday material experience enables people to be more than cogs in a social mechanism. For this reason, he embraces a world beyond the language of economic performance, a place where it is possible to imagine a merchant-entrepreneur transformed into a social visionary committed to the common good and collective life. On one level, this might be understood as a return to the pastoral, a golden age of human freedom, embodied in the playful children on the right. And yet, Chetham’s Life Dream is much more than this because Brown deploys Chetham to say something about human aspirations. There is, in short, good reason to believe that Brown’s Chetham is a tribute to the critical and practical powers of the imagination. As represented in this unusual panel, Chetham constitutes the conversion of personal achievement into public success.111 Brown’s romantic conception of identity, where Chetham confirms the reality of social creativity, is highly significant. After all, Brown 60

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would have had access to some of the historical records in which Chetham appeared. For local historians, antiquarians and members of the liberal establishment, Chetham was a dynamic and resourceful manufacturer whose understanding of the logistics of trade and patterns of consumption allowed him to develop other revenue streams, most notably the trading of money.112 In this official view of things, Chetham indicated that the history of capital formation involved the participation and expertise of the merchant classes and the rational distribution of positional goods. He was, in sum, an embodiment of the idea of material improvement. That consensus, Brown proposed, was too comfortable not to be challenged. Hence, one part of Chetham’s Life Dream demonstrates the social dimension of capital, its support for a world where profit growth is translated into human growth and benevolence. Only thus, it is implied, is it possible to picture civil society as an arrangement with its main parts in some organic relation. Put differently, the panel poses a set of interrelated questions: how is it possible to get people to understand that prosperity is a public good, not a private reward; how is it possible to create a culture where value is measured socially, not economically; and how is it possible to ensure that human capital manifests itself in acts of goodwill? Brown’s answer seems to involve the transformation of the playground into a multidisciplinary workshop of life, the production of a fairground space where the players have become embodiments of communal joy. On the right side of the panel, culture is made through a magical combination of physical and mental exercise; on the left side of the panel, formal education produces standardisation and impersonality. This is an unusual configuration. After all, Chetham’s inclusion in the scheme was in line with one of the themes outlined by the committee responsible for organising the decoration of the Great Hall: the history of Manchester as evidence of the rationalisation of economic activity through the appearance of strong businessmen – the traders, suppliers and the agents needed to create and sustain free markets. Councillors and local government officials would have seen Chetham as an exemplar of their guiding thesis: the ineluctable rise of the urban middle class through commercial competition. Their Chetham was prototypical, since he represented the values and qualities that made liberalism distinctive; and as hinge point in the scheme, he confirmed how Manchester would become modern by revealing that British history was completed through the entrepreneurial spirit of commercial society. Otherwise stated, Chetham could be cited to support the Whig view that modern British social and economic history should be explained in teleological terms: its destiny was immanent in a process that could be delineated at its point of inception.113 In contrast, Brown reverses the orientation of this version of history by making Chetham an organiser of community values. Chetham enters the space of representation as the subject of conversionary experience: his ‘Life Dream’ indicates that history is significant not for its own sake but because it offers a vision of something beyond itself: the integration of individuals into a condition 61

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of social wholeness, a quality of human life beyond the logic of commerce, capital and consumption. What is pictured, then, is a world of communal cohesion where the production of wealth is measured in terms of the production of well-being. What Chetham sees, when he considers the world of play, is a place in which it is possible to connect the self with something larger than itself. What we discover, when we peer into Chetham’s ‘Life Dream’, is the living past, Carlyle’s ‘Eye of History’, which reveals that ‘Life is a vision, dream and yet fact, – woven, with uproar, on the Loom of Time!’114 In effect, Chetham confirms the indissolubility of society. He becomes, a socio-spiritual master craftsman, the social self who finds something problematic at the heart of modern life. Read this way, Chetham is Brown’s talismanic surrogate whose active resistance to the legitimation of capitalist modernity signals the possibility of a condition that allows the subject to make connections between all parts of life. The full import of these considerations, where Chetham presides over the creation of a shared imaginative space, is developed in Chapter 4. I have argued that Brown’s authority is of a similar kind to Carlyle’s and that the idea of everyday vision provides the context for appreciating the thinking behind the Manchester murals. Furthermore, it has been established that Brown wanted to complicate the picture of history by finding the true sources of human significance in life dreams rather than economic processes, archives and other official records. By his reckoning, traditional methods of historical study should be replaced by something resembling an anthropology of the social imagination. This approach provides a gateway into the second half of this volume, which deals with the genesis and completion of Brown’s heterodox murals. Before that, however, Chapter 2 relates Brown to the lived fabric of social, political and cultural life in mid- and late Victorian Britain. Notes 1 FMB, 31 August 1855, p. 152. 2 FMH, p. 421. 3 Carlyle, History of Friedrich II of Prussia, in TC, vol. 12, pp. 17–18. 4 The reader interested in the history of the scheme, as well as Brown’s choice of medium for painting the murals, is advised to consult J. Treuherz, ‘Ford Madox Brown and the Manchester murals’, in J. Archer (ed.), Art and Architecture in Victorian Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 162–207 (hereafter JTFMB). As Treuherz notes, at pp. 176–7, ‘cartoons, working drawings, studies and replicas remained the property of the artist. The Corporation was to pay for colours and materials.’ In the contract of 1878, Brown and Frederic Shields were required to produce six panels each at a fee of £275 per panel. A later contract stipulated that Brown was to paint all twelve panels at a fee of £375 per panel. See also, JT, pp. 47–59. Treuherz’s foundational research on Brown, in what has become a large literature, deserves serious attention. 5 It is worth stressing here that many contemporary commentators seem indifferent these works. They are passed over in total silence by T. Barringer’s Men at 62

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6 7

8

9

10

Work (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), which purports to offer a new reading of Brown’s paintings. They do not merit serious discussion in E. Prettejohn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to The Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). They are absent from two valuable art historical surveys of the period: C. Stephens (ed.), The History of British Art 1870–Now (London: Tate Publishing, 2008); and D. Arnold and D. Peters Corbett (eds), A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Nor do they appear in A. J. Kidd and K. W. Roberts (eds), City, Class and Culture: Studies of Cultural Production and Social Policy in Victorian Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). They do not warrant attention in a wide-ranging account of the cultural history of modern Manchester: J. Wolff and M. Savage (eds), Culture in Manchester: Institutions and Urban Change Since 1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). More bizarrely, they are conflated with Work (1852–65) (Manchester Art Gallery), Brown’s most extraordinary and distinctive oil ­painting – the depiction of a street scene in Hampstead – in a very fuzzy and extremely unreliable survey of realism, one which makes no effort to discover anything about the material reality of Brown’s artistic interests, intentions and motivations: ‘As a mural in … Manchester City Hall [sic] … the municipal building of the chief site of the Industrial Revolution in England, [Work] is not surprisingly an allegory. Even so, its view of work may be excessively Ruskinian … rather than an attempt to come to terms with the reality of work in Manchester.’ See P. Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 81. Another version of this remarkable distortion is made by S. Meacham, ‘Raymond Unwin: Designing for Democracy in Edward England’, in P. Mandler and S. Pedersen (eds), After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (Oxford: Routledge, 1994), p. 82, who manages to convince himself that Brown and William Morris went to Manchester to ‘supervise the painting of the town hall murals’. By contrast, for a reliable overview of Brown and his oeuvre, see MB, who indicates (vol, 1, p. 287) that nothing of note was published on Brown’s murals between 1921 and 1985. FMB, 15 September 1864, p. 92. As noted by W. M. Rossetti, in FMH, pp. 53–4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti endorsed this judgement: ‘By far the best man that I know – the really good man – is Brown.’ FMH, p. 54. Hueffer noted that Brown’s conversation was ‘marvellously entertaining and his conversational mannerisms naïve and charming. His range of subjects was almost unbounded, and his faculty of throwing his whole mind into the subject under consideration and of enunciating original views most unusual.’ FMH, p. 391. FMH, pp. 399–400. Brown noted, ‘I cannot help it but somehow whatever I am about I must go through with to extremity.’ See FMB, 21 September 1854, p. 93. Elsewhere he acknowledges that he is ‘very pig-headed, and never take anyone’s advice’. See letter by Brown to unidentified recipient, in FMH, p. 179. See FMH, p. 76, who reprints a section from a classic Reynoldsian critique of Brown in a notice by F. Stone ARA, in The Athenaeum (24 May 1851). Stone’s ‘Fine Arts: Royal Academy Paintings’, The Athenaeum (2 June 1849), 574–6, includes a highly critical account of the Pre-Raphaelites. As recognised by Sidney Colvin, who notes that from the early 1840s, ‘matters of composition … are … subordinated to the attempt at direct originality of passion’. See Colvin, ‘Ford Madox Brown’, in Beavington Atkinson et al., English Painters, p. 36. 63

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11 As demonstrated in his description of Peter Cornelius’s Death on a Pale Horse: ‘Full of action and strange character, it was everything the reverse of that dreadful commonplace into which the art on the Continent seems to be hurrying back. But Cornelius was no commonplace being.’ F. M. Brown, ‘Historic Art’, Universal Review (September–December 1888), 49. 12 For an immensely wide-ranging and extremely perceptive account of this subject see, P. Barlow, ‘Everyday Life’, in S. West (ed.), Guide to Art (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 54–70. 13 See MB, vol. 1, p. 286. 14 FMH, p. 2. 15 Despite the risk of over-simplification, I treat these office holders as a relatively homogenous group concerned with financial prudence and civic pride and connected by similar industrial, commercial and social interests. 16 Ford Madox Brown, 2 November 1880, Town Hall Committee, vol. 1, p. 304, p. 325, Manchester Local History Library, Manchester Central Library, Manchester (hereafter MLHLMCLM). 17 Brown, cited in FMH, p. 362; Rowley, cited in MB, vol. 1, p. 285. Shields tried to persuade Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of the New Town Hall, to apply pressure on the councillors to provide additional funding. Shields informed Brown that the councillors should ‘contribute from their private purses if they object to vote the public money for the purpose, and it could be no dishonour to you’. Frederic Shields to Ford Madox Brown, undated letter, in FMH, p. 351. Shields told G. F. Watts on 13 November 1891 that ‘the miserable pittance paid for the first six frescoes at Manchester left [Brown] eight hundred pounds to the bad’. See E. Mills (ed.), The Life and Letters of Frederic Shields (London: Longmans, 1912), p. 312. Dante Gabriel Rossetti agreed with this assessment: ‘the Manchesterians are too stingy to pay properly’: see FMH, p. 345. 18 P. Barlow, ‘Local disturbances: Ford Madox Brown and the problem of the Manchester murals’, in E. Harding (ed.), Re-Framing the Pre-Raphaelites (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). p. 82 (hereafter PB). 19 See the comments by Bright and Gladstone recorded later in this chapter and in the first section of Chapter 2. 20 Brown to Frederic Shields, 16 April 1886, in FMH, p. 376. Shields, a fellow radical, claimed that the hostility of Conservative councillors to the representation of the Peterloo Massacre arose from their distrust of free speech. See Thompson papers, Frederic Shields to Joseph Thompson, 7 March 1878, MLHLMCLM. 21 Brown to Frederic Shields, 24 December 1884, in FMH, p. 365. Three years later he told Shields that ‘this place agrees so ill with my wife that I fear if I stop in it she will become a confirmed invalid’: see, Ford Madox Brown Letters, British Library, 449.5, 22 May 1887 (hereafter FMBBL). 22 Brown to Frederic Shields, 22 May 1887, in FMH, p. 381. 23 See The Athenaeum (3 August 1878), 153; FMH, pp. 331–2, 184; and MB, vol. 1, p. 284. 24 Brown to Frederic Shields, 25 August 1878, in Mills, The Life and Letters, p. 232. Abel Heywood, an active Chartist in his youth, had been prosecuted for selling unlicensed radical literature in the 1840s and worked alongside Ernest Jones, the last Chartist leader in the Manchester Manhood Suffrage Association in 1858. By the 1860s and 1870s he had been assimilated into the public world of merchant 64

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princes, mill owners and financiers. See D. Thompson, The Chartists (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 153; and P. A. Pickering Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1995). 25 Brown gleefully noted that senior figures at the Corporation flattered him when they heard that Gladstone had inspected the murals: see FMBBL, 449.5, 22 May 1887. 26 FMH, p. 350. 27 FMH, p. 363. In a letter to Shields, 29 December 1886, at p. 377, Brown notes that his decorative designs for the Manchester Jubilee Exhibition ‘may a little recoup what I have lost walling at the Town Hall’. See also, H. Quilter, Preferences in Art (London: Swan Sonnonschein & Co., 1892), p. 9, who notes that Brown ‘spent fifteen years at little more than journeyman’s wages in painting the frescoes of the Manchester Town Hall’. 28 F. M. Brown, ‘Mural Painting and Coloured Decoration: The Gambier Parry Process’, Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects Sessional Papers, 21 (1880–81), 276. 29 William Michael Rossetti provides a typically shrewd assessment of Brown’s debt to Carlyle: ‘[Brown] can relish … what is peculiar in itself, or what, from familiarity of association, appears peculiar or even odd in relation to historic dignity; an interest which, being real and personal, neither disdains this subsidiary familiar element, nor forces the ampler dignified element into artificial and bloodless pomposity. There is a decided touch of the Carlylean in Mr. Brown’s interpretation of history.’ W. M. Rossetti, ‘Ford Madox Brown: Characteristics’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, New Series, 1 (1886), 49. 30 An entire book could be devoted to the impact of Carlyle’s social vision on key Victorian thinkers and artists. In 1854 Ruskin confessed that he ‘owed more to Carlyle than to any other man’; in 1856 he declared that ‘I find Carlyle’s stronger thinking colouring mine continually’; and in 1872 he celebrated Carlyle’s writings as ‘the only faithful and useful utterance in all England.’ See JR, vol. 12, p. 507; vol. 5, p. 427; vol. 17, p. 280. George Eliot, another great Carlyle admirer, proclaimed in 1855 that ‘there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived’. She concluded that ‘his greatest power lies in concrete presentation. No novelist has made his creations live for us more thoroughly than Carlyle has made Mirabeau and the men of the French Revolution, Cromwell and the Puritans.’ See G. Eliot, ‘Thomas Carlyle’, Leader (27 October 1855), 1034–5. Earlier, in his ‘Coleridgean’ phase, J. S. Mill was star-struck by Carlyle’s The French Revolution: ‘This is not so much a history, as an epic poem … It is the history of the French Revolution, and the poetry of it, both in one; and on the whole no work of greater genius, either historical or poetical, has been produced in this country for many years.’ J. S. Mill, unsigned review, London and Westminster Review, vol. 27 (July 1837), 17. For an account of Carlyle’s impact on Victorian art, see C. Trodd, ‘Culture and Energy: Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and the Cromwellian grotesque’, in Trodd, Barlow and Amigoni (eds), Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, pp. 61–80. 31 FMH, p. 332, explains that Brown formulated the Manchester mural scheme in accordance with the critical method mapped out in Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843). 65

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32 T. Carlyle, The French Revolution (London: Chapman & Hall, 1848), vol. 1, p. 25. 33 T. Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches [1845], TC, vol. 6, p. 10; T. Carlyle, letter to J. S. Mill, 22 July 1836, Charles Richard Sanders et al. (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle Durham (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970–), vol. 9, p. 15. 34 ‘The sincerity that shines out in him lights up not only the vulgarity of his age, but too many of his own perversities and pedantries.’ H. James, ‘On Frederick Walker, Sir Frederic Leighton and Ford Madox Brown’, Harper’s Weekly (20 February 1897), 183. ‘Grim or whimsical oddity … is the personal characteristic of … Brown’s art … From first to last … Brown as a designer was rude and clumsy; grotesque was his only chance.’ McColl, ‘Madox Brown’, 191–2. Even William Sharp, a supporter of the Pre-Raphaelite cause, balked at his paintings: ‘[Brown] was an eminent artist, whose personal influence and enthusiasm were of great service, but whose own work is rarely masterly, is often mediocre, is sometimes bad, but, it must be added, is always original.’ W. Sharp, Progress of Art in the Century (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers Limited, 1906), pp. 190–1. Similar critical matters are discussed variously in the following: FMH, pp. 403–23; Charles Rowley, Fifty Years of Work Without Wages (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911), p. 94; JTFMB, pp. 162–207; JT, pp. 283–324; PB, pp. 81–96; Codell, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Carlyle, Macauley, Bakhtin: The Pratfalls and Penultimates of History’, 324–66; Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown, pp. 93–6; MB, vol. 1, pp. 281–345; C. Trodd and J. Sheldon, ‘Introduction’: Ford Madox Brown and the Victorian Imagination’, in C. Trodd and J. Sheldon (eds), Visual Culture in Britain, 15:3 (2014), 227–38. 35 See, for example, the account of Cordelia’s Portion in the Saturday Review (2 March 1867), 269–70, where the anonymous critic, using the terminology of Reynoldsian art criticism, complained that that ‘energy is not accompanied by moderation and good taste … There is an overcrowding and obtrusiveness of minor material which … is a fault and a hindrance.’ Harry Quilter, Brown’s friend, used the same idiom when he grumbled about the reproduction of ‘cramped’ and ‘exaggerated’ gestures: see Quilter, Preferences in Art, p. 13. 36 F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I [1878], trans. Gary Handwek (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 26. We do not know whether Brown ever read Nietzsche, but he had the opportunity to discuss modern German thought with his son-in-law, Francis Hueffer, the author of Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future (London: Chapman & Hall, 1874), which featured one of Brown’s best book designs. Additionally, Brown produced a design for a ‘Lohengrin’ piano in 1873. Whatever the case, Brown’s energy-centred version of historical agency shares some of the characteristics of Nietzsche’s early works, such as The Birth of Tragedy (1872). 37 A. H. Mackmurdo, ‘A History of the Arts and Crafts Movement’, unpublished manuscript, William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, K 1037, p. 181. 38 W. M. Rossetti, ‘Mr. Madox Brown’s Exhibition and its Place in our School of Painting’, Fraser’s Magazine (May 1865), 606. 39 G. B. Shaw, ‘Madox Brown, Watts and Ibsen’, Saturday Review (13 March 1897), reprinted in G. B. Shaw, Our Theatres in The Nineties (London: Constable and Company, 1932), vol. 3, p. 70. 40 R. Browning, Essay on Shelley [1852], in A. Roberts (ed.), Robert Browning: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 576.

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41 On this matter, see PB, p. 95, who notes how the Manchester murals ‘threaten to break up into fragments as the nominally central forms collapse into confusion’. 42 Carlyle, The French Revolution, in TC, vol. 2, pp. 5, 15, 134. Characteristically, for Carlyle, the term hovers over a text that never reduces it to the conventional form of a concept. In this sense, it belongs to the ever-alive atmosphere of history as environmental presence within modern life. See also, ‘The Hero as Poet’, in Heroes and Hero-Worship, in TC, vol. 5, pp. 78–114, where sovereignty, the aesthetic power to marry a ‘general feeling of the world’ with visual ‘transcendentalism’, is incarnated in Dante, who is ‘world great … because he is world-deep’, pp. 84, 90. Throughout this chapter, Carlyle identifies Dante as a painter of self-animating images, not a poet of static forms. 43 Brown’s detailed knowledge of Carlyle’s works is evident from numerous entries in his diary. The entry for 15 December 1855 refers to Carlyle’s historical essays: ‘The glorious kind hearted old chap. Boswel [sic], Diderot, Cagliostro & the necklace are the best in the book, & among what he has ever done best … Real gold & solid weight & close packed wisdom is not wanting in the general run of it, more indeed than is attainable in any other writing now publishable’. See FMB, p. 158. See also, Brown’s references to Carlyle in his ‘Lectures on Art’, I, p. 3, where he calls The French Revolution ‘poetry’ (MSL 1995/174, Box 45, FMBV&A). 44 Carlyle, ‘The Hero as Poet’, TC, p. 100. 45 The French Revolution, TC, vol. 2, p. 6. 46 Cosmo Monkhouse came to the same conclusion: ‘[Brown] makes the old more real, for ever bringing the past into the present instead of thrusting back the present into the past.’ C. Monkhouse, ‘A Pre-Raphaelite Collection’, Magazine of Art (1883), 67. 47 For more on the background to Brown’s engagement with Carlyle’s ideas, see C. Trodd, Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World, 1830–1930 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), pp. 245–68. 48 Two classic sources on sovereign power are: E. H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); and M. Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/Knowledge; Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). See, for example, p. 105, where Foucault contrasts the theory of sovereignty to that of disciplinary power: ‘as long as a feudal type of society survived … sovereignty was in effect confined to the general mechanisms of power, to the way in which its forms of existence at the higher level of society influenced its exercise at the lowest level … But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have the production of an important phenomenon, the emergence, or rather the invention, of a new mechanism of power … which is constantly exercised by means of surveillance rather than in a discontinuous manner by means of a system of levies or obligations distributed over time.’ 49 See Ford Madox Ford, Ancient Lights (London: Chapman & Hall Ltd, 1911), pp. 204–5. More generally, Brown’s diary entries contain numerous references to the modelling and remodelling of heads. See FMB, pp. 50–67. Bennett notes that much of Brown’s early work was concerned with exploring the ‘dramatic possibilities [of] precise facial expressiveness, which was to be the hallmark of his career.’ See MB, vol. 1, p. 5.

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50 The complexities of this model are illuminated by PB, pp. 81–96. 51 MB, vol. 1, p. 340. 52 T. Newman and R. Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991), p. 75. Surprisingly, the murals are ignored by two leading commentators on Brown’s historical works: L. Rabin, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite History Picture (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1978); M. Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in NineteenthCentury England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 417–31; and M. Meisel, ‘Pictorial Engagements: Byron, Delacroix, Ford Madox Brown’, Studies in Romanticism, 27:4 (Winter 1988), 579–603. 53 C. A. P. Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain 1840–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 179, is wrong to believe that ‘Free Trade is clearly behind the subject of The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers’. Nor does she adduce any evidence whatsoever to substantiate the equally strange assertion that The Trial of Wyclif alludes to ‘Manchester’s nineteenth-century reformers such as [John] Bright’, p. 178. It is important to challenge the ease and casualness with which such lazy readings attach Brown to mainstream liberal beliefs. To this end, it is worth pointing out that Bright was born in Rochdale, not Manchester – and that he was never put on trial. More importantly, Brown, unlike Bright, showed no interest in validating the core theorems of classical political economy, which may explain why Bright was silent about Brown’s murals when he spoke at the opening of Manchester Town Hall in September 1877. 54 For an insightful analysis of this aspect of Brown’s aesthetic, see JT, pp. 9–21. 55 PB, p. 82, who goes on to note, at p. 93, ‘[h]is … style becomes a jumbled eclecticism: the dispossessed of art history brought together in rich profusion.’ 56 PB, p. 83. This pioneering essay was the first to resist the crowd-pleasing mantra that the murals can be dismissed because they fail to represent industrial Manchester. 57 For a good general description, see R. Lipsey, K. I. Carlaw and C. T. Bekhar, Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long-term Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 131–218. 58 The classic expression of this thesis is supplied by E. P. Thompson, The Making of The English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963). 59 For a consideration of this and cognate issues, see Berg, The Machinery Question; and P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class c.1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 60 Here I argue against the view that the murals depict the commercial evolution of Manchester, an attitude outlined by T. Hunt, in Building Jerusalem, p. 133: ‘[Brown produced] a set of striking frescoes [sic] of bewildering determinacy … a vibrant cycle chronicling Manchester’s mercantile history as well as the city’s ­contribution to the advance of civilisation.’ D. Sudjic repeats Hunt’s windy assertions about Brown’s adherence to a liberal model of ‘progress’, but his misleading reference to the scale of the works suggests that he has not bothered to see them: ‘Inside Manchester’s sprawling town hall, Ford Madox Brown’s sequence of huge murals celebrates the city’s triumphant progress, from its origins as a Roman fort by way of the arrival of the first Flemish weavers to the building of the Bridgewater canal.’ Guardian, ‘Journal’ (28 October 2016), p. 31. Note how the ­less-than-triumphant Dalton Collecting Marsh-Fire Gas, the final work in the series, is mysteriously

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61 62 63

64 65

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omitted as Sudjic invents a new terminus which aligns Brown’s programme with the ‘civic-commercial’ iconography of the decorations in the Town Hall. P. Readman, Storied Ground (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 230, manages to convince himself that Brown starts his history in ‘medieval times’ and that the murals ‘told a confident and optimistic story … paying notable attention to the city’s economic development’. These sloppy and flashy assertions are repeated by D. Sandbrook, ‘The Victorians’, Evening Standard (19 February 2009), p. 22, when he announces, with intensified platitudinous wonder, that Brown’s works ‘commemorated the city’s history in glorious technicolour’. For a different reading, see S. Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 146. For a discussion of this matter, see S. Smiles, Self-Help (London: John Murray, 1859), pp. 27–66. A similar motif, used in Brown’s stained-glass window The Marriage of St Edith (1878), St Editha Church, Tamworth, brought forth this angry response from Dante Gabriel Rossetti: ‘Really I must say they are inconceivable. Every figure (it is a long series) is passing one hand through the stone mullion of the window into the next panel of glass! – each panel containing one figure.’ Undated letter from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Jane Morris, in J. Bryson and J. C. Troxell (eds), Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris Correspondence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), no. 97. Brown, in Mills, The Life and Letters, p. 223. Shields, in Mills, The Life and Letters, p. 238. An earlier version of potential subjects, derived from a long list supplied by Thompson, included these titles: Origin of Manchester, Agricola fixes Roman Station (A.D. 80); Beginning of Christianity. St Michael’s Church Erected at Aldport. The Saxon Lord of Manchester Baptised (A.D. 626); Commerce. Annual Fair instituted by Henry III (A.D. 1229); Instruction. Free Grammar School founded by the Will of Hugh Oldham (A.D. 1520); Patriotism. Manchester Envoy Against Armana 38 Arguebus Men, 36 Archers, 144 Armed Men etc. (A.D. 1586); Science. Crabtree and Venus … (A.D. 1639); Patriotism again. 72nd Regiment at Gibraltar (A.D. 1777); Industry. Thomas Walker and Thomas Richardson Return from London to Announce Abolition of the Fustian Tax. Great Enthusiasm – Borne in Triumph in Chairs (A.D. 1785); Opening of the Railway between Manchester and Liverpool (A D. 1830); Vote of Reform Bill and Enfranchisement of Manchester and Salford, Celebration by Magnificent Procession on 9 August (A.D. 1832); The Free Exchange Opened with Banquet (A.D. 1843); Fine Arts. Prince Albert Opened Art Exhibition (A.D. 1857). See MB, vol. 1, pp. 282–4, where she reviews the genesis and development of the scheme. Thompson became a councillor in 1865 and a member of the New Town Hall Sub-Committee. He was the dominant force on the Decorations Sub-Committee, established in January 1876 to manage the mural project. See JTFMB, 168–80. Thompson, in MB, vol. 1. p. 282. See letter from Thompson to the Chairman of the Town Hall Sub-Committee, 8th October 1878, M 79/1/10a, 1–2, MLHLMCLM. See also, W. M. Rossetti, ‘Mr. Madox Brown’s Frescoes in Manchester’, Art Journal (September 1881), 262. Thompson to Chairman of Town Hall Sub-Committee, 8 October 1878, M79/1/10a, 2, MLHLMCLM. See also, JT, p. 168.

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70 On Brown’s suggestion that this should be the terminal point in the mural programme, see MB, vol. 1, p. 284. 71 Letter from Brown to Shields, 30 April 1879, in FMH, p. 335. Other subjects proposed at Council for the final mural included the opening of the Manchester to Liverpool railway line and the repeal of the fustian tax. See JT, pp. 50, 174–5. 72 P. Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire, in Every Quarter of the World (London: Joseph Mawman, 2nd edn, 1815), p. 68. 73 W. Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire (London: Duncan and Malcolm, 1842), p. 4. 74 Cotton Supply Association, Lord Stanley’s Speech to The Manchester Cotton Supply Association June 19th 1857 (privately published, 1857), p. 2. The council of the Manchester Cotton Supply Association contained some of the most eminent landed families in the northwest, including the Egertons, the Leghs and the Devonshires. 75 Edward Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby, known as Lord Stanley from 1851 to 1869, was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1866 to 1868 and Foreign Minister from 1874 to 1878. 76 J. Bright, Speeches on Parliamentary Reform (Manchester: John Heywood, 1866), pp. 7–15. 77 J. E. T. Rogers, Public Addresses of John Bright (London: Macmillan and Co. 1879), pp. 401–2. 78 It is important to note that the main office of the National Federation of Associated Employers of Labour was established in Manchester in 1873. The NFAEL deployed free trade arguments in support of the maintenance of existing legal contracts between employers and workers. See M. Curthoys, Governments, Labour and Law in Mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 186. 79 Woodstock (1826) is the key text in this school of thought. See W. Scott, Collected Novels (London and Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1871), vol. 21. See also, E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790); and R. Southey, Sir Thomas More; or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (2 vols, London: John Murray, 1824). The tradition is summarised and endorsed by A. Bryant, The Spirit of Conservatism (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1929). 80 The material in the following paragraphs is selective and schematic. It would be good to know more about Brown’s connections with clubs and societies in the 1880s. For instance, did he have any contacts at the Manchester Positivist Society, and was he aware of the discussion of Comtean Positivism at the Church Congress in Manchester in 1888? Auguste Comte, referred to in Brown’s lectures, was treated in a sympathetic manner by some speakers at the Congress. See C. Dunkley (ed.), Official Report of the Church Congress (London: Hodges, 1888). More broadly, as a regular visitor to Tyneside, did Brown have any contact with the Church of Humanity in Newcastle, a Comtean organisation headed by Malcolm Quin, whose service included reproductions of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and Hunt’s The Light of the World? 81 Rowley, Fifty Years of Work without Wages, pp. 223–6. 82 Rowley’s impressive art collection included Brown’s Cordelia’s Portion (pencil, ink, chalk and wash; 1869); The Entombment (watercolour, gouache and gold paint; 1871–78); Romeo and Juliet (pen, and ink and black chalk or charcoal; 1876); the St Editha series of cartoons (chalk and wash; 1873–77); Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet

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(watercolour; 1876); the ‘Great Men’ series of cartoons (black chalk and wash; 1878); and Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois (oil; 1878). Brown went on to paint Rowley’s portrait in 1885. 83 Brown gave his portrait of C. P. Scott’s daughter to the Horsfall Museum, established to support working-class engagement with the visual arts, in 1885. Potter is referred to in a letter to Mackmurdo: see FMBBL, RP 2125 (ii), 25 March 1882. 84 Brown called Waddington ‘the Rienzi of the Manchester Unemployed’. Rienzi, a medieval Roman populist figure who fought against Italian nobles, was celebrated by the Pre-Raphaelites and other cultural radicals in this period. See letter from Brown to M. H. Spielmann, 9 May 1886, John Rylands Library, Manchester, English MS 1290. 85 Letter from Brown to M. H. Spielmann, 9 May 1886, John Rylands Library, Manchester, English MS 1290. Brown informed Spielmann that ‘the future of the world’ would be determined by the resolution of industrial strife. In London, in 1866, Brown and his wife turned their drawing room into a soup kitchen for the unemployed. See FMH, p. 172; and Juliet M. Soskice, Chapters from Childhood: Reminiscences of an Artist’s Granddaughter (London: Selwyn & Blount, 1921), p. 43. In 1862 and 1863 Brown contributed money and Mauvais Sujet (1863) to the Relief Fund established to support Lancashire Weavers during the Cotton Famine. See FMH, pp. 184–5, who claims that Brown wanted to include this subject in the Manchester Town Hall murals. 86 The best example of this cultural type was George Allen, a carpenter and joiner, who became an assistant drawing master at the Working Men’s College, London, before assisting Ruskin as an engraver and then ending up as his publisher. For more on Allen, see B. Maidment, ‘Author and Publisher – John Ruskin and George Allen, 1890–1900’, Business Archives, 36 (June 1972), 21–32. Brown knew about this culture as a partner in Morris, Faulkner & Co., which was established as a cooperative agency for the production and supply of furnishings and the decorative arts in 1861. 87 See FMH, p. 247; MB, vol. 2, p. 402. 88 For more on these matters, see FMH, pp. 298–383; and MB, vol. 1, pp. 273–355. 89 See W. Crane, ‘Of the Decoration of Public Buildings’, in Art and Life, and the Building and Decoration of Cities; A Series of Lectures by Members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Delivered at the Fifth Exhibition of the Society in 1896 (London: Rivington, Percival, and Co., 1897), p. 147. Rowley introduced Brown to Crane. See W. Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences (London: Methuen, 1907), p. 201. 90 Brown acknowledged Shields’s support in a letter dated 14 September 1875: ‘Swinburne writes that he and Professor Jowett have seen more than one laudation of me in some Manchester papers recently. To what pitch of electric commotion have you fractioned them that these sparks are elicited!’ See FMH, p. 303. 91 Shields painted multiple versions of William Blake’s Workroom and Deathroom. Additionally, he produced a perceptive essay on Blake’s Night Thoughts designs in the revised edition of Alexander Gilchrist’s standard biography. Dante Gabriel Rossetti praised Shields’s work in a letter to Brown: ‘The new Blake volumes are truly splendid. Shields has made the most wonderful cover … and has written a long paper … which reads as if he had been writing all his life. He has also drawn a most interesting plate of Blake and his wife from Blake’s sketches, and

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a separate one of Mrs. Blake from another sketch of Blake’s. In fact, he has halfmade the book.’ See, FMH, p. 346. See also, A. Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake [1863] (London: Macmillan, 1880), vol. 2, pp. 289–308; and Trodd, Visions of Blake, pp. 149–56. 92 W. Hazlitt, ‘Gusto’, in The Roundtable (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817), vol. 2, pp. 21, 23, 24. 93 In addition, Brown may have been familiar with Mackintosh’s well-known Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy (1830), which included a lacerating attack on Benthamite utilitarianism. 94 See J. Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae and other writings on the French Revolution, 2nd edn (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791), pp. 63–66. Hazlitt claimed that Mackintosh was ‘one of the ablest and most accomplished men of the age’, in The Spirit of the Age (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), p. 207. Brown displayed his allegiance to Mackintosh’s vision of an Anglo-Saxon culture thwarted by Norman feudalism in The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror. Brown turned to William Godwin, another political radical, when researching the life of Chaucer: see FMB, 1 December,1847, p. 17. 95 See FMB, pp. 98, 114–17; and Brown’s letter to Shields, 10 April 1882, in FMH, p. 355, where he contrasts the genius of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who died that day, with the sham art of Herbert Herkomer, whom Brown associated with the commercialisation of a social activist aesthetic. 96 Brown, in Mills, The Life and Letters, p. 222. 97 Letter from Brown to Alfred Waterhouse, 1 October 1878, Autograph Collection archives, MLHLMCLM. 98 Brown in JTFMB, p. 174. 99 See T. Carlyle, ‘Thoughts on History’, Frazer’s Magazine (November 1830), 415–17. See Brown’s letter to Shields, in FMH, p. 333, where Axon is called a ‘little demon’. 100 On this matter see PB, p. 95, who understands that the panels ‘do not illustrate, but stand for the experience of modernization. The growth of the modern city is simultaneously centralizing and diversifying, populist and alienating.’ 101 It is deeply ironic, then, that Brown gained a reputation as a ‘dryasdust’ artist in post-Victorian art criticism. For instance, the prolific and influential R. H. Wilenski claimed that Brown, like William Powell Frith, was ‘merely a categoric chronicler of minute specific forms’. See R. H. Wilenski, English Painting (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1943), p. 225. 102 This is not to deny that when Barry was left to his own devices, as in the case of the remarkable Passive Obedience (c.1802–5), his vision of British constitutional history became a history of corruption, intrigue and mystification. 103 For more on this tradition, see Trodd, Visions of Blake, pp. 26–32. 104 JR, vol. 5, pp. 146–7; vol. 10, pp. 203–4, p. 214; vol. 11, pp. 158–76. For an overview of Ruskin’s model of the grotesque, see L. Hartley, “‘Griffinism, Grace and All”: the Riddle of the Grotesque in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters’, in Trodd, Barlow and Amigoni, Victorian Culture, pp. 81–96; and C. Trodd, ‘William Blake, the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Mythography of Manufacture’, in K. Nichols, R. Wade and G. Williams (eds), Art Versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 81–100. Although Brown was a Ruskinian when it came to defining the

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105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

expressive value of craft labour, he disliked Ruskin intensely, noting in the Diary, 20 March 1856, p. 170, that ‘R. is a fiend whose true charackter [sic] will one day burst forth to the world in spite of his pious disguise’. Another entry, 20 March 1857, p. 196, contends that Ruskin is ‘absurd and spiteful’. The best critical introduction to this topic is J. Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). See especially, pp. 69–162. For a succinct account of mid-Victorian responses to Reynoldsian art theory, see P. Barlow, ‘Fear and Loathing’, in Denis and Trodd (eds), Art and the Academy, pp. 15–32. For more on these matters, see C. Trodd, ‘Ford Madox Brown and the William Blake Brotherhood’, in Trodd and Sheldon (eds), Ford Madox Brown and the Victorian Imagination, 288–90. For a dazzling account of the Carlylean dimension of Brown’s aesthetic model, see Barlow, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s Grotesque Conceits’, pp. 37–55. See also, Trodd, Visions of Blake, pp. 247–85. F. G. Stephens, ‘Mr. F. Madox Brown’s Frescoes’, The Athenaeum (26 November 1881), 710. F. Nietzsche, ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’ [1874], in Untimely Meditations [1876], trans. and ed., R. J. Hollingdale and J. P. Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 74–5. F.M. Brown, ‘Modern v. Ancient Art’, The Builder (4 November 1848), 530–1. See Trodd, ‘Ford Madox Brown’, pp. 291–3. Chetham’s life story is helpfully elucidated by S. J. Guscott, Humphrey Chetham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 125–268. As Berg succinctly puts it, for some members of the industrial bourgeoisie ‘it became axiomatic that mechanical change was natural and evolutionary, the very motor of progress itself’. See Berg, The Machinery Question, p. 2. As described by Carlyle in a letter to his wife, Jane Carlyle, 2 November 1835, in Sanders et al. (eds), Collected Letters, vol. 8, pp. 253–4.

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He treated everyone with whom he came in contact as an equal …The utterances of a navvy had as much weight with him as those of many distinguished philosophers … That which was near him he deemed far more important than things of greater weight but out of sight.1 He hated all Academicians, all Cabinet Ministers, all Officials, all Tories, all Whigs and the Times newspaper.2 … I never would have to do with societies – they’re bound to end in cliquishness … I have never found anything but disaster from the Academicians, and the beaten track has been barren as well as beaten …3 Pictures must be judged first as pictures … a deep philosophical intention will not make a faire picture … I should be much inclined to doubt the genuineness of that artist’s ideas who never painted from love of the mere look of things.4

It has become received wisdom to relate the representation of everyday life to the broader idea of a universal aesthetic, as this emerged as a topic of heated critical discussion in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Scholars have focused on the line of reasoning advanced by Charles Blanc, Jules-Antoine Castagary, Champfleury, Edmond Duranty, D. S. MacColl, Richard Muther, Théophile Thoré and many other prominent nineteenth-century commentators, all of whom proclaimed that this critical idiom, where commonplace art is defined as the authentic Voice the People, or Historical Consciousness, or some other variant of these important (but elusive) terms, was the hitherto partially hidden inner logic of European painting. Everyday expression meant many different things, of course, but a significant number of critics agreed that it disproved the Romantic thesis, where painting meant inner vision, and that it contested academic discourse, where painting meant rhetoric transfigured by form.5 There were different ways of reaching this conclusion, some ‘socio-political’, some ‘humanist’, some 74

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‘neo-spiritual’, and some involving a fusion of all three. A common preoccupation was the desire to demonstrate that the art of realism, as vector for democratic impulse, should be detached from the special interests of the social elite. Although recent reflections on these areas have consolidated the importance of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Adolph Menzel, Camille Pissarro and other canonical nineteenth-century modernists, one consequence of the standard critical focus has been to deflect attention away from concurrent models of critical thinking by less fashionable artists.6 Brown was attracted to aspects of the historical-realist paradigm of everyday culture, especially the idea that historical subjects should exhibit different kinds of awareness of the ordinary world, but his interest in this subject has never really been analysed as closely as it deserves. The major challenge faced by this chapter is to explain how Brown’s pictorial preoccupations mesh with his social and cultural experiences. Accordingly, a couple of points are worth mentioning here. The first involves recognising that although Brown’s subject-based painting set out to deal with the sensuous immediacy of the world, there is nothing ‘Hegelian’ about his conception of the function of art. At no stage in his career did he imagine a set of circumstances in which art drew its meaning from a self-making totality. The second involves recognising that what I have called his Carlylean approach to the painting of ordinary life was an expression of a social activist aesthetic. This second point becomes clearer when we realise that the Manchester murals engage with history through the articulation of conflict and that they depict a world where individuals are represented as experiencing, or responding to, the pressures of life. Just as historical representation meant depicting the larger upheavals of society, so The Trial of Wyclif, The Proclamation Regarding Weights and Measures, Chetham’s Life Dream and John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, attest to a persistent interest in different modes of life, as delineated in fluid situations combining personal, social and institutional concerns. Some of the more puzzling aspects of Brown’s aesthetic vision become understandable when it is realised that one of his main concerns was to represent the crowded reality of common life – to create a pictorial version of Carlyle’s reading of history, which insisted on pressing the reader to experience the uncontainable abundance of the everyday world. This last point acquires added significance when it is remembered that Brown’s images diverge from the traditional model of the mural cycle as a depiction of the progress of society. Besides, as we have already determined, Brown did not think about history in terms of the adaptiveness of human experience to incremental changes within political and social organisations. For example, Chetham’s Life Dream (Plate 8) and John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle (Plate 10), obvious retorts to conventional History Painting, can be viewed as interventions into the historical archive on behalf of the forgotten people in the margins of the historical records associated with Chetham and Kay. Both paintings indicate how Brown mobilises historical energies to imagine a different 75

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sort of social order with new habits, interests and human relationships. This important pattern of thought comes to the fore in the following pages, in which I argue that Brown’s vision of art as a form of knowing should be related to his experience of living in a changing world.7 The quickest way to explain Brown is to recognise that he thought art should be based on the fluid life going on around the artist and his or her social domain. Similar claims were made by Hazlitt, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo and Stendhal. For each of these figures, Shakespearean culture was a touchstone because it was mobilised to contest the classical-academic belief that art should abstract itself from the raw stuff of imagination. It is known that Brown was familiar with n ­ eo-Shakespearean literature and criticism, which relates to his vision of the humanisation of history as a concatenation of eruptive social forces.8 What is more, by the time Brown began work on the Manchester murals he had a deep interest in the institutionalisation of social relations and customs, and models of nationhood and cultural memory. It is evident from his Diary, that he became wedded to the idea that historical writing belonged on the same spectrum and should follow the same procedures as the visual arts. Unsurprisingly, there were various catalysts for this conviction, but Carlyle’s replacement of traditional constitutional history with a history of human brokenness and expressiveness, was far and away the most important. With this transfiguring vision in mind, it is possible to see how Brown arrived at a point where he believed that he had to produce an aggressively physical style to register the liveliness of the subjects in his paintings. Before considering this issue in greater detail, something must be said about Brown’s early experiences as an art student, since they shed some light on his subsequent aesthetic concerns. Brown’s artistic training started in Bruges and Ghent, where he came under the influence of pupils of Jacques-Louis David. He studied with Baron Wappers at the Antwerp Academy between 1837 and 1839. He moved to Paris in 1842, where he studied the Old Masters and became aware of leading modern painters, such as Delacroix, Théodore Géricault and Paul Delaroche.9 In addition to these formative experiences, Brown seems to have responded to the emerging leftist vision of commonplace painting and the resurgent interest in the Le Nain brothers and ‘peasant realism’, which culminated in important publications by Blanc, Champfleury and Thoré.10 Then again, Brown’s regard for common life was enriched by looking at Hans Holbein the Younger and Rembrandt, whose works were compatible with Hazlitt’s aesthetic, which insisted that the viewer is required to be alert to the means by which painters create a sense of aliveness in the painted image.11 In this respect, it is worth remembering that Brown’s lost early paintings include Man, after Rembrandt, Wife, after Rembrandt, and Portrait of a Man, after Holbein.12 Although our knowledge of works from this period is far from complete, it should be stressed that some of the titles of untraced paintings – Friday of the Poor, Head of a Humpback and Head of a Flemish Fish Wife – suggest a critical practice combining an interest in felt life 76

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from the outsider’s viewpoint with a broad social-humanitarian commitment to the plight of the poor.13 Another untraced work, Colonel Kirke – described as a ‘repulsive sort of picture, painted with some force and … strong expression’ – depicted the military officer who, commissioned to put down the Monmouth Rebellion (1685), acted cruelly in the execution of his orders. Brown’s lost painting relates to his lifelong distrust of officialdom and authority, his identification with the socially marginalised, as well as his commitment to the politics of place.14 Surviving works – The Fisher Boy (1837) and Blind Beggar and Son (1837) – confirm a desire to get close to ordinary subjects with a view to making painting responsive to the demanding conditions of modern life. By and large, this concern with the democratisation of thinking and feeling offers a glimpse of the ‘activist’ vision he began to formulate from the 1840s.15 There is another facet of the reception of realism relevant to the development of Brown’s critical project. I mentioned the importance of Byron and Shakespeare to Brown above.16 Naturally, there are all sorts of reasons for Brown’s identification with these authors, but a common thread was the way they highlighted situations where extremes of expression and character were brought together, as demonstrated in his pen-and-ink version of King Lear (1843–44) (Figure 2.1), a phantasmagoria of social angularity, spiky power and psychological intensity, qualities he would have recognised in Delacroix’s famous lithographs of Hamlet (1834–43).17 Hugo, in his seminal ‘Preface’ to Cromwell (1827), had similarly declared that the superiority of Shakespeare’s mercurial aesthetic was based on the intermixing of opposites: beauty and ugliness, the tragic and the comedic, the sportive and the serious, the extraordinary and the everyday. In sum, these factors establish a critical context for understanding Brown’s association of painting with unconventional patterns of feeling and experience.18 The literary references invoked here – and they could have been ­multiplied – demonstrate how Romanticism assigned cognitive authority to the work of art, in part through the representation of the animation of matter.19 For now, however, it is sufficient to note that this was Brown’s attitude in an article published in The Germ, the house journal of the Pre-Raphaelites, where he avowed that the artist should reach for ‘dramatic truth internally in himself’.20 This sounds like Keats, whose model of art is based on the unity of sense experience and imagination. Keats, who was venerated by the Pre-Raphaelites, saw in visual enchantment a condition of psycho-cultural creativity.21 What Keats called ‘Negative Capability’ was a way of harnessing a Hamlet-like condition of mental energy to the needs of aesthetic life. It was a state of being, he supposed, ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’.22 Nor should it be forgotten that variations on this proposal – where human introspection is the dynamic of intersubjectivity – would attract Carlyle, Ruskin and their followers, for whom aesthetic expression meant the search for the equilibrium of feeling between elation and despair. 77

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Figure 2.1  Ford Madox Brown, King Lear, 1843–44

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One test of the real influence of this strand of Romanticism on Brown is his use of its language in pictorial form.23 Brown, following in the wake of Byron (his favourite poet), Keats, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Blake, equated aesthetic value with the imaginative remaking of moments of lived experience.24 At the same time, Brown thought that painting would supply its own energy when it depicted individuals struggling to become something greater than the part of humanity they represented by being in the world. Brown’s interest in Byron’s Manfred is a case in point.25 Manfred, part Faustian dreamer, part Rousseau-like embodiment of suffering humanity, and part rootless wanderer, supplied a language of feeling that linked private experience to public life, a condition where bodily intensity acted as a critique of normalised forms of existence.26 This reading of culture in terms of gusto, where the active subject incarnates the real through intensification or exaggeration of self, would become an important feature of Brown’s painting in subsequent decades. Which brings us to another substantive point: Brown’s interest in the association of human energy with the interconnectedness of social life should be related to his development of a ‘shock’ aesthetic designed to reintroduce strangeness into the very fabric of physical life.27 These currents of thought were sparked by many writers, but Carlyle seems to have been a constant influence on Brown. From Carlyle’s perspective, it is by the performance of inward vision that the receptive historian engages with the past. This Romanticist account of the mental universe as living picture was an affirmation of the authority of intersubjectivity, a premise Carlyle used to justify his reading of history in a well-known letter to John Stuart Mill in 1833: The ‘dignity of History’ has buckramed up poor History into a dead mummy. There are a thousand purposes which History should serve beyond ‘teaching by Experience’: it is an Address (literally out of Heaven, for did not God order it?) to our whole inner man; to every faculty of Head and Heart from the deepest to the slightest … Now for all such purposes high, low, ephemeral, eternal, the first indispensable condition of conditions, is that we see the things transacted, and picture them out wholly as if they stood before our eyes.28

Carlyle thus postulates a state of being where the researcher ‘contacts’ history through something resembling a sensory trance. The historian, he believes, remembers the past in the process of beholding its kinetic forms, its physical presence. These and other magical connections between past and present are enlivened by the idea of irregularity, which Carlyle equates with expressive energy. Just as the individual presence of things is what the historian hopes to see and know, so variety, not uniformity, is the goal of historical study. The historian – the artist – sees his or her forms living in time, in the flurry of things, forces and confusions that pour into the imagination. The sharp distinction Carlyle drew from vital and static versions of historical representation would become a guiding principle in Brown’s account of the art of looking. 79

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Other voices within Romanticism are relevant here, especially Hazlitt, whose celebration of William Hogarth – for combining ‘truth of external observation with strength of internal meaning’ – would have been immensely attractive to Brown.29 The same point can be made about the cultural logic of the Manchester mural programme which uses gusto to affirm the fluidic nature of historical identity. From The Romans Building a Fort to Dalton, Brown’s aggressively kinetic style signals that verve is the nucleus of all graphic life. More importantly, gusto provided a critical context for pursuing the volatile quiddity of things. It confirmed, in visual terms, energy as the physical basis of life. Gusto signified variation and change since force was never uniform or internally regularised. In some works, such as The Expulsion of the Danes and John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, this involved the expression of chance and chaos in real life. At the same time, Brown remained alert to signs of cohesion and collaboration, one example being the matter of human touch. The humdrum expression of energy through human contact allowed him to explore ideas of kinship and community as related to the lives of the common people, most evident in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers (Plate 4), Chetham’s Life Dream (Plate 8) and Dalton (Plate 12). The last point about the imaginative remaking of the world through touch suggests that we need to relate Brown’s engagement with the Romantic aesthetic to the state of British art before the appearance of Pre-Raphaelitism. As already noted, the claims about the culture of feeling are both far-reaching and complex; they also provide an important insight into the state of the art world when Brown finally settled in London in 1846. In truth, the social dimension of British Romantic painting requires more scholarly attention, although it should be noted that recent writings have begun to address different aspects of the cultural landscape in the period before the emergence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.30 Little known today, George and James Foggo were key figures in the British art world from the 1820s until the 1850s.31 They associated with critics, politicians and public officials, and were progenitors of Brown’s belief in the union of painting reform and democratic government. For these reasons, several aspects of their cultural radicalism are noteworthy.32 First, there is the introduction of topics relating to representative sovereignty, such as Wat Tyler Killing the Tax Collector, to create a popular history where liberty is set against the power of social elites. Second, there is the engagement with international activist radicalism, such as Parga During the Awful Ceremony that Preceded the Banishment of its Brave Christian Inhabitants and the Entrance of Ali Pacha (1819).33 Third, there is the argument that artists should use public platforms to connect the social reform movement, which drew attention to the pernicious effect of hereditary landed wealth and power, with the domination of the art world by the Royal Academy.34 Last, there is the attempt to remodel History Painting as a form of ‘municipal service’.35 To this end, they produced a large historical painting for the Town Hall in Macclesfield, Cheshire, in the 1830s, and submitted Before the Altar of St. Edmondsbury, The Barons solemnly Swear to procure from King John the 80

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restoration of the Saxon Laws to the Westminster Hall competition in 1845.36 In addition, the Foggo brothers made strenuous efforts to transform the nature of art discourse in the 1830s and 1840s by extending notions of popular sovereignty to debate of the rights of independent artists within the art world. The significance of these activities and interests come to the fore when we note their involvement in major public debates about the social value of art. George Foggo, for instance, spoke at an event organised to support free access to public monuments, museums and other cultural institutions, held at the Freemasons’ Tavern on 29 May 1837, chaired by the Benthamite MP Joseph Hume, and supported by appeals and testimonials from other radical parliamentarians, including Thomas Wyse and William Ewart. Unsurprisingly, many of the speakers saw the cultural world as a replication of the clientelism they detected at work in the political world. Foggo, for instance, wanted the Royal Academy to be a popular assembly of artists and audiences: ‘The ­independent artists of this country claim that the Royal Academy be either made national, and as such responsible, or that Parliament declare it at once a private society and treat it like all other private bodies.’ He went on to demand: All that the free artists of this country desire is a fair chance of competition, the opportunity of exhibiting their works to the public … Let the [Royal Academy] exhibition be made national under Parliamentary Control, or let Parliament at once declare the Academy to be no other than a private society; but if the Government is resolved to leave them as they are in an edifice constructed at our expense, then let the other half of the building [The National Gallery] be given to the great body of artists; and notwithstanding their titles, their wealth and their privileges, we will compete with them. We will either take upon ourselves the whole expense, on condition that one day in the week be allowed us for private view, the other five days being free to the public, or Government may take upon itself the expense and throw open our exhibition every day to the people.37

The key theme here – that open competition between artists was the best mechanism for amplifying the public character of art – was repeated four years later when Foggo attended the General Meeting of Artists. This large-scale public debate was set up to consider the development of the Art-Union of London, and to ascertain how this organisation related to wider societal and commercial forces, including the corporate logic of the British art world and the reform of national art education. Foggo, who made several interventions at this lively event, supported the idea of art unions but felt that the management of the newly formed Art-Union of London would be taken over by print-sellers.38 His contention – that the modern art world had been colonised by traders at the expense of producers – can be traced back to earlier discourses, some of which proposed that the predatory interests of art managers impeded the development of a national school of painting.39 Foggo extended the terms of this existing critique by arguing that the value of associational culture arose from 81

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liberty of commercial arrangements. ‘All institutions’, he averred, ‘should have competitors to become useful.’ Hence, ‘The “vantage ground” of the Art-Union of London must be the confidence of the Artists.’ By contrast, ‘the “vantage ground’” of a privileged, plutocratic organisation, like the Royal Academy, ‘may be the back-stairs to the palace – even though that may give them profit and a power of tyranny over the minds and fortunes of our fellow artists’.40 Statements of this kind, where the Royal Academy is seen to block the free expression of professional life through the imposition of monopoly contracts, became commonplace in liberal cultural discourse during the following decades.41 The political implications of this platform culture are obvious. In a wide-ranging public lecture, delivered in 1843, Foggo presented the history of art as a battlefield between aristocratic and liberal values before reminding his audience that in the current artistic climate progressive artists should dispense with ‘the palette knife’ in favour ‘the trowel’. In his view, this was an age in which ‘clothes, furniture, neatness and comfort were all smothered in lime dust and [so] mortar, burnt hands and hard labour became familiar to our artists’.42 In consequence, the modern painter had to imagine the conditions in which art would be free to listen to and respond to the People, an imagined political formation defined as the alliance of small manufacturers, civil professionals, progressive intellectuals, artists, journalists, artisans and skilled or self-educated workers. In other words, those groups and types committed to free assembly, public knowledge, the creation of a transparent social order and the development of a productive economy. Throughout their careers, the Foggo brothers held true to this conviction that social progress meant economic liberalism, a condition of cultural life where the ‘charted and legalised’ organisation would not be subordinate to the imperatives of ‘private and secret society’.43 Their speeches, pamphlets, letters and evidence before select committees were at once interventions into a social field and imaginative projections of how the elements in that social field might be reconfigured to produce new forms of popular politics, new mechanisms of communication. Their reflections on reform were expressions of a desire to put cultural entrepreneurship at the centre of debates about social improvement.44 The entire orientation of their careers was toward a situation where artists would be able to reframe art as a form of public discourse and associational culture sitting alongside mass meetings, public petitions, periodicals, pamphlets, speeches, appeals and forms of publicity. They wanted their works to contribute to radical discourses on the efficacy of civil society, a space of creativity and free expression beyond the control of ‘government’.45 The same is true of Brown who wanted to reframe the discourse of radicalism, which had been concerned with the development of reformed parliamentary power to contest the authority of social and political elites, by exploring the creative potential of the cultural life of popular audiences. It is obvious that Brown was acquainted with writings of the Foggos, for they were widely disseminated. At the same time, it should be noted that their critique of the polite arts – where a free society of activist artists 82

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is thwarted by the authority of mere power-mongers and placemen – occurred at a moment of serious social, cultural and political disruption.46 From the 1820s, social criticism and cultural opinion became ever more convoluted. A political radical in foreign affairs and constitutional matters might be a supporter of industrialism and New Poor Law legislation, which designated vast numbers of the poor as socially and economically useless.47 At the root of all this was an interest in the efficacy of the national body.48 The importance of the situation sketched here cannot be exaggerated, since it refers to the world Brown discovered when he returned to Britain in 1846 to pursue a career as an artist. Agitation, dissent and hardship were all around him; there were 1.4 million paupers in the country by 1843; this was to be a decade of continuous economic crisis.49 An important pinch point occurred on 10 April 1848, when around 150,000 demonstrators attended a Chartist meeting on Kennington Common, which was designed to inspire a new mass movement committed to reform of the franchise. Brown agreed with the central claim of Chartist discourse: working-class militancy was a response to the legalistic definition of property within mainstream political economy, which failed to appreciate that workers possessed property in the form of labour. As indicated in Chapter 1, this tradition of plebeian radicalism was incorporated into the Manchester murals through the representation of the Flemish Weavers, John Wycliffe and Humphrey Chetham, all of whom Brown related to expressions of associational culture and social freedom. It is impossible, then, to find any evidence to support the claim that Brown advocated the economic liberalism of the 1840s, as articulated by The Economist: We consider the mental degradation of the masses – the extinction amongst them of the spirit of enterprise and of self-reliance with the annihilation of the feeling of independence … which is everywhere the consequence of the perpetual interference of the State, to be one of the most disastrous … effects of the legislation which is intended to benefit the people … [T]he masses … are greatly to blame [for their] suffering … Nature makes them responsible for their conduct … We find them suffering, and we pronounce them in fault.50

In opposition to this model of economic determinism, Brown set out to create a culture of dissent derived from subjects dealing with social reform and social injustice. Perhaps the best way of illustrating Brown’s development of a social activist model of art is to say a few words about his engagement with print culture. In 1848, Brown’s The First Translation of the Bible into English: Wycliffe Reading his Translation of the New Testament to His Protector, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster in the Presence of Chaucer and Gower, His Retainers (1847–48) was reproduced in a radical-populist paper influenced by the social criticism of Carlyle and Robert Owen.51 The People’s Journal, edited by John Saunders, set out to combine ‘amusement, general literature, and instruction, with an earnest and business-like inquiry into the best means of satisfying the claims of industry’. 83

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The terms of the public appeal noted in the following extract, focusing on the great diffusion of education, may explain why Brown viewed the journal sympathetically: We propose … to deal … with the claims of industry … [We] will … do this freely … [and] in the spirit of Thomas Carlyle will seek to aid in the solution of the mightiest of all problems – how shall we Emancipate Labour? We also propose to make the People’s Journal … an efficient helpmate to the Working Man by … interesting itself in his HOME and in the all-important subjects involved in that word, as Suitable Buildings, Domestic Management, Care of Health, Household Education, the Garden, and the Field Allotment – by … describing to him the New Book that he would like to read, or the New Play, New Actor, or the New Exhibition that he would probably like to see; by giving him, through the means of the engravings and accompanying letterpress of the People’s Portrait Gallery, an almost personal knowledge of our great and good men and women, especially those of our time; – by endeavouring, in short, to promote the true business and duty of man’s life – the development of all the capacities of his nature. For this, we require not only the knowledge how to support life by industry and the Useful Arts, or how to guide life by the Social, Moral, and Religious Laws, but how to vivify, elevate and spiritualise life.52

Other advocates of civil liberty and popular sovereignty set out to mobilise parallel and alternative political programmes, some of which represented modern society as a soulless machine attacking the weak and vulnerable, denying their common interests. The Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), which resulted in the introduction of vast workhouses designed to resettle large numbers of the urban poor, was a big target.53 The most brilliant description of the ideology of the Victorian workhouse system was provided by Carlyle, for whom it was a concrete representation of market capitalism and industrial society: all human values, as articulated within the discretionary paternalism of the moral economy, had to be converted into abstract economic terms. ‘England’, he observed, in the introduction to Past and Present (1843), is ‘full of wealth’, of multifarious produce, supply for human want of every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow-harvests, thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest … and the willingest our Earth ever had; these men are here; the work they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us: and behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, ‘Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is the enchanted fruit!’54

He is moved to avow, at the end of the book, the nihilistic nature of economic modernity: ‘It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die … But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, 84

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unrelated, girt-in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead Infinite Injustice.’55 W. J. Linton’s Bob Thin (1845) (Figure 2.2) is the most remarkable example of an attempt to convert the nerve of this argument, where poverty is a crime, into an ‘activist’ or radical aesthetic based on the experience of the expropriation of the public identity of the labouring poor. The spindly images accompanying Linton’s poem depict a world where the battle between humanistic and economic powers is enacted through the tension between organic and mechanised forms.56 Bob Thin is pulverised in a grotesque realm devoid of material or optical joy; conjoined with mechanical devices designed to make him economically productive; and exiled from the world of family, social welfare and human fellowship. The first image in the book, where Bob Thin becomes a coin, demonstrates that experiential life within the workhouse system is determined by relations of power. In fact, Linton is prolific with such effects, and so Bob Thin appears in a carceral space in which human life is reduced to the Carlylean cash nexus.57 But this is not all. Bob Thin contains Linton’s radical take on the idea of ancient constitutionalism in the form of the ‘Norman Yoke’ thesis. This was the view that feudal tyranny was unknown until the Norman Conquest in 1066. In Anglo-Saxon times, then, ‘There were no Poor-laws, for this good / Reason, that no man wanted food; / And none on’s neighbour any ravages / Committed; till at length some savages, / A lordly, idle set of stoats, / Seized peaceful husbandman by th’ throats, / And over Nature’s gentlest code, / On roaring Rapine rough-shod rode.’58 For Linton, Anglo-Saxon culture stands for a world of popular sovereignty, a realm of friendships and alliances arising from the generation of community life and craft culture.59 Following this logic, he can be seen as a prototype for the politically aware artisan associated with the radical wing of the Arts and Crafts Movement: commitment to a vision of the expressiveness of labour was part of a bigger story involving the denunciation of the existing socio-economic order, a system in which industrial production was little more than a mechanism for replacing one privileged group for another. Nor should it be forgotten that Linton went on to edit The Cause of the People and English Republic, and to contribute to The Red Republican in the 1850s, before working alongside the Rossetti brothers when they edited the mammoth The Life of William Blake (1863), which was left unfinished by the premature death of Alexander Gilchrist.60 In these respects, Linton’s vision of popular culture – a fusion of periodicals, political ephemera, prints, ballads, political manifestoes with the literary forms and productions of mainstream public culture – was a more radical version of the programme proposed by the Foggo brothers.61 Other accounts of the convergence of cultural and historical forces may have coloured Brown’s eclectic critical thinking. Young England, a short-lived movement, was another turbulent fusion of radical and conservative politics. Active between 1842 and 1845, it comprised a small group of backbench parliamentarians headed by Benjamin Disraeli, George Smythe, Lord John 85

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Figure 2.2  W. J. Linton, Bob Thin or The Poorhouse Fugitive, 1845

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Manners and Alexander Baillie. They drew support from some fellow MPs, notably Alexander Beresford Hope, William Busfield Ferrand, Peter Borthwick and Richard Monckton Milnes.62 A broad alliance, rather than a faction or sect, Young England championed a number of political, cultural and social causes, most of which involved disputing the idea of commercial populism associated with Whig politics, a system they presented as little more than the political legitimation of a financial oligarchy established by Sir Robert Walpole, the most acutely ‘worldly’ of all eighteenth-century politicians. For its advocates, the idea of ‘Young England’ meant social renewal by the reorganisation of the social order around Monarchy and Church, both of which were identified in terms of the supposed authority of their medieval identities. Furthermore, art, architecture and ceremony were spotlighted as socialising powers that stood out against the interests of commercial society. Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), in many respects a manifesto of Young England, projects paternalism as a correction to commercialised aristocracy and a rejection of the rational-technical state. Egremont, Disraeli’s socially aware aristocratic hero, declares: ‘The mind of England is ever with the rising race.’ He continues in the same vein: ‘I live among these men; I know their innermost souls … I know the principles which they have imbibed, and I know … these principles must bear their fruit. It will be a produce hostile to the oligarchical system. The future principle of English politics will not be a levelling principle, not a principle adverse to privileges, but favourable to their extension. It will seek to ensure equality, not by levelling the few, but by elevating the many.’63 Brown expressed similar convictions, especially the reading of post-Restoration British history as a triumph of a pseudo-aristocratic oligarchy, the rise of parasitic classes and clientelism at the expense of a national community. A digest of his thinking is articulated in this striking passage taken from his Diary: To what pitch is England destined to soar in the History of the world. Externally a far shining glory to all the Earth and an example, internally a prey to snobbishness and the worship of gold & tinsel – a place chiefly for sneaks and lacqueys, and any who can fawn or clutch, or dress clean at church & connive. The deepest pondering alas brings me back to old & nothing original conclusions that the Aristocracy of this Country presses with Torpedo influence on all classes of men and works.64

Brown’s pronouncement – mixing hope, despair and fury – may be seen as an indication of his divided and contradictory nature in the 1850s. On one level, his muscular statement pictures an unequal world where the productive classes are thwarted by Old Corruption, the entrenched powers of landlords, fundholders and placemen. On another level, Brown swerves away from order to settle on an image of the messiness of human affairs, where he is obliged to accept variations of consciousness and identity, as well as different levels of social engagement. In tandem with this belligerence, we get a glimpse of the radical-patriot lament associated with William Cobbett: party politics negates expression of national 87

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identity. Actually, in another part of the same entry, Brown complains, ‘Here the Government with our boasted nobility the greatest in the world takes the lead in all that is dullest & stupidest, and the genius of the nation with utmost effort can alone force the improvements of art.’65 These themes were commonplace in the rhetoric of patriot radicalism, which Brown deployed to question the prevailing logic of British political life and to argue for a new type of national feeling based on the principle of public scrutiny of political elites. Brown’s thoughts on the production and distribution of political knowledge relate to another event noted in the Diary: ‘Called on Woolner who declares we are more devil worshipper than Christian. His reason for the great popularity of Lord Palmerston is that he is treacherous & pugnatious [sic] which are the two characteristics of us English & that therfor [sic] being the most so of any, he by natural force or gravitation is the king of England.’66 Once again, Brown’s opposition to oligarchy signals his patriotism. At the same time, Brown saw the modern landed elite as a closed stratum of privilege earning their money from rent-seeking mechanisms of one form or another. The result was a culture of wealth extraction and social stasis: [O]ut with D. G. R[ossetti] to Stafford house … The magnificence of the place, such as I had never witnessed but in Pallaces [sic], gave food for much ­reflection … Oh how strange a place is this world, only those seem to possess power who don’t know how to use it. What an accumulation of wealth & impotence is this which is gained by stability & old institutions. Is it for this that a people toils & wearied out its miriad [sic] lives, for such heaping up of bad taste, for such gilding of hideousness, for such exposure of embilcility [sic] as this sort of thing is. Oh how much more beautiful would 6 model labourers’ cottages be, built by a man of skill for £100 each.67

Here, and in other circumstances, Brown was motivated by the need to challenge the English system of land tenure, and to improve access to the natural environment for the landless masses.68 These interests, which he shared with Mill, Ruskin, Linton, Morris and the Chartists, colour his attitude to the two final panels in the Manchester mural programme, both of which are examined in Chapter 5. Friends, colleagues and family members saw different aspects of this uncompromisingly radical personality at first hand: Brown ‘hated tyrants and proud rich people’, recalled his granddaughter.69 For Brown, aristocrats were parasitic drones because they blocked the free exchange of ideas and inhibited the exercise of cultural creativity through direct and indirect control of cultural institutions. These convictions throw light on his aversion to the reactionary populism of Lord Palmerston’s administration, which united the comfortable classes and the working classes by obscuring the true reality of post-Restoration aristocracy – and monarchy.70 William Michael Rossetti confirmed Brown’s dislike of privilege and noted his engagement with radical literature, whilst Hueffer concluded that his ‘intellect made him a Socialist of an extreme type’.71 These 88

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sympathies may explain why Brown employed the anarchist Communard Jules Andrieu to teach his son, Oliver, from 1871 until his untimely death in 1874.72 Another decisive factor in Brown’s social activism was the impact of a critical imagery pioneered by Carlyle, Brown’s favourite modern writer. Carlyle was an uncommonly brilliant dissector of the mechanics of popular politics, as preached by Liberals and Conservatives. ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829), one of his most original and influential essays, offers a trenchant account of a world transformed by the integration of the machine into all aspects of material life.73 Carlyle ponders: Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophic Age, but above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.74

In these succinct phrases Carlyle conjures a Blakean world of ‘mind-forg’d manacles’: ‘[n]ot the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its pre-established apparatus, it is not done by hand, but by machinery.’75 All that belongs to the culture of the imagination, Carlyle infers, is distorted by the cultic veneration of facts. Consequently, the thick mesh of traditional social interactions is replaced by the impersonal authority of markets and machines; a condition of self-alienation where ‘Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.’76 It is worth pausing here to note that Carlyle’s central contention, that the modern science of political economy was little more than the reduction of acts of knowing and believing to the mere power of ‘arranging and communicating’, would be repeated in several pictorial settings.77 A good example of this is Robert Seymour’s (known as ‘Shortshanks’) The March of Intellect (1829) (Figure 2.3). Seymour’s mechanical monster – a parody of Lord Brougham, who was appointed Lord Chancellor in Lord Grey’s reforming administration – ­challenges the vested interests of Church and Law with his giant broom.78 Progress, equated with the violating efficiency of mechanical action, is represented as absurd, the indiscriminate attack on history in the name of organisation and quantification. The image is captioned by a text which, in the manner of James Gillray, conflates the discourse of enlightened knowledge with the rhetoric of enthusiasm, the term used throughout the early nineteenth-century to indicate what was 89

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deemed to be the anarchic nature of radical nonconformism. Seymour’s inventive arrangement produces an image of the mechanised life: I saw a vision. A Giant form appeared it eyes were burning lights even of Gass, and on its learned head it bore, a crown of many towers, Its Body was an engine yea full of steam its arms were iron and the legs with which it strode like unto presses that men called printers use, from whence fell ever and anon small Books that fed the little people of the Earth. It rose and in its hand it took a broom to sweep the rubbish from the face of the land, the Special pleaders and their wigs also and the Quack Doctors also and the ghosts and those that wear horns, and the crown of those that set themselves above the laws and the Delays in Chancery it utterly destroy’d, likewise it swept from the Clergy every Plurality, Nevertheless the Lawyers and the Parsons and divers others kickt up a great dust.79

Conversely, radical artists of the next generation would recognise the limitations of this putative fusion of the ideas of Carlyle and the graphic style of Gillray: it arose from a visual language in which there were no positive terms. Seymour’s quasi-Utilitarian giant is no more than a mechanical negation of the social negation of Old Corruption, personified by the phalanx of placemen and rent-seekers he sweeps away with his impressively productive broom. It would be Brown’s task to devise a radical-popular Carlylean language of positive, as well as minus, terms. We can now see how these lines of thought could converge. ‘Foggoism’, Chartism, popular radicalism, Young England, and the writings of Carlyle, constitute a nucleus of ideas about social development to which Brown was sympathetic.80 In the catalogue to his solo exhibition, held in 1865, Brown develops a more belligerent version of the critical idiom of ‘Foggoism’ by identifying academies as ‘huge manufactories of artists, from which, however, every now and then a man of genius surges up and disentangles himself’.81 Another strand of Foggoism, the contention that modern art discourse should reflect on the aristocratic world of privilege, patronage and power, is expressed much earlier, in 1848, when Brown records a conversation with John Marshall, at that time assistant surgeon at University College Hospital, London: ‘Marshall called in and talked a great deal about the approaching revolution, what is to be the upshot of it.’82 Other members of Brown’s circle reflected on inter-class rivalries. It could be that Dante Gabriel Rossetti spoke to Brown about ‘The English Revolution of 1848 (No connection with over the way)’, one of his satirical poems about the bluster of British radicalism as unstable mixture of politics, theatrical display and sentimentality.83 For now, we need only note that this was the fluxional and adversarial social scene Brown encountered when he returned to Britain in 1846. It was, as he recognised, a moment of great uncertainty, marked by falling wages, high unemployment and widespread pauperism. He entered the affray by criticising the official art world. The Royal Academy, the focus of his ire, was dismissed as dull, 90

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Figure 2.3  Robert Seymour (‘Shortshanks’), The March of Intellect, 1829

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standardised and sclerotic.84 Echoing the Foggo brothers, Brown defined Royal Academicians as hucksters dedicated to cronyism and corporatism.85 The Royal Academy, a clique masquerading as a place of cultural fellowship, was a closed organisation where cultural magnates conducted their business with industrial magnates and members of the landed aristocracy. Devoted to the manufacture of power and the perpetuation of elites, it was little more than an expression of the normal party of the Establishment at play, he proposed.86 Yet Brown went beyond the paradigm of ‘Foggoism’ – based on liberal principles of social reform and representative government – to address the nostrums of classical and neoclassical economics. This is evident in Work (1852–65) (Figure 0.2), a wonderfully strange concoction of impassiveness and concentration. It is impossible to summarise this immensely complex meditation on what Carlyle called the ‘Condition of England’ problem in Chartism (1839).87 Be that as it may, it is important to stress that Work includes a convincing analysis of a world where capital is identified as the central matrix of social life.88 This takes the form of a Hogarthian parody of pictorial symmetry, a device Brown went on to use in Chetham’s Life Dream. On the left side of Work we see a handbill inscribed ‘Money! Money! Money!’; on the right side we see a bunch of unemployed people wearing placards advertising the claims of Bobus, Carlyle’s fictional incarnation of klepto-parasitic capitalism, the subject who monetises his ‘brand’ by branding others as human adverts.89 Unlike the Foggo ­brothers – whose modern capitalist is a dynamic agent of social and moral progress because he creates new systems for the production and distribution of goods and services – Brown’s modern capitalist represents the unalloyed triumph of the ruthless profiteer over the living community. By extension, the invisible Bobus announces a new world order which reduces everything to transactional questions of money, rental labour and advertising, as seen in the inclusion of the faceless and interchangeable human advertising units marching away from the subject of civic work performed in the foreground. For Brown it was a critical axiom that representatives of capital – Bobus, the MP, the affluent women on the left of Work – are distinguished from the signs of service, duty and care associated with the paternalism of Carlyle and F. D. Maurice, both of whom are included in this painting. The Carlylean world of human wants based on personal exchanges between rich and poor is assailed by Bobus’s world of contractually agreed tasks. Human value is being squeezed out by an organisational view of life. For sure, the teeming detail located at the edges of the painting might be read in terms of the diversified and enriched nature of metropolitan life – a modern space where subjects perform specialised functions. Nonetheless, it is more accurate to say that the viewer looks at a world where instrumental and practical relations are in the process of defining the social order the artist is obliged to visualise. Above all, however, since the flanks of Work are not held in equilibrium with the central world of the navvy-labourer, the image affirms the alienation of what might pass for ‘social enterprise’ from traditional patterns of civic life. Note, too, how the introduction 92

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of the principle of structural division allows Brown to represent different forms of social being. Chief among these is the financialisation of everyday life: on the left of the pictorial field the monetisation of social experience; on the right the reduction of the body to a form of embodied cash. It seems likely that this characterisation of the social order is designed to get the viewer to think about several interrelated questions. How does capital colour human interaction? How does capital reshape the social values of daily living? How does capital remodel the relationship between bodies and social spaces? Put slightly differently, we are dealing with an early example of a Carlylean formulation of modernisation as a problem involving custom, contingency and public liberty. One early-twentieth-century commentator, largely overlooked in the secondary literature, recognised this activist aspect of Brown’s aesthetic, which addressed how people live with or encounter others in a world that has become strange or uncertain. The Reverend John Linton’s The Cross in Modern Art (1916) proposes that, by selecting navvies as his central subject, Brown attempts to picture the nature of those ‘[n]ear the lowest of our social strata, crushed too often, body and soul out of human semblance by an unrelenting industrial struggle’. On this understanding, Brown’s navvies incarnate values pushed to the edge of social modernity by the spirit, if that is the right word, of industrialisation. Instead of seeing Work as an evasion of industrial life, it becomes, in Linton’s reading, a ‘protest against the prevailing standard of values that selfish competition creates’, a radiant meditation on the idea of popular sovereignty.90 In fact, Linton’s vision comes close to what Brown called a ‘Life Dream’, the jubilant reimagining of a non-antagonistic social world in which the individual subject, freed from the thraldom of the ‘brutal and soulless standard of supply and demand’, would realise that human well-being is not reducible to the pursuit of material wealth.91 On the basis of these observations, which turn on the fact that Brown’s modelling of public good is at odds with the liberal conception of the sovereignty of capitalism, it becomes possible to make sense of his Diary, produced between 1847 and 1868. While his entries cover a multiplicity of subjects, many of them loop back to the central experiences of the critically self-aware Victorian social radical: the conviction that daily self-reflection assists in the routines of work; the belief that active personal ambition relates to progressive social change; the hope that art can be produced in such a way as to remain independent from the commodity economy; and the recognition of the value of work produced by women artists.92 Seen in these terms, the Diary is a form of self-exploration, an extended inquiry into how honour is maintained in an age marked by plutocratic power, clientelism and contingency. It is also true that it provides the reader with a strong indication of how Brown’s activist mentality was rooted in the day-to-day reality of labouring to become a successful painter. If we put to one side the tone of gloomy introspection and the cultivation of a universal outsider persona, it is the sense of the endless struggle to become visible as an artist that makes his entries so vivid and powerful. It prompts us to realise that Brown 93

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had an interior realm of ambition, fantasy and worry. Tenacity, vulnerability and quaking inadequacy are key facets of the intense consciousness mapped out in this remarkable text, where Brown is forever ‘restoring the erasures’ in his designs.93 Naturally, it provides plenty of ammunition for those who believe that Brown was a gruff figure who needed public rejection to sustain his self-image as a chippy outsider.94 Nonetheless, the Diary is a richly textured and complicated record of self-debate, charged with tormented personal struggle, loneliness – and intense anxiety.95 Having said all this, however, it is necessary to add a couple of qualifications. In broad terms, to write a diary is to become an editor of one’s own existence, to be concerned with the organisation of materials and meanings, some of which seep into the public realm. It is unclear if issues of individual insecurity and anxiety were general topics of debate in Brown’s regular meetings with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, although such matters do pop up in letters from Brown to other members of his social circle. In the wider social world, working-class radicals deployed the idea of collective insecurity to explain why they had little confidence in the existing institutions of the state or with the arrangements of civil society. Still, there is no doubt that he saw individual insecurity as an endemic problem in capitalist society and that the Diary records actions designed to alleviate social disadvantage and reduce economic indigence.96 An important tic in the Diary is the way in which discussion of his body replicates worries about artistic performance and productivity. The idea of self-struggle is ubiquitous.97 What Hueffer called ‘nervous hysteria’ flares up in Brown’s rendition of work schedules and the plight of fellow artists; and hypochondria, or what Brown called ‘mania’ and ‘mulligrubs’, must have been one way of connecting with the complementary mentalities of Carlyle and Cromwell, his lifelong heroes.98 Lethargy, insomnia, disquiet and panic are perennial topics, vividly adduced in the following sequence of inner-directed reflections straddling different days: Got up late; felt low & dejected, never feel Happy – got to work about 12 … got up at 7 have not slept last night, what is the reason of it? … Lazy began writing this in consequence … Got up at ½ past 8 ready to go … Look for a prescription till 10. Found, and suffering at my chest from indigestion … This morning up late the fleas this weather will not let me sleep I pass wretched night trying to catch them – my skin is so nervous & thin that a flea is torture to me … up at 10. Headache, to work about 12 … felt very oppressed about the head owing to anxiety … Last night I awoke with excruciating pain in my chest & almost fainted in bed, slept again & in the morning do. So lay in bed – got up towards the evening … up at 8. Very absent & dejected no prospect but going to India … When I was young a disappointment in painting used to give me a dreadful pain in my throat, now other miseries take the place of these & the nervous system feels most acutely about the heart & chest – no pain is like this … began work again to today, intensely thick about the upper regions, but felt that I must begin again. Worked till dusk from ½ past 1, scraped out the hand but felt too

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stupid to venture to touch it again. Did a lot of promiscuous touches. All the week I have been ill with a tired brain & relaxed bowels. I think anxiety as well as work affects my head.99

These Romantic-Carlylean spasms of anxiety concerning corporeal failure, energy loss and inner disintegration are framed by tenaciously self-critical ruminations on character: ‘I must now endeavour to keep up this diary more accurately, but have become lazy through discouragement … broken in spirit and but a melancholy copy of what I once was.’100 What is striking about Brown’s compulsive self-inspection is that the mental world parallels the general instability of the social world, since both seem to block the desire for a stable livelihood and the realisation of the state Keats called Negative Capability, the capacity to enter situations and moments from a position of psycho-bodily detachment. The reader of the Diary looks on as the author struggles to find a way of controlling the stimulus world. Struggle and effort create the conditions for more of the same. Brown wants to work at painting but only to get to the point of experiencing a state of being that sets him free from the belief that work defines his life. This recurring pattern, where creativity arises from the experience of self-struggle, recalls the structure and content of Carlyle’s neurotically restless Journal, especially the self-tormenting lamentations on the production of Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845), where mysterious forces within the body – at once biological and chimerical – multiply to thwart the authority of vision and imagination, and thus undermine the crucial balance between mental energy and physical determination, the Stakhanovite realm to which the writer longs to belong.101 Beyond these expressions of bitter experience, however, there are moments in the Diary where Brown points to a realm where productive inwardness – what might be called heightened creativity arising from free thoughts – goes beyond the repetition of loathing, exhilaration and self-evaluation to fuel the idea of socially engaged existence. This is another way of saying that the life-dream mentality, enacted at key points in the Diary, provides a strong sense of how Brown insists on the imaginative transformation of the world through the labour of vision.102 There were various elements at work here, one of which was the desire to establish an identity free from direct market relations, a condition of social and cultural life where the value of personal creativity would be publicly endorsed. More broadly, belief in the ‘Life Dream’ found an outlet in the Manchester murals – commissioned after the Diary was terminated – many of which reimagine history through the prism of public service. The important point is that the characterisation of knowledge in terms of the ‘Life Dream’ testifies to Brown’s abiding interest in understanding the clash of powers at work in the social domain, as well as the precarious position of art within modern life. To be sure, we know enough about the circumstances of the production and reception of the mural programme to appreciate the difficulties he faced when dealing with 95

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corporate patrons, some of whom may have struggled to see painting as an occupational profession. In line with this, it should be noted that Brown’s sense of professionalism cannot be detached from his ethic of work, a constant theme in the Diary. The ethos of labour, expressed in the idea of the unified organic force of common life, explains why some of the Manchester murals treat hands as social instruments rather than parts of the body, a topic to be dealt with extensively in subsequent chapters. Any assessment of Brown’s attitude to work and leisure must find space to deal with his experience of the social dimension of culture.103 Putting to one side his fraternal relations with many anti-establishment artists, something should be said about his interactions with powerful cultural institutions and their representatives. The first point to make here is that while Brown showed little or no interest in belonging to ‘official’ cultural associations, Dante Gabriel Rossetti took it upon himself to propose Brown’s membership to the Garrick Club in 1865. Ironically, Brown was obliged to withdraw his candidature because he was informed that many senior members held the view that there was something vulgar about ‘one-man’ art exhibitions.104 A self-proclaimed outsider, Brown was unimpressed by the custodians of the emergent rational-technical cultural field. Consider, for instance, his dealings with Henry Cole, the first Director of the South Kensington Museum. Brown, who deplored opportunism and careerism, associated Cole with the sophomoric machinations of a new class of cultural oligarchs. In the Diary, Cole epitomises what Brown took to be the insidious, self-serving character of the cultural bureaucrat, a kind of modern sophist who introduces techniques and technologies of administration to exercise personal control over important aspects of the public realm. Cole’s ‘enterprise’, Brown implied, was no more than a vehicle for furthering his own interests, a perception likely to be shared by anyone familiar with Cole’s tenaciously self-promoting autobiography, which declares, in tedious detail, how his mania for investigating, counting, inspecting and regulating, laid the foundations for the creation of the entire Victorian art world.105 In any regard, Brown saw Cole’s elephantine ego as the internalisation of a managerial system dedicated to ‘throttling’ independently minded artists.106 As an opposition to Cole’s creed of calculating, can-do Utilitarianism, Brown favoured the Germanic tradition of philosophical Idealism. William Cave Thomas, one of his closest friends, was a leading advocate of this school of aesthetics, which upheld intuitional thinking and argued for the primacy of the imagination as source of knowledge.107 Although Brown continued to recommend other forms of art theory, especially the popular-expressive model proposed by Hogarth, he spoke favourably of Romantic aesthetics in his lectures to art students, and Blake, the greatest exponent of this strand of thought in British culture, comes in for lavish praise in the same writings.108 The bigger picture here is that these artists, each in their own way, seemed to announce a condition of cultural life based on the principle of cooperating individuals. 96

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In consequence, Brown was able to dismiss the Royal Academy on the grounds that it favoured manufactured individuation over expressive individualism, and because it upheld the ritualised interests of landed classes.109 To this end, he stopped trying to exhibit at the Royal Academy annual exhibition by the mid-1850s and engaged with other exhibiting societies in Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. When obliged to show works in London, he exhibited at the Free Exhibition of Modern Art (1849); later he financed and curated the first exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art held at Russell Place, Fitzroy Square, in 1857, before becoming one of the founders, and then chairman, of the Hogarth Club in 1858. In 1865, he organised a solo exhibition in Piccadilly, which included a self-authored catalogue.110 Alongside the Diary, Brown’s self-authored catalogue has been underestimated in the scholarly literature on Victorian art – and in publications reflecting on Victorian life-writing and professionalisation. It is, however, a significant document in which Brown endorses the view that culture is a mode of social engagement. More broadly, it indicates that he adhered to the idea that modern art must be an art of conviction and energy, an attitude he would have encountered when exposed to works by Delacroix and other Romantics. Furthermore, the catalogue advances the view that modern painting renews itself by representing subjects associated with idea of popular sovereignty. These beliefs come across in several entries, which, for the sake of brevity, are conflated here: Wickliff, whose reforming tendencies seem to have embraced social as well as religious topics, like most of the other great religious innovators, used to inculcate contempt of mundane cares and vanities, going barefooted in cassock of the coarsest material … [The Last of England] is in the strictest sense historical. It treats of the great emigration movement which attained its culminating point in 1852. The educated are bound to their country by quite other ties than the illiterate man, whose chief consideration is food and physical comfort … [Cromwell on his Farm] [a]t this date … when Cromwell was engaged in cattle farming, the electrical unease of nerves which is felt by nations prior to the bursting of psychological storm, seems to have produced in him a state of exalted religious fervour mingled with hypochondria.111

Brown’s explanation of Work is equally significant, seeing that it incorporates the contingency of working-class labour into an account of the underlying environmental conditions of the scene: Through [Work] I have gained some experience of the navvy class … [they are] serious, intelligent men, and with much to interest in their conversation, which, moreover, contains about the same amount of morality and sentiment that is commonly found among men in the active and hazardous walks of life; for that their career is one of hazard and danger, none should doubt … I have only to observe … that the effect of hot July sunlight … has been introduced, because it seems peculiarly fitted to display work in all its severity, and not from any predilection for this kind of light over any other.112

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It will be immediately evident that these comments on the composition of the social order relate to Brown’s broader convictions concerning popular sovereignty and distributive justice. The cumulative effects of these interests can be traced in the Diary. Half-way through a long, self-lacerating account of his lethargic progress on The Last of England (1855), Brown breaks off to note that there are no lamp candles in his unheated house. He goes on to state that despite his modest prices, D. T. White, his dealer, never visits his studio, before adding: ‘What chance is there for me out of all the Bodies, Institutions, Art Unions & academies & Commissions of this country. Classes sects or cotteries [sic], Nobles, dealers, patrons rich men or friends. Which one takes an interest in me or my works. Is it encouraging to go on?’113 These comments should be related to another matter, for it provides a context for understanding Brown’s position within the wider social world. It is well known that his unsteady economic situation was offset by a small family inheritance, but it is the business-end of the domestic world that is given much more attention in the Diary.114 The 1850s were years of real hardship in the Brown household.115 He notes, in the winter of 1855, ‘Dreadfully nervous, anxiety about immediate wants & the melancholy prospects of future ruin.’ The previous year he records: This morning … [Dante] Gabriel [Rossetti] not yet having done his cart & talking quite freely about several days yet, having been here since the first Novr & not seeming to note any hints, moreover the two children being here & one stupid girl insufficient for so much work Emma [his wife] being within a week or two of her confinement & he having had his bed made on the floor in the parlour one week now & not getting up till eleven, & moreover making himself infernally disagreeable besides my finances being reduced to £2.12s which must last till 20th January, I told him delicately he must go … This evening inconceivably dejected & stupid … Emma about to be confined, £ 2.10 in the house, Christmas box to be paid out of this & the children taken back to Gravesend & not one person in the world I would ask to lend me a pound – no one that buys my picters [sic], Damn old White.116

At the end of the year he records that his shoes were ‘unsound in wet weather’ – and that his bedroom window ‘would no longer close’. The first entry for 1855 states that his dress coat, trousers, waistcoat, necktie – plus various items belonging to his wife – had been bundled off to a pawnbroker. A few weeks later he visits a moneylender and at one stage walks ‘about 18 miles in snow’, to avoid transport costs.117 And yet, Brown’s approach to finance is truly remarkable. He provides cash to friends, even when he is short of funds, and then asks debtors to recirculate loans to others in distress rather than repay him. His version of economic redistribution implies that he connected money with the idea of public good.118 This spirit of sympathy for those in distress indicates that associational life and philanthropic support were important aspects of a value system based on hospitality and loyalty, qualities of common culture advanced 98

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in the Manchester murals through The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers and Chetham’s Life Dream.119 By extension, then, compassion, justice and welfare should be seen as the guiding principles in Brown’s idiosyncratic reworking of the relationship between political economy and cultural practice.120 Another aspect of the Diary merits comment. It is evident that it offers a critical account of the profit-driven entrepreneurship at the centre of the art world. More specifically, it reveals the edge of a cultural scene which is at once related to, yet cut off from, the world of commercial abundance and human productivity arising from the industrial and manufacturing system of ­mid-Victorian Britain. At the same time, Brown creates a vivid portrait of the mediated nature of the art market, as well as its instability and points of blockage. Some of these matters are explored when Brown populates the art market and its mechanisms with real people: the dealers, agents, critics and patrons who claimed to represent its specialised operations. Brown’s usual dealer, D. T. White, dubbed a ‘cunning old rogue’, gets plenty of coverage.121 Collectors of Brown’s works in the 1850s included Francis McCracken, a cotton manufacturer from Belfast, John Miller, a tobacco merchant from Liverpool, and T. E. Plint, a stockbroker from Leeds.122 The next step in my argument is to relate this ensemble of personal, social and institutional forces to Brown’s attempt to make himself into a public artist. In 1843 the Fine Arts Commission offered £2,000 in prizes for cartoons on a subject from British history or literature.123 The entries, from established and emerging artists, were displayed in the medieval Westminster Hall in a series of exhibitions between 1843 and 1844.124 As one would expect, most of the exhibitors subscribed to the jurisprudential paradigm of parliamentary sovereignty outlined by the commissioners.125 Brown’s submission, Spirit of Justice (1844–45) (Figure 2.4), which proved to be unsuccessful, did not adhere to the conventions followed by other competitors in the scheme.126 Nevertheless, it caught the attention of the notoriously hard-to-please Benjamin Robert Haydon, who noted: ‘The only bit of fresco fit to look at is by Ford Madox Brown. It is a figure of “Justice”, and exquisite as far as that figure goes.’127 Haydon, a history painter, using the idiom of connoisseurship, was impressed by the boldness of the design, its unusual expressiveness, rather than the subject matter, which represents the abuse of privilege by a medieval nobleman.128 In this respect, Haydon fails to detect that Brown’s vision of medievalist social activism was designed to question the standard model of constitutional history. It is important to stress that the crucial turning point in Brown’s perception of the social value of painting took place before the advent of Pre-Raphaelitism in the late 1840s. Spirit of Justice confirms Brown’s interest in creating an art of common politics by drawing attention to the connection between political liberty and social welfare.129 As a result, he offers a vivid model of what authority looks like from the position of the ‘plebeian’ subject, the petitioning widow in the foreground.130 Note, too, that he actualises justice by placing its personification in a concrete situation, one where this enraged and underprivileged 99

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Figure 2.4  Ford Madox Brown, Spirit of Justice, 1844–45

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widow protests ‘against the oppression of a perverse and powerful Baron, who is assisted by a hired adviser, and supported by the wealth of his father’.131 In other words, by stressing the communicative value of the widow, Brown pictures a world where outraged feeling confronts institutional power. It is important to stress that this sense of division and conflict is expressed in bodily terms: the dynamic immediacy of the petitioning widow is encapsulated in the dramatic force of her thrusting hand, which, pointing at the baron, is a stimulus for action.132 His posture, at once languid and defiant, indicates aristocratic hauteur. The widow’s head turns away from the viewer to engage with the situation by appealing to Justice, the figure at the apex of the image, but the baron stares at the widow in an act of pure contempt. The widow lives in this moment and attempts to galvanise the agent of the law. She resides in history; he is abstracted from it. She is a burst of energy, a manifestation of common nobility; he is no more than a common example of crushing and brutalising power.133 In summary, what all this means is that Brown’s social activist vision of history spotlights different sensibilities, values and mentalities. Brown pits schematic format against situated event, ‘structured formalism’ against ‘human life’, a pictorial system he went on to amplify in The Trial of Wyclif.134 He offers the viewer a confrontational world where two forms of social being – two forms of identity – face each other. The heraldic world of jurisprudence and constitutional law is brought into contact with the mercurial world of human feeling and social subjection: abstractions of legal theory and political power are confronted by a full-blooded representation of the common people. Unjust distortions of the social order, it is implied, will be corrected when the common widow and the figure of Justice overcome the bisected space in which their mediated encounter takes place. In all this, Brown mobilises the stylistic procedures of modern (neo-medievalist) German art, with its interest in decorative surface pattern, to question the social logic of that art: the idea that members of the medieval aristocracy were more caring than the impersonal agencies of modern society. There is another point, too, of real importance to consider here. Brown’s design gives credence to the struggle against social elites by the actualisation of a dispute about misrule. Public opinion, in the form of the petition, is articulated in juridical terms.135 Yet, in imagining the social order in these terms, Brown breaks with the idea of pictorial symmetry. With her billowing dress, part of which is broken by the border, the widow disturbs the patterning of the image, calling attention to its schematic properties. She is made from the compound of two pictorial features: the top section of the body, an inverted L shape, suggests compressed power; the bottom section of the body, a whirl of lines, suggests propulsive movement. This mixture of mechanical and athletic gusto – where the body is the result of reinforcing cross-currents or poly-rhythms – would become one of the dominant graphic elements in Brown’s Manchester murals, some of which set out to represent moments of exhilaration. Part emblem, part tableau and part situation, Spirit of Justice represents a moment where attention moves between the representative of a social group 101

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(the widow) and the representation of a social system (Justice). In keeping with the protocols of academic art theory, the conclusion to the petition is not represented. Even so, the outcome – the vindication of ordinary truth over baronial power – is suggested by the widow. As expressed here, she bypasses the repetitions of clerical-statist justice in the depthless rows in the middle of the design, to appeal to ‘higher’ beings at the top of the design. Her movement suggests that she is in the process of transferring her gaze from Justice to Mercy, which is to say, from the personification of power to the personification of the common people. Put differently, Brown’s social activist image historicises the category of the political nation: the widow draws attention to the immobilised forms of legalistic constitutionalism standing between herself and Justice; and her gestures call into question the authority of those figures and symbols associated with the belief in the providential ordering of British society. The radical physicality of Brown’s interpretation of justice and law comes to the fore when compared to a more conventional realisation of the subject in another design submitted to the Westminster scheme: A female in chains is represented appealing to the tribunal for justice; she is pointing to the broken law. Above is seen a council of wise men. In the centre is seated the figure of Justice, in one hand holding the scales, with the other resting on the globe. She is trampling on the Dragon, the emblem of tyranny and sin, and is attended by the Angel of Judgement with the sword of justice on one side, and on the other side by an Angel of Peace, holding in her hand the table of the law.136

Here tension exists within, and is contained by, the self-perpetuating terms of academic allegory, a system designed to manage engagement with the material forms of the social world. In contradistinction to this vision of constitutional history, Brown creates a form of rowdy and disordering medievalism where public life is neither polite nor ornamental, and where Mercy takes the form of a peasant woman. We have seen enough, I hope, to begin to understand how Spirit of Justice connects historical experience to popular sovereignty, and so departs from the critical preoccupations of academic painting. Nowhere is this clearer than in Brown’s attitude to pictorial organisation, which compresses planes to assert the perceptual and bodily power of the widow. Just as she sets out to make the grandiose world of the dignitaries uncomfortable, so Brown replaces a generalised version of medieval history with a living vision of medieval liberty. Everything revolves around the concentrated energy of the widow, the most active figure in the design. In effect, Brown depicts the socialisation of a mental universe in which a representative of the common people insists on making her own viewpoint the subject of the representation of historical experience. Aligned to this, he transforms national history into a form of political demonstration, thus mobilising the contemporary discourse of public opinion through a medievalist rhetoric of popular feeling. 102

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Much of the idiosyncrasy of Brown’s work results from this need to draw attention to the complexity and richness of social feeling, an approach to the social order that chimes with forms of radicalism advanced in the 1840s. Where some of the Chartist writers set out to develop a popular aesthetic, one which responded to the crisis of authority, so Brown developed an activist aesthetic opposed to the academic model of representation.137 His interest in strategies for change arising from the experience of modern life extended to his treatment of gesture and expression. As noted in an important article by Nick Tromans, many commentators recoiled from what they considered to be Brown’s misguided interest in facial or bodily distortion.138 In what follows, I want to contribute to this valuable line of thinking by contesting the idea that Brown’s interest in melodramatic forms should be seen as evidence of a taste for bizarre and vulgar subjects. The chief reason for this error, I believe, has been a general failure to appreciate how Brown’s distinctive version of the real was a response to the agenda established by the Fine Art Commissioners and their academic allies. This concern with melodrama was not a formal exercise.139 In fact, it enabled Brown to connect modern medievalism and common politics through a culture of popular feeling.140 Melodrama was, of course, a public system in its own right. Mass circulation periodicals, such as the Art-Union, supported cognate programmes, especially the neo-Hogarthian strand of British art associated with articulations of common humanity.141 These attempts to free pictorial representation from conventions of gentility and respectability relate to the continuing authority of the social dimension of Romanticism, the desire to force a distinct shift in aesthetic perception by spotlighting subjects from everyday life.142 Seen like this, melodrama, which called into question the distinction between aesthetic and the social dimensions of life, was a way of developing a new conversation about representing the body of the common people. I have used the term ‘activist’ to this point at a generalised level to suggest that Brown was concerned with identifying imagery arising from collective experience in one form or another. Now is the time to deepen this reading by arguing that melodrama is the vehicle by which Spirit of Justice connects social activism with History Painting. Awareness of this process begins when we note that melodrama establishes the look of a world where the most significant figures signal division and conflict. Moreover, melodrama explains the insurgent and labile nature of the widow as the subject of suffering and wronged humanity, and it confirms the purpose of a pictorial arrangement in which foreground and background are in the processes of being moulded into a single critical unit.143 Melodrama is what gives the widow a strong and vivid presence in this otherwise self-contained world of jurisprudence. Instead of seeing Spirit of Justice as a stuttering distortion of realism, then, it is more helpful to reconnect it with the socio-conceptual world into which it was born. Spirit of Justice is a ‘Life Dream’: the transformation of the mass open-air meeting or public platform into a rowdy artwork, the reimagining of the spaces in which national history is made. It is an activist image that takes seriously the discourses of social 103

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radicalism, all which were motivated by ideas of political division and social welfare. Moreover, it gestures to a cultural world where traditional History Painting, with its displays of gravitas, politeness and servility, is eliminated by an operatic system of engagement, protest and confusion. Melodrama licensed the extreme physicality noticeable in many of Brown’s paintings and drawings. It helped him reimagine History Painting as an ‘appeal’ to the common people. It proclaimed that humans are creatures of sense and it encouraged him to believe that by developing hyperbolic images it was possible to force spectators to see history as conflict of one kind or another. Hence, his melodramatic images are ‘democratic’ in the larger sense that they refer to an open system of will and imagination. They are contributions to his worldview, at the centre of which is human vitality. In this respect, they relate to and supersede those semi-forgotten projects and appeals, at once artistic and agitational, formulated by the Foggo brothers and other opponents of the Royal Academy, most of whom, treating painting as an extension of the social sciences or as a mode of historical consciousness, set out to find subjects that affirmed the growth of common life. Stated more prosaically, Spirit of Justice is a pictorial counterpart of Brown’s confrontation with institutions of authority. Its manic forcefulness may have been designed to instantiate a sense of what he imagined the newly politicised classes felt themselves to be. In any case, this innovative work deploys the rhetoric of melodrama within a critical setting where power is expressed in terms of the force and fraud imagery of popular radicalism, with its division between signs of liberty and tyranny. In framing my argument in these terms, I am suggesting that Brown took an active interest in those sites of debate (public art programmes, the art gallery, the press, the stage, cultural meetings and gatherings) where models of political sovereignty were proposed, disputed and amplified. At this point it might be helpful to stand back and make a wider point about how we can understand the authority Brown attributed to the painted image. I think it is essential to distinguish between multi-dimensional and ­mono-dimensional forms of critical interpretation. My preference, as should be apparent by this stage, is for a multi-dimensional reading, on the grounds that it restores issues of agency to processes and practices of art-making, and so avoids those crass simplifications which result in the identification of the scholar as a heroic edge-walker – someone whose primary job is to supply the master theory that the hapless artist struggles to understand or represent.144 With this in mind, it is possible to complete our discussion of Spirit of Justice by considering some of its unusual tectonic characteristics. The principal observation is that this pictorial world is held together by a series of interlocking shallow planes. It follows that in the absence of perspectival markers, the viewer is obliged to attend to the disposition of figures. The symmetrical organisation of the design, with figures segmented into four layers, creates a sense of intimacy and vitality. At the top and the bottom, the viewer 104

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discovers subjects who represent the everyday world; in the middle rows we see figures who are supposed to conceptualise the world. This bold arrangement – which separates action and abstraction – supports the thesis that the design is meant to represent the incarnation of justice, a process involving two forms of visualisation. In the first instance, we see abstract representations of justice – the phalanx of Lords Spiritual and Temporal in the middle of the design. These figures enter the image as disembodied types denoting status or character. In the second instance, Justice cups her ear to hear the appeal of the petitioning widow. These two figures look like each other, their bodies display the same bulky physicality, and they indicate a similar capacity for active life. But this is not all, for Brown’s lighting of figures is equally inventive. The light source that illuminates Justice explains the lighting key of the bottom portion of the widow’s dress. The diagonal shaft of light, which connects Justice and the widow, frontalises the design and suggests the urgency of their encounter. Nor should we overlook the fact that the widow, a mixture of physicality and luminosity, is given far greater material resolution than the centrally placed Lords, all of whom are denuded of volume. Conceived in these terms, image-lighting is used to express the gusto of historical life, which is played out as the dramatic interplay between two realisations of the common people. The question arises, of course, whether Brown’s stylised reimagining of medieval society does indeed function as a coherent aesthetic system, one in which composition is transformed into a type of pictorial confrontation. To address this matter, I will complete the reading of Spirit of Justice with a few reflections on how Brown draws the viewer into the world on view through the association of the body with edge points. For instance, the object edges – the shoulders and arms of the baron, the gesticulating arm of the widow, the clinging arm of the infant – are emphatic. So, too, is the massive hand of the widow which scoops the second child. Brown’s interest in bodily presence explains the unusual appearance of Justice. For certain, her foreshortened left arm, as out of scale as the widow’s left hand, suggests human engagement rather than the condition of detachment encountered in conventional pictorial representations of jurisprudence. Thus conceived, edging becomes an expression of pictorial logic; it indicates that Brown used zigzag patterns and angular lines to suggest the strength and gusto of common people, an attitude developed in the Manchester murals where he represents the hectic animation of ordinary subjects. We know this much at least: in the radical activist medievalism of Spirit of Justice, the powerful hand of the widow acts as a sign of human spirit, a marker of an ability to generate new patterns of civil association from the codifications of the feudal order.145 Likewise, the common subjects in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers (Plate 4) allowed Brown to shift his focus from aristocratic visions of medievalism. This is noticeable in the treatment of the workers in the foreground, all of whom are given greater physical presence than the royal group in the middle of the design. These workers are powerfully concentrated 105

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articulations of Brown’s belief that one way of depicting community life is through representations of expressive labour. With both Spirit of Justice and The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers, then, medievalism is the prism through which Brown sees the plebeian classes as active, sensory agents working within disordering historical processes to set their own rhythms, generate their own identities – and so establish their own life dreams. To return to the subject of melodrama. It is my belief that it is present in several early works, including The Execution of Mary Stuart, The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror and Spirit of Justice. These images were designed to mobilise what Brown hoped would be a new visual community interested in direct expression and ‘sensationalism’. Melodrama offered, or seemed to offer, an inclusive and overarching vision of common life, a democracy of feeling and response. In this regard, Brown’s productions of the 1840s set out to extend the nature of activist art. The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror (1844–61) (Figure 2.5) is an uncommonly strong version of this attempt to harness the attention-seeking qualities of melodrama to the rhetoric of feeling arising from radical politics. Instead of dividing Saxons from Normans, Brown

Figure 2.5 Ford Madox Brown, The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror (Willelmus Conquistator), 1844–61 106

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presents the armies as one gigantic ball of confusion. History, seen in these terms, is the struggle between different expressions of the common people, the bubbling up of competing subjects to confound the self-contained compositions of academic History Painting. Even King William and King Harold, sovereign forms, are made to express the intermixed nature of the wider social body. Here, as elsewhere in Brown’s art, gusto is part of an appeal to a social world ignored by academic culture.146 It is likely that this ‘first wave’ of interest in activist History Painting coincided with a belief in the popular efficacy of melodrama, which may have ebbed somewhat by the end of the 1850s, when Brown found it increasingly difficult to make an impression in the art world.147 It can be remarked in passing, that the relative decline of Chartism after 1848 made it more difficult to imagine a cultural project based on trans-class foundations. All the same, Brown’s interest in the physicality of melodrama, with its emphasis on urgency and heterogeneity, should be related to Carlyle’s understanding of historical representation. As noted in Chapter 1, Brown and Carlyle are linked on several different critical levels. It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that Brown was an exegete of the Word of Carlyle. On the contrary, he could be sceptical about some aspects of Carlyle’s work.148 Nonetheless, Brown was fascinated by Past and Present, which deepened and enriched his understanding of the connection between historical memory and the organisation of social life. In Carlyle’s view, to see history is to be enveloped by a form of sensory atmosphere – to feel and breathe its fragmented forms. Carlyle was instrumental in the development of the modern concept of environment as fluxional living space. His attitude was endorsed by Brown in numerous works, including Geoffrey Chaucer Reading the ‘Legend of Custance’ to Edward III and his Court (1847–51), where the treatment of environmental setting brings the past alive. Brown described this reanimated everyday world thus: [it was] ‘the first in which I endeavoured to carry out the notion … of treating light and shade absolutely, as it exists at any one moment, instead of approximately, or in generalised style. Sunlight a bit too bright, such as is pleasant to sit in out of doors, is here depicted.’149 Seen against the background of Carlyle’s thought as a whole, it becomes possible to make sense of Brown’s plastic thinking. For instance, Carlyle’s concept of the ‘Eye of History’ relates to Brown’s idea of the ‘Life Dream’, the capacity to see history in terms of human transformation. At its most basic level, the ‘Eye of History’ confirmed that historical understanding was both visual and discursive. The true historian, Carlyle implies, must picture historical life through his or her inner eye. This is particularly evident in Past and Present, which is constructed as a network of visualising processes designed to make the past luminous again. History consisted of fragments, he believed, and the purpose of historical research was to discover what held those fragments together. History was a kind of conductive system, the energy transmitted between subjects across great expanses of time and space. Instead of producing linear narrative structures arising from the principle of factuality, the true historical investigator equated knowing with 107

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seeing, feeling and revivifying the miscellany of things extinguished alongside the vanished past. I have referred to similarities of purpose and strategy in Carlyle and Brown, both of whom were drawn to a bodily view of representation. Earlier in this chapter I described how Brown’s social activist art arose from his interest in a cluster of social, cultural and political topics. I went on illustrate this point by discussing Spirit of Justice, which, in keeping with Brown’s disposition to splice figures into parallel bands, compacts lower and upper sections of the design to affirm their importance as representatives of universal or common experience. It was established that this association of the pictorial field with figural presence is a feature of the Manchester murals. These examples demonstrate that Brown’s primary concern was with the subjective conditions of life, not the objective validity of method. In saying this I am making two points. First, what he called the ‘Life Dream’ was annexed to the Carlylean term the ‘Eye of History’, in that both were dynamic systems set up to record the vital energies of history. Second, we should recognise that Carlyle treated the ‘Eye of History’ as a modern gestalt, a way of framing the environmental life of the past. With all this in mind, it is time to turn our attention to the representation of Manchester, another optical-ecological fantasia, which is the subject of the first section in Chapter 3. Notes 1 FMH, pp. 392, 404. 2 F. M. Hueffer, ‘Nice People’, Temple Bar, 128 (November 1903), 572. 3 Personal note from Brown to Ford Madox Hueffer, and letter from Brown to unidentified recipient, in FMH, pp. 63, 179. 4 F. M. Brown, The Exhibition of Work, and other Paintings (London: M’Corquodale & Co., 1865), p. 5. 5 See, among so much, D. S. MacColl, Nineteenth Century Art (Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1902), who summarises this tradition, albeit with modifications to the socialistic impulses found in the writings of Thoré, Hugo and Zola. It is highly likely that Brown was familiar with Thoré’s account of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857), written under the pseudonym William Bürger, where realism is identified as a manifestation of common consciousness. See W. Bürger [Thoré], Les Trésors d’art en Angleterre (Paris: Veuve J. Renouard, 1857), pp. viii–x. This viewpoint – where the main principle of the idea of society as it develops in history is universality – would be extended by various British Comtean groups from the 1870s. For an illuminating discussion of Comtean thought in this period, see T. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). William Hazlitt predicted some of the universalist principles of mid- and late nineteenth-century discourses on realism: see, for instance, ‘Introduction to an Account of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses’, The Champion (27 November 1814), in Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 320–1. 108

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6 The most dazzling example of literature in this vein is M. Fried, Manet’s Modernism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999). It is worth noting, however, that although Fried has produced highly original books on Courbet and Menzel, he has nothing of any real value to say about Victorian painting and art theory. True, Ruskin makes a fleeting appearance in his account of Menzel, but is then eliminated from proper discussion on the quasi-connoisseurial grounds that he supported ‘the lamentable Pre-Raphaelites’. See M. Fried, Menzel’s Realism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 154. The fascinating history of the interplay between connoisseurship, canon formation and critical theory has yet to be written. 7 Brown’s awareness of these matters is evident from a statement to George Rae, his patron and friend: ‘I am going to lecture to the members of the Birmingham and Midlands Institutes … I have chosen for subjects … The Latest Phase of Modern Art and Style in Painting. In the first I propose to show that the innovations so much talked about of myself are nothing more than the rule at present with all leading European artists.’ Letter to George Rae, 31 August 1873, George Rae Papers, National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Gallery on loan to Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. See also, Ford Madox Brown, The Slade Professorship: Address to the Very Rev. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, pamphlet, 20 December 1872, pp. 1–8, where modern art is seen through the prism of realism. 8 In 1866 Brown informed William Michael Rossetti: ‘I want to speak with you someday about Stendhal’s book Le Rouge et le Noir, which is indeed a remarkable work. I am reading it slowly and savouring it, for it deserves attention … Had I not known it, I should have set it down to Balzac, but it is still more Shakespearian, and more imbued with Hamlet’s subtleness.’ See FMH, p. 228. See also, FMB, 4 September 1847, pp. 2–3; September 1847, p. 7; 16 December 1847, p. 20; 12 February 1848, p. 30; 2 April 1848, p. 40. Brown refers to his portrait of Shakespeare, commissioned by the Dickinson brothers for lithographic reproduction, in the entry for 3 November 1849, p. 68. 9 The corpse in Brown’s The Prisoner of Chillon (1856), after Byron’s poem of the same title, is indebted to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. See MB, vol. 1, pp. 5, 14, 24, 26; vol. 2, p. 444, for helpful details on Brown’s training. See also, FMB, 2 December 185, p. 157, where Brown observes ‘I have always stuck up for Delacroix although seeing but few of his works’. Likewise, Brown was responsive to works by British Romantics, such as Francis Danby and William Etty, as demonstrated by entries for 8 February 1848, p. 29; and 30 August 1854, p. 87. 10 See Fried, Manet, pp. 66–135, for a wonderfully rich account of this matter. 11 Manfred in the Chamois Hunter’s Hut (1840) is another example of Brown’s interest in Rembrandt. See FMH, pp. 28–9, 41, 407–9, for more on Brown’s engagement with Rembrandt and Holbein. 12 George Bernard Shaw announced that Brown ‘is more of a realist than Rembrandt … You can all but breathe his open air, warm yourself in his sun … Rembrandt would have died rather than paint a cabbage unconditionally green, or meddle with those piercing aniline discords of colour which modern ingenuity has extracted from soot and other unpromising materials … Brown took to Paisley shawls and magenta ribbons and genuine greengrocer’s cabbages as kindly as Wagner took to “false harmony”.’ See Shaw, ‘Madox Brown, Watts and Ibsen’, Our Theatres in The Nineties, vol. 3, p. 71. 109

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13 Such works may reflect a muted awareness of subjects tackled by Flemish Realists, although Joseph Stevens’s best-known works in this idiom did not appear until the late 1840s. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s introductory letter to Brown, March 1848, waxes lyrical about Brown’s early works: ‘Since the first time I ever went to an exhibition … I have always listened with avidity if your name happened to be mentioned, and rushed first of all to your number in the Catalogue.’ W. M. Rossetti (ed.), D.G. Rossetti: his Family letters with a Memoir (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895), vol. 1, pp. 116–17. 14 As remembered by William Michael Rossetti, and cited by Hueffer, in FMH, p. 20, who notes, at p. 19, that Brown called Kirke a ‘monster’. Charles Rowley thought that ‘one of Brown’s most lovable qualities was his touching affection for suffering and distress. While in Manchester he often took boys and girls who were badly shod in wintry weather and bought them shoes or clogs.’ Rowley, Fifty Years of Work Without Wages, p. 107. 15 By the end of the decade he argued that the Renaissance was in part responsible for the eradication of energetic vision by the introduction and perpetuation of a cultural system favourable to academic drones. See F. M. Brown, ‘On the Influence of Antiquity on Italian Art’, The Builder (2 December 1848), 580–1. 16 See, for instance, FMB, 4 September 1847, p. 2, where Brown identifies Byron and Shakespeare as his favourite writers. See also, W. M. Rossetti, ‘Ford Madox Brown: Characteristics’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, New Series, 1 (1886), 48–54, for a highly perceptive account of how Brown’s art can be modelled as a combination of interests found in Shakespeare and Romanticism. Shakespeare and Byron are represented in Brown’s The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry (1853); the names of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth appear on cartouches carried by the putti. 17 William Michael Rossetti, who thought Delacroix was the greatest modern artist, claimed that for ‘dramatic power and invention’ Brown’s King Lear drawings were ‘far superior’ to Delacroix’s famous Hamlet lithographs. See W. M. Rossetti, ‘Mr. Madox Brown’s Exhibition’ Fraser’s Magazine (May 1865), 606. Hueffer, in FMH, p. 37, was equally impressed: ‘Rough and ostentatiously unfinished as they are, there need be little hesitation in calling them one of the most, if not the most, effective and vigorous series of designs for any of Shakespeare’s plays.’ 18 See Victor Hugo, ‘Preface’ to Cromwell [1827], in E. H and A. M. Blackmore (trans. and eds), The Essential Hugo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 16–53. Similar comments are found in Brown’s lectures: see MSL 1995/174, Box 45, Lectures on Art I, pp. 73–4; Lecture on Art II, pp. 6–7, p. 27; Lecture on Art III, pp. 11–12, where he states, ‘I care not who began the reform first, but with the expiring falsity [of dark shadows and studio lighting] goes out the last hindrance to pure realism in painting’ (FMBV&A). 19 A detailed account of the relationship between Aristotle’s theory of entelechy, the idea of dynamic creative matter, and nineteenth-century art theory has yet to be written. 20 F. M. Brown, ‘On the Mechanism of a Historical Painting’, The Germ (2 February 1850), 71. Brown’s allegiance to this critical idiom may explain why he showed little interest in Turner’s later works, many of which spotlighted humanity’s struggle with nature.

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21 Brown appears to have read R. Monckton Milnes, The Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (London: Moxon, 1848). For further details on this matter, see FMB, p. 46. 22 Keats presents Shakespeare as the great master of Negative Capability: ‘that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. H. E. Rollin (ed.), The Letters of John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 193–4. 23 Bennett reproduces contemporary reviews in which Brown is identified as a romantic artist. See, for example, MB, vol. 1, p. 333. 24 Brown called Hugo the ‘greatest of modern French poets’, Berlioz ‘the greatest of the French composers’ and Wagner ‘the Shakespeare of music’. See MSL 1995/14, Box 45, Lectures on Art’, I, pp. 201, 34, FMBV&A. 25 Brown produced the title page and five illustrations for W. M. Rossetti (ed.), The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (London: E. Moxon Son & Co., 1870). 26 Other subjects taken from Byron include The Prisoner of Chillon (1843), The Corsair (1869), Don Juan and Haidee (1870), Sardanapalus (1871) and Byron’s Dream (1874). For an overview of Brown’s interest in Byron, see FMH, pp. 30–1; and Meisel, ‘Pictorial Engagements’, 579–603. 27 For more on this matter, see Trodd, ‘Culture and Energy’, in Trodd, Barlow and Amigoni (eds), Victorian Culture, pp. 61–77. 28 Carlyle to J. S. Mill, 17 December 1833, in Sanders et al. (eds), The Carlyle Letters, vol. 7, p. 52. 29 W. Hazlitt, ‘On Old English Writers and Speakers’ [1821], in P. P. Howe (ed.), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930–34), vol. 12, p. 322. 30 I am thinking here of the Eastlakes, surely one of the key intellectual forces in the British art world from the 1830s. For an excellent account of their combined cultural impact, see S. Avery-Quash and J. Sheldon, Art for the Nation: The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012). The reader interested in discovering more about this complicated moment in British art should examine four additional important productions: N. Tromans, David Wilkie: The People’s Painter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); D. Blayney Brown, R. Woof and S. Hebron, Benjamin Robert Haydon 1786–1846 (Kendal: The Wordsworth Trust, 1996); J. Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and M. Myrone (ed.), John Martin: Apocalypse (London: Tate Britain, 2011).   Although the goal of my work is not to delineate the activities of those artists working in opposition to Pre-Raphaelitism, numerous important works by Paul Barlow have done so. See, for example, ‘Imagining Intimacy: Rhetoric, Love and the Loss of Raphael’, Visual Culture in Britain, 6:1 (2005), 15–36, which includes a brilliant reading of works by Henry O’Neil, a leading member of The Clique. Barlow’s unpublished manuscript, The Post-Hogarthians: The Clique in The Age of Pre-Raphaelitism argues that Henry O’Neil, E. M. Ward, Augustus Egg, Alfred Elmore and John Phillip produced neo-Hogarthian paintings that reflected self-consciously on themselves. These artists appear in Barlow’s groundbreaking Time Present and Time Past, at pp. 43–4, 90–2, 165, 183 and 206–8, where they are used to illustrate how Victorian painters approached the

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matter, of great importance in academic and romantic art theory, of using art to conceal art. They are absent from the extensive literature on the Pre-Raphaelites. Nonetheless, Brown joked about their paintings and lithographs. See FMB, 3 November 1847, p. 12. For more on the Foggos see P. Barlow and C. Trodd, ‘Constituting the Public: Art and its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century London’, pp. 1–29 and P. Barlow, ‘“Fire, Flatulence and Fog”: The Decoration of Westminster Palace and the Aesthetics of Prudence’, in P. Barlow and C. Trodd (eds), Governing Cultures: Art Institutions in Victorian London (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 69–84. Christopher Sells offers a fascinating account of a possible connection between the Foggos and Gericault in C. Sells, ‘After “The Raft of the Medusa”: Gericault’s Later Projects’, Burlington Magazine (August 1986), 563–71; and Barlow notes similarities between the Foggos and Delacroix in P. Barlow, ‘A Free Market in Mastery: Re-imagining Rembrandt and Raphael from Hogarth to Millais’, in M. C. Potter (ed.), The Concept of the ‘Master’ in Art Education in Britain and Ireland since 1770 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 47–62. The work, now lost, was exhibited at The Great Room, Madox Street, London, in 1822. A later review, in The Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres, Arts and Sciences, 25 June 1842, p. 444, commended a work ‘which has few, if any, parallels in our age of humble prettiness and marketable picture-manufactures’. Similar sentiments were expressed in the Art-Union, 1 June 1842, pp. 143–4. Much later, W. J. Linton described the Foggos as ‘painters of large and unsuccessful historical figure subjects, long since gone out of sight’. See W. J. Linton, Memories (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1895), pp. 176–7. See G. Foggo, A Letter to Lord Brougham on The History and Character of the Royal Academy (London: T. and W. Boone, 1835); and Results of the Parliamentary Inquiry Relative to Arts and Manufactures (London: T. and W. Boone, 1837), for particularly muscular engagements with the legal, organisational, cultural and political dimensions of the Royal Academy. The Foggo brothers are absent from the most recent ‘socio-political’ literature on the British art world: D. H. Solkin (ed.), The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001); S. Monks, J. Barrell and M. Hallet (eds), Living with The Royal Academy, 1768–1848 (Ashgate: Abingdon, 2013); and M. Quinn, Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013). They are little more than spear-carriers in M. Myrone, Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), which sets out to reconstruct some of the educational features of the British art world c.1770–1830. Foggo in H. G. Clarke, A Hand-Book Guide to the Cartoons, Frescos and Sculpture … now Exhibiting in Westminster Hall to which is prefixed the History and practice of Fresco Painting [by George Foggo] (London: Henry G. Clarke and Co., 1844), p. vii, and reprinted in H. G. Clarke, A Critical Examination of the Cartoons, Frescoes and Sculptures Exhibiting in Westminster Hall, to which is added the History of Fresco Painting (London: H. G. Clarke and Co., 1844), p. 56. The work produced for Macclesfield Town Hall, Nathan Reproving David, is lost. A contemporary account explained that the Town Hall had ‘an elegant Grecian edifice by [Francis] Goodwin [and] a picture by Foggo … decorates the entrance of

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the petty Session hall’. Leigh’s New Pocket Road-Book of England and Wales (London: Leigh and Son, 5th edn, 1837), p. 116. Before the Altar of St. Edmondsbury, The Barons Solemnly Swear to Procure from King John the Restoration of the Saxon Laws was praised by H. G. Clarke in A Critical Examination and Complete Catalogue of the Works of Art now Exhibiting in Westminster Hall, With Full Explanations (London: H. G. Clarke and Co., 1847), no. 21. 37 George Foggo, as reported in Report of the Proceedings at a Public Meeting held at the Freemason’s Hall (London: T. and W. Boone, 1837), pp. 29, 31, 32, 33. The relationship between the early Victorian art world and debating societies warrants further research. 38 Giving evidence before the Select Committee on Art Unions, George Foggo said that in a ‘commercial country almost everything requires to be done by individuals or by combination of individuals’. See Report from the Select Committee on Art Unions (1845), qu. 4662. 39 For a wonderfully rich and intelligent account of the historical background to this matter, see M. Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). 40 See Report of the Proceedings and Resolutions of the General Meeting of Artists Held at the Freemasons’ Tavern, December 17, 1841 (London: J. Oliver, 1843), pp. 17–18. George Foggo’s allies in Parliament included influential radicals, such as Joseph Hume and William Ewart, both of whom were instrumental in getting him to deliver evidence before various parliamentary commissions on art. Foggo’s proposals are discussed in Report from the Select Committee on the National Gallery (1853), qu. 511–30. At qu. 511, he envisions a government programme designed to make the National Gallery a site for ‘the instruction and improvement of the intellectual and moral condition of the people’; at qu. 527, he recommends ‘against Government interference in anything that individuals or combination of individuals might do for themselves’. 41 This matter was discussed in various settings. See, for instance, Anon., ‘The Royal Academy’, Westminster Review (July 1851), 394–429; and J. B. Atkinson, ‘London Exhibitions and London Critics’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (August 1858), 193–5. 42 Foggo in Clarke, A Hand-Book Guide to the Cartoons, vii. This fusion of work and creativity relates to the imagery in Sartor Resartus (sections of which were published to great public acclaim in Fraser’s Magazine in 1833 and 1834), in which Carlyle lauds the ‘the toil-worn Craftsman [who] conquers the Earth’. See TC, vol. 1, p. 181. 43 G. Foggo, evidence included in Report from the Select Committee (1853), at qu. 511–12. 44 What we can call ‘Foggoism’ may explain the popular-radical thinking behind Robinson Elliot’s lost and forgotten Negro Emancipation: Britannia Influenced by Charity and Justice, Vanquishes the Demon, Oppression, which was exhibited at Westminster Hall in 1847, where one commentator called it a ‘well-composed and expressive picture [but] the execution is feeble, inexperienced and unfinished’. See Clarke, A Critical Examination and Complete Catalogue of the Works of Art, no. 13. Brown, who knew and admired Elliot, comments on his work in the late 1840s. See, FMB, 16 October 1847, p. 10; 29 February 1848, p. 32; 25 March 1848, p. 36; 30 November 1848, p. 52; 19 January 1849, p. 56; and 23 February 1849, p. 59. 45 The quasi-Benthamite nature of their critical idiom may explain why they are absent from all thirty-nine volumes of Ruskin’s writings.

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46 The Foggo brothers had many significant allies, some of whom, such as Frederick Yeates Hurlstone, the President of the Society of British Artists, shared their distrust of the Royal Academy. Brown seems to have created the right impression on Hurlstone: see FMB, 31 October 1848, p. 12. 47 Two salient cases among so many. Lord Brougham, the Whig Home Secretary, announced in the House of Commons that supporters of factory legislation were no more than ‘victims of a misguided and perverted humanity’. See J. W. Dodds, The Age of Paradox: A Biography of England 1841–1851 (New York: Rinehart, 1952), p. 158. The Manchester Guardian, established in 1821 to continue the campaign for parliamentary reform and to assert the rights of those killed or injured in the Peterloo Massacre, had become, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a vehicle for the interests of Manchester cotton merchants in the struggle against those workers who refused to touch cotton picked by American slaves. 48 See P. Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 49 See C. H. Feinstein, ‘Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 58:3 (1988), 625–58, who notes that real wages for urban workers remained static between 1825 and 1850. 50 Anon., ‘Who is to Blame for the Condition of the People?’, The Economist (21 November 1846), 1517. 51 Brown was angry when another radical journal, Reynolds’s Miscellany, produced an unauthorised version of the woodcut on 21 October 1854. See FMB, 21 October 1854, p. 103, where G. W. M. Reynolds, the owner of the journal, is called ‘the infamous scoundrel’. See also, B. Maidment, ‘Magazines of Popular Progress & the Artisans’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 17:3 (1984), 83–94. 52 J. Saunders, People’s Journal (3 January 1846), 1. Brown records a meeting with Saunders in FMB, 17 June 1848, p. 44. Surtees notes that Brown may have used Saunders’s Cabinet Pictures of English Life: Chaucer (1845) for research on Geoffrey Chaucer Reading the ‘Legend of Custance’ to Edward III and his Court (1847–51). See FMB, p. 9. 53 There were, by 1843, 221,687 inmates in the workhouse system. Brown was brought into direct contact with this world: ‘[L]ost myself in Somerstown got into a place where there was no gas thought I should get my throat cut, persevered and after almost breaking my neck got into Kings Rd at last … good thing I found my way back to it again, reached it just by St. Pancras Workhouse.’ See FMB, 6 September 1847, pp. 4–5. 54 Carlyle, Past and Present [1843], TC, vol. 10, p. 1. For valuable readings of the workhouse system see K. Williams, From Pauperism to Poverty (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) and G. R. Boyer, An Economic History of the English Poor Law 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 55 Carlyle, Past and Present, TC, vol. 10, p. 209. 56 W. J. Linton, Bob Thin or the Poorhouse Fugitive (privately printed, 1845). The text was illustrated by Thomas Sibson, W. B. Scott and Linton. 57 ‘Supply-and demand is not the one Law of Nature; Cash-payment is Not the Sole Nexus of Man with Man’. Carlyle, Past and Present, TC, vol. 10, p. 232. See

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B. Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), for a seminal account of Bob Thin. 58 Linton, Bob Thin, p. 5. Linton went on to co-opt Oliver Cromwell into this vision of radical nationalism in ‘Britain’s Worthies: Oliver Cromwell’, Northern Tribune (December 1854), 409–14. Linton worked alongside the Rossetti brothers on Alexander Gilchrist’s posthumously published Life of William Blake (1863). 59 Another artist, one who moved in the same circles as Linton, shared this vision of precedent and tradition. Thomas Sibson adhered to an ideology of Anglo-Saxon hospitality, a world in which it was possible to discover the true fabric of national life. Sibson’s most interesting project, a set of designs entitled Saxon Arts (1842/43), was commissioned by Linton, who met Sibson via William Bell Scott. Linton went on to ask Sibson to produce an ‘illustrated History of English Civilization’, a radical project where ‘the social life of the English people should be dominant, and its epochs so distinguished, instead of by the reigns of Kings’. See W. Minto (ed.), Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott (London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1892), vol. 1, pp. 153–7; and Linton, Memories, pp. 68–70. 60 Gilchrist was one of Brown’s friends: see FMH, p. 182; and Trodd, Visions of Blake, pp, 242, 288–9. 61 Linton, overlooked by historians of Victorian art, knew Brown, Crane, Scott, George Cruikshank, Richard Dadd, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, the Rossetti brothers, and the Foggo brothers. On Linton’s interests and concerns, see F. B. Smith, Radical Artisan: William James Linton 1812–1897 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973); and J. Viscomi, ‘Blake after Blake: A Nation Discovers Genius’, in S. Clark and D. Worrall (eds), Blake, Nation and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 214–50. 62 Milnes, like many of these figures, was actively engaged in the world of culture. For an account of his literary interests, see Trodd, Visions of Blake, pp. 133–4, 216 and 292. 63 B. Disraeli, Sybil; or, The Two Nations (London: Longmans Green, 1845), p. 340. 64 FMB, 3 October 1854, p. 98. This statement recalls a famous passage from Carlyle’s Past and Present, one of Brown’s favourite works: ‘To whom … is the wealth of England wealth? Who is it that it blesses; makes happier, wiser, beautifuller, in any way better? Who has got hold of it, to make it fetch and carry for him, like a true servant, not like a mock-servant; to do him any real service whatsoever? As yet no one. We have more riches than any Nation ever had before; we have less good of them than any Nation ever had before’ (TC, vol. 10, p. 9). 65 FMB, 3 October 1854, p. 98. 66 FMB, 20 December 1855, p. 159. In another entry, 14 May 1855, p. 137, Brown notes a discussion with Woolner: ‘much politics, ending in gloomy apprehension for the British Empire’. The following year Woolner commends Brown for his rejection of ‘the maypole dance of fashion’ before advising him to seek patrons by living in central London, ‘and mix to some degree in society’. Dante Gabriel Rossetti made the same observations in a letter to Brown dated 2 October 1865. See FMH, pp. 108, 218. 67 FMB, 7 September 1855, p. 148. 68 FMB, 3 January 1855, p. 116: ‘At Dark walked to Hendon by a forbidden private foot path … Walked home again by the same … found the gate locked, clambered over it.’

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69 Soskice, Chapters from Childhood, p. 34. 70 See FMB, 20 February 1855, p. 123, for Brown’s critical comments on Palmerston (Home Secretary,1852–55; Prime Minister, 4 February 1855–February 1858). 71 W. M. Rossetti, letter to Kenningale Robert Cook, 9 July 1871, in R. W. Peattie (ed.), Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), p. 275; FMH, p. 401. 72 See O. Bornand (ed.), The Diary of W. M. Rossetti 1870–1873 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 195. As his granddaughter noted ‘[Brown] kept all the pictures he had painted and all the books he liked to read in a little room next to his own, and it was called “Oliver’s room.” [His son, Oliver Madox Brown, died in 1874 aged 19.] He had the key in his pocket, and he used to go in all alone and touch the things and look at them’. Soskice, Chapters from Childhood, p. 71. 73 T. Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, Edinburgh Review, 49 (June 1829), 349–59. Similar ideas were expressed by John Stirling, MP. Stirling and Carlyle were friends (Carlyle went on to write Stirling’s biography), and Brown knew Stirling’s daughter: see FMB, 27 January 1858, p. 200. 74 Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, 350. 75 Blake, ‘London’, Songs of Experience [1794], D. V. Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), pp. 26–7; Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, p. 351. 76 Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, 351. As D. O’Brien points out, in Exiled in Modernity (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), pp. 1–17, Delacroix held similar opinions. 77 Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, 360. 78 Lord Brougham was a leading member of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. 79 See B. Maidment, Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 144–208, for an extremely helpful account of visual representations of the ‘march of intellect’ discourse. 80 Hueffer, who had a vested interest in the matter, characterised Brown’s ­anti-authoritarianism thus: ‘In his early days he was nearly a Whig; in later life he was by temperament a good deal of a “Tory of the old school”, but his intellect made him a Socialist of an extreme type.’ FMH, p. 401. 81 Brown, The Exhibition, p. 14. On p. 13 he implies that Royal Academicians placed ‘facile completeness and handling, above painstaking research into nature’. Similar thoughts were aired by Géricault and Delacroix. See C. Clement, Géricault étude biographique et critique (Paris: Didier et Cie, 1879), pp. 239–49; and Hubert Wellington (ed.), The Journal of Eugène Delacroix (Oxford: Phaidon, 1951), pp. 38–41, 358. 82 FMB, 7 April 1848, p. 38. Marshall went on to become Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy. Other key figures in his circle included Thomas Woolner, Charles Lucy, Lowes Dickinson, Mark Anthony, J. P. Seddon, William Cave Thomas and the Rossetti brothers. Brown notes riots in Trafalgar Square for the entry of 8 March 1848, p. 33, and mentions political turmoil in Paris in entries for 25 February 1848, p. 31 and 29 February 1848, p. 32. 83 Rossetti was receptive to some forms of Chartist poetry, especially Ebenezer Jones’s Studies of Sensation and Event (1843). See Fredeman et al. (eds), The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. 4, p. 363.

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84 Brown dismissed C. R. Leslie’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy as ‘Twaddle’. See FMB, 17 February 1848, p. 30. See also, 13 May 1855, p. 137: ‘Cave Thomas here till Monday, in disgust with R.A’; and FMH, p. 73. 85 George Foggo’s belief that the Royal Academy supressed individualism and enfor­ ced a corporate model of truth is affirmed in evidence supplied to the Report from the Select Committee (1853), qu. 528: ‘I do hold that what is commonly called taste by artists is a conventional regulation altogether, and not a taste found on nature.’ 86 This attitude extended to the National Gallery, which Brown presented as a commercial enterprise, unlike the Antwerp Museum, which started life as the medieval Guild of St Luke. See F. M. Brown, ‘Our National Gallery’, The Magazine of Art (1890), 133. 87 In addition, Brown’s representation of the flower seller in Work may have been coloured by Carlyle’s account of the bizarre ‘Loose-skirted Herb-merchant’, who pops up in his epic reading of revolutionary France. See, TC, vol. 3, p. 164. More broadly, Hueffer is surely right to characterise Work as an ‘exposition of a sort of Carlylean energy and exuberance’. See FMH, p. 415. 88 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, equally scornful of the penetration of capital into the cultural realm, joked with Brown about the promotion of his one-man exhibition in 1865: ‘I’ve thought of an advertising system for you, which is so good you must be the benefit of it. You should begin by enormous placards with the one word Work, thus – W O R K And go on with this for a week or two. Then another week of Mr. F. M. Brown’s Work, and then condescend to further particulars’. See FMH, 209. Here Rossetti channels Carlyle’s satirical vision of advertising in Past and Present, in which he refers to ‘that great Hat seven-feet high, which now perambulates London Streets … The Hatter in the Strand of London, instead of making better felt-hats than another, mounts a huge lath-and-plaster Hat seven-feet high, upon wheels [and sends] a man to drive it through the streets; hoping to be saved thereby. He has not attempted to make better hats, as he was appointed by the Universe to do … his whole industry is turned to persuade us that he has made such.’ See TC, vol. 10, p. 141. 89 FMH, pp. 195–6, notes that Brown underlined passages relating to Bobus in Carlyle’s Past and Present, and that ‘the Carlylean spirit is prevalent and recurrent’. 90 J. Linton, The Cross in Modern Art: Descriptive Studies of Some Pre-Raphaelite Studies (London: Duckworth & Co., 1916), pp. 29–30. 91 Linton, The Cross in Modern Art, p. 33. 92 One example of this mentality was his preference for Joanna Boyce’s Elgiva over Frederic Leighton’s Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession Through the Streets of Florence, both of which were displayed at the Royal Academy in 1855. See FMB, 22 May 1855, p. 138. 93 FMB, 25 December 1854, p. 112; and 2 January 1855, p. 114. 94 Hueffer, in FMH, comes to this conclusion at pp. 94–5 and p. 403. Hunt claimed that Brown was ‘acute with certain angularities … He had often had differences with others, which sometimes ended in quarrels … I could not shut my eyes

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to his curious crotchets.’ See W. H. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (2 vols, London: Macmillan & Co., 1905), vol. 1, p. 155. Henry James called Brown ‘obstinate and rancorous’: see James, ‘On Frederick Walker’, Harper’s Weekly (20 February 1897), 183. 95 See, for instance, FMB, 28 June 1856, p. 180, for Brown’s reflections on the fate of a brother artist ‘reduced to beggary’. Surprisingly, the scholarly literature on Brown does not include any detailed readings of the Diary. 96 Brown took one of his servants from the Barnet workhouse: see FMB, 26 August 1854, p. 86. Other relevant entries include 28 October 1847, p. 11; 27 December 1847, p. 21; 13 October 1854, p. 102. 97 Like Blake and Carlyle, he developed a quasi-Freudian model of repression in which one source of anxiety originates in the activities of unstoppable bodily drives. 98 FMH, pp. 94, 311–16; FMB, 21 September 1854, p. 93; 9 September 1855, p. 153. These reflections on mental health found other outlets: ‘Talked about suicide & suicides … with Rossetti’, 14 December 1854, p. 110; ‘What would become of my children if I were to finish my wretched Existance [sic] & what is to become of me if I do not’, 5 July 1855, p. 142; and, ‘is beggary more honorable [sic] than suicide?’ 28 June 1856, p. 180. 99 FMB, 4 Oct 1847, p. 8; 6 November 1847, p. 13; 10 December 1847, p. 18; 14 December 1847, p. 20; 5 September 1854, p. 90; 10 January 1855, p. 115; 4 March 1855, p. 125; 11 April, p. 132; 5 July 1855, p. 142; 31 August 1855, p. 151. 100 FMB 16 August 1854, p. 82. By 23 August 1854, p. 86, he records: ‘Lazy; sad, nervous, stupid state again, hopes gone, unspeakably flown’, before the bathetic climax: ‘onions for supper’. 101 See J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London, 1834–1881 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1884), vol. 1, pp. 201–30, 328–35, 351–69. Carlyle’s vision – where to be in the world is to be caught by endless confusion – is echoed by Brown’s belief that existence is a set of ‘struggles with chaos and the devil’. See letter from Brown to Lowes Dickinson, 17 October 1852, cited by Thirlwell, Into the Frame, p. 95. 102 This fantasy of purity is most evident in the numerous references to Work, which seems to exist in a condition beyond ordinary time and experience. 103 Another important, topic, one I do not have space for here, would be the examination of Brown’s need to augment his activities as a professional artist through commercial artwork and art teaching. For example, his involvement with the Dickinson Brothers, a Bond Street firm focusing on print and lithograph publishing and dealing, requires further research. Lowes Cato Dickinson was involved in founding the Working Men’s College and was a catalyst in the formation of a drawing academy run by his firm. Brown taught at both educational institutions and was paid for retouching and restoring portraits for the Dickinson Brothers. They commissioned Brown’s portrait of Shakespeare for circulation via lithographic reproduction. See FMB for a guarded reference to this line of business: ‘Robert Dickinson came in & proposed that I should help at his portrait manufactory from Callow-types enlarged’, 17 January 1856, p. 162. Elsewhere, Brown notes, ‘Gave my first lesson for a guinea & am no longer a gentleman’, FMB, 9 May 1855, p. 136. 104 This experience was repeated in 1871 when he was obliged to withdraw his candidature from the Old Water-colour Society. See FMH, p. 249.

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105 See H. Cole, Fifty Years of Public Work of Sir Henry Cole Accounted for in his Deeds, Speeches and Writings (London: Bell and Sons, 1884). Volume 1 opens (at pp. 1–3) with the observation that he devised national systems relating to public-record keeping, the organisation of trade and business, the rationalisation of art education and the codification of public health legislation – all of which allowed lesser mortals to become efficient government administrators. 106 Brown’s account of ‘the humbug Henry Cole’ is included in a diary entry for 1 January 1855; by 13 January 1855 Cole has become a ‘scoundrel’; three days later Brown notes a ‘letter from some underling of the scoundrel Cole … subterfuge & insolence – no go in that quarter’. See FMB, pp. 114, 116–17 and 164. An earlier entry, 16 August 1854, p. 72, notes: ‘Much study of Blue book of Department of Art & science [First Report of the Department of Science and Art] impudently called of ‘Science & Art’.   Seen in broader terms, Brown presents the tirelessly self-publicising Cole as a banal, bureaucratic extension of Reynoldsian art theory, the proponent of the view that art is subject to learnable rules and therefore susceptible to management and control by officiating bodies. This would explain Brown’s vitriolic response to Cole’s invitation to participate in a design project at South Kensington, as recorded by William Bell Scott: ‘departmental correspondence was facilitated by the use of certain size (foolscap) paper, having printed at the corners, right and left, forms containing a number appropriate to the document and other directions to the correspondents – all this being printed within ruled and ornamental square enclosures. Brown had looked at this half-printed folio, and not finding [in] it anything he understood, at the first moment, became furious, read it wrong, and replied in a moment by cutting out of an old drawing-sheet, making some grotesque scribbles in the top corners, which had struck Mr. Cole as examples of lunacy, filling the paper below with a refusal to do any such thing as celebrate any such fool as Julio [sic] Romano, and posted his reply at once’. See Minto, Autobiographical Notes, vol. 2, pp. 189–90. 107 For evidence of Brown’s admiration for Cave Thomas and his ideas on art, see FMB, 7 February 1848, p. 29, where he states, ‘I hardly know what to make of [Cave Thomas] … his talents are so wonderful & varied.’ See also 19 August 1847, p. 6; 16 October 1847, p. 10; 16 November 1847, p. 14; 20 November 1847, pp. 15, 29; 1 February 1848, p. 28; 7 February 1848, p. 29; 28 October 1848, p. 49; 4 March 1859, p. 59; 29 March 1849, p. 62; 30 August 1854, p. 88. A. C. Swinburne, another close friend from the late 1860s, adhered to this idealist mindset, as did Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 108 Brown wrote glowingly: ‘[Blake] had painter’s ideas of the highest, nay often of the sublimest kind’; he produced ‘great works’; ‘he was ‘the most imaginative artist who ever lived’; and ‘in the matter of genius [he was] second to none’. See, MSL 1995/14, Box 45, Lectures on Art II, pp. 84–110, FMBV&A. On the general importance of Blake to Brown see Trodd, Visions of Blake, pp. 241–301; and Trodd, ‘Ford Madox Brown and the William Blake Brotherhood’, in Trodd and Sheldon (eds), Ford Madox Brown and the Victorian Imagination, pp. 277–98. See also, FMH, p. 34, who locates Blakean elements in the untraced Adam and Eve (1842). 109 In an angry diary entry, Brown compared the failures of the Crimean War to the ‘decline of an academician or any other Titled, decorated, and legalized humbug’. See

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FMB, 5 October 1854, p. 98. For more on the perceived political partisanship of the Royal Academy, see C. Trodd, ‘The Authority of Art: Cultural Criticism and the Idea of the Royal Academy in mid-Victorian Britain’, Art History, 20:1 (1997), 3–22. It is worth noting that Brown disliked and did not trust Francis Grant, who succeeded Sir Charles Eastlake as President of the Royal Academy in 1866. For details of their long-standing feud, see FMH, pp. 85 and 279. Brown’s hostility to the Royal Academy and Royal Academicians went on to the end of his life, as was noted by other artists. See, for instance, Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, vol. 2, pp. 382–4. 110 William Ewart Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, visited the exhibition and shook Brown by the hand. See George Rae Papers, National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Gallery on loan to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Brown to Rae, 18 March 1865; and FMH, p. 211. Walter Crane praised the event: ‘I shall never forget the impression that the work of this most remarkable artist made on me. “One-man shows” were very unusual in those days, and such a display of original conception, intellectual force and grasp, united with vivid realisation and extraordinary variety of subject, as was comprehended in this small exhibition, is indeed rare at any time. The absolute sincerity, the conviction with which every subject was handled and painted, the extraordinary penetrating power of each picture, and charged as it was with subtle thought and significant detail, gave an unusual distinction and peculiar marked individual character, by which the work of Ford Madox Brown stands in the history of English art.’ Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences, p. 82. 111 Brown, The Exhibition of Work, p. 3. 112 Brown, The Exhibition of Work, p. 25. By 5 July 1865, the exhibition had generated £126 9s. and sold over 2,000 catalogues at sixpence each. On top of this, 3,000 visitors had paid the one shilling entrance fee. See Ford Madox Brown, Household Account Book, Walker Art Gallery. 113 See FMB, 3 October 1854, pp. 96–7. 114 Brown’s rentier income took the form of shares in small holdings in Deptford and Kent. For further details, see FMB p. 5, and FMH, p. 21. 115 Money is a persistent worry between 1847 and 1867, the years Brown kept a diary. On 21 September 1854, p. 93, he records: ‘This even wasted 2 hours with Emma [his wife] trying to make out an error of sixpence in our accounts in which I succeeded at last.’ On 24 September 1854, p. 94 he remarks: ‘[W]orked at the Ladye of Saturday Night Cartoon which White has promised to buy but has not yet performed, two pounds and the pawn shop is all that now remains us. No debts however except about £14 in all to my tailor my lawyer & my frame maker … & have one hundred a year still.’ For an overview of income in this period, see H. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society [1969] (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 420–2, who notes that an annual income of £150–200 was the norm in most respectable lower-middle class households. At the other end of the scale, J. S. Mill had an annual salary of £2,000 as Chief Examiner at the East India Company. See M. St J. Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954), p. 388. 116 See FMB, 4 February 1855, p. 121; 17 December 1854, p. 110; 18 December 1854, p. 110. Brown had to borrow money from T. E. Plint, who commissioned Work, to pay for the funeral of his son Arthur, who died on 21 July 1857. 117 FMB, 27 December 1854, p. 112; 3 January 1855, p. 113; 13 February 1855, p. 122; 17 January 1855, p. 117.

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118 This took other forms. Brown instigated a scheme to support the family of the landscape painter William Davis, who died in extreme poverty in 1873. In 1886 he organised a raffle in aid of the widow of the painter Daniel Casey, an old friend, who died in debt. Seventy guinea tickets were proposed with two prizes: Casey’s Horses in a Storm, commissioned by Brown, and Brown’s small oil study, Platt Lane. Note, too, that in 1891 Shields planned a subscription to provide financial support for Brown in his old age. Shields’s troubles in extracting significant contributions from the pathologically solemn G. F. Watts, the pathologically self-important William Holman Hunt and other leading artists are outlined in Mills, The Life and Letters, pp. 311–17. Brown, horrified by the proposal, ensured that the scheme did not go ahead. 119 Dante Gabriel Rossetti thought that Brown’s altruism had an impact on his career: ‘I certainly think it is a very serious necessity for you to stop this kind of preoccupation rigorously … [Your work] is of more consequence to you than the inevitable destinies of the families of deceased artists’. See FMH, p. 283. 120 Whatever way we look at it, Brown’s charitable deeds are vastly different to the calculated philanthropy of an artist like G. F. Watts. For an astute account of Watts’s self-congratulatory ‘altruism’, see P. Barlow, ‘The Pointless Meaningfulness of Watts’s Work’, in C. Trodd and S. Brown (eds), Representations of G. F. Watts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 29–47. 121 FMB, 22 February 1854, p. 123. White was the subject of the following sarcastic ditty: ‘Could I but see him here once more / That shining Bald pate deep old file / O how I’d meet him at my door / And greet him with a pleasant smile / His blarney soft I’d suck it in / Nor let his comments stir my bile / And when my hand once grasped his tin / How kindly on him would I smile. / And as he strained my hand, full fain / My daubs were in his cab the while / And promised soon to come again – / Oh! How I’d smile him back his smile’. See FMB, 10 October 1854, p. 101. 122 See FMB, 25 September 1856, p. 189, where Brown notes that Miller’s house was ‘full of Pictures even to the kitchen’. Brown’s financial problems with the slippery McCracken are noted in the Diary on 16 August 1854, p. 74. Other major patrons included James Leathart, a lead manufacturer from Tyneside, and George Rae, a banker from the Wirral. Brown compared Rae’s Thomas Bullion; or, the Letters of a County Banker to ‘Cobden’s speeches’ and ‘Balzac’s stories’. See letter from Brown to Rae in FMH, p. 217. 123 The call for the development of civic-nationalist painting had been made by other painter-writers. See for instance, D. Scott in British, French and German Painting: being a reference to the grounds which render the proposed painting of the new Houses of Parliament as a public measure (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1841), p. 68, where the author argues that the ‘character’ of British painting is ‘worth preserving’, as it was ‘a more eminent and worthy manifestation of mind’ than German painting, before posing the question: ‘[d]id … Barry, Fuseli and Blake wear the sackcloth of neglect about them in vain?’. 124 Hueffer, in FMH, pp. 33–6, provides a full account of Brown’s involvement in the competition. 125 The Parliament decorations and competitions are analysed in two important works by P. Barlow: ‘The Imagined Hero as Incarnate Sign: Thomas Carlyle and the Mythology of the National Portrait in Victorian Britain’, Art History, 17:4 (1994),

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517–45; and ‘Fire, Flatulence and Fog’, in Barlow and Trodd (eds), Governing Cultures, pp. 69–82. 126 The version reproduced here is Brown’s watercolour study; the original cartoon design was cut into fragments sometime in the 1960s and then distributed to various private owners. 127 See T. Taylor (ed.), Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and Journals (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1853), vol. 3, p. 309. Haydon, a friend of Keats and Wordsworth, terminated his wildly unsuccessful bid to place himself at the head of a new school of British historical painting by committing suicide in 1846. His poverty, unreliability, critical failure and demise haunted Brown. See, for example, FMB: 20 August 1854, p. 83; 2 October 1854, p. 96; 6 May 1855, p. 136; and 11 January 1855, p. 115, where Brown announces: ‘I am getting a regular Haydon at pawning – so long as I do not become one at cheating my creditors.’ Brown would have known about the calamitous failure of Haydon’s solo exhibition at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, which was eclipsed by Tom Thumb’s performance at the same venue. Dante Gabriel Rossetti may have alluded to this example of the triumph of capitalised popular culture over creative art when he quipped about Brown’s solo exhibition in 1865: ‘Are you to succeed [P. G.] Hamerton, or the Talking Fish [meaning a performing seal]?’ See W. M. Rossetti (ed.), Rossetti Papers (London: Sands & Co., 1903), p. 70. 128 Dante Gabriel Rossetti informed Brown that ‘The outline from your Abstract Representation of Justice which appeared in one of the Illustrated Papers constitutes, together with an engraving after that great painter Von Holst, the sole pictorial adornment of my room.’ See W. M. Rossetti (ed.), Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. 1, pp. 116–17. See also, W. M. Rossetti (ed.), PraeRaphaelite Diaries and Letters (London: Hurst and Blackett Limited, 1900), p. 53, where Brown indicates that William Etty and John Martin were impressed by Spirit of Justice. 129 A. I. Wright, ‘Ford Madox Brown and the Body of Harold: Representing England at Mid-Century’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 8:1 (2009). www.19thc-­ artworldwide.org/spring09/42-autumn07/autumn07article/127-ford-madoxbrowns-the-body-of-harold-representing-england-at-mid-century, provides a useful account of how Brown’s works relate to the tradition of an ideal ancient constitution embedded in a vision of Saxon culture. 130 Brown’s Diary contains many entries relevant to this design. At one point, he criticises the ‘family interests’ of aristocratic culture before noting: ‘Whoever feels a tenderness for a fellow being worships God in the act, nay a kind of feeling for a dog or a cat shall not pass unnoticed, but woe to the selfseeker & him who despises the poor.’ See FMB, 5 October 1854, pp. 98–9. 131 Brown in F. Knight Hunt (ed.), The Book of Art, Cartoons, Frescoes, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts as Applied to the New Houses of Parliament (London, 1846), p. 181. The confrontational nature of the design tended to be ignored by reviewers: ‘[This is a] ‘constitutional, and not a moral, representation of Justice … The spirit of the work differs from every other in the series: it presents a version of Justice in reference to the sources of the executive power of our constitution.’ See, Anon., Westminster Hall, the Cartoon Exhibition, and New Houses of Parliament’, ArtUnion, 83 (August 1845), 258. 132 For Brown’s habit of creating poly-rhythmic images in the 1840s and 1850s, see Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown, p. 48, who notes, ‘conflicts of form. Lines do 122

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not flow into one and another, but meet at angles or in opposing directions. Large shapes and small stand next to one another, without elements of transition … unity [is] provided by repetition.’ 133 For valuable assessments of this work, see C. Cruise, Pre-Raphaelite Drawing (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), pp. 33–7; and JT, pp. 108–10. 134 For a concise and illuminating account of Spirit of Justice, see MB, vol. 1, p. 35. Bennett’s description is infinitely more helpful than the windy assertion that Brown’s design is striking because of its ‘bold clarity of utterance’. T. Barringer, ‘The Effects of Industry: Ford Madox Brown and Artistic Identities in Victorian Britain’, in Sidey (ed.), Ford Madox Brown, p. 25, who never bothers to explain what it was that Brown wanted to utter – or indicate how Brown’s works relate to the ‘effects’ of industry. 135 In this sense it parallels Bentham’s formulation of the Public Opinion Tribunal, conceived as a constitutional body with the power to exercise popular sanctions in cases of misrule. See Jeremy Bentham, First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code [1822], ed. Philip Schofield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 56–73. 136 E. Butler Morris’s Justice, as described in Knight Hunt (ed.), The Book of Art, p. 181. 137 For which, see M. Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 6–68; and Barlow, ‘Local disturbances’, pp. 85–91. 138 N. Tromans, ‘Drawing Teeth: Reflections on Brown’s Mouths’, Visual Culture in Britain, 15:3 (2014), 299–312. 139 William Holman Hunt qualified his praise for the main figures in Spirit of Justice by suggesting that ‘attention was distracted by the Gothic quaintness of the central design … arranged at equal distances symmetrically in a row across the picture, their faces covered by large titling helms inclined alternately to the right and left’. He was equally disturbed by the physicality of The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror, which he dismissed as ‘grotesque’. See Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, vol. 1, pp. 120–1. 140 See FMH, p. 418, for shrewd comments on the politics of Brown’s ‘raw’ representation of medieval culture. 141 See Allan Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Artists, Sculptors and Architects (London: John Murray, 1831), vol. I, p. 66, p. 83, pp. 166–7. 142 David Wilkie is a key figure here, as noted in two important publications: Tromans, David Wilkie; and D. H. Solkin, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 143 As Bendiner reminds us, it is important to note that the widow confirms Brown’s interest in forms of histrionic figural expression pioneered by Fuseli. See Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown, p. 90. 144 On this matter, see Barringer, Men at Work, pp. 21–81; J. Bland, ‘The Academy and the Avant Garde’, in L. Dawtrey and T. Jackson (eds), Investigating Modern Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 35–47; A. Boime, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century’, Arts Magazine (September 1981), 117–21; T. Nakamura, ‘Bleak House and Brown’s Work: a Gaze Upon the Poor’, Shiron: Essays in English Language and Literature 39 (2000), 39–65; and J. A. Walker, Work: Ford Madox Brown’s Painting and Victorian Life (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 123

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2006), pp. 45–92, all of whom are inclined to reduce Victorian art to synchronised discursive norms. For an illuminating account of the structural problems in this school of thought, see P. Barlow, ‘The Ordering and Disordering of Work’, Visual Culture in Britain, 15:3 (2014), 258–76. 145 Brown would have been familiar with the use of the hand motif in Carlyle’s writings, where it stands for a sign of ‘ludicro-terrific’ powers of alien intimacy unleashed by revolutionary consciousness. See The French Revolution, TC, vol. 2, p. 253. For more on this this matter, see Trodd, ‘Culture and Energy’, in Trodd, Barlow and Amigoni (eds), Victorian Culture, pp. 68–80. 146 Brown remained interested Anglo-Saxon culture throughout his career. See, for instance, the sketches of eight Saxon kings and queens, in MB, vol. 2, p. 477. 147 Brown’s wry comments about a project derived from Beauty and the Beast indicate how he thought a melodramatic subject might be made commercially viable by the injection of ‘folkic’ and ‘exotic’ element: ‘I intend it for what the story is, a jumble of Louis XV and Orientalism. The glories of eastern luxuriance mix’t with household common appurtenances to tickle the fancy at both ends’. See FMB, 14 September 1854, pp. 91–2. 148 See FMB, 15 December 1855, p. 158. Nor did Brown share Carlyle’s view of the history of slavery, as expressed in his notorious account of Governor Eyre’s violent suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica (1865). 149 Brown, The Exhibition of Work, p. 4. W. M. Rossetti, who knew about Carlyle’s impact on Brown’s model of art, made perceptive comments on the environmental nature of the murals. See W. M. Rossetti, ‘Mr. Madox Brown’s Frescoes in Manchester’, 262–3.

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History embodied

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Manchester, mythos, murals

At this time … Brown was engaged upon … his series of frescoes in Manchester Town Hall … and I never knew of any man who combined to a like extent the gift of not being in a hurry with a greater sense of the true value of time … Deliberation … effectively prevented his being unduly carried away by his powerful dramatic gifts and the romance of poetic sentiment, and it was the rare combination of these qualities which used to make me think of … Brown, amongst all my circle of acquaintance of business, professional or political vocation, as most truly entitled to the attribute of the ‘practical’ man.1 By universal admission, the Town Hall is a worthy monument to the industrial greatness of Manchester and an outward and visible sign to the world that we are not wholly given up to Mammon and that the higher culture is not neglected among us.2 The twelve frescoes were to be illustrative of the history of the town of Manchester, a city that, speaking loosely, has practically no history of any appreciable antiquity. The importance of the town as a manufacturing centre dates from no earlier than the present century of machinery and steam, and any discoverable events connected with it previously have been almost coincidental.3

Eight years before Brown’s Manchester Town Hall commission, W. E. Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal Party and future prime minister, called Manchester the ‘centre of the modern life of the country’.4 His large claim is hard to dispute. After all, Manchester, known as ‘Cottonopolis’ since at least the 1850s, had been at the heart of industrial development throughout the nineteenth century.5 London was more of a finishing centre for consumer goods; Leeds and Bradford, important industrial units, were not on the same scale as Manchester, which had the greatest concentration of factories and manual workers in the kingdom; and Birmingham was rooted in high-skilled, but small-scale, artisanal units and workshops. Although Manchester was widely considered to be the world’s first industrial city, it developed a strong retail and distribution profile 127

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as demonstrated by the many magnificent wholesale Renaissance-style warehouses in the city centre.6 Additionally, Manchester was a regional power for banking, insurance and mercantile investment.7 Brown would have received a strong sense of its distinctive provincial culture when he attended the famous Art Treasures Exhibition, held at the Old Trafford site, Manchester, in 1857.8 Most nineteenth-century accounts of Manchester treated it as integrated industrial-commercial entity. Two readings dominated the exegetical literature. First, Carlyle’s highly influential catastrophist model, which entered the British cultural scene in the 1830s. Second, the administrative model, best known through James Kay’s The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832), and Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the labouring Population of Great Britain (1842). Here ‘Manchester’ was granted apodictic authority in the development of economic liberalism, and so Kay and Chadwick rejected the romantic tradition, to which Carlyle was affiliated, by using a statistical-sociological method of urban study.9 A third model, Friedrich Engels’s politico-economic account of the squalid living conditions of the poor in central Manchester – not widely known until The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845) was published in New York in 1887 – would have been unavailable to Brown when he produced the majority of the Manchester murals.10 Nonetheless, Carlyle was a crucial figure in Victorian perceptions of Manchester in that he provided a diagnostic framework for those writers and artists for whom modernisation meant conceptual disturbance, not cultural development. Carlyle’s Manchester signified a repellent mentality where quantification, the language of political economy, stood as the master term of human existence. From this point of view, to write about Manchester required a type of exegesis that explained why it was a social and discursive space of conflict in which laissez-faire individualism warred with what passed for historical experience. Hence the hyperbolic character of Manchester in Past and Present (1843), where Carlyle sets out to reveal the inadequacy of the improvement narrative supplied in standard bourgeois readings of industrial society. Unlike economic liberals, who represented the inventiveness of Mancunian industry as evidence of the meliorism at the heart of modern Britain, Carlyle discovered a social-material Moloch that ingested everything around itself, an interpretation he supported by pointing out the pauperisation of skilled, pre-industrial textile workers by the steam-powered factory system. In parallel to this reading, it is necessary to distinguish between Carlyle’s epistemology of value, which was designed to question the belief that historical value is realised in the perfect synthesis of human services, positional goods and economic performance, and his ethico-catastrophic vision of Victorian society as demonic disruption of traditional forms of knowledge and consciousness. Presented in these terms, Carlyleanism existed as a fluid ­critical-philosophical arrangement supported by a sub-section of the Victorian intelligentsia. But it was much more than this, since Carlyle’s modelling of Manchester attracted the 128

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attention of other sections of society through expository writings, lectures and public conversations. These individual platforms led to the creation of networks in which the cultural qualities of civil society were discussed alongside the growth of commerce and manufacturing, and the impersonal polarisation of the rich and poor by the spatial organisation of modernity. It is part of my argument that Brown’s engagement with Carlyle is an example of this kind of cultural syndicalism, where individuals and groups devised programmes and proposals to counteract the authoritarian effects of industrial society, particularly its fetish of paid labour and the idea of employment as non-social category of aggregated ‘output’. Carlyle’s vision of modernity as a Janus-like process of misery and abundance was at once endorsed and developed by Ruskin, who, surveying the material and cultural spaces of the industrial cities of the North, discovered an unstoppable machinic world denuded of true social affections, a menacing Babel of warring signs. In his view, Manchester – the conceptual and physical heart of laissez-faire economics – made a fetish of industrialised labour, which, by robbing workers of inherited knowledge, experience and identity, was a negation of life.11 An equally condemnatory view of industrial society was advanced in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), where the fictional Coketown is modelled on the economistic thinking associated with Richard Cobden, John Bright and other exponents of what was called the Manchester School. Dickens questioned the core features of the Manchester School model – in which society was described as a set of economic arrangements – when referring to the monotonous materiality of his imaginary town. Coketown, a brutish and infernal space, was where massified and alienating work robbed the subject of the ability to imagine additional dimensions to human experience. In this respect, Dickens concurred with Carlyle and Ruskin: ‘Manchester’, the locus of social and discursive modernity, meant technological advance, material production and wage-slavery, a system of social organisation in which an obsession with profit replaced a way of life based on the principle of the creation and distribution of human wealth. Other perspectives were available, however. For example, some members of the Liberal substratum argued that the industrial city might be something more than a set of relations of production, something other than a catalyst of social disruption. Consequently, W. E. A. Axon, Abel Heywood and Thomas Horsfall became interested in developing forms of municipal responsibility via voluntary associations.12 From their perspective, Manchester was an active centre for debates about civic values and social welfare, and its clubs, libraries, concert halls and newspapers played their role in the production of a vibrant civil society, meshing public and private life. These influential public figures were interested in arrangements designed to make Manchester a distinctive metropolitan centre for science, literature and the arts, a place of social collaboration and mutual aid.13 But we are running ahead of ourselves. By the time Brown moved to Manchester in 1881, it had diversified from an inland warehouse environment 129

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into a coordinated financial, banking, and retail centre. In addition to the many Renaissance-style warehouses in the city centre there were shops and department stores in the districts surrounding St Peter’s Square, the location of the Town Hall, built between 1866 and 1877 to the design of Alfred Waterhouse. Bustling, dynamic, shapeshifting: Manchester was the ideal source material for an artist fascinated by the flux and efflux of human experience and the ever-shifting contours of modern cultural life. It would be wrong to imagine, however, that this type of coherence – the organisation of space through retail, the consumption of manufactured goods and money exchange – featured in Brown’s Town Hall murals. Nor should Brown’s feeling for the richness of human experience be mistaken for an interest in the pageantry of history or picturesque social panoramas. As outlined in Chapters 1 and 2, Brown wanted to spotlight situations where life is realised via collective action. This matter – which hinges on the idea that society is creative – can be approached by offering a few thoughts on Brown’s involvement with local institutions and associations. Brown contributed to the cultural life of Manchester in several ways. He attended art exhibitions, collaborated with local artists and supported local art groups. He presented papers at the Manchester Literary Club, the Royal Manchester Institute and the Graphic Club. He involved himself in their conversaziones and supported their shows. He presented awards at art classes, exhibited his works at the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts and attended the Hallé concerts. He became a close friend of James Kendrick Pyne, the organist, who played music when Brown worked in the Great Hall. Brown was an honorary member of the Brasenose Club, one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in late nineteenth-century Manchester.14 The imprint of some of these activities and events can be found in satirical journals like The City Lantern, The Freelance, and The Sphinx, which tended to cultivate an air of bohemianism when recording the details of urban life. At the other end of the spectrum, the Manchester Courier and the Manchester Guardian were unswervingly serious in their observations of the rituals of civic culture.15 The last point is important. A city is more than the sum of its built spaces or the totality of its civic networks; it is a lived space, and a lived space is at once created and recreated. Unsurprisingly, some commentators attempted to adapt Carlyle’s notion of environment, the dynamic relations between objects in a specific location, to the formal procedures of urban investigators, many of whom were motivated by the belief that the history of urbanisation was a history of human odyssey towards self-identity. Here, for instance, is Hugh Miller, the Scottish stonemason turned geologist musing on the fate of the river Irwell as it snaked in the direction of Manchester: The hapless river – a pretty enough stream a few miles higher up, with trees overhanging its banks, and fringes of green sedge set thick along its edges – loses caste as it gets among the mills and print-works. There are myriads of dirty things given it to wash, and whole wagon-loads of poisons from dye-houses

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and bleach-yards thrown into it to carry away; steam-boilers discharge into it their seething contents, and drains and sewers their fetid impurities; till at length it rolls on – here between tall dingy walls, there under precipices of red sandstone – considerably less a river than a flood of liquid manure, in which all life dies, whether animal or vegetable, and which resembles nothing in nature, except, perhaps, the stream thrown out in eruption by some mud-volcano.16

Miller’s Manchester, a labyrinthine space of chronic disturbance, cannot be ‘composed’ because its purpose is to invade and corrupt things. This process of adulteration starts with the River Irwell itself, a thronging devastation of life, from which monstrous forces flow into the hellish heart of the city. The river makes vivid the raw formlessness of modernity by deracinating the social relations of civil society. Here is an alien, shapeless place where telluric forms are turned against themselves in a world dominated by non-human life. This is, of course, an attitude that is customarily attributed to the opponents of modernity. In 1844 Léon Faucher, the French political economist and free trader, deployed a different critical lexicon when referring to the political life of Manchester: ‘The centres of industrialism are seats of corruption, in which the population enjoy an atmosphere neither more salubrious nor moral, than those large towns, which are formed by political institutions, or by the demands of commerce.’17 Social tension, which Faucher saw everywhere, was a motivating force in the creation of the Plug Plot of July and August 1842: ‘1,000 men armed with sticks and bludgeons entered Manchester, stopped the engines, compelled the workmen to turn out and join their body, and declared a general suspension of labour until their grievances were redressed. The rioters remained masters of the town for several days, and it was found necessary to recall some troops from Ireland to dislodge their position.’18 Faucher figures class as a barrier to the free expression of social life; a common enough trope in both populist and technical versions of liberal political economy. The true process – industrialised society arising from the voluntary marketisation of human power – re-establishes itself when the protestors’ energy is converted into the self-disciplining rhythms and patterns of work: ‘Happily for England, Industry soon recovers from the convulsions which from time to time afflict her. That which would be for other nations a revolution, is to her only a shock.’19 From Faucher’s viewpoint, the ‘higher’ function of industrialism is to reveal the natural cooperation of capital and labour, but at the necessary expense of a ‘lower’ function resulting in the weakening of moral agency: The town, strictly speaking, is only inhabited by shopkeepers and operatives; the merchants and manufacturers have detached villas situated in the midst of gardens and parks in the country. This mode of existence … excludes social intercourse … And thus at the very moment when the engines are stopped, and the counting-houses closed, everything which was the thought – the authority – the impulsive force – the moral order of this immense industrial combination, flies from the town and disappears in an instant. The rich man spreads his couch amidst the beauties of the surrounding country and abandons the town to the 131

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operatives, publicans, mendicants, thieves, and prostitutes, merely taking the precaution to leave behind him a police force, whose duty it is to preserve some little material order in this pell-mell society.20

Faucher’s system-based reading of the crannied spaces of Manchester recalls some aspects of the urban sphere described in Carlyle’s seminal essay ‘Signs of the Times’.21 One of the most remarkable features of Carlyle’s mythopoetic reading of the industrial city is his concentration on images that struggle to bring something resembling identity into being. On the one side, the modern city is the descent of life into a world beyond history; on the other side, it is the source of endless confusion. This double reading explains the extreme nature of Carlyle’s imagery: catastrophic movements harden to define the petrified environment of modernity. It would be the duty of the modern writer to develop a new language to picture the gigantic upheavals generated by these revolutionary processes, to see beyond the normative urban taxonomies established by the discourses of civic liberalism. At this point it is worth stressing that Carlyle’s mode of thinking applies to Brown’s pictorial universe. After all, Brown deploys a system of parataxis, with clashing forms and planes, to distance himself from the compositional ecologies of academic and genre painting.22 In any event, Carlyle was Brown’s favourite thinker, and he was familiar with Carlyle’s highly influential perception of Manchester as place of social and psychic dislocation. According to Carlyle, the advent of mass mechanisation was a material problem that generated a more serious metaphysical and psychological problem: the reduction of human experience to mechanisms of perception and motivation. Factories, monopolies of monotony, produced the hypertrophy of mental life. The extraordinary originality of this vision, developed in the 1820s, is often overlooked. We tend to assume that everyone observed, thought about and theorised the function of the factory as the driver of industrialised society. It should be remembered, however, that classical political economy, particularly in the Ricardian school of thought popularised by John Stuart Mill, devoted most of its attention to agricultural, mercantile and financial arrangements. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), with its emphasis on free trade and free competition, is a classic example of how the discourse of expertise marginalised the physical experience of industrial labour from its postulations about the structure of the social formation and the formation of capital. For Carlyle, industrialisation meant the deracination of tradition and community, a point reiterated throughout Past and Present. In the ­chapter ‘Manchester Insurrection’ – a visionary account of a universe forced out of shape – the weary, alienated workers are sole custodians of historical memory: [The] poor Manchester manual workers mean only, by day’s-wages for day’swork, certain coins of money adequate to keep them living; – in return for their work, such modicum of food, clothes and fuel as will enable them to continue 132

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their work as itself! They as yet clamour for no more … This is the supportable approximation they would rest patient with, That by their work they might be kept alive to work more! … The world has retrograded in its talent of apportioning wages to work … The world had always a talent of that sort, better or worse. Time was when the mere handworker needed not announce his claim to the world of Manchester Insurrections! – The world, with its Wealth of Nations, Supply-and-demand and such like, has of late days been terribly inattentive to that question of work and wages … Never till now, in the history of an Earth which to this hour nowhere refuses to grow corn if you will plough it, to yield shirts if you will spin and weave in it, did the mere manual two-handed worker … cry in vain for such ‘wages’ as he means by ‘fair wages,’ namely food and warmth!23

This retort to the logic of market economy, where industrial capitalism treats labour as a little more than an invidious rent-seeking process designed to suppress ‘natural’ profits, has lost none of its exegetical or ethical power. Carlyle’s vision of a universe in which everything is in the process of being standardised, unitised and monetised, and where the labourer is the last custodian of the precarious values of the moral economy, was shared by Brown, who went on to produce his own ironic version of ‘Manchester Insurrection’ in the form of John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle (Plate 10).24 A concentrated version of these ideas, in which Manchester constitutes a condition of historical disturbance, appeared in a sonnet by Mathilde Blind, one of Brown’s closet friends.25 Blind, a free-thinking radical, embodied the progressive, cosmopolitan mentality of Brown’s circle.26 ‘Manchester by Night’ (1893) is her amalgamation of the images found in Romantic and Victorian critiques of the instrumentalism of industrial society: O’er this huge town, rife with intestine wars, Whence as from monstrous sacrificial shrines Pillars of smoke climb heavenward, Night inclines Black brows majestical with glimmering stars. Her dewy silence soothes life’s angry jars: And like a mother’s wan white face, who pines Above her children’s turbulent ways, so shines The moon athwart the narrow cloudy bars. Now toiling multitudes that hustling crush Each other in the fateful strife for breath, And, hounded on by divers hungers, rush Across the prostrate ones that groan beneath, Are swathed within the universal hush, As life exchanges semblances with death.27

What Blind is talking about here, it must be stressed, is a world that has become alien to itself. Like Blake’s famous ‘London’ (1794), Blind’s Manchester is a set of fractured spaces and a site of alien intimacy.28 Like Carlyle’s ‘Signs of the Times’, Manchester is the capital of raw modernity; and like Ruskin’s, 133

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The Political Economy of Art (1857), it is an economic system set apart from the historical world. Echoing all three writers, Blind’s imagery refers a phantasmal world of life-death, an anti-threnody, where modern existence is the experience of dispossession, the eradication of social affections by the brutal facticity of synthetic systems. These identifications need not detain us here, but it is important to note that Blind’s sonnet outlines a post-Romantic world in which the poet is unable to enact of his or her civics of vision because nature, or what is left of it, is at war with itself.29 The next part of this chapter reflects on Brown’s circumstances in the years before he embarked on the Manchester murals. This material is followed by some fresh thoughts on the critical and pictorial structure of the scheme, before attention turns to The Romans Building a Fort at Mancenion, A.D. 80, the first painting in the series. The concluding section of the chapter balances this intensive reading with three shorter accounts of The Baptism of Edwin, The Expulsion of The Danes and The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers. In each case, the intention is to attend to Brown’s representation of the historical subject. By the mid-1870s Brown needed a large project to obviate ongoing financial difficulties. Although the 1860s had been a reasonably successful decade in terms of volume of sales, Brown was never able to command consistently high fees, so his average annual income, £800, was about the same as his annual outgoings.30 Brown’s earnings began to dip again in the late 1860s, at a time when he moved from a modest house in Fortress Terrace, Kentish Town, rented at £52 10s per annum, to the relative splendour of 37 Fitzroy Square, rented at £96 per annum.31 Some of the additional expenses incurred by this move into fashionable society were covered by jobbing work: retouching portraits for the print-sellers Dickinson and Company, tutoring, and delivering lectures.32 Brown’s social position and his location in the marketplace cannot be isolated from his long-standing interest in current affairs. It comes as little surprise that he was sympathetic to supporters of the Paris Commune, or, that in 1871, he asked the anarchist exile, Jules Andrieu, to tutor his son, Oliver.33 For these and other reasons, his grandson remembered Brown as an iconoclastic figure, someone who was enraged by all representatives of the established order, and yet, often gregarious, captivating and dashing.34 The social gatherings at Fitzroy Square included radical politicians (Sir Charles Dilke), men of letters (Edmund Gosse), actors (Johnston Forbes-Robertson), poets (A. C. Swinburne), artists (Dante Gabriel Rossetti), publishers (Charles Kegan Paul), academics (William Minto) and leading European literary figures (Ivan Turgenev). One of the best accounts of this milieu is provided by the Irish nationalist politician, novelist and historian Justin McCarthy: ‘there was no good cause, there was no movement concerning human interests and human civilisation which failed to have his earnest sympathies, and, where he could give it, his practical support. When I came to know him first his home was a kind of open house for all who had any interest in art or, indeed, in anything that concerned the welfare of humanity.’35 134

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Here, as is often the case in such literature, personal charm is associated with the magical energy of human fellowship. It is against the background of Brown’s social environment that one must consider the most traumatic event of the decade. Brown’s son, Oliver, a preciously talented juvenile painter and writer, died of blood poisoning in 1875.36 Brown saw Oliver as his better self – ‘a perfect genius’ and a better colourist, even at an early age.37 William Michael Rossetti recalled that Oliver was a young man of many accomplishments; indeed, Rossetti called him a pivotal figure in the critical understanding of Blake’s gnomic symbolism.38 Brown’s response to Oliver’s death, which was relayed in a letter to his friend and patron, George Rae, is intensely moving: ‘We are strangely calm, after our wont, and indeed, my belief; it is of no use arguing with the whirlwind. There is nothing for it but to patch up what remains of hope in other directions and get to work again – but the savour is gone, unless in the work for itself.’39 It is impossible to over-estimate this tragic loss, since Brown associated Oliver with the idea of the attainment of human wholeness through creativity. That is, he saw in Oliver a unique combination of imaginative power and practical skills, someone who exhibited great sensitivity to nuances of aesthetic expression and down-to-earth abilities to get things done. Oliver was, in this respect, the living expression of Brown’s conception of the ‘Life Dream’, a desire to integrate art and work in the service of a better form of existence, the utilisation of the inner life to create a world in the image of social care and mutual value.40 It is correspondingly difficult to ignore the fact that this overwhelming personal tragedy was underscored by his second wife’s chronic alcoholism. Emma Brown’s erratic and addictive behaviour, noted in the Diary, and in Brown’s letters, continued in subsequent decades.41 Nor should it pass unnoticed that one reason why Brown’s earnings started to decline in the late 1860s was that some of his patrons stopped collecting or died, as demonstrated in a desperate letter to Shields: ‘Things are rapidly coming with me to such a pass that I would hail with delight and avidity the prospect of … anything … which might hold out a hope of hard cash. I have not for years known anything like it – not apparently the faintest chance of effecting a sale on any hand or obtaining a commission.’ He ended the missive on an ominous note: ‘Nothing seems ever now to approach the house except Christmas bills, which come tumbling in with a will certainly; not so the wherewithal to acquit them.’42 While Dante Gabriel Rossetti proclaimed that Brown was ‘one of the greatest painters now living anywhere’, this and other such superlatives did not lead to lucrative commercial contracts.43 Nor should it be forgotten that Brown remained hostile to the official art world, declaring to Charles Rowley in 1878: ‘I can assure you things are much worse than you suppose … For here there is an entirely new school of men arisen, both painters, critics, and R.A.s, who are far more deadly and dangerous than the old opposition.’ He concluded on a melancholic and anxious note: ‘For five-and-twenty years I have been rashly indifferent to the Academy, Tom Taylor and Ruskin; but now this new state of things will be “too many” 135

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for me, and I shall go under.’44 From this perspective, the Manchester mural scheme offered the prospect of escape from a London art world dominated by hostile forces. Brown had limited knowledge of Manchester prior to the Town Hall commission.45 True, the Diary refers to occasional visits, but these tended to coincide with trips to Merseyside to meet two of his chief patrons, the tobacco merchant John Miller, and the banker George Rae. Brown did exhibit at the Royal Manchester Institute at the beginning of the 1850s, and delivered a set of lectures there in December 1874, which, he informed Rae, ‘were considered successes, and there were handsome notices of them’.46 Brown’s credentials were endorsed by Frederic Shields, the painter, engraver and designer encountered in Chapters 1 and 2. Shields, a leading figure in the Manchester art world, had been immensely impressed by King Lear (1848–49) when it was exhibited in 1853. Shields was equally taken by Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet (1852–56) when he saw it at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857, informing Brown that it ‘held me riveted – large and simple in the composition of its masses as Giotto, brilliant and forceful, yet true and refined in its colour and lighting, and wonderful for its grasp of human character and passion’.47 Shields provided Brown with many useful social contacts and went on to introduce him to Frederick Craven, the Manchester calico printer, who bought several works. In effect, Shields acted as Brown’s agent, promoting him in the local press and via institutional and patronal networks.48 From all the available evidence, it seems likely that Charles Rowley, the frame-maker, educationalist and Mancunian politician, was introduced to Brown by Shields.49 Rowley’s ability to fuse cultural and political issues made him Brown’s most important ally in Manchester. Brown received many invitations to visit Rowley before moving to the city, and Rowley stayed with Brown when travelling to London. Rowley offered advice concerning residential matters in Manchester and introduced Brown to its cultural life. We get a sense of Rowley’s commitment to the Manchester murals from the following remarks to Brown about the corporate organisation of the scheme: ‘Anything legitimate I will do. I grieve to think that these men are so stupid that they cannot see that you, perhaps the fittest man now on the planet, could do that for them which wd. be an honour to their city & yourself.’50 In another letter, Rowley reassured Brown that ‘None of the decoration Committee have any feeling for Art.’51 The symmetry of their relationship is plain enough. Brown was supportive of Rowley’s initiatives as Councillor for the New Cross ward in Ancoats, an economically distressed district of Manchester. Rowley enthusiastically spearheaded many operations dedicated to improving the environmental conditions and cultural opportunities of working-class communities.52 A brilliant organiser and campaigner, he attracted important artists, writers, musicians and academics to his cause, and created an imaginative programme of lectures, concerts and art exhibitions.53 William Morris, Walter Crane, Prince Kropotkin and George Bernard Shaw were some of Rowley’s more interesting contacts. In 1889, Rowley went on to 136

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form the Ancoats Brotherhood, a remarkable cultural organisation designed to encourage workers to become involved in the visual arts, which was supported by Brown, Walter Crane, G. F. Watts and other leading artists, designers and social thinkers (Figure 3.1). Another key supporter in the Manchester mural project was Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of the New Town Hall. Waterhouse took a keen interest in the interior design of the Town Hall and proposed a vast mural programme running across key ceremonial rooms. Although budgetary matters restricted the decorative scheme to the Great Hall, Waterhouse was responsible for the inclusion of other materials, including sculpture, armorials and tiles, most of which

Figure 3.1  Walter Crane, Charles Rowley as Hope 137

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are topical to the historical development of Manchester.54 His numerous recommendations to the Decorations and Furnishings Sub-Committee were taken very seriously, particularly by Councillor Joseph Thompson, the most powerful political presence in the institutional orchestration of the mural programme.55 By the summer of 1877, Waterhouse was proposing that Brown and Shields should be responsible for painting all twelve murals in the Great Hall. This, and the plan to ask Walter Crane and W. F. Yeames to paint the remaining rooms, was met with stiff resistance from the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts.56 Brown, as impassioned as ever, threatened to withdraw from the project, before being placated by a bulletin from Rowley, ‘Yesterday we passed a Water Scheme to cost 3 millions but any flea-bite in the way of Art only irritates them.’57 It is here, at so vital a point in the development of the programme, that we should pause to consider the process for selecting the subjects of the twelve murals in the Great Hall. At some point in 1876 Thompson produced a vast list of around 250 possible topics. Brown and Shields used this document to select the following subjects: A.D. 79. Building of a Roman fort by Agricola; A.D. 620 … The Baptism of Eadwine; A.D. 870 … The Danes Seize Manchester after an obstinate resistance from the Anglo-Saxon Inhabitants … A.D. 1330. Edward III establishes the Flemish Weavers in Manchester … A.D. 1337. John of Gaunt Supports Wyckliffe before the consistory court at St Paul’s Cathedral … A.D. 1566. The Court Leet try and stamp Weights and Measures … A.D. 1639. Humphrey Chetham, a Manchester merchant, founds a school for 40 healthy boys … A.D. 1639. William Crabtree discovers the Sun’s parallax by observation of the transit of Venus on Kersall Moor … A.D. 1642. Lord Strange beaten back by Bradshaw at the fight on Salford Bridge … A.D. 1745. Prince Charles Edward reviews the Manchester Regiment in the collegiate Churchyard … A.D. 1753. John Kay, inventor of the fly shuttle, saved by being carried off in a wool sheet as the mob are breaking into his house at Bury.58

The final panel was left blank, but this provisional list was approved by the Corporation of Manchester in the autumn of 1878.59 Brown and Shields continued to tinker with the schema, and at one point they imagined it might culminate with the Peterloo Massacre, a subject designed to represent the struggle of the masses to acquire full political representation. Unsurprisingly, representatives from the Corporation were unimpressed by this proposal and Shields’s subsequent address to Thompson, seeking support for the subject on the grounds of free speech, was unsuccessful.60 One of the original ideas – the depiction of the Old Pretender reviewing the Manchester Regiment – was ­abandoned, and additional topics from the world of science, technology and industry were entertained before it was agreed to conclude the scheme with the opening of the Bridgewater Canal and John Dalton’s investigations with atomic theory in chemistry. Brown, ever suspicious of the operational logic of bureaucratic systems, complained to Shields about the commissioning process as early as February 138

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1878: ‘There is really no news as to the other matter, and we had better try to forget all about it till there is, for otherwise we shall grow to take no interest in ordinary work and forget our few friends, if we have any, in the vain pursuit of this ignis fatuus, that is like a lawsuit or a patent invention that will not act.’61 At the end of the year he had other reasons for being concerned: Waterhouse (the architect) has been here. His object was to ascertain, before meeting the Committee of Decoration at Manchester, if we were still up to the work of the Great Hall, as he reckoned on settling that for us next week. It seems that Gosse, the poet, who is an old friend of his, had told him that I did not care twopence about the job … I let him understand that we had both of us plenty to do, and that, had we cared so very much about the matter, we might both have been dead before now.62

Brown was notified of his commission by the Corporation of Manchester on Christmas Eve 1878, beginning the designs in London, and starting work in the Great Hall in April 1879. When Brown worked on-site – he lived in Manchester from 1880 to 1887 – he occupied ‘a moveable wooden booth with a platform floor’ to ensure a degree of privacy, since the space was used for committee meetings and other purposes.63 Initially, this arrangement was exciting, as evidenced in an upbeat letter to Shields: I date to you from this, to us, memorable place (the Town Hall). How I have ever got here seems to me a puzzle and a dream. I find it very comfortable; the only thing about my box (for it’s like a box at the opera) being that it is far too comfortable, and, I fear, not to be abandoned often enough to see the effect of one’s work at a distance. At night, when I’m all alone, with an excellent gas stand, it is perfectly delightful, and by daylight, I feel charmingly free from household worries.64

Brown described his gruelling work regime to F. G. Stephens: ‘My hours are from 10 am to 10 pm seven days a week – consequently no dinners or little trips to friends out of Manchester.’65 By September of the same year he confided to Rowley from London, ‘What has come over me I don’t know, I seem to have exhausted what little energy pertains to me while at Manchester, and here can only yawn and lie on the sofa.’66 The return to Manchester brought fresh irritations, as outlined in a complaint to the Committee about ‘interruptions to which my work is constantly subjected. I speak not of noise caused by what might be termed the legitimate use of the room I am painting in for Public Meetings, Flower Shows, Organ Recitals … What I wish to draw your attention to is the quite novel employment of the Great Hall as cloakroom for dinner-guests, causing me again tonight a loss of five hours.’ Brown went on to make additional complaints about ‘the draughts from the opening of doors and other impediments’, before concluding on an ominous note: ‘unless you can stand between me and such disturbance, I shall be forced to return to my natural sphere in London’.67 This threat was never enforced; in May 1881 he 139

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vacated the house in Fitzroy Square, and moved to Calais Cottage, Cleveland Road, Crumpsall, Manchester.68 He told the ever-dependable Rowley that he had ‘written to Heywood about a studio in the Town Hall, and think this is the time, now or never, to make a new start in life. With a painting-room in the Town Hall I might perhaps, get in with a fresh lot of clients, and things could not be worse than in London, and will certainly be cheaper.’69 I will not try to deal here with all the ways in which Brown addressed physical impediments when painting the murals nor with the many ramifications of these experiences. For convenience, I will start the next section of this chapter with a few observations about the interlocking concerns of the mural programme, before examining the first four panels in the scheme. The first point to acknowledge about Brown’s programme is its unusual treatment of history as combination of public events, routines of daily living and practical human activities. Brown’s matter-of-fact world is charged with energy. These are Carlylean characteristics, for Brown starts from the assumption that it is the present that makes historical experience. This attitude, where the researcher is immersed in the ceaseless flux of the past, relates to Brown’s mode of painting. What unites his panels is the sense that ordinary life is forever in the process of tumbling around the ritualised spaces of high culture and political power. Observing these features allows us to recover the critical force of Brown’s fascination with the small scale, the marginal – and the convulsive. In general, then, the panels are prickly and elastic, as if designed to insist on the relentless dynamism of human life. There are sudden escalations of action and truncations of perspective. No one has explained these critical features and graphic processes better than Barlow: The scheme … has a pattern to it, albeit a paradoxical one. Its account of local identity is caught between contradictory tendencies. It celebrates irrepressible difference, a resistance to control by centralizing and unifying forces, but this competes with the need to deliver a coherent account of Manchester as a developing site of cultural and economic importance, its unique identity consolidated and distinct. It is this second, more ‘official’ project that seems confused and unsuccessful. In this respect the scheme itself is a site of failed integration. The aggregation of subjects never achieves full articulation. Instead, we are confronted by a juxtaposition of irreconcilable moments in which neither the progress nor identity of Manchester is ever fully defined or consolidated.70

There is yet further dimension to the plastic thinking evident in the bristling panels, which leads directly to my second point. What sets them apart from orthodox historical representations was Brown’s creation of an elaboratively concessive style. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the organisation of his intermixed world: some figures intrude, recede or lunge; others halt or stagger. That is, Brown puts to one side the world of academic symbolisation to focus on concrete historical events set within a graphic system producing unexpected levels of surface movement. From all this we can conclude that he felt that 140

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genuine knowledge, something other than ordinary discursive truth, required a slanting view of history. In this rendering of a pictorial world, Brown’s panels are strikingly reminiscent of the cobbled-together nature of Carlyle’s textual world. Within Carlyle’s scheme, the attentive historian pictures the past as an endless oscillation between background and foreground, centre and margin, environment and action. Nothing is trivial for Carlyle because everything is related in his model of historical experience. Brown perpetuated Carlyle’s representation of history as psychomachia by highlighting the relationship between social body and social setting throughout the Manchester mural programme. Like Carlyle, Brown wanted to re-experience or re-enact the past, which meant resisting the critical features of conventional public art programmes. For example, he showed no interest in replicating the features of the Palace of Westminster scheme, which subscribed to a linear or developmental model of history, and thus minimised signs of irregularity and struggle. Likewise, Brown disregarded administrative models of History Painting where the representation of human performance of one kind or another was given priority over the messy everyday world in which people live and interact as social beings. Against the dominant trends in British History Painting, Brown’s situational and sinewy designs treat the body as a proto language of history itself. As seen in Chapters 1 and 2, Brown associates the human form with struggle and conflict. In consequence, he was free to explore the use of gyrational bodies within a double-squared landscape format, especially in the riotous The Expulsion of the Danes. Elsewhere, in Bradshaw’s Defence of Manchester (Plate 9) and John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle (Plate 10), key forms are forced together, a mode of graphic design that distorts traditional expressions of planar order. These unusual pictorial patterns encourage the viewer to understand that nothing is excluded from Brown’s historical framework. The proper conceptual space for considering these matters is Carlyle’s speculations on the ‘Eye of History’, which stressed the entangled, polycentric nature of the life of the world. This, I think, is the significance of Brown’s vision of historical experience: in representing the phenomenal world it reiterates a Carlylean mentality where knowledge is not derived from practicable procedures of deductive logic. Vision implied movement and the rejection of the self-contained composition celebrated in academic discourse. The painter’s situation, then, resembled the world faced by Carlyle’s historian, who confronted the ‘ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements.’71 This treatment of historical representation as hermeneutical project allowed Brown to resist one of the main features of academic art theory (and Whig ideology): the conviction that history has an ineluctable direction. Brown’s anti-cycle has no proper beginning or ending; it is marked by contradiction and discontinuity; and the endpoint, Dalton Collecting Marsh Fire Gas (Plate 12), seems to announce a condition of colloquial stasis, a non-urban topography 141

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that points to nowhere in particular. It helped, perhaps, that this concluding panel looks like a moment outside time, something close to a synthetic statement about the enriching inertia of an everyday version of the pastoral. Whatever the case, it is an image of how customary folkways become common spaces of everyday life; the opposite, then, of the world of displacement and assimilation encountered at the inception of the series, where The Romans Building a Fort indicates the transformation of the ownerless earth into fortified territory. At the centre of The Romans Building a Fort (Plate 1) a bored army general inspects an architectural plan, labelled ‘Mancuniensia’, held by an eager-toplease subordinate. The plan, displaying the grid-like shape of the fortification, confirms the centralising agency of the Roman Empire and its allegiance to science. Beyond the ramparts, we glimpse the Peak District and a slither of the river Medlock. Above the Nubian slaves, on the right-hand side of the panel, the general’s wife shivers in the autumnal wind. F. G. Stephens, a close friend commented favourably on the interplay between climatic and decorative elements: ‘The tints – which are of a very high key, the key-note being deep red – are clear, strong and sharply defined, as wintry air causes natural tints to be; and the painter has thus secured an intensely brilliant general effect for his work.’72 In the foreground, emerging from the substratum of the design at the bottom left, a cluster of Brito-Celts are laying red sandstones under the supervision of Roman legionaries. The reviewer in The Times picked up on this incident: ‘A striking feature of the picture is the contrast of type between the hardy Britons and their conquerors whose bronzed complexion and dark hair betoken the natives of a southern country unused to the inclemencies of British skies … The idea of the Roman conqueror triumphing over all difficulties could not have been expressed by more realistic and … pictorial means.’73 Described thus, the image seems to witness the submission or incorporation of British natives to Roman ‘law’, the development of the rational-technical state from a militarised condition based on the coordination of human performance and engineering. Yet this account, which emphasises the rationality of the event, is not an accurate description of what Brown depicts. The association of urban development with bodily power, not technocratic knowledge, explains the thinking behind The Romans Building a Fort. True, the history of Manchester begins with the creation of a mesa, the construction of an isolated, defendable place rising above the landscape. Nonetheless, the plan, which is upside down, calls into question the competence of the building programme. The general, who moves away from the centurion in a swirling inversion of contrapposto, fails to perform his role as inspector of works. His wife, whose black eyebrows clash with her bleached hair, looks on absent-mindedly. Her son, with his over-sized bugle, ‘who is attired in [a military] uniform’, lashes out at the Nubian slave, another sign of the routinisation of violence in history.74 The legionnaire, the highest figure in the panel, carries the standard, but it is truncated by the top of the 142

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frame. High and low values fail to stick to high and low forms. For example, the Romans’ self-organising world of formulas is confronted by the Brito-Celts’s eruptive world of pure gusto. These plutonic beings – for whom, one might say, ‘History has been written with earth-mounds and monumental stone-heaps’ – are bursting into view from below to become one with the space of the picture plane.75 These uncommon arrangements signal Brown’s interest in the relationship between identity and community. The Romans, state-builders, are associated with the faultlessly regular shape of the fort drawn in the plan held by the legionnaire. Below them, we see the shapes, subjects and activities that suggest history is more elastic and complicated than its modelling in the plan.76 We also see a mark in the landscape, the transformation of common land, something that belongs to the tribe, into the territory of empire. The Romans, who stand above the substratum of nature to announce the complete management of space, want to co-opt the Brito-Celts to their vision of nature as rational resource. They need these natives to become pacified and predictable units of bodily labour. In short, the Romans belong to a mental order where technics produces trade and prosperity by hammering the land into shape and by organising human behaviour, human performance. The next thing to make clear is that The Romans Building a Fort is an ­anti-beginning, at least in the terms outlined by cyclical or stadial versions of history, the two standard models of human development articulated in Victorian historiography.77 For Brown, history does not oscillate between periods of social virtue and public ostentation, nor is it driven to realise itself through the development of commercial arrangements – or some other ‘civilising’ force. In fact, in keeping with the neo-Hogarthian orientation of his aesthetic, which locates conflict within subjects and forms, Brown incorporates signs of indolence and boredom – classic markers of corruption as articulated by cyclical versions of history – within the standard figures of liberty or virtue.78 Hence, the wife of the Roman general, a rococo-like figure, is closer to the neo-classical type of corrupt oriental luxury than she is to the values of republican stoicism. By contrast, it is the hardy Brito-Celts, the barbarians on the ambitus of the design, that signify the explosive power of life and the development of the useful arts. From all this, I think that one can conclude that an interest in human socialisation runs throughout the entire mural programme. In The Romans Building a Fort Brown draws attention to the nature of exchange relations between the Romans and the Brito-Celts, which takes the form of the gap between the geometry of the plan held by the Roman officer and the raw power of work.79 It has been suggested that the plan presented to the general indicates a model of history as something self-grounding: Roman forces intend to build over a void, to transform wild space into habitation or environment. Their project is the project of modernity defined in a famous statement by Martin Heidegger: ‘The securing of supreme and absolute self-development of all the capacities 143

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of mankind for absolute dominion over the entire earth is the secret goad that prods modern man again and again to new resurgences.’80 In other words, the Romans are determined to manage or contain the restless forces of history, to remake the world as ‘empire’ to reflect the reality they want to see. In practice, however, technological leadership, incarnated in the Romans, is treated in a highly idiosyncratic manner by Brown. For sure, the mechanisms of control – pre-requisites for leadership – are evident. The edges, teeming with life, are subject to a centre exuding authority. The war machine, in its civil guise, contains within itself the social and industrial skills needed to make a thriving modern city. The history of human society, as related to the birth of Manchester, seems to be the rational exploitation of work within an orderly system of construction. Manchester will grow through the application of techne: the organisation of labour in accordance with scientific principles designed to create resilient objects. Modernisation, a system of social discipline, will transform inert space into a working environment. And yet, Brown appears to be far more interested in the inexhaustible variety of life cutting across this ‘civic’ event. Accordingly, it makes sense to relate these cultural-graphic matters to the issue of Brown’s style, which, as seen previously, has deterred serious analysis of his works in the ‘culture-as-ideology’ school of criticism. For Barlow, by contrast, ‘Brown’s style is adapted to provide a visual form through which the process of modernization encounters the alien and the “irrational” character of local identity. To achieve this Brown provides a visual alternative to the academic conventions of History Painting, which comes to stand for repressive imperial authority attempting to subdue local diversity.’ As Barlow points out, ‘By combining Pre-Raphaelite emphasis on detail with the influence of Hogarth, Brown creates a style that affirms local traditions and popular experience as a source of resistance to mechanisation of life.’81 Brown’s Hogarthian concern with process over organisation, it might be added, runs in parallel with a Carlylean outlook which maintains that energy is derived from the ambitus of a system, situation or event. For Brown, no social form can be understood in isolation. By the same token, his intricate, multi-layered designs allowed him to equate historical representation with the clash of conventions. As I have already suggested, he creates a human picture where the platitudinous ‘stuff’ of everyday existence is pushed into the shallow space of life. It is striking, therefore, that he emphasises the physiological aspect of representation by insisting on a low viewpoint, which acts to throw the viewer into the pictorial world. Put differently, just as the living fact is associated with the collective energies of the painter and the subject he or she represents, so the image functions as a cluster of vital pressures. Brown’s critical orientation, to make the painting receptive to different forms of life, recalls Hazlitt’s well-known concept of gusto, the neo-vitalist theory that posited energy as the basis of life. And again, by creating a world brimming with life Brown rejects the view that art is a question of repeated consistency in vision and performance. 144

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Having grasped the dynamics of Brown’s mode of representation, the underlying spatial organisation of The Romans Building a Fort becomes understandable: we peer into a world where energy is conducted by the virile BritoCelts, since they demonstrate the existential nature of historical vision. These figures – compressed and truncated – indicate that the source of action is expressed through the physicality of work; the Romans, by contrast, signify the reduction of consciousness to merely a formal coherence. Which is to say, radical division is presented as the condition in which historical knowledge comes into being. Instead of a single composition, dual situations; instead of pictorial stability, where parts work in tandem, a world where ‘subordinate parts are continually threatening to detach themselves from the pictorial site of action, distracted by their own concerns’.82 In this peculiar place, human stuff never settles into a coherent picture of the surpassing might of the Roman Empire. In fact, Brown replaces the developmental view of history with something very different – a historically contingent perspective, a set of situations where subjects struggle to know or to shape the world. Academic pictorial truth – enshrined in the rationalising power of the coherent centre – is absent in a panel where historical power is associated with the effervescing source of common life, the forceful figures popping up from the bottom of the panel and propping up the forces of history. With this in mind, we can return to the representation of the Roman general and his wife. Instead of dominating or normalising the action around them, they are doubly detached. The general’s oddly articulated body seems to move back and forward at the same time. His wife’s rococo-inspired coiffure, associated in Pre-Raphaelite circles with shallowness and solipsism, indicates an artificial state of being. She belongs to the world of decoration and consumerism. She is symptomatic of the distortion of aesthetic experience by a condition of anti-work. The general, offered what seems to be a plausible representation of an orderly future, turns away from the map of Manchester and shows little interest in the work going on around him. He is almost fatigued by performing the inspection; the preoccupation with technology seems to reside in another sector of the Roman Empire. The power inherent to life belongs to the BritoCelts, not to their bored or foppish conquerors. For Brown, radical change, construed in terms of the social values consequent upon civics, is equated with the labour power of the conquered figures at the base of the image bashing and pulling masonry, not the chilly and indifferent Romans.83 We have seen enough to appreciate how Brown developed a powerful graphic system to demonstrate his belief that history meant ceaseless movement – and discord. This surprising feature is noted by Barlow: ‘Stepping back to take in the whole image and identify with the supposedly dominant Roman General only reveals the complex decorative elaboration of the image, its broad planes and twisting lines forcing the Romans into abstract shapes derived from the principles of the Celtic tattoo, as their cloaks swirl around the plan of the fort.’84 In other words, Brown’s achievement was to present the birth of 145

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Manchester as an intermixed space of gusto where signs of unity give way to division in the performance of human activities.85 Note, too, that nothing is so distinctly Carlylean as these characteristics. The Romans Building a Fort is a type of mock-beginning, a state that is to be superseded by the rational-technical might of the Roman Empire, as seen in the military edifice undergoing construction in the foreground. Brown presents us with confusing coordinates of the ‘primitive’, the Brito-Celtic, within the ‘modern’, the Roman Empire.86 The design is a sort of ‘ground plan’ for a system of logic that is at once displayed and displaced. For a start, the Brito-Celts are erupting from the ‘ground’ of history, bursting into the image to confirm a worldliness that exists prior to the staging of human performance. More than this, though, these figures establish the critical shape of the series as a whole: the heaping of life into unpredictable patterns; the identification of the margins of the composite image with hectic animation; the depiction of history as set of messy entanglements; and the articulation of historical painting as an inexhaustible medley of motion and stasis. For Brown and Carlyle, the life of the world, more than the aggregation of people and things, refuses to submit to the edicts of the Romans: it will not become a self-contained whole. To adequately capture the critical force of these arrangements it is necessary to turn to Brown’s description of the panel: ‘[It shows] the foundation of Manchester; for, although the British name “Mancenion” seems to indicate this locality as a centre for population, it is improbable that anything worthy of the name of a Town existed before the Roman Mancenion … [The] standard bearer … a “Dragonifer”, holds up the silken, wind-inflated Dragon standard which the Romans … had adopted from the “Barbarians.”’87 Perhaps it suffices to say that these comments offer a perspective on Brown’s historical method. After all, as he makes clear, the use of the name ‘Mancenion’ encourages the viewer to see the fortification from the perspective of the Brito-Celts, as if it is something they continue to possess, albeit linguistically. The possibility of contact with truth arises from the realisation that historical experience is hybridised, as occasioned by the inclusion of the Dragon standard. Representation, outlined in these terms, is obliged to be responsive to the dynamic and complex relationship between the sovereign and the servile. On the one hand, the image insists on the distinctions to be made between the activities of the Romans and the Brito-Celts. On the other hand, it indicates that the idea of authority, as incarnated in the cropped standard, has become detached from the expression of a codifying locus or self-contained whole. All of this suggests that we need to recognise four interlocking features of The Romans Building a Fort. First, Brown starts the mural programme by proposing that this specific landscape, a combination of militarised and ­commercial-civic attributes, is the result of speculative thinking. The Romans, like the ­system-building thinkers of the nineteenth century, have convinced themselves that it is possible to predict outcomes by measuring what are taken to be the key features within the social organisation. Here, then, society becomes a process of rationalisation, 146

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embodied in the machinic form of the plan held by the Roman officer. Yet, as we have seen, the idea of substantive rationality, the belief that there is a deep meaning within the bureaucratic structure, is called into question by the rumbustious Brito-Celts, who have been transposed from their natural communal environment to generate the surplus materials required to produce social stability and coherence. Their tattoos, the externalisation of a pre-modern world of ritual, refer to a mode of consciousness at odds with the Roman mentality of regularisation, as incarnated in the ground-plan, which signals the conviction that science can predict the shapes and forms of human experience.88 Second, as should be apparent by now, Brown rejects the spectrum model at the heart of academic History Painting, where different forces are held in check by a ‘strong’ or ‘synthesising’ centre. Brown’s concern is with situations where authority breaks down or where social energies are detached from disciplinary powers and social leadership. His is a composite world where things compete to dominate picture space. Third, his interest in tension, conflict and the play of continency relates to the critical thinking devised by Carlyle, whose writings are at once meditations on the desire to possess history in one form or other and the need to make the act of writing history convey a sense of the feeling of life as it happened. Note, too, that like Carlyle – who also imagined his job was to disinter figures buried by the historical record – Brown pictures his Brito-Celts rising from the ground, to be realised as dynamic agents in the life force of history. In his distinctive way, then, Brown starts with an image which calls into question the idea of thematic unity by drawing attention to the historical construction of social identity. Seen from this angle, History Painting addresses the underlining structural relations between competing social forces and different forms of consciousness. Last, Brown’s interest in the history of the organisation of the body suggests that he identifies the Romans as precursors of the market-efficient hypothesis: they embody a social perception that existence can be rationalised by the introduction of the appropriate ‘machinery’ of sovereignty. The Baptism of Edwin (1879) (Plate 2), the next work in the scheme, conforms to the same pattern of thinking. Like The Romans Building a Fort, it is a composite image made from sub-divided groups. A mixture of powerful horizontal lines and voids within a shallow space, it commemorates the marriage of Edwin, King of Northumbria (whose territories included Manchester), to Queen Ethelberga of Kent. Edwin, shown in profile, and with hands clasped in prayer, adheres to the hieratic attitude common in early modern religious painting. Once again, Brown departs from academic conventions of the centre-margin relationship, for the subject of baptism is pushed to the left of the image to make room for an open space attended to by the choric figures of common life. These onlookers are semi-obscured by the ceremonial drapery of the screen, which acts as a barrier between vernacular life and monarchical authority; this inventive arrangement creates the impression that members of the congregation peer into the image from an external position, one adjoining nature, which is glimpsed above their heads. As Hueffer puts it, 147

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The congregation kneels, half hidden behind the cloth thrown over what is, perhaps, the Communion railing. Their mental attitude is one compounded of mocking wonder and superstitious dread. A laughing mother holds up her naked baby that he may have a better view of the outlandish ceremony … The Saxon warriors, young and old, refuse to bow the knee to the new White God. The little thurifers, after their manner, are not over-reverent behind the SaintBishop’s back – one of them laughs mockingly at the other, who can only keep his incense alight by blowing it.89

Such is one way, at any rate, of engaging with a world brimming with life. It is worth pointing out that the baptism takes place on a mosaic floor, suggesting a connection with the world of The Romans Building a Fort, as does the classical portico of the temple spied through Saxon triangular-headed windows. Brown’s juxtaposition of forms implies that the image looks back into history, in the manner pioneered by Carlyle in Past and Present, for Queen Ethelberga is placed on a Roman mosaic containing the inscription SPQR, the sign of imperial power. At the same time, this expression of historical experience is complicated by Brown’s orchestration of forms. For instance, the flag held by a member of the congregation exemplifies the Hogarthian spirit active throughout the series, since it represents a warrior-king whose giant sword seems to extend beyond the design to inhabit a plane parallel to Queen Ethelberga. These structural features are repeated by the decorative cape worn by the warrior-king, coloured to resemble the Queen’s crown. Additionally, beneath the congregation, the swirling patterns of the Saxon cloth connect to the Roman mosaic made from standardised geometric units. Through these graphic procedures Brown strikingly insists on a model of historical life at odds with standard accounts of beginnings, endings and mediating points. His concern is with an everyday world of crooked spaces, multiple viewpoints and different stages of attention. Just as everything here begins with amplification, adulteration or exaggeration, so the antique source of nationhood is little more than a mosaic of fragments. What is commonly called the significant event becomes a kind of backdrop for the details found in the margins of academic art. These matters were recognised by a reviewer in The Academy who noted the ‘massive’, ‘complete’ and ‘broad’ treatment, before commending a scene which ‘lives for us as it might have happened, the actors are individualised, and each one is a study of some of the varied emotions one would fancy could be observed in such a crowd’.90 W. B. Yeats, always more receptive to the hieratic image, was less convinced, however: ‘[This is] a picture that I cannot persuade myself to like chiefly, I think, because I have taken a violent hatred for “Eadwins” himself, with his clerical beard, and because I do not know what he has done with his feet in that very small fount they have immersed him in.’91 Yeats was touching here on issues of pictorial organisation which baffled other commentators, a point addressed in Chapter 1. Nonetheless, to sum up The Baptism of Edwin in a few short sentences, one would have to say that it 148

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converts official history into common history. The image, at once spacious and overcrowded, offers a perspective on history as a complex of interactions involving representatives from everyday life and elite society. Seeing history means attending to multiple layers of experience and engagement. To this end, Brown deploys one of his trademark devices: the empty centre, which encourages the viewer to wonder about the life going on around the edges of this egalitarian depiction of a royal event. The identification of historical vision with knotted designs recurs throughout the twelve murals. The Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester, A.D. 910 (1881) (Plate 3), like earlier panels in the series, is an exploration of how subjects react to forces surrounding them. By this I mean that it offers a critical framework of what the historical world looks like and how it can be understood. Brown depicts Manchester as a roughhouse, where indigenous townsfolk and their livestock harass a bunch of swashbuckling Danes in a riotous territorial dispute, summed up by Brown in his description of the painting as a ‘race for life’.92 It is no accident, therefore, that in this gloriously absurd rumination on history as risk, speculation and violence the plundering Danes seem pasted into a clogged space of propulsive conflict. Some of them look furious, but others seem to be fatigued by the experience of perpetual turmoil. Take, for instance, the ghost-white chieftain stretchered across the foreground. Brown calls him ‘rich’, ‘successful’ and ‘young’.93 Yet he is a double parody. First, his languid posture and strange apparel recalls the imagery of supine potentates in orientalist discourse: in Brown’s representation of the Middle Ages barbarian hardiness gives way to a bizarre combination of luxury and effeminacy. Second, the stretcheras-bed, which carries the supine chieftain, turns the battle picture into a version of the domestic subject: the battlefield becomes a bizarre home-from-home, a farce-history, or farce-frenzy where the ravaging invaders are crowded out by the improvised actions of the Mancunians, as well as a cluster of squealing pigs.94 For these reasons Ernest Chesneau’s claim that the subject is ‘grandly heroic’ seems wide of the mark.95 At any event, the opulent figure with his gold ­bracelets – so at odds with the gurning and gesticulating figures surrounding him – looks like a weird conflation of the Hogarthian type of unproductive idleness and the soporific subjects painted by Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton and Albert Moore. This discordant sensibility owes much to a Carlylean feeling for the complexity and interplay of identities within historical events: here comfort is associated with the nomadic aliens, savagery with the builders and defenders of emergent civil society. Another way of making sense of The Expulsion of the Danes is by attending to the distribution of bodies across the narrow space of the panel. In effect, Brown dispenses with the conventions of the unified composition by creating a rotational pictorial system based on the principle of graphic pinch points. The panel deploys, like many of his easel paintings in this period, a trellis system upon which is superimposed rippling patterns, undulating forms and eruptions of energy, as noted by William Michael Rossetti, who referred to the ‘rapidity and violence of action’ of the design.96 149

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The Expulsion of the Danes, a pendent to The Romans Building a Fort, is another montage of invasion and resistance. The Danes are zestful and fearless, but they fail to conquer. Brown informs us that their wealth is something extracted from others, not the result of their own application or industry.97 Situations are piled on top of each other, nothing is held in check and space is filled with signs of graphic disorder. The picture is held together by zigzag patterns rippling across the surface plane, a process that begins with the English horsemen forcing the Danes from the narrow channel in the background. Nor should we neglect the paronomastic element of the image. Note, for instance, how the broken standard (with squawking bird and screaming face) is aligned with a stone figure of Christ, which is itself truncated by the top of the panel. To compound matters, Brown’s cropping forces the players into extreme and contradictory situations, such as the smiling Dane carrying the chieftain from the urban battlefield. Crucially, we have the distinct impression that struggle defines an aggressively physical image in which subjects fight to leave their mark on history. This attitude – where figures compete for attention – is seen in the treatment of the built environment, as observed by Barlow in his careful analysis: ‘The outer wall of the imaginary medieval town is recognizably part of the old Roman fort, to which Romanesque architecture depicted in [The Baptism] has been added. Thus Manchester is literally constructed from confusion. [Brown’s] composition constitutes Manchester as a place which exists through contradictions and borrowings.’ He realises that Brown’s city is ‘a compendium of particulars, a confusion of uncoordinated signs. In the centre a Danish staff, a nonsensical copy of the Roman eagle, snaps in two as it meets the point of architectural contradiction between Romanesque and Roman Manchester. Both Danes and Mancunians have appropriated and adapted aspects of the Roman legacy.’98 If the Danes and the Mancunians compete to manufacture identities borrowed from Roman sources, then the panel becomes a compilation of human stuff where things are forced together, but with no prospect of synthesis or reconciliation. Just as the historical record is the accumulation of odd bits of information resistant to simple conceptual organisation, so the historical image is the compression of things into a condition of continuous disorderliness. As we have been detecting throughout, Brown borrows from Carlyle by emphasising the knotted nature of historical experience. The subtlety and depth of Brown’s response comes to the fore in his utilisation of the idea of the ‘Eye of History’, a vision of a polycentric world devoid of thematic unity, a world where different forms of life are not reducible to the eternal verities of liberal historiography.99 Hence the montaged nature The Expulsion of the Danes, which differs significantly from descriptions of action in traditional History Painting. The world pictured by Brown, tightly filled with friends and enemies, depicts the conditions in which an associational body is sparked into being to oppose an invading militia. Yet these defenders are pictorialised as monadic forms pasted into gallery-like windows. They fight, as individuals, to expel the Danes from a 150

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narrow strip of civilisation, to force them back into a state of nature beyond the city gates. In the final instance, the image pits a would-be collective body ­without fatigue, the furiously animated Mancunians, against the enervated Danes. There is a clearer sense of how energies are rendered more homely in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in Manchester, A.D. 1363 (1881–82) (Plate 4). Here community, craft-mindedness and social shape are emphasised.100 Most importantly, Brown’s design gives the impression that the purpose of History Painting is to recover historical experience by representing different types of social engagement, participation and organisation. This, surely, is one of the key features of an image which is the flipside of academic composition, where topics are subject to a unified truth of a different and higher order than that of everyday life. Brown’s insistence on the organic life of the community creates an alternative pictorial arrangement, one in which the medieval sovereign is no more than a node in a sub-network of kinetic energies. The settled composition of academic painting is replaced by a concatenation of different life-situations. For example, the weavers, a source of ordinary life, affirm their functional independence by ignoring the royal procession. As the title suggests, marginal figures have replaced authority figures to become the central agents in this sprawling vision of medieval Manchester. And, of course, we need to remind ourselves that, on one level, the Flemish weavers are prototypes of the entrepreneurial Humphrey Chetham, the subject in Chetham’s Life Dream (Plate 8), and forerunners of the independent handloom weavers trying to protect craft skills from the machinic logic of modernity, as seen in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle (Plate 10).101 As these reflections suggest, Brown remained sympathetic to the romantic perception of the sensory body and the idea of expressive labour. His affinity with Romanticism takes other forms. Consider for instance, the depiction of an intensely inhabited world where closeness is expressed via truncated form, as seen in the trellis of hands on the left of The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers. Here hands are a close, comforting presence, indicating that people are more than mere signs of economic performance. The hand functions as a central human bond, an affirmation of companionship and skill.102 Brown ­re-emphasises this in the depiction of the disincarnate hand, on the left in the foreground, a peculiarly Carlylean motif. A curious point is raised by the hand which is boxing the urchin’s ear to the extreme left. The action is, of course, momentary, and the hand could only have been seen as a generalised hand, so to speak, in that instance of time. But the artist has put the most careful and elaborate work into the hand … it is very doubtful whether he can be condemned for this … he has only carried to an extreme that primary convention which alone makes painting possible. But the effect is certainly a little odd, and much as we admire the hand per se, we could almost wish that it was not there.103

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Read another way, this tactile world may have been Brown’s way of drawing attention to the relationship between perceptual knowing and conceptual knowing. Whatever the case, the hands in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers – demonstrating how a human society works through the materialisation of trust, and the blending of friendship and purposive work – relate to the concerns of leading critics of industrialism, many of whom noted that apologists of the industrial system used the term ‘hands’ to refer to industrial workers.104 For critics of the industrial process, the term ‘hands’ indicated a condition of thraldom in which the worker was at once alienated from work and his or her body. To be a hand was to be caught up in a process where mechanisation and productivity were the sole means of calibrating value. To be a hand was to be subjugated by the organisation of production, a system where the performance of labour meant workers became estranged from each other. To be a hand was to be a cog in a social mechanism, a productive unit; and to be a hand was to be subject to a process in which value was extracted from the sensory experience of work.105 The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers certifies the importance of social welfare in Brown’s view of history. There is, so to speak, a natural relationship between the hand and the idea of shared being. When looking at the group of children in the foreground, we encounter subjects who learn to associate by conversing through the language of touch and care. It is obvious that Brown goes out of his way to spotlight that the meshing of hands, a bodily technique of belonging, indicates an ability to create a socialised self and to work in partnership with others. The hand was a way of asserting that social life originates in the body, not in contracts, customs and codes. It was a way of demonstrating solidarity. To put the point in another way, the hand linked Brown to his subject because it was at once expression of agency and a way of drawing people together as a living community rooted in work, craft and creativity.106 What this all also means is that in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers we see people who are intensely aware of being alive, of being situated in the world. The hectic animation of the design should be connected to what The Times called Brown’s ‘graphic boldness’.107 The key point here is the transformation of the central part of the design into something resembling a rotational prism with little sense of spatial depth. Looked at from this point of view, it is evident that Brown gives graphic form to Carlyle’s ‘Eye of History’, a doctrine in which the experience of historical truth is defined as combination of imaginative perception and critical embodiment. To peer into Brown’s world is to discover an appeal to human self-assertion. We know this much at least: in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers, the socialised hand registered the cultural dimension of citizenship. It offered the possibility of the development of human spirit, the freedom enacted in and by civil association.108 It expressed creativity and hospitality, the integration of weavers and children through individuating touch. In both instances, the hand meant collaboration, the realisation of collective imagination through bodily contact and the rejection of the model of self-interest, which coloured so many 152

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versions of provincial liberalism in late nineteenth-century Britain. This last matter is unsurprising because, as we discovered in Chapters 1 and 2, Brown’s knowledge of British politics was broad and deep. He would, for instance, have understood the symbolic significance of the weaver in working-class literature, where the artisan was exalted for control over the work practice. Handloom weaving, an occupation within living memory, was a subject of pride for those who wanted to preserve an image of working-class authority and independence through a lifeworld of craft skills, the specialised knowledge of home-based industry.109 To this reading of the self-realisation of working-class identity through the social group Brown grafted a vision of weaver culture as sign of cosmopolitanism. Behind this whole line of reasoning is a form of cultural humanism which accounts for the development of Brown’s activist aesthetic from the 1840s until the 1890s. Brown, like so many of the artists and writers associated with Romanticism, was drawn to the proposition that value was the outcome of free critical labour derived from awareness of the workings of the world rather than the product of ratiocination. He rejected the premise, common in liberalism, that human advancement was caused by enhanced economic performance. Thus, the idea of the critical authority of work to human existence links Brown to Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris, all of whom were concerned with identifying the creative potential and mental value of free labour. For this reason, The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers belongs to the independent culture of the cottage economy with its system of handicrafts.110 Such bluff confidence in the possibility of a world filled with friendships and fraternal networks may explain Brown’s reaction to the most important real-world event that occurred when working on The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers. On 10 April 1882 he received news that Dante Gabriel Rossetti had died. The telegraph, from his daughter Lucy, ‘sent a terrible pang’ to his heart. As he confided to Theodore Watts-Dunton, ‘I had known him, without a break since [18]48 I believe. It is like part of one’s own life torn away … All day the memories of events 10, 20 or 30 years past away have been “crowding up” … in my memory & however he is to be replaced for me or others I can’t think.’111 Notes 1 H. Rathbone, ‘Madox Brown as a Teacher’, in FMH, Appendix A, p. 428. 2 Abel Heywood, Mayor of Manchester, Opening Ceremony Speech, Manchester Town Hall. See Cutting File Abel Heywood, MLHLMCLM. 3 FMH, p. 330. 4 See J. W. Diggle, The Lancashire Life of Bishop Fraser (London: Samson, Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1889), p. 34. Gladstone spoke to Brown when he went to the Town Hall in 1886. See FMBBL, 449.5, 22 May 1887. 5 It is worth noting that Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836), one of the most important merchant bankers of the early nineteenth century, moved to Manchester in the late 1790s and established himself as a warehouseman trading in cottons. 153

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6 In this sense it was different to classic cotton mill towns like Bolton, Bury, Oldham and Stockport. 7 A chamber of commerce was established in Manchester in 1820 and formal money exchanges were established in Manchester, Liverpool and other urban centres in the 1830s. 8 See FMH, pp. 145–7. Prince Albert’s opening address at the Manchester Fine Art Treasures Exhibition deployed the terminology devised by Sir Robert Peel, Thomas Wyse, Joseph Hume and other politicians interested in the social value of culture to the industrial state: ‘We behold a feast which the rich, and they who have, set before those to whom fortune has denied the higher luxuries of life – bringing forth from the innermost recesses of their private dwellings, and intrusting to your care, their choicest and most cherished treasures, in order to gratify the nation at large.’ See [Prince Albert] Principal Speeches, p. 180. 9 E. Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (London: Chapman & Hall, 1848) was a rare attempt to fuse aspects of these competing critical idioms. 10 Engels, one of a large group of German businessmen, social thinkers and musicians drawn to Manchester, worked at the textile firm Ermen and Engels from 1842 to 1869. 11 See Ruskin, The Political Economy of Art (1857), reissued as A Joy For Ever (1880), where the industrial practices of Victorian liberalism are called ‘the principle of death’ (JR, vol. 16, p. 26). 12 The Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society was founded in 1781, The Manchester Portico Library in 1806, The Royal Manchester Institute in 1832 and the Manchester Statistical Society in 1833. 13 John Seed’s observation that by the 1860s a vibrant art world was fully integrated into the social and economic life of Manchester, sounds about right. See J. Seed, ‘Commerce and the Liberal Arts’, in J. Wolff and J. Seed (eds), The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-century Middle Class (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 46. 14 See letter from Brown to Shields, 22 May 1887, in FMH, p. 381. 15 See S. Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City 1840–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 71–8. 16 H. Miller, First Impressions of England and its People (Edinburgh: John Johnstone, 1847), p. 38. 17 L. Faucher, Manchester in 1844 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1844), pp. 90–1. 18 Faucher, Manchester, pp. 150–1. The Plug Plot, where textile workers in the districts between Manchester and Halifax removed boiler plugs in textile mills, was a response to wage reductions and redundancies. 19 Faucher, Manchester, pp. 150–1. Like Carlyle, Faucher knew that Manchester had experienced food riots at the end of the eighteenth century, a weavers’ strike in 1808, Luddite-like attacks on machinery in 1812, the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, weavers’ riots in 1829 and the launch of the National Charter Association in 1840. Nor should it go unnoticed that Manchester organised the first mass petition against slavery as early as 1787 and that John Doherty established the Manchesterbased Grand General Union of Cotton Spinners in 1828. This culture of radicalism explains why the Home Office took direct control of policing from 1838

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to 1841, the high point of Chartist activity in Manchester and other parts of the country. 20 Faucher, Manchester, pp. 26–7. 21 Carlyle went on to develop a much darker and more complex version of this vision of social modernisation as paradoxical combination of intimacy and alienation in Past and Present. 22 Perhaps this desire to create a full spectrum vision of human life should be called Shakespearean realism. For a perceptive account of this matter, see Thirlwell, Into the Frame, pp. 214–15. 23 Carlyle, Past and Present, TC, vol. 10, pp. 21–3. 24 For the best account of the idea of the moral economy, see E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of The English Crowd’ and ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, in Customs in Common (Pontypool: Merlin Press, 1991), pp. 185–258, 259–351. 25 Karl Blind, her father, an ex-member of the Communist League, knew Marx. Blind fled from Baden and in 1852 found refuge in London. On this matter, see G. Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Penguin, 2016), p. 368. 26 Charles Rowley provides a sympathetic account of what he calls the ‘lambent spirit’ of a ‘loveable and enlightened woman’, in Rowley, Fifty Years of Work, pp. 108–9. Blind’s account of Highland crofter eviction in The Heather on Fire (1886) repeats the critique of rentier landlordism and profiteering made by Brown in his Diary. 27 A. Symons (ed.), The Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), pp. 445. 28 In The Prophecy of St. Oran (1881) she proclaims a Blakean gospel of energy as eternal delight. The inscription on her wreath at Brown’s funeral – ‘Death is the mercy of eternity’ – was a modification of ‘Time is the mercy of eternity’, from Blake’s Milton (1804–10). See the Funeral Notice in the Morning Post (12 October 1893), p. 5, for an account of Brown’s funeral. The pioneering nature of Blind’s poetical humanism, which resets Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) in a Comtean social framework, has yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves, least of all from art historians. Nonetheless, for a sympathetic and detailed account of her life and times, see J. Diedrick, Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016). 29 Blind, painted by Brown in 1876, was critical of some of the ethical and metaphysical aspects of Romanticism, as can be gleaned from her comparison of Shelley and Darwin: ‘is it true that all things in Nature, where man is not, speak “peace, harmony, and love”? Why, if we open our Darwin, the very opposite fact meets us at every turn. Yes, in the very vegetable kingdom, amid the gentle race of flowers so dear to Shelley, precisely the same forces are at work, the same incessant strife is raging, the same desires and appetites prevail, which he so abominated in the world of man. For gnawing at the root of life itself seems this power of evil from which the poet’s sensitive soul shrank with such horror – lust, hunger, rapine, cruelty. So far from peace being the law of Nature, we learn on the contrary, from our great naturalist, that from the lowest semi-vital organism to the highest and most complex forms of life battle is being waged within battle for the right to breathe, to eat, and to multiply on the earth.’ M. Blind, Shelley’s View of Nature Compared with Darwin’s (privately published lecture, 1886).

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30 See Thirlwell, Into the Frame, p. 97. Hueffer notes that the switch to Fitzroy Square meant that Brown’s position had ‘changed from that of an almost unknown iconoclast to that of an artist only officially unrecognised, whilst his house became one of the chief resorts of those men of genius and talent who, like himself, were mostly “officially unrecognised”’. FMH, p. 219. 31 As noted by Thirlwell, Into the Frame, p. 98, this imposing property boasted twenty rooms spread over six floors. 32 See JT, pp. 47–8. 33 See Bornand, The Diary of W. M. Rossetti, p. 195. 34 See F. M. Hueffer, ‘Nice People’, Temple Bar, vol. 128 (November 1903), p. 572. 35 J. McCarthy, Reminiscences (London: Chatto & Windus, 1899), vol. 1, pp. 314–15. 36 Brown’s first wife, Elizabeth, died in his arms while crossing Paris by carriage on 5 June 1846, and Arthur, his first son, died, aged ten months, on 21 July 1857. 37 As expressed in letters to Frederic Shields, 5 July 1866, and George Rae, 30 November 1868, in FMH, pp. 238, 243–4. Brown informed Rae that ‘he beats me in colour already, and, I fancy, before many years he will beat me in other qualities also, seeing that till February he will not be fourteen years old’. 38 See Trodd, Visions of Blake, p. 289; and Peattie (ed.), Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, p. 337. John Sampson, a distinguished editor of Blake’s literary works, noted Oliver’s contribution to Blake scholarship in his The Poetical Work of William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), p. 306. 39 Brown to George Rae, 16 November 1874, National Museums Liverpool, George Rae papers, Lady Lever Art Gallery (on loan to the Walker Art Gallery). For Oliver’s funeral, see Soskice, Chapters from My Childhood, pp. 71–2. 40 This vision of Oliver as master of multiple art forms was expressed by J. H. Ingram, Oliver Madox Brown: A Biographical Sketch (London: Elliot Stock, 1883). 41 See Thirlwell, Into the Frame, pp. 163, 229, who notes that expenditure on alcohol was often much greater than bills for foodstuffs in the 1860s and 1870s. See also, MB, vol. 2, p. 387, who reproduces two paintings of Emma convalescing in bed. 42 Letter from Brown to Shields, 9 February 1869, in FMH, p. 250. 43 See Dante Gabriel Rossetti, letter to Lady Ashburton, 8 June 1871, in Fredeman et al. (eds), The Correspondence, vol. 5, p. 57. 44 Undated letter from Brown to Rowley, in FMH, p. 309. 45 This section of the chapter, which deals with the genesis of the programme, is indebted to Treuherz, who provides a detailed and reliable account of the complex history of commissioning and supervising the murals in JT, pp. 47–59. 46 See letter from Brown to Rae 6 February 1876, in FMH, p. 302. 47 Shields, in FMH, p. 146. 48 See FMH, p. 257. 49 JT. p. 48. 50 Charles Rowley to FMB, 14 December 1876, MSL 1995/14, Box, 18, FMBV&A. 51 Charles Rowley to 8 July 1876, FMB, MSL 1995/14, Box 18, FMBV&A. 52 In 1878, Rowley encouraged Brown to produce a ‘Great Men’ series of cartoons to be displayed in what Brown called ‘the New Manchester Museums for the people’. See MB, vol. 2, p. 528.

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53 Another sign of his organisational and diplomatic skills: in 1875, he persuaded Brown and Ruskin, who loathed each other, to join the General Committee for the Frederic Shields exhibition held in Manchester. 54 The ceiling tiles in the Great Hall commemorate trade with France, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Russia, America, Egypt, New Zealand, China and many other nations. 55 Thompson to Chairman of Town Hall Sub-Committee, 8 October 1878, M79/1/10a, 2, MLHLMCLM. 56 See JTFMB, pp. 170–1. 57 Charles Rowley to FMB, 5 July 1877, FMB, MSL 1995/14, Box 18, FMBV&A. 58 See JTFMB, pp. 172–3. 59 Thompson to Chairman of Town Hall Sub-Committee, 8 October 1878, M79/1/10a, 2, MLHLMCLM. 60 Thompson papers, Frederic Shields to Joseph Thompson, 7 March 1878, MLHLMCLM. 61 Letter from Brown to Shields, 20 February 1878, in FMH, pp. 321–2. 62 Letter from Brown to Shields, 19 December 1878, in FMH, p. 322. 63 See FMH, pp. 333–4. 64 Letter from Brown to Shields, April 1879, in FMH, p. 334. 65 Letter from Brown to F. G. Stephens, I June 1879 cited by Thirlwell, Into the Frame, p. 216. Hueffer noted Brown’s punishing schedule: ‘[He] worked almost continuously; at times sitting before his picture for two, or even three, stretches of five hours each in one day.’ FMH, p. 339. 66 FMH, p. 337. 67 FMB to Abel Heywood (draft), 27 January 1881, FMB, MSL 1995/14, FMBV&A. See also, MB, vol. 1, p. 286, who notes that the Great Hall was used for public lectures, recitals, flower displays and other purposes. 68 Brown’s move to 3 Addison Terrace, Daisy Bank Road, Victoria Park, in August 1883, brought him closer to the centre of Manchester. 69 Letter from Brown to Charles Rowley, 29 January 1881, in FMH, p. 341. 70 PB, p. 85. 71 Carlyle, ‘Thoughts on History’, Frazer’s Magazine (November 1830), 415. 72 [F. G. Stephens], ‘Mr. F. Madox Brown’s Frescoes’, The Athenaeum (26 November 1881), 710. 73 Anon., ‘The Frescoes at the Manchester Town Hall’, The Times (25 December 1882), p. 5. 74 Brown ‘Panel No. 1 – The Romans Building a Fort at Mancenion’, in MB, vol. 1, p. 297. 75 Carlyle, ‘Thoughts on History’, 413. 76 As Treuherz notes, the pictorial organisation – full-size subjects in the foreground and a trail of small figures snaking into the background – is derived from ‘King Lear, Who Has Kept Nothing for Himself but a Retinue of Knights’ (1843–44), in Brown’s cycle of drawings based on Shakespeare’s drama. See JT, p. 101. 77 For a thrilling account of the differences between these historical models, see J. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 1–10.

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78 Brown agreed with William Michael Rossetti, who argued that Hogarth was the locus of modern art. See the letter from Brown to W. M. Rossetti, 19 January 1873, in FMH, p. 284. 79 Paraphrasing Blake, we might see the Britons as living form and the Romans as mathematical form. 80 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Nihilism, trans. David Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), vol. 4, p. 99. 81 PB, p. 82. See also pp. 86–92, where Barlow considers the pictorial and critical connections between Hogarth and the Pre-Raphaelites. 82 PB, p. 87. 83 A matter noted by Treuherz, who echoes Barlow: ‘Brown’s anti-heroic subtext favours the Mancunians, exemplified by the tattooed labourer lifting a heavy sack of cement, cut off by the bottom edge.’ JT, p. 285. 84 PB, p. 92. 85 ‘[Brown’s] style emphasizes the disruptive activity of the local and the popular. It acts as a celebration of multiplicity and visual confusion … the Romans’ bungling efforts set off a chain of events in which motifs and meanings proliferate. The symmetry and intelligibility represented by the neat fort never happens.’ PB, p. 92. 86 For three important contemporary accounts of invasion and settlement in Roman and post-Roman Britain, see J. Mitchell Kemble, The Saxons in Britain (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1849); E. A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1870–76); and W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1873–78). 87 Brown, ‘Panel No. 1’, in MB, vol. 1, p. 297. 88 Here it is worth recalling Matthew Arnold’s famous vision of Celtic culture as intrusion of raw life into rational form. See M. Arnold, Celtic Literature (London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1867). 89 FMH, p. 329. 90 Anon., ‘Mr. Madox Brown’s Murals in Manchester’, The Academy (2 August 1879), 92. 91 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Arts and Crafts: An Exhibition at William Morris’s’, Providence Sunday Journal (26 October 1890), reprinted in W. B. Yeats, Letters to the New Island, eds George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), pp. 108–10. 92 Brown in MB, vol. 1, p. 301, and developed in the notice in the Manchester Courier, 14 April 1880: ‘the whole scene is a scramble for life; pigs escape from their houses and trip up the wounded Danes to be trampled to death by their own people; dogs bark, men and women yell and even children take a delight in cruel torment’. See MB, vol. 1, p. 300. 93 Brown in MB, vol. 1, p. 301. 94 See Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown, p. 25; Thirlwell, Into the Frame, p. 214. 95 E. Chesneau, The English School of Painting, trans. Lucy N. Etherington (London: Cassell & Company, 1885), p. 232. 96 Rossetti, ‘Mr. Madox Brown’s Frescoes in Manchester’, 263. 97 As he put it, ‘the wealth which they acquired they were wont to convert into gold bracelets which were worn on the right arm’. See MB, vol. 1, p. 301.

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98 PB, pp. 92–3. 99 John Burrow’s brilliant summary of Carlyle’s vision of history explains Brown mode of thinking: ‘Everything in history is multiply determined; the actors scarcely see beyond their feet, and in every moment an immensity of different events is occurring, any of which may be significant.’ J. Burrow, A History of Histories (Penguin Books: London, 2007), p. 382. 100 David Wilkie Wynfield exhibited The Origin of the English Woollen Trade at the Royal Academy in 1881: see H. Blackburn (ed.), Academy Notes (London: Chatto & Windus, 1881), p. 60. 101 It should be noted that Waterhouse looked to the model of the Flemish medieval cloth hall when he designed Manchester Town Hall. 102 Hands signify these values in other works by Brown including King Lear (1848–49; 1853–54) and The Last of England (1852–55). See Thirlwell, Into the Frame, pp. 57–61, for a particularly sensitive and intelligent reading of the latter painting. 103 Anon., ‘The Mural Paintings in the Town Hall’, Manchester Guardian (27 May 1882), in MB, vol. 1, p. 306. 104 See, for instance, J. R. McCulloch, A Statistical Account of the British Empire (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1837), vol. 2, p. 115, who waxes lyrical about the mechanisation of the cotton industry: ‘the preparation and repair of which employs a great number of hands and a large amount of capital’. All the same, even advocates of the industrial society thesis were concerned about ­de-skilling in new factories, for ‘the designing and direction of the work passed away from the hands of the workman into those of the master and his office assistants. This led also to a division of labour; men of general knowledge were only exceptionally required as foremen or outdoor superintendents: and the artificers became, in the process of time, little more than attendants on the machine.’ See W. Pole (ed.), The Life of Sir William Fairbairn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1877), p. 47. It is worth pointing out that Thomas Fairbairn, William Fairbairn’s son, used some of the capital from his father’s engineering empire to acquire paintings by Hunt. Bennett discusses Brown’s hoped-for commission from Fairbairn in MB, vol. 1, p. 183. 105 Matters relating to imagining the productivity of the body, a topic of particular importance to Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Marx and Morris, are examined in M. Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 1–24. 106 Brown situated art in a network of production, engagement and exchange. He resigned from the Hogarth Club when it refused to display his furniture designs because they were not deemed examples of fine art. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. – ‘Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture and the Metals’ – was jointly created by Morris, Brown and others in 1861. Brown participated in the inaugural exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1888. 107 Anon., ‘The Frescoes at the Manchester Town Hall’, The Times (25 December 1882), p. 5. 108 Brown would have been familiar with the use of the hand motif in Carlyle’s reading of the French Revolution, where it stands for a sign of ‘ludicro-terrific’ powers of alien intimacy unleashed by revolutionary consciousness. See, Carlyle, The French Revolution, TC, vol. 2, p. 253 and vol. 3, p. 42.

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109 See Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 297–346, for a classic account of developments within the cotton industry. By the 1840s most of these workers were employed in weaving and spinning factories. 110 The Proclamation of Weights and Measures, Chetham’s Life Dream and John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle share the same characteristics. 111 Brown to Theodore Watts-Dunton, 10 April 1882, Add 70627, ff. 17–22, FMBBL. Elsewhere Brown writes: ‘I cannot at all get over the idea that I am never to speak to him again … A great man is gone! … To me it seems like a dream; I cannot make out how things are to go on; in so many directions things must be changed.’ Letter from Brown to Shields in Mills, The Life, p. 275.

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The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and ­statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment … Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People.1 [W]hat romance means is the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present.2 [T]he painter himself must be allowed to select [his subject] … It is true that certain limitations may be accorded – for instance, the artist may be required to select a subject with certain tendencies in it – but the actual invention of the subject and working out must be his. In fact, the painter himself is the only judge of what he is likely to carry out well and of the subjects that are paintable.3 [T]he history of all times and places is nothing else but improbabilities and impossibilities.4

The Trial of Wyclif, A.D. 1377 (1885–86) (Plate 5), the fifth work in the mural programme, is another manifestation of Brown’s commitment to an activist reading of history. In effect, it connects the reproduction of historical life with the representation of life-situations. To this end, it draws attention to Wycliffe by deploying the traditional repoussoir motif to celebrate the tenacity and heroism of an individual who is depicted as the presiding spirit of the common people and civil society. It is known that Brown admired Wycliffe, the subject of an earlier painting, The First Translation of the Bible into English, where he signalled the authenticity of common experience in a space dominated by aristocratic privilege. There is, though, nothing especially stately about The Trial. In a sweeping 161

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image, full of animate detail, Brown imagines an egalitarian medieval culture. However, it complicates the idea of communal experience and purposive activity by representing the event commemorated in the panel as a set of separate parts. There is, in other words, no evidence here that Brown set out to duplicate the standard history of the development of civil authority, or depict the subject as a cultural panorama held in check by a system of coordinated forms. The Trial is an arrangement of opposites. Consequently, Wycliffe embodies calmness; the members of the insubordinate crowd demonstrate a heightened sense of crisis within the social order. Once again, we encounter another example of the ‘Eye of History’, a world picture where characters are caught within an arrangement of intersecting planes designed to amplify the clamorous life of this unusual environment. The Trial commemorates a real event, the trial of John Wycliffe for heresy in Old St Paul’s Cathedral, in February 1377. Wycliffe, an outsider placed at the ecclesiastical and judicial heart of the early modern British state, represents the spirit of non-conformism in the northwest of England.5 He is stoical and self-composed. In the centre is John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Wycliffe’s advocate, a super-animated figure, who is situated between the accused and the court judge.6 Gaunt reiterates the histrionics encountered in Spirit of Justice: in a sweeping movement he directs his sword at Wycliffe; in a subtler gesture he uses his thumb and index finger to ratify the vulnerable state of the accused. Five mendicant friars, appointed to represent Wycliffe, pop up from the bottom of the image. When considered together, these elements reveal an unconventional method of looking into the public world, a version of which was encountered in The Romans Building a Fort (Plate 1), where isolated individuals stand for the integrity and resilience of vernacular life. Brown, in his written account of the panel, presents Wycliffe as an important reformer and scholar whose ideas were disseminated in mainland Europe by John Huss and Martin Luther.7 More to our purpose, he takes great care in imagining the spartan and dignified manner of an individual who exhibits an unshakeable belief in the truth of his cause. Dressed in black, Wycliffe is an unvarnished subject surrounded by the colourful costumes and general paraphernalia of feudal statecraft. This modest and intrepid character wants to translate the Bible into English, to illuminate and direct quotidian existence. In short, Brown’s ‘world-renowned … innovator and thinker’ is the opposite of the schismatic identity ascribed to him by his prosecutors.8 One source, clearly, was William Godwin’s well-known biography of Chaucer: Wicliffe was a man of humble birth, but possessed of the most transcendent abilities … His mind was scarcely less original than that of Bacon and Shakespeare; and he has procured for this island the enviable distinction, of having been the first to break the chains which superstition and an hypocritical policy had imposed upon the powers of investigation, reasoning and the 162

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discovery of truth, which characterise the human mind … In philosophy … he was reckoned second to none, and in the depths of scholastic reasoning was without a peer. His powers incessantly goaded him to surpass others in the subtlety of his knowledge and the profoundness of his invention, and to strike into the paths of new and original opinions.9

This is very suggestive: one imagines Brown using Godwin’s evaluation to propose that Wycliffe’s extraordinary reasonableness and modesty relate to issues of public virtue and theo-political liberty.10 And yet, Brown exceeds Godwin’s neo-classical republicanism, by inviting his viewer to see Wycliffe through the mediating agency of his lawyer. There is something sly and coercive about Gaunt. His performance before the judges is actorly.11 Where Wycliffe is prosaic and placid, Gaunt is bombastic and preening. With Wycliffe, the viewer is provided with a sense of vivid internal life; with Gaunt, everything is externalised, since he seeks to enlist our attention through the display of elan. One source for this arrangement is the Hogarthian tradition in which the image is a battlefield of social signs (Figure 4.1), an arrangement that encouraged Brown to commit himself to a pictorial system in which opposites are wedged together.12 This resolves what might otherwise be seen as a form of critical confusion: the viewer responds to the unassuming and truth-telling Wycliffe through the belligerent Gaunt. These observations are germane to a bigger argument concerning the nature of Brown’s social vision. It is evident that The Trial presents Wycliffe as an activist subject unmoved by the trappings of status and power. Here is a supreme example of public fortitude rather than religious zealotry. Note, too, how Wycliffe is connected to another sign of common humanity: in the altarpiece, on the back wall, the Virgin gesticulates at the clamorous proceedings.13 Consider, as well, Wycliffe’s ascetic garb, a manifestation of the spirit of (respectable) ­dissenting culture and politics. Nor is there anything florid about his manner. On one level, he is an unexceptional figure, like the panoply of itinerant friar-counsellors placed below him. On another level, he is a modification of the motionless, rationalised body at the centre of neo-­classical aesthetics. Either way, the viewer is presented with an embodiment of polite and dignified self-assertion. There are, then, rival temperaments on display here. Wycliffe embodies the idea of the humble address – where the subject in the dock looks beyond the accusers before him – to establish his status as everyman. He does nothing to disguise his true nature; his pose implies openness and receptivity to the world. By contrast, Gaunt is a swaggering, worldly figure who uses the trial to conflate charisma and authority. Where Wycliffe’s body semiotic confirms an attitude of Christian stoicism, Gaunt’s body semiotic suggests cunning. Wycliffe signifies the importance of the need for personal wholeness; Gaunt embodies what Aristotle called demonstrative oratory, the summation of character through the booming presence of speech.14 The painting thus constructs its own mode 163

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Figure 4.1  William Hogarth, The Enraged Musician, 1741

of pictorial organisation based on the principle of model and countermodel, a disjunctive system where the humble address of the austere petitioner is restaged by the narcissistic impresario. The space of the trial, Brown is at pains to emphasise, is a space of divergence in which different mentalities, identities and conventions are revealed. The importance of these and related issues are noted by Bennett and Barlow, both of whom are alert to how Brown creates the impression of a surging world from the over-crowded space of the panel. The former notes, ‘A clever series of off-centre diagonals breaks into the stage setting, to link the main action, sweeping in a great curve across the foreground, with the onlooking crowd behind held at bay by soldiers.’15 The latter observes that Wycliffe’s supporters, who burst into St Paul’s, resist the machinations of the centralising state.16 These accounts of Brown’s pictorial gestalt are of course related, since they indicate how the eruptive image, with its dynamic viewpoints, functions without recourse to standard plastic and narrative conventions. In consequence, Brown goes out of his way to connect background and foreground, a Carlylean idea of society as a living body.17 Which is to say, we are given the impression 164

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of a darting world, an effect accelerated by the invading crowd, whose restless energy establishes their activist credentials as both observers and agents of the historical process.18 The turbulent nature of The Trial may have been enflamed by Brown’s failure to persuade the city councillors to support his proposal to paint the Peterloo Massacre, a public meeting at which workers and their families were murdered in an act of state terror. Whatever way we look at it, The Trial is far too frenzied to function as an antiquarian representation of constitutional or theological matters. Once more, the graphic pull of Brown’s art is exerted on behalf of the ‘Eye of History’, which meant departing from the conventions of historical representation. In looking into the image, the viewer is entangled in a world where agents of community life confront representatives of state power. These rival versions of human energy – the overheated Gaunt and the unruly gusto of the crowd – allow Brown to explore different articulations of argumentative power. There are additional features to this critical arrangement. For example, Brown draws attention to the peacefulness of the itinerant monks in the foreground. Busy and ordinary in every respect, they represent shared values and recall the everyday figures supporting Justice in Spirit of Justice (Figure 2.4). Nor should we overlook the appearance of Chaucer, who is inserted into the crowd. A relatively diminutive subject, he is placed on the right, beyond the self-aggrandising figure of Gaunt. Both sign of common humanity and manifestation of the ‘Eye of History’, Chaucer belongs to the common people. At the same time, however, he does not replicate their consternation. A self-effacing figure, he records the religious and legal matters thrown up by the trial. Like the itinerant monks he is a pilgrim-scribe, here to defend the defender of common life against the ruling order.19 All of this of course immediately touches on another important matter: the contrast between Wycliffe’s stillness and Gaunt’s flamboyance allows Brown to connect social division with pictorial division. In consequence, Brown creates a fresh account of the representation of human subjectivity and everyday life. For example, unlike The Romans Building a Fort (Plate 1) or The Baptism of Edwin (Plate 2) – where forms tend to be sequenced into blocks across the picture plane – The Trial resists frontality. The pictorial order is defined by swooping motion rather than dramatic unity and the background threatens to destabilise the foreground. The viewer peers into a composite scene crowded with people; the material vitality of the world mirrored in the graphic energy of the dynamic pictorial situation. On this account, it accommodates itself to history by dismantling the idea that the main subject in History Painting must be accommodated by the world. Hence, Brown’s Wycliffe, the everyday visionary, belongs to a life situation that lives in the future. It has been part of my argument that the sign systems in Brown’s panels have been overlooked by commentators, some of whom define the Manchester programme as the product of scattershot or muddled thinking. My account reverses this judgement by stressing that Brown played a major part in moving the paradigm of History Painting towards social history in two important ways. 165

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In the first instance, by generating an activist aesthetic designed to advance the cause of a common politics through the depiction of the conditions in which ordinary figures encounter representatives of powerful institutions. In the second instance, by deploying a version of the deep-figural hermeneutic at work in Carlyle’s Past and Present and The French Revolution, both of which set out to recover the material conditions in which historical experience took place. Carlyle’s critical stance, whereby small-scale non-happenings and discontinuities are revealed as metonyms of epic developments, provides a conceptual framework for considering The Proclamation Regarding Weights and Measures, A.D. 1556 (1883–84) (Plate 6), the next panel in the mural programme, which takes as its subject the relationship between governmental authority and local culture within the crannied confines of ‘Renaissance’ Manchester. The Proclamation, ostensibly a record of standardisation of systems in the retail sector, is, in reality, an account of the separation of lived experience into distinct social spheres, something Brown alluded to when he referred to the representation of ‘strange and oft-repeated enactments’.20 Along with this sense of social division comes a powerful pictorial division between the main protagonists. Also worth noting is how these demarcations support Brown’s assessment of an unusual situation in which the interests of the small producer collide with the requirements of the public administrator. We watch as a world is built from the non-fusion of local customs and governmental authority. For the shop-owners, liberty means economic freedom, the defence of traditional practices enshrined in trade rights; for the Proclamation Man, liberty means the introduction of a consumer code guaranteeing common levels of service and provision, as enforced by the new edict of the Court Leet of the Barony of Manchester. Viewers are obliged to consider the clash of two rival systems of evaluation: an early modern world wherein the idea of the trading community is embedded in face-to-face arrangements and local habits; and a modern proprietary world, wherein commercial licences and agreements emanate from the central state which exercises total authority over the social realm.21 One might expect The Proclamation to function as an important stage in historical development from the church (The Baptism of Edwin), the royal procession (The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers) and the court (The Trial) to quotidian life. Yet, at every turn, the neo-Hogarthian idiom of The Proclamation stops the viewer from making a simple interpretation of the world it depicts. As proof, are we meant to see the ambulatory Proclamation Man from the viewpoint of the traders? In which case we apprehend a pontifical subject, the bureaucratic suppression of local entrepreneurialism. Or are we meant to see the traders through his (closed) eyes? In which case we are confronted with insolent neophobes. Where do we locate values of fair dealing, trustworthiness and respect in this perplexing world? Who, from the perspective of normalised modern experience, are intruders or outcasts here? Who is narrow-minded or ­mean-spirited? Who are the representatives of the ethic of public service? Are we to look for civil authority in the local traders or in the agent of public 166

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administration? From whatever angle Brown’s image is examined, the viewer comes to the same conclusion: a bureaucratic demand system, which requires impersonality in social relations, generates civil indiscipline. Moreover, this Hogarthian device – the image operates as a space in which competing forms of conceptual thought take place – relates to Brown’s treatment of the city as a parataxis, where disparate things are brought into contact without being organically connected. From his perspective, the city is designed to be subject to systems of observation and control – it seems to be bound up with histories of normalisation, standardisation and measurement – the techniques of study whereby parts are incorporated into wholes, and whereby experience is equated with logical processes. To expand on this: what makes The Proclamation so interesting is that it does not exemplify the notion of social transparency required by the modelling of history as history of civics. There are no shared protocols on display here, and so nothing to assimilate individuals into a coherent community. It is not, I think, wrong to see these matters as Brown’s hermeneutical response to the birth of modern urban life. After all, he presents Manchester as a place of ‘altercation, noise and impending disruption’.22 The self-absorbed Proclamation Man, who announces the introduction of a universal process for testing weights and measures, is a classic example of this modality. He is, simultaneously, a sign of a post-feudal political rationality of public administration, where society is supposedly unitised as knowledge, and a social reject who cannot get the local citizens to recognise the authority of governmental arrangements within civil society. In thinking through these points, it becomes apparent that The Proclamation is especially sensitive to societal security, a subject it shares with The Romans Building A Fort, The Expulsion of the Danes and The Trial. The Proclamation defines the urban realm as a distributional centre bound up with the free flow of information, knowledge and power. That said, Brown turns his back on the military and theological matters addressed in the earlier part of the programme to spotlight the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and bureaucratic systems. For my purposes, one of the key aspects of this relationship is the entanglement of economic activity and state regulation in the world of daily experience. Inevitably, bureaucracy expands its powers within the world, thus displaying a governmental impulse to classify, authenticate and control things. Here, however, bureaucratic might is diffused by contact with street life. More to the point, the practical manifestation of state power, in the form of the Proclamation Man, is met with unalloyed violence by the traders. That is to say, in charting the social life of the street Brown produces a network of signs, none of which cohere into a stable, integrated critical system. It follows, then, that in looking into the image the viewer comes across a shift in modes of vision: commerce (the angry and resentful traders), governmental authority (the practical Proclamation Man), contemplative experience (the aesthetic schoolboy) and poverty (the pious beggar-girl seeking alms) exist in and for themselves as separate orientations to the forces at work within this newly minted world. 167

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Read this way, it is evident that Brown’s world becomes ludicrous by displaying rival energies or identities. The Proclamation remodels the relationship between public space, administrative regulation and local custom by inviting the viewer to peer at a government official, traders and wanderers, all of whom coexist in a bizarre space augmented by a honey-coloured wall and pavement.23 The mental world of objectification and standardisation, represented by the self-absorbed official, stands against the material world of convention, the world belonging to the traders. Alongside this, the social world is converted into a patchwork of angry, passive, ridiculous and overlooked subjects, an odd assortment of Netherlandish and Italian Mannerist sources.24 There is, then, no solvent that fixes these individuals into a meaningful collective shape. From what we have now seen of The Proclamation, it is reasonable to speculate that the representation of jolting physicality was an important aspect of Brown’s social activist aesthetic. His viewer peers into an anti-panorama which situates figures in a compressed pictorial world defined by discord. One is struck by the lack of meaningful contact between these subjects. Likewise, instead of compositional unity – the traditional idiom of History Painting – Brown pits the intimacy of the tableau setting against the brutal and alienating life-situation: here is a compact world held together by elements in tension. Furthermore, the conventions of the paternalist pastoral – a world of plenty combining hospitality and public charity – is at once evoked and nullified by a version of the extremes of nature: the dreamy, conflict-free schoolboy with his bow and arrow; the heliotropic cheese, the object of his gustatory pleasure; and the wretched beggar-girl who holds the chubby, naked child. Brown delights in these d ­ e-normalising visual effects of detachment and immersion, all of which encourage the viewer to see historical representation as a sign system, reminiscent of Carlyle’s Past and Present, where abundance and misery are wedged together to establish that, under the conditions of social modernity, wealth is measured in private, not public, terms. All of this is not to detract from what is obviously true: The Proclamation takes place in a frieze-like space augmented by what Bennett calls ‘a series of complimentary curves’.25 The viewer might expect a locale of this nature to offer signs of social fellowship, to uphold the relationship between good household management and the creation of a system receptive to the needs of outsiders. And yet, there is no evidence of neighbourliness or community care. The beggar-girl, for example, with what Brown calls her ‘leaden-lidded clap-dish, with the clapping of which beggars seem to have been entitled noisily to arouse public attention’, is ignored. Nor is there any curtilage between the space occupied by the traders and the outside world.26 Instead of a doorway or porch – the obvious signs of welcome – Brown’s shop resembles a fortification: it is an arrangement of interlocking forms designed to amplify dissonance and to affirm that effort provokes counter-effort in a congested space where the home is the marketplace. In effect, there is no sense of people sharing a place, no indication of a common experience of home.27 168

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The association of pictorial dynamics and social conflict suggests that The Proclamation is a contribution to late Victorian conversations about the role of non-economic human values in the social life of the neighbourhood, albeit a typically barbed one, in which the standard terms of this discourse are questioned. For a start, the Proclamation Man is a representative of centralisation, a dominant category in arguments about the scope of the fiscal and administrative state from the 1830s. Nor should it pass unnoticed that Brown, who was familiar with the social composition of Chartism, would have known that entry-level shopkeepers constituted a considerable portion of Chartist organisations in the 1840s.28 On top of this, the critical terms of the panel can be set in the context of industrial society, which required high levels of standardisation of systems, processes and objects. Unsurprisingly, Brown undercuts the ostensible message of economic and social harmonisation by presenting the urban realm as an aggregate of separated individuals, a ‘barrier place’ set apart from the world of cooperative action. This is apparent in the dreamy schoolboy, who functions as a pastoral vignette inserted into a panel in which division is the source of social being. Detached from signs of control, he is perched on top of a vast circular cheese, a micro-world orb, the perfected application of aesthetic form to the practical world of craft goods and services. Here, as so often with Brown, cartoonish forces infiltrate the spaces of polite culture. As these comments suggest, Brown creates dual versions of the ‘Life Dream’. On one side, a romantic sensibility (the schoolboy); on the other side, a utilitarian sensibility (the Proclamation Man). In this way, the world of enchantment stands apart from the world of economic performance. One is left with the possibility that the Proclamation Man, an agent of the nation-state, relates to Brown’s distaste for representatives of the administrative order within Victorian culture and society. He is, if seen from this angle, a forerunner of Henry Cole, the entrepreneur of routines and systems, who is lambasted in Brown’s Diary, William Axon, the pedantic historian, who complained about Brown’s choice and treatment of local historical subjects, and many of the functionaries at the Corporation of Manchester. If this reading holds true, then the defiance exhibited by the shopkeepers had its counterpart in Brown’s response to the operational logic of the Victorian art world: it was a pseudo-public space where ‘enterprise’ masked the absence of trust or neighbourliness.29 There is no denying the affinities between Crabtree Watching the Transit of Venus, A.D. 1639 (1882–83) (Plate 7) and the other murals in the cycle. Like The Proclamation, it is a cartoonish representation of a cluttered domain made from uneven parts. Like The Trial, it situates the subject in a hurly-burly world defined by complexities and uncertainties. Like The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers, it is an image rooted in a workshop world combining personal and communal identity, craft goods and precision instruments. Brown touched on the eclectic nature of the panel in a letter to F. G. Stephens, ‘I have represented the scene as taking place over the draper’s shop in a garret, half laboratory half warehouse.’30 That is, he conceived of a space where the world of occupational 169

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training meets the world of scientific observation. Crabtree, a self-taught mathematical astronomer, observes the shadow of Venus crossing the sun, the image of which is beamed through a telescope onto a paper disk stuck on a table. Such is the excitement that Crabtree, with his robe and slippers, forgets to make a record of the transit. Brown intensifies the impression that Crabtree is not in control of the event he is meant to record by emphasising the tumbledown nature of an attic room containing the everyday dross of domestic routine as well as a few scientific instruments. There are signs of improvisation and upheaval: in the background, a length from the bolts of cloth, decorated with pomegranates and roses, covers the window; Crabtree has knocked over his stool; his papers, compasses and pipe have fallen to the floor; a tape measure, confirmation of his occupation as linen draper, spills from his pocket. The tape measure, which spirals in the direction of the knitting held by his wife, might be a playful reference to Hogarth, whose model of expressive beauty – in which a wiry line is wrapped around a cone or shell – was based on the idea that pictorial form contained its own sense of movement.31 Whatever the case, Brown shared Hogarth’s conviction that recursive forms convey energy, and so his viewer is left with the sense that the sweeping lines at once suggest the pulsating rhythms of ordinary experience and threaten the validity of the scientific act.32 It is important to note that Brown’s comments on Crabtree stress the collaborative nature of human action: ‘Crabtree … having been requested to assist the observations of his friend Jeremiah [Horrocks] … watched the Transit of Venus … [Horrocks], who was poor and alone … might never have made his world-­ renowned observation had not Crabtree assisted him by letter as to his books of tables, which were obsolete and valueless. By the aid of the new and corrected tables [Horrocks’s] calculations came right.’ He continues in a similar vein: The weather being cloudy Crabtree watched through that cold winter day from nine a.m. to close upon four p.m., when suddenly a gleam of sunlight revealed the small figure of the planet crossing the sun’s disc, on the paper diagram. Crabtree was so perturbed as not to be able, during the first few moments the phenomenon remained visible, to take measurements scientifically, but he could corroborate [Horrocks’s] observation. Crabtree being but an amateur, he is represented as employing for his laboratory a sort of store-room over his shop, or counting house; a glimpse of the latter is seen through the open-trap door admitting some daylight, though the scene is chiefly lighted from the sunshine on the diagram.33

He offers, in effect, a double account of the panel as historical event and visualised situation, a point reinforced by the critic in The Times, who noted that ‘the poetic motive … lies in the contrast between Crabtree’s scientific enthusiasm, and the commonplace emblems of his trade which surround him on every side’.34 In that case, it is hard to exaggerate the importance of Brown’s plastic thinking, revealed through the deployment of diagonal viewpoints and elaborate cross-lights, both of which establish the unusual pictorial ratios in this 170

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compressed space. Note, too, that the frosted window and chinks of light from the floor below are redolent of Carlyle’s account of the historical picture as something ‘glowing visible’.35 At the same time, Crabtree – described by the Manchester Guardian as ‘eager’ and ‘intellectual’ – is an emphatic figure fascinated by the image cast across the paper diagram.36 In fact, Brown goes out of his way to indicate Crabtree’s quirkiness and independence of mind. He resides in a world of concentrated action and is inspired by the close-at-hand because it is seen to confirm the life of the cosmos. The paper diagram, at once thing and sign, signals how Brown makes gusto the chief element of a graphic system in which matter is dynamic. This is a setting of forms which obviously comes close to Carlyle’s model of an intermixed world held together by material acts of vision. For the full justification of this claim we need to recall that the idea of the ‘Eye of History’ enabled a modern subject to imagine sharing the experience of a historical subject. In effect, Brown responds to Past and Present, especially Carlyle’s insistence on the connection of mental life to material environment. Brown’s method of composing matter in relation to mental attitude is understood by Barlow, who notes how Crabtree is ‘enraptured by the abstract pattern reflecting the transit on the left. His wife holds on to two fractious children at the right, while also attempting to keep control of her knitting. The image is poised between rational order and lively confusion.’37 In other words, the illusion of resolution occurs inside the mind of the everyman scientist, not within the space of the image. Brown’s comments to Stephens indicate that this was his intention: Crabtree watched that dim December day from 9 a.m. till 3.20 – almost sunset – when a gleam of sun-light appearing, revealed the little orb of the planet passing over the right hand upper corner of the sun – on the paper. What followed is pathetic. The linen draper’s heart (a great astronomer nevertheless) beat so violently that he was unable to measure the phenomenon, he only saw it, but so confirmed [Horrocks’s] discovery.38

Here Brown tells us that human truth, or human presence, cannot be translated into a homogenous human picture. Just as the workings of the universe are ‘humanised’ by association with the chaotic abundance of materials in the attic, so the object of scientific attention is dwarfed by the apparatus of vision in the form of the two telescopes and the light beam. As seen here, human experience is shaped by the accumulated stuff of the world and technologies of vision. Succinctly expressed, Brown provides us with another a front-row account of how the ‘Eye of History’ reorganises the pictorial field to attend to the workings of a world in which creativity, arising from the tangle and variety of experience, signals incompleteness. Chetham’s Life Dream, A.D. 1640 (Plate 8) relates to some of the themes encountered in earlier works in the mural scheme. Like The Romans, it depicts the construction of a new world. Like The Trial, it is concerned with the outward composure of the central subject. Like The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers, 171

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it offers a vision of social organisation. Like The Proclamation, it is cleaved into two antagonistic spheres to indicate separate models of social interaction and civic life. Like Crabtree Watching the Transit of Venus, it attends to an everyday world where knowledge, held in common, becomes a public good through the actions of the self-made man. In this busy and colourful world the eponymous subject belongs to the community from which he springs. For these reasons, it is the opposite of the vision of the modern self-made man referred to by John Morley, when reporting on Manchester: ‘The man who began life as a beggar and a Chartist softens down into a radical when he has got credit enough for a weaving shed; a factory of his own mollifies him into what is called a strong Liberal; and by the time he owns a mansion and a piece of land he has a feeling as of blue blood tingling in his veins, and thinks of a pedigree and a motto in old French.’39 Instead of this dream of property acquisition, Chetham’s Life Dream represents something close to a magical formula: the idea that the unfinished human subject completes his or herself by ‘living’ in the future. The consequence of such a view can be seen in Brown’s association of Humphrey Chetham with the common enterprise of vision and play. Brown recreates Chetham, an archetypal mid-seventeenth-century ­merchant-manufacturer, as a protean thinker endowed with the magical ability to appreciate what people imagine when they reflect on what it is to belong to the social body.40 Chetham, in imagining the historical potential of his own life, makes the world at once personal and intersubjective.41 He looks into his surroundings to apprehend a new social matrix. By extension, Brown offers what Morris would call a romance history of participatory governance which sets out to translate the past into the present by converting Chetham, the virtuous citizen of provincial puritanism, into a visionary subject for whom the performance of personal wholeness is an expression of the true Commonwealth.42 Chetham, inserted into a world where human growth is a mixture of inwardness and sociality, is remade as a dream king who creates the future in his mind’s eye.43 These reflections resonate with what we know about Brown’s broader intellectual interests. For instance, Chetham’s Life Dream powerfully conveys Brown’s commitment to the romantic belief that human character is shaped by the material power of the imagination. Humphrey Chetham, a wealthy cloth merchant and money trader, founded and endowed a school for poor boys in Manchester.44 Brown depicts him in the school courtyard surrounded by the future recipients of his generosity.45 A combination of commercial prosperity and individual creativity, Chetham is ‘represented as studying his will in the garden of the College, which in imagination he has peopled with his forty “healthy” boys’.46 Note the process at work here: the world of manufactures and finance is reset as a world of imagination and associational culture in an image where the college is given less significance than its garden. Access to informal education, more important than economic advancement, is part of a bigger vision of the aesthetic imagination as an ethical force in history. The frontal setting of the subject recalls the pictorial arrangement we noted in The 172

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Proclamation, but here Chetham presides over a form of social organisation receptive to strangers.47 Chetham’s Life Dream, swarming with figures, is designed to indicate that different elements of life rub against each other. The world of daily business, the world belonging to the ‘real’ Chetham, has been replaced by a human habitat, half-conceptual, half-concrete. The viewer looks at a socialised ‘Life Dream’, the integration of individual physical life and community feeling. Brown likewise converts the material world into the realm of public service, since Chetham, turning away from his vast will, observes a domain where play is the medium in which the redistribution of social knowledge takes place.48 Chetham presides over a situation where the actual world is reset by its own potential and where the real is the future latent in the present. For these reasons, his segment of this double-sided design enforces a Carlylean mentality, for the artist looks ‘face to face on [the past], in hope of … illustrating our own poor Century thereby’.49 Chetham, who is a proxy for the ‘Eye of History’, provides Brown with a distinctive model based on the interpenetration of educational and artistic values, a world with public trust at the centre of things. In effect, therefore, Chetham is Brown’s way of recreating historical life as a bodily event.50 Concomitantly, by detaching the world of ethically driven social conduct from the world of economic motivation, Brown aligns human creativity with the politics of place. He asks the viewer to observe a double space where social combination is pitted against economic competition. On the right side, and in the middle, children announce a capacity for mutual aid; on the left side, they announce the massification of society. The exuberant children on the right, evidence of self-development and benevolence, demonstrate the social value of aesthetic pleasure. That is, they align psychic life with the sensuous immediacy of shared play. By contrast, the left section of the design depicts an authoritarian world without wonder or imagination, a world where human existence means the standardisation of experience and behaviour. These children, formed into a class, are subjugated by an agent of blind zeal, the stern teacher who forces them into a single shape through the menacing instrument of the birch.51 There is, therefore, an important division at work in Chetham’s Life Dream: in the middle and to the right, the mosaic-like space of self-education, playfulness and direct experience; elsewhere, the living forms of mechanised routine and pedagogical procedures. Put somewhat differently, Chetham, a bridge between the dreamworld and the disciplinary world, is doubly inscribed in time. He signifies care for the community and an existential commitment to childhood as symbol of human wholeness and cooperative organisation.52 At the same time, he telescopes past and present into a single account of human vision: it is 1640 and the viewer shares his conceptual space by travelling with him into the future. This highly unusual set-up – Chetham, at once revenant and messenger, shuttles across history to appear in an intermixed world made from a combination of pastoral and anti-pastoral spaces – is reminiscent of the structure of Carlyle’s Past and Present, which aimed to reinvigorate the materials of the past 173

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through the reflexivity of a discourse where luminosity and physicality are the dominant critical terms.53 Consider, too, the way in which Chetham is ascribed a quasi-folkic presence through the ‘festive’ character enacted on his side of the panel.54 We look at an individual in a moment that does not belong to his experience. Which is to say, he is the subject whose knowledge comes from the strata of an everyday culture belonging to all. As imagined by Brown, he looks into a mini world in which effort and play are entangled. By contrast, Brown equates instruction, articulated on the left side of the panel, with the principles and procedures inhibiting free action. To press home the point, he extends this arrangement by dividing the panel into zones of eruption and containment. Unlike the scene on the left side of the panel, where the appearance of solidarity is sustained by the reality of subordination, Chetham’s extensive portion of the panel enlarges vision, and signals the ‘activist’ nature of the development of the individual within society. Chetham, the observer of patterns of growth, is himself a figure of prodigality. His generosity enriches the world by creating the conditions in which subjects imaginatively engage with each other. But there is, I think, yet more going on in this singular representation of mental life. For example, by picturing Chetham as a subject living inside his own vision of the future, Brown makes him a sign of an alternative social formation. As proposed here, he is a bridge between the ‘Eye of History’ and what Brown called a ‘Life Dream’. Nor should it be forgotten that Brown’s critical idiom, where history is a presence in the present, shares the activist mentality of William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball (1886–87) and News From Nowhere (1890), both of which converted a Carlylean medievalism of human circumstance into a vehicle for social revolution based on communistic principles of common land, and both of which identified the dream as at once personal and intersubjective, a dynamical world-time of shared vision and aspiration. More precisely, Chetham asserts the value of aesthetic existence by living outside his own historical setting. It should not be surprising, therefore, that Brown’s inventive critique of mimetic illusionism produces a consolatory vision of human wealth, since Chetham’s capital, streaming into the social world, sustains the dynamic momentum of future human growth. Brown makes the case for Chetham’s social achievement with these words: ‘Like Crabtree, his fellow-townsman, Chetham was a “drapier” or cloth merchant, but his wealth, great for those days, was largely supplemented by financial transactions of a nature kindred to banking or money-lending … [His] school forms no doubt a precursor in the 17th century of those schemes, educational and philanthropic, which so prominently distinguish the 19th.’55 It is clear enough that this affirmation of Chetham’s primary importance arises from his capacity to equate entrepreneurialism with public service. That is, we do not behold a generalised exponent of the paradigmatic bourgeois virtue of moneymaking: Chetham is not using his impressive capital assets for private accumulation and the development of money systems. Instead, this independent manufacturer creates a 174

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bridge between personal enterprise and municipal responsibility by speculating on the future shape of society. For now, we need only note that Brown deploys Chetham to advance a vision of historical being arising from the intersubjective nature of the imagination. It follows that Chetham is thinking into being a socialised vision of life. To see the past in this way is to revert to a Carlylean formulation of history, in which Chetham, a creative agent of mythos, establishes the awakening of consciousness to a condition of social value beyond that of a capital-owning society. Put slightly differently, Chetham becomes a manifestation of popular sovereignty by dreaming into being a social body held together by the world of imaginative perception. He is the instigator of civil peace, a shaper of community values via a collective ‘Life Dream’ where enterprise and trust are symbiotic forms.56 By the same token, he is the embodiment of the system of knowledge-production articulated by post-Chartist radicalism, not a mere ‘public official’ associated with administrative systems, as is the case with the pedagogue on the other side of the panel.57 As we have been detecting throughout, this association of the image with schismatic forms demonstrates Brown’s interest in Hogarth’s attitude to pictorial composition. Even the most cursory reading of Chetham’s Life Dream leads one to conclude that it splices together two individual situations, two opposing types of social being, and two separate sign systems.58 An onlooker, if not already aware of this process, soon realises that the image is divided into zones of independence and deference. On the right and in the middle, children belong to a world of perpetual growth and movement. These subjects are makers of the interwoven patterns of life. They signal plenitude and happy consciousness. On the left, children are homogenised and docile, and thus subjected to a coercive apparatus. These immobilised subjects have internalised the restrictions of routinised society, substituting play, spontaneity and imagination, with regulatory systems designed to instil social obedience and conformity. No wonder that everything of significance in this world is given its own graphic character. Zigzag movement belongs to the right side and the middle, the energised state of exuberant creativity, the space of care; straight lines belong to the left side, the space of procedures and mechanisms. Gusto characterises the ‘free’ children, sameness characterises the ‘disciplined’ children. A motley and diverse space of self-expression stands apart from a regimented space, a world of commands and self-control. To put it very schematically, Chetham’s Life Dream demonstrates the reality of common feeling and common purpose, which takes the form of a pact between Chetham and the viewer, who looks at Chetham’s extensive world of fellowship and hospitality. Nonetheless, thinking about Brown’s rendition of Chetham more broadly, it is evident that his character resonates with the idea of human wholeness formulated by critics of Victorian materialism. In effect, Chetham is an exponent of economic humanism, an ethos outlined in Ruskin’s Unto this Last (1862), wherein issues of wealth and productivity are 175

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defined by human happiness, hospitality and distributive justice. Collaborative work – meaning practical knowledge and community wealth production – is at the centre of Ruskin’s vision: ‘the entire object of true education is to make people not merely industrious, but to love industry – not merely learned, but to love knowledge – not merely pure, but to love purity – not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice’.59 This captures the atmosphere of Chetham’s domain, where education is not a system or a vocation but a way of living joyfully in the world. Practically, what this means is that Chetham is an expression of social radicalism, a point emphasised when Brown notes that ‘Chetham had forced upon him by Charles I, the invidious honour of collecting the famous “ship money” in the county of Lancaster in the prosecution of which he disbursed much of his own money, a loss that he in vain petitioned to have made good to him from the amount collected.’60 Here, then, the socialisation of wealth runs alongside the redistribution of wealth. There is no question, I think, that Brown set out to recast the practical sphere as a product of the public imagination. He wanted to imagine a world informed by the principles of free labour and natural law. Chetham is, on this reckoning, an affirmation of common life, evidence that public service adds to the fund of human capital. In a world characterised by playfulness, Chetham is separated from the ascetic and self-interested figure described in histories of the Puritan work ethic. More specifically, he is detached from the image of the capitalist innovator who resets the factors of production or creates new markets or consumption patterns. Brown’s Chetham is not seen calculating prices and profits or buying and selling consumer goods. In place of the classic economic subject Brown offers a watchman of the social imagination, an agent of a common ‘Life Dream’, a social subject involved in the production of new social combinations and matrices. That these critical trajectories – imagination, work and community – were made to coincide reflects the importance of the tradition of Romantic ­anti-capitalism to Brown. Additionally, the social aspects of Romanticism gave Brown a sense of identity and provided the critical conditions for explaining Chetham’s mental energy. We have already seen some offshoots of this, but here it should be stressed that Chetham’s enthusiasm for public ventures relates him to Victorian Romanticism, particularly Ruskin’s vision of the master craftsman, who, by coordinating the stages within the labour process, demonstrates an essential wholeness of being and thus amplifies individual and civic happiness. In saying all this, I am arguing that Brown creates a vision of a social arrangement in which the merchant is cherished because he is an activist artisan, the agent for the projection of a belief-system and life-situation where work and capital are public goods. Brown’s Chetham is an exemplary figure of restraint, honesty and modesty, a prototype for a model of social entrepreneurship in which the subject turns away from the contract-based market economy to identify material culture with the growth of collective experience. In this respect, he should be seen as a reformist alternative to the self-made economic man celebrated by 176

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Samuel Smiles and other popular pundits in the second half of the nineteenth century.61 A further dimension to this social activist vision of entrepreneurship becomes apparent when we realise that Harold Rathbone, who established Della Robbia Potteries on the values of the artisanal tradition upheld by Brown, Morris and Ashbee, sat as the model for Chetham.62 In whatever way we look at it, Brown’s Chetham is at the service of a social world where human affairs are associated with the gospel of mutualisation and where play generates organic unity.63 In many ways, of course, these representations must be read as social practices. For instance, some of the concerns and values expressed in Chetham’s Life Dream can be related to the arguments and judgements put forward in Brown’s Address to the Vice Chancellor (1872), submitted in support of his candidature for the Slade Professorship at Cambridge: The master must … be master of his craft … to be a historical painter … requires a man with a living interest attaching to all he does, a man so balanced as to unite executive excellence with imagination and elevation of aims, combining general knowledge with acuteness of reasoning sufficient for the evolution of fresh laws where the progress of art demands them or the [eradication] of rules become obsolete; in short, an artist equally capable of clothing his ideas in words or in works. Such a man commands attention by force of judgement; his memory is stored, but with typical instances – heavy in grain, not with the husk and chaff of dry facts.64

Only one feature of this telling passage shall be mentioned here, as it illustrates the symbolic importance Brown attributed to Chetham. Brown’s ‘master’ resembles Chetham, who is endowed with the ability to make a Carlylean temporal montage, to collapse the distance between past and present by insisting on the superiority of the imagination over the ‘husk and chaff of dry facts’.65 In a similar fashion, the identification of Chetham as a master craftsman, whose authority arises from an ability to shape and evaluate all elements in the production process, made it possible to define him as a social manufacturer, someone concerned with the social quality of lived experience. If Chetham is to be understood, Brown implies, he should be seen to correct economic rationality by supporting an ethical vision of wealth creation and distribution. Having arrived at this position it becomes possible to say more about how Brown’s critique of economistic thought relies on a social vision in which the subject lives as an individual authentically within a social group. Once again, the inner logic of this model is derived from Carlyle, who famously distinguished the ‘Dynamical’ from the ‘Mechanical’.66 The ‘Dynamical’ meant openness to energy and change, the spontaneity of consciousness; the ‘Mechanical’, meant strict adherence to classificatory schemes and regulatory systems. Dynamical life, which relates to Carlyle’s preferred modelling of feeling as manifestation of teamwork and cooperation, is differentiated from mechanical life because it asserts that social being is something other than the outcome of market 177

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exchange. Furthermore, dynamical life is manifested by productive actions of the public imagination. These rival forms of experience are spatialised in Chetham’s Life Dream. The association of the dynamical with feeling pertains to the workings of Chetham’s side of the image, where the viewer discovers a living community based on the principle of informal exchange. By contrast, the mechanical side of the image stresses uniformity and predictability through the anonymous, yet menacing, pedagogue. This division is accentuated by the pictorial treatment of the main figures. Chetham appears as the eye of the mind, a seeing body and rotational form. Conversely, the teacher is a static and sterile figure who occupies space aggressively to control those things in his visual field. These opposing modes of identity are not controlled by a ‘higher’ model of pictorial rationalisation, nor are they modulated by a ‘superior’ critical idiom. As is the case in The Proclamation, the viewer peers into a composite world where the teacher, a precursor of the agents of the administrative state, stands against Chetham, who presides over a world of gusto that cannot be reduced to predictable forms within a regularity system. As should be obvious by now, Chetham’s Life Dream relates human trust to the power of the social imagination. We see this at work in the r­ epresentation of play as collective social practice.67 For instance, the children beneath the sprawling tree represent the translation of individual sensual experience into shared inwardness.68 Their life world indicates that human connectivity is a source of creativity. We might add that the central and marginal trees form a protective canopy to the world of touch and sound spreading from the central part of the panel.69 At this point the panel becomes haptic: the child perched in the tree touches a branch, a gesture of care repeated by the child on the ground with the puppy, as well as the animated and attentive children holding hands at the base of the trunk. The latter, a collective undulant form, are like humanised roots, and so contribute to the rhythmic drive of the tree. Note, as well, how Brown makes the skipping rope, an instrument of play, a sinuous root-thing, a protective line linking the children and the tree trunk. This social organicist vision of childhood explains why hands, like branches from a common body, are direct pictorial expressions of the physical force of life. More precisely, growth is unrestrained, not uniform; it is the general principle for converting the civil sphere into an aesthetic idea of community. Play, a combination of sensual vision and tactile experience, describes the critical arc in which the subject contributes to a common world defined by the development of gusto and the provision of collective goods. We can now see what kind of thinking explains Chetham’s Life Dream: for Brown, as for Blake, Ruskin and Nietzsche, painting belongs in the realm of dreams. The central interesting fact here is that Brown offers a pictorial response to the mental landscape described in Blake’s ‘The School Boy’. Blake’s schoolboy complains that ‘to go to school in a summer morn, / O! it drives all joy away; / Under a cruel eye outworn. / The little ones spend the day, / In sighing and dismay.’ Blake’s dreaming schoolboy continues his lament thus: ‘How can 178

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the bird that is born for joy, / Sit in a cage and sing. / How can a child when fears annoy. / But droop his tender wing. / And forget his youthful spring.’70 Likewise, Chetham recognises that the daydream, one sign of which is the idea of playfulness, is a manifestation of creative life. At the same time, Chetham’s Life Dream is an exploration of the forcefulness subjects bring with them as they attempt to inscribe themselves into the life of the world. Personal identity, as seen here by Brown, is either active or static, according to the placement of the individual body; this extends to the treatment of Chetham himself, who seems to stand apart from the other beings in the image. He is cultivating himself by belonging to a critical realm where entrepreneurial skill is converted into the social goods of education and welfare. In other words, Brown’s Chetham, the nascent modern individual, is an experiment in living: the proleptic subject enacts social wholeness by belonging to a future in which individuality and solidarity are symbiotic forms. Chetham, at the centre of a vision of a spiritual democracy, is dedicated to transcending the utilitarian world where economic performance is the dominant value system.71 This means that Chetham’s Life Dream is the hinge of a public art project designed to uphold the view that ‘there is no history except the history of human life’.72 One is tempted here to add that Brown’s painting is a fusion of the romantic humanitarianism of his early work and the social activism he developed in the 1840s. It revisits the life of history to visualise British culture as the battle between aggressive, pedagogic rationality and visionary, altruistic creativity. It identifies traditional History Painting as a calcified system designed to establish limits and regularities, which it internalises in the form of the pedagogue. It critiques this tradition through the identification of Chetham as the subject of the ‘Life Dream’, the hero of ocular-centric knowledge who sees some larger meaning in the world of playfulness. In point of fact, Chetham, a miracle of social energy, is a Carlylean witness to the ‘wondrous … contiguity and perpetual closeness [of] the Past and Distant with the Present in time and place; all times and all places with this our actual Here and Now’.73 Again, Brown’s vision of the nowness of time relates to his mobilisation of Carlyle’s ‘Eye of History’, the conceit that vision becomes vital and creative when it sees the life of history as an expression of a common culture rooted in the actions of the expressive body. This attitude – where historical life is restored in and through acts of imaginative perception – allowed Brown to distance himself from the generalised nature of standard History Painting. In summary, these points and the tissue of argument that supported them suggest that the ‘Life Dream’ and ‘Eye of History’ gave Brown the opportunity to envision a public-spirited world where people relate to each by recognising the collective value of sensual vision. Chetham points out that playfulness, a sign of the imagination, is something society should value more than money. On top of this, Brown’s conception of history meant the inclusion of different models of social being within the single image, which is to say that he considered Chetham as an apotropaic response to the threat of disciplinary power. 179

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Chetham, the organ of sight, confirms that the human world is the result of collective work. His purpose, then, is to be the subject who sees that play is at once the pre-eminent form of human imagination and a sign of communal knowledge production. Human life, in Brown’s version of things, was always more than a bundle of utilised facts or processes – the sociological reality outlined by Victorian liberalism. It meant growth, in the form of the public imagination; it meant development, in the form civil association. Chetham, the bridge between these processes, lives in the future as an example of an individual devoted to the trans-historical common good.74 One final set of remarks. Chetham is more than a source of social wisdom on the dangers of the massification of society. Although it is true that signs of a supernatural or transcendental cause are missing from Brown’s mural programme, his vision of Chetham, where the transformation of the self involves the renunciation of ego, accords with the humanised model of Jesus found in late nineteenth-century secular circles.75 At the same time, this vision of temporal oneness – Chetham lives in a condition of perpetual togetherness with the future, the playful children existing as guests of his vision – predicts Ernst Bloch’s account of the deep structural content of the experience of historical time beyond the surface of official history: ‘The really common uniform time of the process of history … is springing forth universally only as a temporal form of emergent identity: that is, of non-estrangement between men, and of non-alienation between men and nature.’76 So, too, with Brown: the historical Chetham, who represents the birth of modern consciousness through engagement with money systems, is replaced by a futurological Chetham, the sign of organic vitality, the magical subject who recognises the importance of the imagination to the production of social happiness in the everyday world. Notes  1 G. Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, Westminster Review, 66 (July 1855), 29.  2 W. Morris, ‘Address at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings’ [1889], reprinted in M. Morris (ed.), William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), vol. 1, p. 148.  3 F. M. Brown, ‘Of Mural Painting’, Arts and Crafts Essays by Members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, with a Preface by William Morris (London: Rivington, Percival & Co., 1893), p. 156.  4 W. Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue [1809], in Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 543.  5 Frederic Shields, himself a strong nonconformist, posed for Wycliffe: see JTFMB, p. 193.  6 Harold Rathbone modelled for John of Gaunt and the Archbishop of Canterbury is a self-portrait.  7 Brown, in MB, vol. 1, p. 320.  8 Brown, in MB, vol. 1, p. 320.

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 9 W. Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), vol. 2, pp. 426–7. 10 As noted in Chapter 2, Brown’s The First Translation of the Bible into English (1847–48) appeared in the People’s Journal, a radical-populist periodical influenced by Carlyle and Robert Owen. 11 Alderman Thompson, who preferred the subject of John Bradford’s martyrdom, informed members of Manchester Corporation that he ‘dislike[d] Gaunt’s character’. See Thompson to Chairman of Town Hall Sub-Committee, 8 October 1878, M79/1/10a, 7, MLHLMCLM. 12 Allan Cunningham’s influential account of Hogarth as the manufacturer of forms which embody the life of his subject relates to Brown’s vision of art. According to Cunningham, Hogarth’s ‘powerful mind was directed to studies of actual life in all its varieties … To find excellence in art without perfection of form – to make use of human beings such as they moved and breathed before him … was [his] wish … The schools in which he delighted to study were the haunts of social freedom – schools where the chained-up nature … [is] let loose by passion … and contradiction … He acquired learning by his study of human nature, in his intercourse with the world.’ See Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Artists, vol. I, pp. 66, 83, 166–7. 13 JT, p. 293. 14 On this matter, see J. Hesk, ‘Types of Oratory’, in E. Gunderson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 145–61. 15 MB, vol. 1, p. 318. 16 PB, pp. 83–5. 17 There is a helpful discussion of this matter in Rabin, Ford Madox Brown and the PreRaphaelite History Picture, p. 104, who notes Brown’s interest in ‘the irregular line of flattened silhouette shapes, distorted space, sharp contrasts of values, tight linear design’, and that he places his figures ‘virtually on the surface of the picture plane’. 18 The Athenaeum (10 January 1885), 58, drew attention to Brown’s ‘love of movement’ before referring to the ‘dramatic conception of the subject’. 19 It is fitting that W. M. Rossetti, ‘scribe’ to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and social radical, modelled for Chaucer. 20 Brown, in MB, vol. 1, p. 314. 21 It can be inferred that most members of the Corporation of Manchester identified with the Proclamation Man from these comments supplied to Brown in 1881: ‘subject illustrative of commercial integrity’. See MB, vol. 1, p. 284. 22 MB, vol. 1, p. 317. 23 As Treuherz notes, in JTFMB, p. 195, the design is ‘articulated by the shallow concave movement of the wall with glimpses into deep spaces at the sides’. 24 Treuherz, JTFMB, p. 195, who points out that the schoolboy is ‘like a cupid by Bronzino’. 25 MB, vol. 1, p. 313. 26 Brown, in MB, vol. 1, p. 315. 27 See PB, p. 82, who understands that ‘Brown’s style is adapted to provide a visual form through which the process of modernization encounters the alien and “irrational” character of local identity’. 28 See Thompson, The Chartists, pp. 152–72.

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29 It is impossible to reconcile Brown’s approach to administrative systems with the view that the panel ‘esoterically heralds the introduction of the economically vital notion of quantifiable produce’. See Hunt, Building Jerusalem, p. 133. 30 Undated letter from Brown to F. G. Stephens, in MB, vol. 1, p. 310. 31 W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (James Reeves: London, 1753). 32 As always, Treuherz, in JTFMB, p. 197, is sharp-eyed on pictorial matters: ‘the composition is … organised by the curved lines of the draperies and the straight lines of the floor, furniture and sunbeam’. 33 Ford Madox Brown, ‘Panel No. 7 – Crabtree Watching the Transit of Venus. A.D. 1639’. Brown’s account of the panel is reproduced in full by MB, vol. 1, p. 310. 34 Anon., ‘The Frescoes at the Manchester Town-Hall’, The Times (25 December 1882), p. 5. 35 Carlyle, Past and Present, CW, vol. 10, p. 64. 36 Anon., ‘The Murals in the Town Hall’, Manchester Guardian (3 February 1883), in MB, vol. 1, p. 312. 37 PB, p. 94. See MB, vol. 1, p. 309, where she compares the child with the portrait head of Oliver Madox Brown aged four months, and points out that the mother resembles Lucy Madox Brown. 38 Undated letter from Brown to F. G. Stephens, in MB, vol. 1, p. 310. See also, JTFMB, p. 197. 39 J. Morley, ‘The Chamber of Mediocrity’, Fortnightly Review (December 1860), 690. 40 See Guscott, Humphrey Chetham, pp. 125–268, for helpful details relating to Chetham’s general interests and concerns. 41 It is worth remembering that Dante Gabriel Rossetti died just before Brown turned his attention to Chetham’s Life Dream. Brown was familiar with the standard critical rhetoric, in which Rossetti’s career was read as an elaborate attempt to mystify and confuse. Brown saw it differently, however. He knew that Rossetti exemplified the view that art was a ‘Life Dream’, the attempt to bring new worlds into being by sheer force of imagination. For an illuminating account of Rossetti’s aesthetic practices, see J. McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 1–26. 42 W. Morris, ‘Notes on Thomas More’s Utopia’ [1893], in May Morris’s William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), vol. 1, pp. 288–91. 43 The originality of this conception should be stressed. For instance, William Axon, when criticising the scheme, devoted all his attention to considering how Chetham spelt his name. See Axon to Chairman of Town Hall Sub-Committee, 23 September 1878, M79/1/10, MLHLMCLM. 44 Brown had direct experience of money lenders: ‘to London to see after some ­money-lender – not knowing where to apply could not get hold of one … Friday I called on Seddon & asked him about money-lenders, he told me his father would lend me the £50 I wanted on security.’ See, FMB, 13 February 1855, p. 122. 45 As Barlow notes, Brown depicts Chetham ‘in the manner of a donor in an altarpiece’. See PB, p. 94. 46 Brown, in MB, vol. 1, p. 325. 47 By contrast, consider Burckhardt’s famous vision of the new autonomous figure freed from the thraldom of community in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy

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(1860), where the uomo singular, creating modern institutions in his own image, transcends traditional models of civic life. 48 See JTFMB, p. 199, who suggests that Breughel’s Children’s Games (1560) and The Peasant and Nest Robber (1568) may have influenced Brown’s treatment of this panel. 49 Carlyle, Past and Present, TC, vol. 10, p. 39. 50 Chetham’s monumentality and linearism recalls Brown remarkable stained-glass cartoons, described by Bennett as his greatest productions outside his paintings. See MB, vol. 2, p. 427. 51 It is worth recalling that Forster’s Education Act of 1870 committed the state to full-scale national public provision in schooling for children between the ages of 5 and 12. 52 See JT, p. 19. His earlier account of the painting is more critical: ‘The hesitancy in the drawing is matched by a thin quality in the paint, the modelling being much less solid than in previous murals. The general lack of vigour may have come from the change of medium … the green colour scheme is colder than in any of the previous scenes.’ JTFMB, p. 199. 53 See, in addition, Bennett’s comments in MB, vol. 1, p. 323, where she suggests that Chetham acts as a surrogate of the eponymous subject in Jack the Giant Killer, the book read by the children beneath the aestheticised tree. 54 On pre-industrial folk culture, see William Morris: ‘In the times when art was abundant and healthy, all men were more or less artists; that is to say, the instinct for beauty … had such force that the whole body of craftsmen habitually and without conscious effort made beautiful things, and the audience for the authors of intellectual art was nothing short of the whole people.’ W. Morris, ‘Art under Plutocracy’, [1883], in M. Morris (ed.), The Collected Works of William Morris (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1915), vol. 23, p. 168. 55 Brown, in MB, vol. 1, p. 325. Brown’s research may have led him to conclude that Chetham was a socially aware version of those early nineteenth-century Manchester cotton merchants who moved some of their capital from textiles to insurance. 56 The opposite of Ruskin’s lacerating account of the bourgeois-industrial ‘Life Dream’: ‘Your ideal of human life then is … that it should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath it. On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and stables, and coach-houses; a moderately-sized park; a large garden and hot-houses; and pleasant carriage drives through the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the Goddess; the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family … At the bottom of the bank, is to be the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile long, with one steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high. In this mill are to be in constant employment from eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful language.’ Ruskin, ‘Traffic’ [1864], The Crown of Wild Olive, in JR, vol. 18, p. 453. 57 Brown’s lost portrait of Ernest Jones, the last leader of the Chartists, was produced in 1869. Brown and Jones had a great deal in common. Both venerated Byron as a symbol of cultural radicalism; both were cosmopolitan in outlook and spent their formative years on the Continent; both were radicalised in the 1840s; and both were never free of deep-seated financial worries. The best discussion known to me of Chartism and its

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relation to Victorian culture occurs in M. Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism. See also, S. Ledger, ‘Chartist Aesthetics in the Mid Nineteenth Century: Ernest Jones, A Novelist of the People’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 57:1 (2002), 31–63. 58 See Barlow, ‘The Ordering and Disordering’, pp. 258–76. See also, PB, where he argues, at p. 95, that Brown’s mural scheme converts Hogarth’s account of industry and idleness into ‘the confrontation of Progress with Crisis, Multiplicity with Hysteria’. 59 Ruskin, ‘Traffic’, in JR, vol. 18, pp. 435–6. 60 See MB, vol. 1, p. 325. 61 See Smiles, Self-Help, pp. 27–66. 62 See MB, vol. 1, p. 325; JT, p. 298. 63 In this sense, Chetham’s lifeworld is an antidote to the problems of economic society described at great length in Brown’s Diary. 64 Brown, in FMH, p. 278. The Carlylean nature of the Address is caught in the following remarks about the master: ‘His thoughts run not to catalogues … the dried leaves of commonplace is made nourishment for the living seed of thought as it takes wing and roots itself in the brains and hearts of others.’ 65 See FMH, p. 372, who reads the panel as a Carlylean counterblast to ‘dryasdust’ History Painting: ‘A more remarkable instance of … Brown’s power of squeezing the very last drop of picturesque juice from – or rather of infusing picturesque virus into – the driest of testamentary or historic parchments it would be difficult to find.’ 66 Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, 354. 67 When preparing the manuscript for publication I came across the following statement by Sir Richard Lees, leader of Manchester City Council: ‘The cycle of city life at play is a lovely thing – and should be celebrated.’ See Guardian (Monday 5 July 2021), p. 7. 68 For a suggestive account of the cultural cosmopolitanism in this important section of the panel, see MB, vol. 1, p. 325; and JT, p. 298, both of whom note Brown’s interest in the cross-cultural dimension of the Aesthetic Movement. 69 In his Address, Brown made a point of distinguishing between ‘the sickly plant of dilettantism’ and ‘the powerful tree of knowledge and love of art’. See FMH, p. 278. 70 Blake, ‘The School Boy’, Songs of Experience [1794], in Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 31. Chetham’s Life Dream conflates Blake’s designs for ‘The Garden of Love’ and ‘The Echoing Green’: see C. Trodd, ‘Ford Madox Brown and The William Blake Brotherhood’, in C. Trodd and J. Sheldon (eds), Ford Madox Brown and the Victorian Imagination, 15:3 (2014), 289–93. It is worth mentioning that Mathilde Blind, a semi-official member of the Brown household in this period, adopted this Blakean stance in The Prophecy of St. Oran (1881), where church-sanctioned Christianity is called a ‘joy-killing creed’. See Symons (ed.), The Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind, p. 67. 71 It is hard to imagine that Brown, an egalitarian internationalist, would have shared the sentiments of the Brexiteers filmed celebrating in front of Chetham’s Life Dream when the outcome of the EU referendum was declared inside Manchester Town Hall on 23 June 2016. 72 See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 115. Collingwood was the greatest twentieth-century exponent of ­romantic-humanist tradition to which Brown belonged.

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73 Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History [1840] (London: Chapman & Hall, 1872), p. 149. 74 A rather different version of the ‘Life Dream’ was expressed by Tony Blair, who, in 2015, praised the retail billionaire Philip Green as ‘the person who thought up the dream and dreamt the dream into reality’. In 2005 Green re-engineered his family finances to avoid paying UK income taxes. In 2010 he was appointed by David Cameron to lead a review of public sector efficiency. In November 2020, the Arcadia Group, controlled by Green’s family, went into administration with an estimated £350m deficit in the pension fund. In 2005 the Green family cashed out £1.2bn in dividends from Arcadia. Green’s focus on wealth extraction is hardly unique. In 2017 billionaires made more money than in any year in recorded history. See Guardian (26 October 2018), p. 37. 75 Brown had access to this model, by which Jesus is valorised as universal ethical subject, through members of his social circle, most obviously Moncure Conway; through David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1863); through Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus (1863); and, more broadly, through the critical reception of Comte’s writings by John Stuart Mill, George Eliot and his patron, Vernon Lushington. See also, reproductions of Brown religious works in MB, vol. 1, pp. 126–33, 233–8; vol. 2, pp. 481–90, 494–501. 76 E. Bloch, A Philosophy of the Future, trans. J. Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), p. 136.

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The Manchester school tried to make men realize the brotherhood of humanity, by pointing out the commercial advantages of peace. It sought to degrade the wonderful world into a common market-place for the buyer and the seller. It addressed itself to the lowest instincts, and it failed.1 The wage worker sells to the capitalist his labour-force for a certain daily sum. After a few hours’ work he has reproduced the value of that sum; but the substance of his contract is, that he has to work another series of hours to complete his working day; and the value he produces during these additional hours of surplus labour is surplus value, which costs the capitalist nothing, but yet goes to his pocket. That is the basis of the system which tends more and more to split up civilized society into a few Rothschilds and Vanderbilts, the owners of the means of production and subsistence, on the one hand, and an immense number of wage-workers, the owners of nothing but their labour force, on the other.2

Midway through the production of the murals Brown attended a rally in Manchester. He informed Shields: I was at a mass meeting of the unemployed yesterday at Pomona Gardens – 6000 or 7000 poor, wretched looking, ragged fellows. I had to speechify them, for – did I tell you? – I and some others have started a ‘labour bureau’ to register all who want employment, and invite those who want them to come to us. The workers have come in numbers, but not 5 per cent. of those numbers as employers. In fact, I believe the manufacturer looks upon a good broad margin of starving workmen as the necessary accompaniment of cheap labour – I shall get a nice name, I expect.3

Brown’s reputation among labourers was noted in the same year by William Michael Rossetti, who said that his plumber had pronounced Brown a ‘good man’, and that he was revered by members of workmen’s clubs for being ‘one of the few genuine friends of the working classes’.4 Brown’s identification with 186

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measures designed to protect workers from capitalist control of the labour market was noticed by Hueffer, who recognised that his ‘sympathies led him to encourage a nearly infinite number of struggling workers’.5 Brown’s remarks on the matter of systematic wage-cutting were made at a time when political radicals began to turn their attention from the subject of constitutional reform to re-examine the relations of capital to labour. For some, this meant revisiting Ruskin’s critique of political economy in the 1860s; for others, it meant exploring the relationship between popular sovereignty and industrial society. The pre-eminent representative of the former position was William Morris, who, concentrating on the interpenetration of material culture and political culture, developed the class-based model of labour exploitation Brown adhered to from the 1870s. The pre-eminent representative of the latter position was Arnold Toynbee, who is credited with introducing the term Industrial Revolution to the English-speaking world. Toynbee’s Balliol lectures, published posthumously in 1884 as Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, had an immediate impact on discussions of the economic and social conditions engendered by the development of urban industrialism in the north of England. In parallel, the first of many Ruskin societies was formed in 1879.6 Most of these local organisations amplified Ruskin’s desire to create cultural environments to combat the deleterious effects of industrialisation.7 Ruskin endorsed their aspirations, albeit with a paternalistic and pastoralist turn, when he advised Francis William Pullen, the secretary of the Manchester society: ‘I think you might with grace and truth take the name of the Society of the Rose – meaning the English wild rose – and that the object of the society would be to promote English learning and life as can abide where it grows.’8 A somewhat broader development in the culture of popular radicalism involved determining Oliver Cromwell’s place in British political life and the concomitant rejection of Tory historiography, where he was a negation of authentic constitutional sovereignty. In Manchester, for instance, Cromwell was celebrated as a defender of social and religious liberties, a precursor of the upwardly mobile dissenting spirit responsible for the creation of associational life in the communities in the northwest of England. It comes as no surprise that Matthew Noble’s statue of Cromwell, commissioned by the Heywood family, active members of the Manchester Ruskin Society, was situated outside Manchester Cathedral in 1875.9 The re-evaluation of Cromwell was a topic of interest to Brown, who had acquired a reputation for engaging in a wide range of social subjects, including the history of radical political movements. Brown’s paintings of Cromwell – Cromwell on his Farm (18737–4) and Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois (1877) – can similarly be seen to relate his social activist vision of history to Carlyle’s transformative account of the English Civil War.10 Bradshaw’s Defence of Manchester, A.D. 1642 (1893) (Plate 9), the ninth panel in the mural programme, but the last to be painted, is another example of Brown’s vision of the forces at work in the English Civil War. Although Manchester was held by Parliament, this unusually foreshortened design 187

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places the viewer alongside the Royalists who attacked Manchester via Salford Bridge. The Royalist forces were in the region of three to four thousand; the Parliamentarians amounted to forty musketeers. Deliberately ignoring the historical record, Brown’s panel is a decidedly downbeat version of the tradition of battle painting. In place of epic struggle and heroism, the viewer is offered a low viewpoint into a humdrum scene in which Lord Montagu, the main protagonist, falls from a steed shot by Captain Bradshaw, his parliamentarian foe. In the description of the panel, Brown conflates Captain Bradshaw with John Bradshaw, the lawyer and politician, who, in 1649, was appointed President of the Parliamentary Commission charged with examining Charles I before becoming President of the Council of State in the same year.11 It seems highly unlikely that Brown, who undertook extensive research into the background of the subjects represented in the panels, would have mistaken a minor historical figure for one of the most famous regicides in the Civil War. A more likely scenario is that this is further evidence of his wish to amplify the contribution of political radicalism to English history. After all, John Bradshaw was an ardent republican and his hostility to statecraft led him to oppose the Commonwealth, at the head of which was Cromwell, the Lord Protector. It was noticed in Chapter 3 that The Romans Building A Fort (Plate 1) provides a vivid image of how subaltern figures thrust themselves into historical life from the substratum of the panel. In Bradshaw’s Defence, the colossal subject of the English Civil War is reduced to a cartoonish skirmish between the forces of torpor and resilience in the margins of historical life. Brown contrasts the rather corpulent and weather-beaten Lord Montagu, a Royalist officer, who falls from his mount, with the upright figure who defends the bridge from the back of the image. This is Bradshaw, a dapper and dynamic parliamentarian officer attached to the puff of smoke emanating from his firearm. Montagu, by contrast, is a sprawling shape and obstructive form. Brown’s viewer becomes an eyewitness to a clustered, composite world: the inchoate form of the lumbering Montagu with his fantastically long right arm; the sliding Royalist who seems to be propped into place by Montagu’s musket; the strangely proportioned horse with the diminutive, formless head; and the soporific and appositional Royalist, on the left, loading his gigantic rifle. Together, these signs of distortion at once assert action and block its effectiveness. Which is to say, they give these figures a sense of presence but rob them of agency. By contrast, Bradshaw’s sturdy posture is an affirmation of his status as a sign of historical authenticity. Bradshaw’s Defence indicates how Brown sets out to make history vivid by departing from traditional doctrines of proportion, balance and organisation. The undulating bridge, which provides the overarching unity of the image, brings together an assortment of mannered individuals. In this regard, the design relates to The Proclamation, where the subject matter, in equating contact with division, requires the spectator to mediate between the incompatible experiences of the Proclamation Man and the angry shopkeepers. Brown’s idiosyncratic treatment of space – there is no midground in Bradshaw’s Defence – draws attention to 188

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the difference between the expansive and rotational body of Montagu and the miniaturised, static Bradshaw. Nor should we overlook the obvious fact that Montagu is a parody of the repoussoir figure. That is, instead of reconnecting spaces, he rolls across the picture plane denying the viewer easy access to the background. In fact, Montagu, a massive part-body in the manner of John Kay in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle (Plate 10), resembles a contorted puppet conjoined to the horse spreading out beside him. This bulbous figure is at once abbreviated and formless: look at how Montagu’s displaced right arm is made to appear as an autonomous body-thing held in place by the delicate operation of the soldier placed above him. Brown’s interest in pictorial distortion extends to the treatment of Montagu’s gun, implausibly held by his displaced arm, which blends in with the leg and hoof of the fallen steed. The elastic foreground is a tumbling foreshortened road; the truncated background framed by the vanishingly small opening to the bridge. The main shapes are contained within warped and fractured structures: Brown defines the geometric proportions of the bridge via motility, a movement within matter that acts to swell the wall in the foreground, as if it is adjusting itself to the actuality of Montagu’s bulky, bulging and jarring presence.12 For certain, much of the strangeness of the image comes from the spent energy of Montagu, and the sense that his body is a repeat, a presence spilling into the restless space around him. Squeezed into the foreground, he is little more than an incomplete surface pattern, an irregular form that cannot become a dynamic pictorial gyre, an immoveable blob about to be engorged by the earth. It is known that Brown, a diligent researcher, spent time looking at materials located in local archives relating to the subjects included within the programme. It is possible to get a sense of the range and depth of these activities from letters to friends and colleagues. In October 1879 Brown informed Shields: I have been at the Museum Library two or three days since I have seen you and should, I think, pretty well have cleared up for us all doubts worth entertaining with respect to our subjects. I wish to write to Thompson, but first ought to clear up about Kay and the wool sheet. Can you advise me as to this matter? Kay seems to have been a sort of friend and hanger-on of Arkwright. I doubt if there is any biography of him. There is still doubt as to Crabtree being a sufficiently important character. I must consult with you about the matter, and as to the Danes I can as yet discover no authority for their taking Manchester, though no doubt they were fighting all around them and were no doubt there often enough; but I must consult Malmesbury. So there are still three doubtful subjects. I have been trying the square of plaster, and this seems equally a doubtful subject. I must talk the matter over with you when we meet; meanwhile if you find out anything more about Kay, pray remember him.13

What catches my attention here is the combination of diligence and indifference, the way in which research is put to the service of a critical idiom where the subject is compressed into history by other forces. Expressed differently, it is striking that Brown’s comments offer few clues as to how John Kay, who in 189

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1733 patented a new form of wheeled shuttle, should be commemorated. To appreciate what Brown thought Kay stood for it is necessary to go straight to the painting. It is customary for art historians to say that mid-nineteenth-century realism captures a world in transition. In John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle (Plate 10) Brown depicts a subject in transition. Nothing in this intensely odd world sits together. As seen here, Kay incorporates the idea of energy revolution – the transformation of the productive power of society – into the movement of his body. It is appropriate, therefore, that Brown converts the poise and stillness of the stereotypic figure found in orthodox History Painting into the electric intensity of a subject who seems to resist socialisation. While some commentators have touched on this topic, the critical purport of the panel has not been grasped.14 Kay’s restless body, as rendered by Brown, is a bravura performance in distortion. Little more than the accumulation of contradictory impressions and forces, Kay becomes a gloriously strange and off-balance form moving in two directions at the same time.15 This is in keeping with Brown’s lifelong a­ nti-academicism, since he replaces the idea of the settled composition, at the centre of which is a subject who performs cognitive or social mastery, with an image with many wholes: the bewildered Kay, his supporters, the apprentice and flying shuttle configuration, as well as the mob of workers. The actual Kay, defined in the historiography of British industrialisation as a luminary in the development of the rational-technical state, is recast as an irrational and distorted entity who is being physically absorbed by his retinue. Despite Brown’s interest in the archival traces of the real Kay, John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, depicts a rudderless world where the self-made entrepreneur, agitated and disorientated by the social response to machine technology, is the source of violent interaction. Once again, Brown aims for a congruence between style and subject, something noted by Blind in her perceptive review of this novel design.16 Another indication of Brown’s creativity is the application of an Hogarthian mock-epic aesthetic to what is a proto-industrial environment. In line with Hogarth, Brown rejects the core-periphery model of academic composition by presenting Kay as the negation of the idea of the intrepid inventor. Like Hogarth, Brown is interested in the jumbled forms of ordinary life, expressed pictorially through the logic of reversal (Figure 4.1). To this end, Brown’s Kay, an awkward and bristling entity, belongs to the realm of hysteria rather than the realm of hermeneutics: he is the self-distorting subject whose erratic movement brings disequilibrium into the world. It is entirely in keeping with this arrangement of reversal that Brown draws attention to the stark contrast between the quivering Kay and the material geometry of the sturdy loom, which acquires the trappings of homeliness through its physical resemblance to a four-poster bed. Many of these matters will be dealt with in detail later. For now we need only note that to discover the overall balance of intellectual forces at work in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle it is necessary to broaden the inquiry beyond 190

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the discussion of style. It is my belief that this panel supports a general feature of Brown’s thought: that, following Carlyle’s writings on this subject, modernity means the humanisation of chaos. Carlyle’s blend of exhilaration and despair accounts for Brown’s representation of the eponymous subject of the painting. Kay’s unthinking actions and wild gesticulations create a disproportionate body whose reach matches the magnitude of his invention, which was driven by a flying shuttle, a labour-saving device with the capacity to control yarn twice the length of that commanded by the handloom operator. Kay is the individual part who signifies the mixed-up socio-psychological whole that is capitalism: community is replaced by a kind of association based on collective anxiety, insecurity and fear. It follows, then, that Kay is another example of Brown’s commitment to making an argument through the orchestration of pictorial forms. In Brown’s perspective, Kay takes the form of a delirious rush of energy because he stands for the reduced significance of labour to the new industrial process. Kay is instinct with life, but this is expressed in machinic terms.17 Brown’s concern with the feel of everyday life must be related to his vision of painting as a social diagram in which opposing values and forces are brought together. For instance, Brown depicts Kay, the herald of the new industrial order, as a swirling, self-cancelling presence detached from his invention. Kay and the worktable in front of the loom are aligned along the panel’s horizontal axis; the flying shuttle itself lies discarded on the floor in the foreground. Kay is defined through the intricately recursive body patterns of the tight-knit group; the loom is static, modular, rectilinear – and isolated. Behind the loom Brown includes an angry mob of handloom weavers, whose leader has smashed one of Kay’s windows with a hammer.18 The reflexive dimension of the design is affirmed by these figures, all of whom are in the process of breaking into the image to protest at their loss of control over the labour process.19 The loom cannot connect the ‘kin-group’ on the frontal plane to the ‘village commune’ at the rear of the image; instead, it is a false whole whose job it is to confirm the reduction of human labour to a production factor within an industrial process.20 Signs of industrial development, economic dislocation and labour revolt exist in their own sub-spheres, a matter noted by Barlow in his inspired reading: The machine occupies a space constructed from rigid patterns of squares and rectangles. This … rationality splits the composition down the middle. A rigid line separates Kay and his family from the machine and the mob. Protective bars in rectangular windows keep the mob at bay, but the Kay family group is a site of frenzied visual confusion … This is the culmination of the confusions of space and the fragmentation of inherited iconography that began with the contrast between Roman linearity with Celtic curves … The more completely the space is bashed into squares, the more chaotic and distorted the reaction. Modern manufacture is suspended in chaos, opening an irresolvable split between the parallel confusions of the mob and of the Kay family, snapping the image in two.21 191

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In other words, the spectator is forced to oscillate between the symmetry of the machinic world and the distortion of the human world. Not surprisingly, the impression is of an artist for whom the flying shuttle generates social conflict and for whom social conflict is expressed by the organisation of the panel into flattened and disjointed planes. Brown’s loom is at once isolated pictorial unit and physical reference to the material processes of industrialisation. True, it has no immediate operational value, as it is not active, and yet its authority – it was the first stage in the development of the automatic loom – is confirmed by its centralised placement within an atomised world where the main subject is falling apart. This loom, the static form that denotes the dynamism of industrial capitalism, is placed behind a worktable, and seems to hover in mid-ground, its upper part framed like a painting. With this unorthodox arrangement the object of instrumental rationality becomes an inert form pushed to the side of a frenetic social tableau. Like Hogarth, customary signs of identity are subject to definitional distortion. For instance, the loom, the worldliest of things, takes on the appearance of a devotional object, which is Brown’s way of pointing to the divergence between a human world of protection and mutual support, and the timeless, automated world of reproductive technology.22 Consequently, Brown imagines industrialisation as riotous from within: mechanisation brings immobility, uniformity – and chaos.23 The next point to make here is that although Brown insists on the family dimension of textile production, there is nothing comfortable or homely about a subject that folds the world of common life into the world of universal struggle. Kay represents dividedness, the melodrama of the commonplace. A contradictory being, Kay is Brown’s response to the mixed human condition within modernity, where the experiences of work and home converge to generate new social pressures. Fellow feeling, the experience of belonging to a community with its own values and distinctive ethos, has been replaced by the collective worry displayed on the right side of the image. Status and respect, key terms in the imagery of artisanal society, do not feature in a new world of atomic individualism. On this reckoning, Brown’s activist mode of seeing involves distancing the objects of industrialisation from the languages with which they were promoted and evaluated. If nothing else, Brown makes us wonder why this engagement with the forms of rationalistic modernity locates Kay at the periphery of his own world.24 Put now in these terms, it is not difficult to see where this questioning of the idea of the utility of the industrial process came from. As noted, Brown set out to mesh his social activist aesthetic to the worldview of popular radicalism. For certain, John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle spotlights the tension between technological fact and human feeling at a moment of massive social development. Kay’s ‘irrational’ body, Brown wants us to know, is a living image of slavish dependence on machine logic. The very fact, in other words, that Kay is both technical expert and sensational subject has the effect of drawing attention to one of the critical features of new manufacturing technologies: 192

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the disruption and distortion of the social patterns and structures established by craft culture. Hence, the loom of modernity invades the home, altering the scale of material production. In part, this explains the oddness of the brittle forms encasing Kay’s body, since they serve to render a world in which everything has become unsteadying and complicated. Just as this world violates orderly spaces, so Kay becomes a restlessly lively subject who attempts to flee from what he has created. Once again, the graphic character of the painting contributes to a life-situation where the unstable Kay is a node in a network of atomised and self-alienating forms. The human world, as Brown understands it, is the endless intermixing of forms and bodies best rendered by a grotesque aesthetic.25 Paraphrasing Nietzsche, Kay is the incarnation of dissonance in a human setting.26 He is a percussive force, not a settled subject. This feverish individual, who is being incorporated into an energy-filled world in which surface pattern takes priority over the orderly representation of forms held in check by spatial containers, amounts to the dislocation of rational human identity. Kay is no more than this cluster of heterogenous spasms, jolts and vibrations. Subsumed by the volcanic energies he brings into being, Kay is a one-man version of a world out of joint, an orphan in a space of his own making. To say this is to recognise that Brown’s aesthetic, a retort to the vision of the self-contained subject in the tradition of liberal individualism, uses the critical idiom of the grotesque to present the body as at once physically chaotic and potentially boundless.27 More than this, Kay is etiolated and malleable, and so he has an additional burden: he is a creator who does not possess the bodily strength to protect his property, family or livelihood. Similarly, he does not have the character to enact his ‘Life Dream’: the quest to become a powerful manufacturer, the subject who commands his world by coordinating machinic energy and labour power in the pursuit of material wealth.28 This vision of the relationship between subjecthood and environment relates to three late-nineteenth-century cultural themes on the nature of artistic identity. First, the Victorian-romantic model, where the inward-facing subject appears in a realm filled by individuals warring with one another. Second, the Aestheticist model, where the subject occupies a position in the world by improvising his or her life. Third, the Carlylean model, where the ‘Eye of History’, remodelled as somatic force within an ever-dynamic environmental setting, signals a condition of heightened vision. These reflections resonate with what is known about Brown’s broader critical interests. It was remarked in Chapter 2 that the aesthetics of melodrama, where psycho-expressive concerns are amplified, explains some aspects of Brown’s social activist vision of painting, which tends to give priority to larger-than-life figures placed in extreme situations. In what follows I argue that melodrama, otherwise recessive in the surrounding panels, comes to the fore in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, as this work conflates popular radicalism with a version of the Hogarthian model of the quotidian grotesque. 193

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It ought to be remembered that the social value of melodrama was of interest to George Cruikshank, another important exponent of the idea of activist art in this period. Cruikshank appealed to those artists sympathetic to an engaged version of modern culture, for he tried to ensure that the interests of his audience coincided with the subjects of his engravings, most characteristically in the ferocious urgency on display in The Worship of Bacchus (1860–2).29 This work is consistent with the Hogarthian tradition of popular-radical imagery, since like Hogarth, Cruikshank uses graphic forms to map the evolution of bourgeois society. Cruikshank’s critical organisation of picture space through composite bands is evident in ‘Tremendous Sacrifice’ (Figure 5.1), published in Our Own Times (1847), a remarkable vision of a grotesque realm beneath the surface of polite culture. The first point to make about his etching is that industrialisation is represented as an application of Carlyle’s view of the grotesque forces unleashed by the French Revolution to a British setting. From Cruikshank’s point of view, understanding industrial society involves confronting forces that cannot be unified. To see ethically – to observe mechanisms of exploitation – is to appreciate how aesthetics, in the form of the fashionable world of bourgeois society, mutilates workers and robs them of their humanity. Wherefore, the viewer is confronted with a fetishised world in what purports to be the real – consumption within commercial society – is, as depicted on right side of the design, no more than an illusion of poise and ­gentility.30 The left side of the design, a retort to consumption, indicates that the culture of politeness is maintained by locating workers on the precipice of life, a point emphasised by the appearance of the guillotine, the mammon-effigy which has become the end point of a deskilling process where the work unit turns independent handloom weavers into starving, sacrificial drones. These desperate subjects are shaped by the instruments surrounding them; their ‘mind-forged manacles’ convey them across an environment given over to the mystery of machine idolatry. Cruikshank makes us peer into a sensational world in which machinic workers are no more than a set of production factors. Here, then, is a life-situation where work amounts to perennial punishment or destruction. ‘Tremendous Sacrifice’ reconnects the industrial machine to the occluded features of modernity. It creates an effect of disjunction by making production and consumption warring forces within civil society. Put another way, Cruikshank spatialises experience to explore different dimensions of modern life. Truth to tell, Brown offers a similar perspective in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, a composite vision of modernity as relentless frenzy, n ­ on-assimilation and social crisis. Cruikshank, it can be argued, allows us to see how Brown resets Hogarth’s graphic system in the context of Carlyle’s vision of history. Hence, technology, in form of the flying shuttle, has become protean, unleashing revolutionary powers. As to Kay, he is a subject who exists in a state of perpetual perturbation. In looking at him the viewer encounters a being reduced to a central nervous system, a body transformed by the mechanism it brings into 194

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Figure 5.1  George Cruikshank, Tremendous Sacrifice!, 1847

195

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being. Kay, a source of conflict, is a stranger in his own world. Contrary to expectations, he embodies upheaval: he is the physical rupture in a way of life – the passing of cottage economy, the traumatic birth of industrialisation and the casualisation or the material displacement of skilled labour by machinic forms. Kay’s explosion into life is expressed ironically: it is a sign of Brown’s engagement with social romanticism, one aspect of which questioned the discourse of functionalist efficiency advanced by supporters of the social revolution generated by industrial society. Brown’s ironic mode may account for another aspect of John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle: the right section looks like an absurd transfiguration of Raphael’s The Transfiguration, a work much feted in romantic art discourse. Whatever the case, Brown’s inventive vision of a modern human world subject to the powers of disruptive technologies relates to Carlyle’s romantic model of modern history, where schism, not unity, is universal law.31 For his part, Brown prefers to picture Kay as a composite being, as if dissonant energies and sensations course through his fluidic form. Carlyle’s description of history as web of ceaseless interactions sums up this line of thinking: ‘actual events are nowise so simply related to each other as parent and offspring are; every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events … and will in its turn combine with all others to give birth to new: it is an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being’.32 What interests me about this critical idiom is that history – perpetual movement without conclusion – mimics and vindicates the muddle and messiness of human experience. John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle establishes a formal parallel with Carlyle’s line of thinking by depicting a contorted world, a ‘Chaos of Being’, in which mechanised labour produces a new kind of body. Nonetheless, unlike Cruikshank and Carlyle, both of whom focus on the mechanised worker, Brown shows an inventor ‘mechanised’ by his own invention. Kay, the scientific-industrial entrepreneur, the hero of technics – the vision of modernity sponsored by Brown’s corporate sponsors – is afflicted by the uncontainable life around, and within, him. If nothing else, Kay makes us wonder about how physiological and psychological aspects of industrialisation relate to the idea of the sovereign subject. These remarks help us reflect on the structural nature of the design. For instance, it is noticeable that the congruence of stable workplace and unified social identity is called into question, as the viewer plunges into a space without smooth transitions, a space where machinic truth is in the process of altering social foundations. In other words, the image is a meditation on a problem within the culture of modernity: how can a creator critically respond to the idea, common among supporters of modernity, that the machine belongs to the truth of the modern world? Brown’s take on this matter is to insist that history is to be understood in terms of social phenomenology. The implications of his attitude are obvious. The environment becomes an evanescent personality, since Brown is less interested in depicting what Kay looked like than in imagining how he felt in this self-distorting space.33 In effect, he pictured Kay as a bodily version of strangeness and astonishment, the incarnation of ‘Human Life, which 196

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bursts through the thickest-quilted formulas’.34 Kay, the externalisation of inner ­disintegration, offered Brown the chance to explore the possibility of giving shape to the anarchic fury of the industrial world, a matter of considerable import once the Peterloo Massacre and the Lancashire Cotton Famine were removed from the list of topics to be represented in the programme.35 Here is the moment to recall the earlier point about reversal. Coming between the viewer and the mid-grounded loom, the gesticulating Kay is an unsettling presence in a space defined by rectilinear patterns. Engulfed by his entourage, he becomes a parody of social solidarity. Another destabilising force takes the form of the mob of independent craftsmen set against the asymmetrical rectangular windows on the left.36 The iconoclastic nature of industrial modernisation is answered by the iconoclastic nature of the mob, the obstreperous figures seeking to break into the space of action to smash the flying shuttle.37 Put another way, Brown’s panel forces the viewer to recognise that modernity is marked by unorchestrated energies, by gusto. Modernity is motion and mutability – and failed transfiguration. Modernity is Kay’s jellified body, which, moving in different directions, becomes the self-displacing force Carlyle called the ‘Chaos of Being’. Nor should we forget that this catastrophist vision of the modern subject belongs to an inflection point in history when the dominant model of work value was expressed through standardised performance, not through the traditional model of individual performance. Naturally, much could be made of this matter. But here I want only to point out that Kay’s position in economic history, at the advent of what is called the Industrial Revolution, provides a helpful context for understanding why Brown defines him as bewilderment in human form. As depicted here, Kay comes into being to confirm that the idea of collective life has been replaced by the struggle to imagine the relationship between individualism and community. It is part of Brown’s pictorial idiom, then, that signs of social collaboration are converted into a form of continuous pictorial friction, expressed in what Treuherz calls the ‘wriggling curves’ of Kay, his wife and two assistants.38 Brown’s interest in the intermixing of social identities and cultural forces is not the full story, however. Brown, like Hogarth, equates pictorial creativity with unpicking the fabric of social relationships and questioning mimetic norms. His approach to representation, at once activist and formalist, encourages the viewer to see Kay as an exercise in the inversion of symbolic form. We came across this matter when I mentioned Brown’s orientation to the idea of transfiguration. Yet there is another category of expression worth noting. I am thinking about the deposition of Christ, which is invoked in the sensitising power of Kay’s energised body. Instead of representing a condition in which the subject incarnates a value beyond the material world, however, Kay exists for the sole purpose of confirming what happens to the working body under the conditions of industrialisation. This is how he directs – and holds – our attention. Kay is a direct representation of pulsing presence and endless turbulence, not a characterful expression of purposeful action or social politeness. He represents the 197

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dissolution of the subject into something approaching self-conflict, a condition of being that cuts him off from the life-experiences of the workers outside the windows. No other figure associated with Pre-Raphaelitism expressed the need to make painting focus on humanly constructed space as powerfully as Brown did. Certainly, none connected it as explicitly to a reading of modernity as did he. In consequence, Brown’s Kay is not a mimetic type. In actual fact, he is the symbolic form whereby an image of organic society is replaced by an image of industrialised society. Kay belongs to a world that is pulled apart and remade by the machine, the ultimate sign of property rights and endless productivity. Yet the rational-technical features of the machine are not validated pictorially through the language of natural description. As an alternative to the academic model of composition as unity of interlocking parts, Brown deploys a Hogarthian system of differentiated zones of experience (Figure 4.1). The most emphatic example of this process is the treatment of the group swarming around Kay. Their engulfing embrace diminishes the estranged ‘hero’, rendering him into a cluster of warring body parts. These dedicated followers create what might be called inverted form: through them the depleted Kay will ‘soar’, but he will not be unified with an external force or a social community. Why did Brown allude to, and then nullify, the possibility of a gestalt-like synthesis in the treatment of Kay and his retinue? One explanation is that this unusual arrangement enabled Brown to stage Kay’s ‘development’ as a flight from his concrete life-situation. On this reading, the image operates as failed apotheosis, an important subject in the tradition of Hogarthian graphic art, in which matters of incarnation and transcendence were subject to satirical review and reversal.39 Another explanation is that Brown was responding to Hazlitt’s ‘Hogarthian’ understanding of the representation of the social matrix. For Hazlitt, ‘life’ is the outcome of complex interactions between the subject and the entire social order. Unsurprisingly, he cautions us to pay attention to Hogarth’s faces, since ‘they exhibit the most uncommon features, with the most uncommon expressions; but which yet are as familiar and intelligible as possible, because with all the boldness, they have all the truth of nature’. Hazlitt notes that Hogarth is ‘carried away by a passion for the ridiculous … There is a perpetual collision of eccentricities … [We are struck by] the unaccountable jumble of odd things which are brought together … [and] the inexhaustible variety of incident and circumstantial detail … Hogarth was a painter, not of low but of actual life.’40 To represent actual life the artist creates an intermixed aesthetic, one part grotesque, another part physical power or movement. The result is gusto, the primordial phenomenon of all living things. Hazlitt’s image of continuously active subjects and situations pertains to the world sketched in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle. On one side is the loom, the material manifestation of a manufacturing system based on principles of infinite extension and indefinite repetition, and on the other side, tumult, the evanescent now of the permeable self. It might be added that the idea of 198

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standardised and rationalised mass production, the aim of the industrialising process and mechanical philosophy, is displaced by the mass body, the convulsive shape taken by Kay and his entourage. On the left side of the image, trapezoid forms; on the right side of the image, an amalgamated grotesque body. Unlike Chetham’s Life Dream (Plate 8), in which Chetham represents a great joy in the expressive plasticity of the playful children, Kay is little more than a writhing, twisting and disturbed form. Just as Chetham at once sees and completes the life of the world in and through a dreamscape, so Kay is an inchoate shape stuck in a would-be rational space. With Kay, sensitivity is translated into sensationalism. The bigger picture here is that Chetham’s world – where individuals coexist without encroaching on each other – has been replaced by the permanent forcefulness of production, as indicated by Kay’s anxious expression. Kay’s reaction to his immediate world, a caricature of Promethean gusto, indicates his awareness that the machine is a law unto itself. Brown’s account of a fluidic and physiological world held in place by the principle of raw energy as constant force on matter is an obvious retort to academicism, a condition of picture-making where the subject is abstracted from the concreteness of actual life. More specifically, the critical substructure of John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle is unlike the schema of Reynoldsian painting, where planes are organised in accordance with the idea of composition as self-balancing whole analogous to the workings of polite society. In consequence, Brown’s Hogarthian schema depends upon a play of contraries: containment and eruption, empathy and aggression, rationality and chaos, balance and disorder, improvement and atavism – verismo and gusto. Just as Reynolds’s discourses instruct the painter to detach painting from the detritus of common nature, so John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle is an exercise in imagining what happens to the spirit of common life within the modern workspace. Brown, accordingly, splits his design into three autonomous zones: the space of invention (the left), the space of the inventor (right), and the space of workers (at the back of the design). By doing so, he produces a composite lifeworld, a viewpoint on existence, where bits of the real are forced together to create an intermixed place with two porous openings in the background and a self-cancelling subject in the foreground. The paradigm for what Brown is doing is the montage: we investigate a world where things are pulled apart to reveal that the real is made from a concatenation of warring parts and conflict points. The representation of the workers is a case in point. They are in the process of breaking into the image by attacking the window frames in the background of the panel. Which is to say, they exist as an internal framing device, drawing attention to how the existence of work is situated by a work of art. Their purpose, then, is to penetrate beneath the surface of the world before them and to protest at the erosion of the cottage economy, at the loss of skill resulting from the domination of work by machinery. Needless to say, Brown’s unconventional representation of working-class insurgency calls into question the liberal vision of society as a continuous process of development. This liberal vision of the subject was 199

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perpetuated in the Town Hall Committee résumé of 1881, where the panel is described thus: ‘John Kay inventor of the fly shuttle saved by being carried off in a wool sheet as the mob are breaking into his house at Bury [Machinery in great part the cause of Manchester’s prosperity’].41 What is at issue in Brown’s appeal to common experience is that for much of the eighteenth-century the term skill was a term applied to ‘artificers’, the working people who made the things that made the world work. Skill, once a way of describing a craft identity, would be transformed by the discourses of technics and political economy into a set of standardised points within a circuit of production. In this sense it was the opposite of the culture of craft, which emphasised the continuity of individual skill across boundaries of knowledge and practice. Within the parlance of technics and political economy, craft was reconstituted as a form of rent-seeking: it impeded the division of labour, technological development and the expansion of the market for consumer goods and general utilities. It goes without saying that Brown, who never adhered to this official vision of industrial civilisation, was acutely sensitive to the destruction of the artisanal skills associated with the cottage economy. It may be helpful to clarify the argument at this point by stressing that Brown’s vision of the relationship between handicraft and technology is defined in pictorial terms: the indistinct natural world in the background threatens the standardised, logical, quantified space of the workshop, as articulated in the open-ended foreground. Rowdy craft workers, displaced by new machinery in the form of the flying shuttle, are trying to break into the image from the position of nature. Again, this affirmation of collective resistance to the rationalisation of the world through the development of capitalist industry is another indication of Brown’s neo-Hogarthian pictorial idiom.42 Specifically, the contrast between Kay and these angry figures allows Brown to revisit one of the topics popularised by Hogarth: the relationship between the master, the apprentice and the crowd. There were many ways of configuring these elements, the most conventional of which was to represent the crowd petitioning for a meeting with a master or masters, thus suggesting a synthesis of contending forces around the preservation of craft status.43 Brown, however, departs from this culture, based on signs of hospitality and reconciliation, to picture a world full of strangers, a world in which representatives of craft autonomy set out to confront the inventor of a new system of automation. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the hand-loom weavers are seen from Kay’s position, the internal viewpoint of the space of invention. At the same time, however, Brown detaches Kay from any sense of sensory or physical authority by turning him away from these representatives of artisanal values. No longer a master of a situation, or a monadic subject in control of his own destiny, he has become a ludicrous appendage to the general phenomenon of machine culture. His creativity unleashes pure chaos.44 For Brown, then, two forms of disorder are frozen in a moment before they confront each other: the physically and symbolically disordered Kay, and the economically disordered 200

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crowd. In all this, Brown’s point of view is that of the absurdist: we peer into a demented human comedy, centred on the baggy body of the fumbling antihero, the source of domestic, social and economic convulsion. Here is an unsettled place where human connection does not work any more: people, places, categories have become detached from their traditional identities. Even signs cannot be domesticated: gone wild, they are exiled from their prior associations and contexts. This takes us back to the subject of melodrama for, as we have already seen, the painting, an inversion of standard representations of domestic production, establishes modernity as a condition of confusion. Kay exemplifies a condition of pure subjectivity detached from a world of community engagement. He is the reversal of the human ideal articulated in Reynoldsian painting, where the central figure is a source of graphic energy and compositional power. Kay is robbed of this power because his job is to indicate how the modern workspace has become estranged from the work culture of the past. Brown takes the cottage economy format – domestic work as outcome of consensual social relations between master and worker – but dispenses with the system of pictorial organisation from which it was constructed. Space and bodies are not coordinated; signs of homeliness are in short supply. Other inversions should be noted. The processional becomes an insurrection; the master attempts to shed his identity; the world of technics appears at odds with the energies it has unleashed; the social world is invaded by popular disturbance. Into this hectic and unfixed world Brown introduces Robert, the son-apprentice, who, looming over the worktable in front of the loom, attempts to save it from the disgruntled workers outside the windows. Robert’s easy elasticity – he stretches back into the image to orchestrate the family flight by gesturing with his right hand – gives him greater individual presence than anything displayed by the adults on the right side of the panel. Having come so far in this account of John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle we are now returned to the matter of Carlyle’s importance to Brown. Kay, as seen here, is the pointless performance of neurotic vitality and source of relentless, inexhaustible multiplication. He is at war with the predictable and coordinated world of manufacture. An expert who falls apart, he is the modern subject identified in Sartor Resartus: ‘[within all of us] lies a world of internal Madness, an authentic Demon-Empire; out of which, indeed, his world of Wisdom has been creatively built together, and now rests there, as on its dark foundations does a habitable flowery Earth-rind’.45 Such convictions allowed Brown to develop a Carlylean optic in graphic form, to propose that modern society creates new forms of thraldom. Unsurprisingly, then, Kay’s ascension to heroic status is denied by a system of visual rhetoric in which the hodgepodge subject is simultaneously overwhelming and empty: no more than the sum of his hyperbolic ‘attributes’, he is detached from the true meaning of human interaction. Brown’s remaking of the world in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle displays great analytical virtuosity in its account of the relationship between a subject’s 201

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private drives and the social relations of modernity. Modern History Painting is reimagined by spotlighting the decay of domestic industry within the history of industrialisation. In effect, Brown provides the spectator with a subject drained of the stuff of the self and drowned in the stuff of the world. Kay, eyewitness to his own ruination, does not fit into the orthodox story about the development of national life and national character. For this reason, then, the image functions as a critique of the discourses of political economy and liberalism, where the value of the individual is conceptualised as efficiency and organisation. By extension, Kay is an incarnation of what Carlyle called ‘living nerves’, an indication of what happens to the mental world of the subject within modernity where nerve stimulation is an important sign of the material nature of industrial capitalism.46 The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal A.D. 1761 (1891–92) (Plate 11), the penultimate panel in the programme, depicts the official opening of the canal on 17 July 1761. Rather than emphasising the Duke of Bridgewater, who presided over the opening ceremony, Brown concentrates on the narrow boat, pulled by two mules and controlled by a sturdy woman at the tiller. Her twin babies, placed at the front of the barge, occupy the centre of the vibrant image, forcing the Duke, the sign of ‘commercial aggrandisement’, into the obscurity of the background.47 The tilted vessel, which creates a sense of spatial depth, becomes an undulating body-thing, an ocular presence directed at the spectator through the eyes of the ‘portentously large’ babies at the bow.48 In consequence, they represent the ‘Eye of History’, the conversion of the ritualised public event into the local commons of ‘everyday life’.49 The mother, who incarnates workaday gusto, is in marked contrast to the appositional figure of the Duke. Nor should it be overlooked that her commanding physical presence is reinforced by a low viewpoint, thus establishing the exchange between the viewer and the subjects in the painting. Note, too, how the informality and spontaneity of this segment of the panel forces playfulness to the centre of things: we apprehend a fairground-space where the meandering, foreshortened narrow boat is given priority over the rationalisation process eulogised by the supporters of canal building. An animated boy on a coal barge breaks into the image from the bottom left. His attitude – is he saluting the swimming dog or the tipsy Duke? – is another example of a critical attitude where the real is constructed by amalgamating competing signs. Brown places, between the barge-boy and the military band, a motley collection of truncated subjects, some of whom are out of scale; a strange device that makes the military band resemble the ‘Potsdam Giants’ described in loving detail in Carlyle’s Frederick the Great. Brown displays little interest in recording the operational nature of the canal, which, after huge levels of private investment, transformed the material and economic infrastructure of Manchester and the northwest of England.50 Nor does he enforce the authority of the Duke of Bridgewater who, by building a waterway reducing transport costs on his coal, went on to become one of the richest landowners in Britain. This polemical edge explains why Brown ignored the advice of his sparring partner, Axon, who informed the Corporation: 202

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There are … two agencies to which Manchester owes not a little of its prosperity and which ought to have a place in such a series. Inland navigation and railways. As to the first what more picturesque subject could be chosen than the busy sight presented by the Old Quay in the early days of the Canal? The old Duke helping the poor man to his sack of coals would not be a bad incident to represent. The story is told in Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers Vol. 1 p. 405.51

Brown shows no interest in the world of aristocratic paternalism, in which dukes help the poor with their sacks of coal; instead, he shows the world of effort and the workings of a social jamboree from the position of everyday people. The exuberant energies of nature, he implies, belong to the large, thrusting w ­ orking-class figures, not the stiff, diminutive and awkward Duke, who is moved to the penumbra of the image. Just as Brown replaces industrial leadership with the cooperative leadership of the landless, wage-earning classes who dominate the environment, so it is tempting to see The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal as a comment on radical politics.52 For instance, Dorothy Thompson reminds us that Chartism was organised by thousands of anonymous people using ‘traditional forms of processions, carnivals, camp meetings … and services to put across the message of the six points. Flags, banners … scarves, sashes and rosettes appeared on public occasions. Slogans from the Bible, from literature and from earlier radical movements decorated the banners and placards they carried.’53 Thompson’s comments, which capture the verve of popular culture, provide a context for understanding the compositional oddity of a design where energy production is associated with the gusto of the working-class body.54 That is, Brown fashions his image of human vitality by drawing attention to the social body of the common people rather than the formalised customs of the social elite. It was noted in Chapter 2 that Spirit of Justice embodies Brown’s ambition to produce art forms that dispense with the idea of a social world presided over by civic dignitaries. The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal pushes pictorial egalitarianism to its extreme by offering an intimate portrayal of what ordinary people look like when brought close to the picture plane. Following Carlyle, Brown distinguishes between felt experience and formula: the common people, bubbling with life, are brought before the viewer; the Duke, little more than a doll-effigy, is an abstraction from the fullness of life. These were some of the features that led Alderman Thompson to declare that he was ‘startled’ by the design; another member of Manchester Corporation called it a ‘burlesque’.55 It is worth noting, however, that this criticism occurred before it was made public that Brown painted The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal – as well as Bradshaw and John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle – after suffering a stroke. At this point, the Decorations Sub-Committee demanded the artist should submit a drawing of Dalton for appraisal. In response, Ford Madox Hueffer informed readers of the Manchester Guardian that Mr. Brown did not choose his subject, it was chosen for him … and who but a municipal councillor would have desired such an impossibility of so great an

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artist? … Nevertheless, Mr. Brown was foolish enough to take upon him the colossal task of making a fine picture out of nothing, and he has done it in a way that no man, past or present, unless it be Hogarth – ever has done. He has made a picture, it is true, that gives us something to reflect upon, and that is just what municipal councillors do not want. The picture is brimming with life, and with English life too. It is at once a masterpiece of genre and of historic painting.56

Brown – resolutely spikey in his dealings with officialdom – refused the edict from the Corporation, that the final panel be presented for ratification, notification of which he received after the death of his wife from a protracted and painful illness. In fact, he stopped the Mayor and his retinue from inspecting Dalton. When informed by officials that the Corporation would not honour the fee, he responded by indicating that the panel would be sold to another patron. In the end, after an intervention from Rowley, the Decorations Sub-Committee was obliged to accept it.57 Some commentators have concluded that The Bridgewater Canal and Dalton are disappointing because they do not confront the powers that created modern Manchester. According to Treuherz, ‘neither of these adequately represents the … forces that shaped nineteenth-century Manchester’.58 Dalton, he complains ‘is shown not in a laboratory but in an oddly inappropriate pastoral setting’.59 More broadly, a few years after Brown’s death, Ellen Terry informed George Bernard Shaw that ‘Dear old Brown’ was the ‘father of all the good late work. I loved him, and he loved me. Do you know the great hall in Manchester Town Hall? The last three panels I could not like so much as the rest. He told me I ought to like those the best, and I tried to, but couldnt.’60 These readings fail to detect the close kinship between these works and the rest of the mural programme. For example, Dalton (Plate 12) replies to the trauma of industrial modernity enacted in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle by offering a complication of the standard vision of rustic tranquillity. John Dalton, the focal point of the image, expresses a combination of intensity and curiosity. Dalton’s role, it can be inferred, is to indicate that the world is discovered in and through thought. In other words, Dalton, the inventor of atomic theory, wants to delineate the principles that enable life to appear in the world. Carlyle may have lamented that ‘[l]ife c­ onsists … in the sifting of huge rubbish-mounds’ but Dalton’s fetid pool, the source of his mechanical-mathematical model of atomic combination in A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808–27), becomes the foundation of knowledge and wonderment in Brown’s inventive version of everyday life.61 Having said this, a fully convincing explanation of the panel is still lacking. The thrust of my argument is to suggest that Dalton is not a straightforward validation or glorification of science. For a start, there are no heroics on display here. On the contrary, the viewer looks at a gentle and spare scene containing rustic children as well as the amateur chemist and schoolteacher, who stirs a stagnant pool to capture marsh-fire gas. Brown’s figures exist in separate spatial containers, different zones of experience. Nor should we overlook the autobiographical component of the image: the small boy with the fishing rod 204

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is provided with the same garb worn by Brown when he was at this age. As he carefully recorded, at this stage in his childhood, ‘I was dressed in what was then called a blouse – jacket & trousers all in one, buttoned up behind & a little of the shirt frequently, on that side, remained out. Precisely, so I have painted the little boy in the fresco of John Dalton of Manchester: only mine was of blue cloth & in spite of the fine day it got marked with my [sea]sickness & so remained an … eye-sore to me long after.’62 More than this, the ‘Brown child’ is given the sinuous qualities of the children springing from Blake’s designs in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience.63 In effect, the subject, animated by expressive body patterns, embodies a generative inner world. Put more forcefully, Brown places the world of the pastoral, the world of playfulness, in front of the world of science, the world of adult stasis. Here, at the end of the cycle, is a future the artist wants to call home, a state of child-like being that resembles the conclusion to Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope: ‘Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation, and alienation … there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland.’64 Brown’s mural programme can be explained as an attempt to create a world picture, a vision of history as living forces. His interest in developing a new historical perspective is captured by the term ‘Eye of History’. The ‘Brown child’ in Dalton and Chetham in Chetham’s Life Dream exemplify this all-seeing eye for they carry the past into the present, and so suggest another kind of future. In turn, this fascination with the creative potential of the imagination to describe an animist world, returns us to Brown’s formative discovery that humanistic painting was a way of fusing romantic and realistic tendencies in modern culture through the practice of imaginative sight. Charles Baudelaire, who shared Brown’s interest in the animist art of Delacroix, explained this attitude very effectively: There are those who call themselves ‘realists’ – a word with a double meaning, whose sense has not been properly defined, and so, in order the better to characterize their error, I propose to call them ‘positivists’; and they say, ‘I want to represent things as they are, or rather, as they would be, supposing that I did not exist.’ In other words, the universe without man. The others however – the ‘imaginatives’ – say, ‘I want to illuminate things with my mind, and to project their reflections upon other minds.’65

Brown was one of Baudelaire’s ‘imaginatives’, and the ‘Eye of History’ was the vector for seeing history as the history of the human imagination. The presence of the artist within Dalton is consistent with this approach, since it ratifies the belief that collective memory is inseparable from personal memory, ocular behaviour and lived experience. It is my contention that Dalton is a complication of the model of historical knowledge associated with the civic patrons driving the Manchester Town Hall mural scheme. It should be recalled that this panel replaced the Peterloo 205

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Massacre, which was rejected by Manchester Corporation. Here is what Alderman Thompson wrote about the possible replacements:

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As [Peterloo] gives offence to some I would suggest one of the following (a) The packhorses taking away goods from the Duke of Bridgewater’s Canal. (b) The triumphant reception of Messrs Walker and Richardson on the return from London after the repeal of the Fustian Tax. (c) Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. (d) Dalton’s discovery of the atomic theory.66

Brown opted for the final suggestion but, true to form, he lauds something other than the practical understanding associated with Dalton. In Dalton the world is that which prepares the ground for an aesthetic creation. Accordingly, history, idyll and autobiography are entwined in the form of Brown’s child-­artist, the master of this self-contained, unexceptionable common space. History comes up to date not with the appearance of autonomous polity or with the emergence of public science, but with a socialised pastoral, something resembling J. S. Mill’s vision of a stationary society, an open space in which human development is more important than economic growth.67 The point was not to replicate the vision of land ownership found in civic humanist models of community, but to amplify the importance of land utilisation by ordinary people.68 At the end of Brown’s series, then, society means community support and common endeavour, a highly quixotic variant of the domestic industries noted in The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers and John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle. Such convictions were not, in essence, different from those that led Brown to establish a committee to preserve the native arts of India. Working alongside Frederic Shields, Walter Crane and Herbert Horne, Brown wanted to discover the impact of competition and marketisation on the production and distribution of textiles within rural communities.69 Naturally, this identification of India as a bastion of folk culture – something suppressed or eradicated by industrial civilisation – was commonplace within the Arts and Crafts circles, where writers and artists looked for a model of cultural nationhood based on the social ethics of craft work. Ananda Coomaraswamy, for example, a great admirer of C. R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicrafts, argued that the rapid economic deterioration of Asia was a ‘portent for the future of humanity and for the future of Western social idealism. If either in ignorance or in contempt of Asia, constructive European thought omits to seek the co-operation of Eastern philosophers, there will come a time when Europe will not be able to fight Industrialism, because this enemy will be entrenched in Asia … [I]t is fraternity which assures us of the possibility of co-operation in a common task, the creation of a social order based on Union.’70 Economic exploitation – no subject was more pressing on the activist wing of the Arts and Crafts Movement. It comes as no surprise that Coomaraswamy, like Ashbee, Crane and Brown, associated Blake’s critical integrity with his opposition to the industrialisation of craft culture.71 206

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From all this interest in artistic performance and the social life of free work one can make an obvious deduction: Brown enters Dalton to become an active, worldly subject in a place set apart from industrialised Britain. It therefore follows that the panel, as representation of a ‘Life Dream’, knowingly complicates history by producing a plenitude of social and ethical details, two of which can be noted here. First is the combination of peasant proprietorship with the spontaneous sociability associated with the Blake cult as it developed from the 1860s.72 Second, comes the identification of ruralism with communal life, a version of which was eulogised by leading late Victorian historians.73 In so far as Dalton can be said to have a subject, I take it to be the social creation of the experiential world as realised by a combination of effort and play. To sum up: the ‘Brown child’ asserts the value of aesthetic existence by operating as a universal ‘Eye of History’ who bodies forth his ‘Life Dream’. That is, his appearance relates to the underlying mental structure of Brown’s model of representation. This becomes evident when we attend to the ways in which the ‘Brown child’ is oriented to the objects in the panel. The first thing to note is that he registers an intimate relation to the material world by moving his right foot close to the picture plane. This physical responsiveness gives him the trappings of an internal viewer who offers the actual viewer an encounter with Dalton’s stagnant pool. In fact, the ‘Brown child’ indicates that Brown’s utilisation of past experiences was part of a wider project of disengagement from positivistic models of historical representation. True, Dalton is the nearest Brown comes to providing a record of homogenous space (albeit without the inclusion of a vanishing point), yet the murals conclude with a nondescript scrubland, the antithesis of the imperial expansion recorded at the inception of the programme. The second thing to note is how Dalton works as a spatial system. In peering at Dalton, the viewer is obliged to note the visual angle from which the ‘Brown child’ looks at the spongy surface of the farm pond, the opposite of the epic displacement of earth commemorated in The Romans Building a Fort. That this avatar becomes a key aspect of our visual field is confirmed by the off-­centred bump of land to his right, which shares his colouration and establishes a connection between pictorial and perceptual space. Brown’s unusual patch of land is shaped like a body-part buried within the earth. It, unlike the children, ‘looks’ at Dalton, who is the mirroring form on the opposite side of the stagnant pool. These two viewpoints signal Brown’s allegiance to an art sympathetic to the notion of the ‘Eye of History’, the idea of seeing the life that moves through all things.74 The critical audacity of this attitude results in a panel in which future life constitutes a transition from the current state of industrialism to an agrarian world where what people have in common is sensory knowledge and inner sight.75 Brown’s sanctification of ordinariness through the imagination illustrates how he was affected by the cross-currents of late Victorian political culture. By the 1880s debates about the relationship between land nationalisation and popular sovereignty were common in the circles in which he moved.76 It is 207

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customary to point to Ruskin or Morris as influential figures in this broad-based movement. While this is true, matters relating to land reform pre-date their well-known pronouncements. Here, for instance, is Mill, writing as early as 1845: We must … think … that there is something out of joint, when so much is said of the value of refining and humanizing tastes to the labouring people – when it is proposed to plant parks and lay out gardens for them, that they may enjoy more freely nature’s gift alike to rich and poor, of sun, sky, and vegetation; and along with this a counter-progress is constantly going on, of stopping up paths and enclosing commons … We look with the utmost jealousy upon on further enclosure of commons.77

Mill’s attitude, which was amplified in late-nineteenth-century debates about the benefits of the social use of land, may explain Hueffer’s oblique claim that Dalton brings the series ‘into touch with modern methods of thought’.78 On top of this, Mill’s comments give credence to Barlow’s observation on the distinctive critical idiom at play in the final segment of the cycle: ‘dreamy utopian imagery culminates in the … image of Dalton in his rural haven … [which] gives the impression that modern Manchester is a traditional rural community’.79 Humble and humdrum, Dalton is a blueprint for an egalitarian version of everyday life. It is an example of Brown’s commitment to an open world, defined by possibility, indeterminacy and becoming. It helps, perhaps, that this final panel is something akin to a crossroads, a point of intersection between different subjects, a place marked by different experiences and activities. Likewise, it is a symbolic domain, where learning and play are combined in a single image to confirm that the history of Manchester reaches something like fruition on a mini mesa, an ordinary bank of earth, a reanimation of the commons on which historical actions are intermixed. Brown’s terminal point is unorthodox. He closes with an image in which the world is at once incomplete and yet renewed by radiant visions of childhood, folk community and creativity. For Brown, then, the painter belongs to the future because he or she must embrace all the dimensions of human life. Notes  1 O. Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in Intentions (London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1894), p. 207.  2 F. Engels, ‘Preface’, The Condition of The Working Class in England in 1844 (1892 edition) (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1952), pp. vii–viii.  3 Letter from Brown to Shields, 16 April 1886, in Mills, Life, p. 29; FMH p. 376. It is possible that Brown read Engels’s comments about industrial relations in The Commonweal, which was edited by William Morris (with whom he was reconciled in September 1885): ‘temporary improvement … was always reduced to the old level by the influx of the great body of the unemployed reserve, by the constant

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 4  5  6

 7  8  9

10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18

superseding of hands by new machinery … You can never get the masters to agree to work “short time”, let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the work-people to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man.’ F. Engels, ‘England in 1845 and in 1885’, The Commonweal (1 March 1885), 13. This article was incorporated into the ‘Preface’ of the 1892 edition of The Condition of The Working Class in England in 1844. See Thirlwell, Into the Frame, pp. 224–5. FMH, p. 400. See also, J. Phillips Emslie, ‘Madox Brown as a Teacher’, Appendix A, p. 427, in FMH, who notes that Brown was the first master at the Working Men’s College to have his ‘assistant’s name placed on the prospectus beside his own’. It is worth noting that many of these Ruskin societies set out to address the relationship between civics and industrialisation, and that the first meeting of the original Ruskin society was held in Manchester Town Hall in 1879, the year after Brown began work on the panels in the Great Hall. See S. Eagles, After Ruskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), who provides an authoritative overview of an extremely complex subject. JR, vol. 34, p. 539. Abel Heywood was mayor of Manchester when Brown and Shields were given the commission to produce a set of murals for the Great Hall. For an extremely valuable discussion of Noble’s statue, see S. Cunniffe and T. Wyke, ‘Memorializing its Hero: Liberal Manchester’s Statue of Oliver Cromwell’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester, 99:1 (2012–13), 179–206. As noted in my Introduction, Brown’s paintings of Cromwell – Cromwell on his Farm (1873–74) and Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois (1877) – relate to his social activist vision of history, as does his awareness of Carlyle’s transformative account of the English Civil War. See also, Trodd, ‘Culture and Energy’, pp. 62–80. It is worth pointing out that Alderman Thompson, the leading member of the Decorations and Furnishings Sub-Committee, was impressed by Brown’s Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois. See MB, vol. 1, p. 283. For Brown’s description of the panel, see MB, vol. 1, p. 345. As Treuherz notes, ‘[t]he composition has extraordinary daring, with the boldly foreshortened bridge stretching straight back into the picture, and the fallen horse strongly outlined … [T]he conception is dramatic, adventurous and typical of Brown’s unorthodox mind, even in his old age.’ JTFMB, p. 201. Letter from Brown to Shields, October 1879, in Mills, Life, p. 235. See, for instance, the useful comments in JT, pp. 302–3. The same process is at work in Manfred on the Jungfrau (1841, 1861). ‘The moment chosen for representation … is rather pictorial than literary.’ Mathilde Blind, ‘Mr Ford Madox Brown’s Pictures at Dowdeswell’s’, Art Weekly (19 April 1890), 70–1. Again, it is tempting to see Kay as Brown’s response to the modern subject articulated by Carlyle: ‘Delirium … is … incarnated in the shape of him.’ See Carlyle, The French Revolution, TC, vol. 4, pp. 121–2. Whatever the case, Brown’s inventive treatment of Kay explains why he rejected Richard Arkwright’s mill as a potential subject. Alderman Thompson, who was disturbed by Brown’s description of the painting, noted: ‘I cannot understand this, I think it must be (in transcribing) a confusion of

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two events. John Kay invented the shuttle in 1738, not 1753 and the rescue from the mob was of Samuel Crompton of … Bolton. I do not remember that Kay was attacked by a mob. I think a better subject for illustration might be the custom at this period (1738) for Merchants to give out warps and raw cotton to spinners and weavers receiving them back in Cloth and paying for the spinning and weaving.’ See Thompson to Chairman of Town Hall sub-committee, 8 October 1878, M79/1/10a, 12, MLHLMCLM. 19 Brown may have been aware of Alfred Barlow’s description of this episode: ‘[i]n 1753, a mob broke into [Kay’s] house and destroyed everything they found, and it is probable he would have been killed had not two friends carried him away in a wool sheet to a place of safety’. A. Barlow, The History and Principles of Weaving by Hand and by Power (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1878), p. 97. 20 ‘Previous to Kay’s invention of the fly shuttle, it required two men to work the broad loom, one at each side of the loom, and the shuttle was thrown from one to the other alternately.’ Barlow, The History and Principles of Weaving, p. 97. 21 PB, p. 95. Brown calls the workers ‘rioters’. See MB, vol. 1, p. 332. 22 Additionally, Brown sees industrialisation in bodily terms: ‘on the floor lies … the very simple invention by means of which two boxes fastened to the loom fire the shuttle, so to say, to and fro into each other’s mouths.’ See Brown, in MB, vol. 1, 332. 23 JT, p. 303, makes a similar point when he refers to the image as ‘an ambiguous way of introducing the industrial revolution to the … murals. [The] comically grotesque presentation of Kay undermines[s] the idea of Manchester as progressive.’ 24 The German sociologist, historian and philosopher Ferdinand Tönnies, another admirer of Carlyle, made a similar division between the craft world and the modern machine world in his famous Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), published one year before Brown started work on this panel. 25 A point made by William Michael Rossetti, who notes that ‘one of [Brown’s] most marked characteristics is that of combining with elevated subject matter, and a passionate dramatic, and impressive general treatment, a considerable spice of the familiar, or even the grotesque or semi-grotesque’. See Rossetti, ‘Ford Madox Brown: Characteristics’, 49. 26 ‘If you could imagine dissonance assuming human form – and what else is man? – this dissonance would need, to be able to live, a magnificent illusion which would spread a veil of beauty over its own nature.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1872], trans. Ronald Spiers, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 154. 27 A matter noted by one commentator, who complained that the main group was ‘a confused tangle, and at first sight the head and shoulders of Kay appear to belong to the legs and feet of the man stooping to lift him.’ See Anon., The Builder (19 April 1890), 231. 28 Brown’s readings enabled him to understand the main features of Kay’s unsuccessful career as an inventor and technologist: first, he found it impossible to convince influential woollen manufacturers in Bury that his physical apparatus was robust enough to operate in the workplace; second, he was almost bankrupted by attempts to defend the originality of his invention in law; last, he retreated to France, where he died, date unknown.

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29 For an account of Brown’s knowledge of and engagement with Cruikshank, Douglas Jerrold and their circle, see FMH, pp. 38–9. 30 This interest in the ethico-political semiotics of clothing is derived from the critical framework outlined in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. 31 Carlyle’s vision of history, where motion is more evident than equilibrium, was not the only example of this form of critical modelling. For example, it is worth noting that Auguste Comte, another figure with whom Brown was familiar, made the distinction between statics and dynamics when forming his theory of historical development. Comte’s impact on British art has yet to be fully documented, but it is evident that his ideas, mediated by his disciples and admirers, influenced many writers, thinkers, designers and artists of this period including George Eliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Leslie Stephen, Moncure Conway, G. F. Watts and Walter Crane. For a helpful introduction to this subject, see Wright, The Religion of Humanity, pp. 131–201. Vernon Lushington, one of Comte’s most interesting British supporters, enthused about Brown’s The Hayfield (1855), which he saw at the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition. Lushington was equally impressed by Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet (1851–52, 1854, 1856–58), and The Last of England (1852–55). See the letter from Lushington to Brown, 16 August 1857, FMBV&A; and Vernon Lushington, ‘Two Pictures’, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (August 1856), 479–88. Brown’s description of the young wife in The Last of England, where he suggests ‘[t]he circle of her love moves with her’, comes very close to the kind imagery deployed by Comte when he wrote about Clotilde de Vaux, his archetype of moralised love. See Brown, The Exhibition, p. 6. Mathilde Blind, a strong presence in Brown’s life during the production of the Manchester murals, uses a critical framework coloured by Comtean rational humanitarianism in The Ascent of Man (1889), where evolution is imagined in terms of raw energy transmuted into altruism. 32 Carlyle, ‘Thoughts on History’, 513. 33 One topic I do not have space to consider is the relationship between the crisis environment of John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle and Brown’s family history. From this perspective, Kay is a warping memory of Brown’s grandfather: the innovator exiled from the source of his innovation. 34 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Two Hundred and Fifty Years Ago’ [1850], reprinted in Chris R. Vanden Bossche (ed.), Thomas Carlyle: Historical Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 295. 35 MB, vol. 1, p. 284, notes the presentation and rejection of these topics. 36 It can be inferred that Brown knew that these workers tended to own their own tools and materials and worked at home on looms they owned or leased from textile masters. In the main, the cottage industry culture of the hand loom weaver combined textile work with small-scale commercial farming. See Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 297–346. 37 As so often, Barlow provides the sharpest account of this panel: ‘This subject nominally celebrates the benefits of technological innovation, but it … depicts the inventor fleeing from a mob of enraged loom weavers, intent on the destruction of his machine.’ See PB, p. 83. 38 JTFMB, p. 203.

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39 For more on this important matter, see PB, p. 95, who notes that this group is ‘distorted [and] twisted … [and that] the body of the workman holding up Kay’s legs appears to merge with Kay himself, so that his … body tears apart’. 40 Hazlitt, ‘Hogarth’, in Lectures on English Comic Writers [1819] (London: John Templeman, 1841), pp. 287, 289, 290, 297. 41 See MB, vol. 1, p. 284. 42 Brown would have been aware of the history of the replacement of cotton hand-loom by power-loom weaving. First, government policy, throughout the 1830s, was to resist petitions and recommendations from hand-loom weavers and their allies in Parliament to intervene in the labour market to alleviate extreme poverty. Second, many hand-loom weavers supported the more militant aspects of Chartism in Greater Manchester in the 1840s. See P. Richards, ‘The State and Early Industrial Capitalism: The Case of the Handloom Weavers’, Past and Present, 83:1 (1979), 91–115. 43 See Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: High Art and Low, 1732–1750 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 289–322; and, more broadly, Thompson The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 59–110. 44 See Trodd, Visions of Blake, pp. 280–5; and Trodd, ‘Ford Madox Brown and the William Blake Brotherhood’, 286–7. 45 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, TC, vol. 1, p. 207. 46 Carlyle, Past and Present, TC, vol. 10, p. 286. 47 See Hueffer in MB, vol. 1, 340. 48 Anon., ‘Mr Ford Madox-Brown’s New Mural Painting for the Town Hall’, Manchester Guardian (25 February 1892), p. 8. For Hueffer, the babies are representatives of the eternal gusto: ‘Oh those babies! How each mother’s heart must go out towards them in their fat, chubby health, with podgy limbs pressed out of shape by their own lusty well-fed weight!’ See MB, vol. 1, p. 340. 49 Anon., ‘Mr Ford Madox-Brown’s New Mural Painting for the Town Hall’, p. 8. 50 For orthodox pictorial celebrations of canal building, see Benjamin Williams Leader, The Excavation of the Manchester Ship Canal (Eastham Cutting with Mount Manisty in the Distance) (1891) and James Mudd, Opening of the Manchester Ship Canal by the yacht Norseman (1894). The Manchester Ship Canal, opened in 1891, connected the city directly to the sea. 51 Axon, Letter to Chairman of Town Hall sub-committee, 23 September 1878, M79/1/10, MLHLMCLM. 52 ‘The people who matter in Brown’s painting are not the Duke contemplating his higher revenues, nor the burghers of Manchester seeking the adornment of painting for their civic offices, but the mass of people who haul the coal and tend the children, and who here invade both the historical scene and the walls of the Town Hall to remind their masters where their wealth comes from.’ See James Purdon, ‘Grand Union – How Canals have Captivated British Artists for Centuries’, Apollo (21 March 2020). www.apollo-magazine.com/canals-british-art/. 53 Thompson, The Chartists, p. 118. The subject was chosen by the Town Hall Committee in April 1879 as a substitute for the Peterloo Massacre, which had been proposed by Brown and Shields. See MB, vol. 1, p. 337. 54 Nor should we overlook the fact that Brown makes the Duke, who he knew was a teetotaller, look a touch woozy, his nerve fortified by James Brindley, the trusty engineer filling his glass with spirits.

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55 See MB, vol. 1, pp. 340–1. 56 Letter signed F. H., Manchester Guardian (24 May 1892). See MB, vol. 1, p. 340. 57 For a full account of this matter, see FMH, who concludes, at p. 395, that ‘The weary task of the decoration of the buildings, which had cost so many years of his life, was thus brought to a very bitter end, and … Brown may be pardoned for thinking, what there is no very great reason to believe was not entirely the case, that his labours had received no official recognition whatever.’ 58 JT, p. 183. By contrast, the art critic Marion Spielmann announced that with this and the other murals ‘the artist may be content in that he has written his name indelibly on the walls of one of the greatest art-centres of the world.’ [Marion Spielmann], ‘Mr Madox Brown’s New Manchester Painting’, Pall Mall Gazette (20 September 1887), p. 13. 59 JTFMB, p. 207. 60 See C. St John (ed.), Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence (London: Reinhardt & Evans Ltd, 1931), p. 142. 61 Carlyle, ‘Notes in Journal’, in Froude, Thomas Carlyle, vol. 1, pp. 422–3. 62 Letter from Brown to Boddington cited in Thirlwell, Into the Frame, pp. 10–11. According to Blind, there was ‘no more delightful companion in the open air than … Brown with his childlike enjoyment of the simplest and most familiar sights of Nature.’ FMH, p. 342. 63 The re-evaluation of Blake through the lens of childhood is exemplified by S. Colvin, Children in Italian and English Design (London: Seely, Jackson and Halliday, 1872). 64 E. Bloch, The Principle of Hope [1938–47], trans. N. and S. Plaice and P. Knight (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), vol. 4, p. 1376. See also, Anon., ‘Mr Ford Madox Brown’, The Pall Mall Gazette (12 April 1890), p. 2, where Brown’s productions are described as ‘simple’, ‘artless’ and ‘like the works of a child’. 65 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Governance of the Imagination’, in ‘The Salon of 1859’, Art in Paris 1845–1862, trans. and ed., Jonathan Mayne (Oxford: Phaidon, 1965), p. 162. 66 See Thompson to Chairman of Town Hall Sub-Committee, 8 October 1878, M79/1/10a, 12, MLHLMCLM. 67 See also, MB, vol. 1, pp. 349–56, who reproduces Brown’s designs for the Royal Jubilee Exhibition Manchester, 1887, all of which detach representatives of industry from the realities of modern industrialisation. 68 Brown informed the Decorations and Furnishings Sub-Committee that a subject from Dalton’s life was preferable to Prince Charles Mustering Troops, which ‘has no claim to be connected in any way with the aggrandisement of Manchester morally or physically’. See MB, vol. 1. p. 327. 69 Unlike Marx, who applauded the introduction of steam power and free trade in India on the grounds that they would obliterate the traditional village system of production based upon the ‘domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits’. See K. Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’ [1853], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2005), vol. 12, p. 128. 70 A. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1924), pp. 37, 154. 71 Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva, p. 152; Trodd, Visions of Blake, pp. 240–85. 72 Walter Crane exemplifies this position in The Sirens Three (1886). See Trodd, Visions of Blake, pp. 109–11, 203–5, 385–6. More broadly, this process relates to Blake’s

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appearance in socialist songbooks from the 1880s. See C. Waters, British Socialists and The Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 107–10. 73 See J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan and Co., 1874); and E. A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1870–76). Green was much admired by Alderman Thompson. See Thompson to Chairman of Town Hall Sub-Committee, 8 October 1878, M79/1/10a, 7, MLHLMCLM. 74 In this respect, it should be noted that the farm pond was derived from direct experience rather than any of the many field trips to Cheshire. See F. M. Brown ‘­Self-Painted Pictures’, The Magazine of Art (1889), 185, where he remarks that he had been out to Urmston, ‘searching for a stagnant duckweed-grown pond for … Dalton … I was unsuccessful … and found later the pond I did paint within a stone’s throw of my own house in … Victoria Park’. 75 See R. Blatchford, The Sorcery Shop: An Impossible Romance (London: Clarion Press, 1907), whose socialistic ‘Merrie England’ vision of the future of Manchester shares some of the characteristics of Brown’s murals. 76 Land ownership remains at the centre of contemporary debates about power, privilege and access to asset markets. See, for instance, G. Monbiot (ed.), Land for the Many, a report commissioned by the Labour Party in June 2018, which argues that tax should be shifted from the producing classes to the ultra-rich. For further details, see https://landforthemany.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/land-for-the-many.pdf 77 J. S. Mill, ‘The Claims of Labour’ [1845], in J. M. Robson, M. Moir and Z. Moir (eds), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), vol. 4, p. 384. 78 FMH, p. 378. Ruskin-inspired Fabians and political economists, such as Alfred Marshall, favoured land reform measures from the 1880s. 79 PB, pp. 85, 83.

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In art he recognised a creative power able when perfected to form the happier world.1 [He] dislike[d] … anything approaching publicity as a self-advertising medium.2 [T]he thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about common things, will … become thinkable once more.3 It is even possible that being is only possessed completely by the dead.4

The National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry, a civil body dedicated to the diffusion of cultural values within the public realm, held its inaugural congress in Liverpool in 1888, one year after Brown returned to London to complete John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal and Bradshaw’s Defence of Manchester.5 Although the Liverpool congress included an entire section on the decoration of public buildings, Brown’s murals received scant attention. This is decidedly odd, as his cycle had been discussed in local, regional and national newspapers from the late 1870s. Nonetheless, Gerard Baldwin Brown, Professor of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh, informed the Liverpool congress that ‘studio painting’ was an artificial art form, invented by the ‘modern Corot-worshipper’ intent on perpetuating the error that ‘extreme specialness’ was a primary artistic principle. By contrast, monumental wall painting, a ‘release from bondage’, was ‘manly’: it was a ‘branch of art that demands … common effort – that brings workers together into close friendship’, an arrangement where ‘the patron is the civic or national community’.6 He went on to proclaim that murals ‘are for common use, and are put together upon broad and general principles … of universal recognition’.7 He felt, clearly, that the social usefulness of public art became apparent when the artist elucidated the idea of liberty in pictorial form. Framed thus, mural painting, a concrete expression of strength and freedom, enabled the culturally alert citizen to imagine the conditions of civil association. 215

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Baldwin Brown’s enthusiasm for the rationality of mural painting led to the following declaratory statement: ‘A decorative picture is one of a series, and the artistic laws of symmetry and balance must govern its composition.’8 Ruskin had expressed similar sentiments in The Stones of Venice when he referred to ‘reciprocal interference’, ‘a magnificent principle, for it is an eternal and universal one, not in art only, but in life. It is the great principle of Brotherhood, not by quality, or by likeness, but by giving and receiving; the souls that are unlike, and the nations that are unlike, and the natures that are unlike, being bound into one noble whole by each receiving something from and of the others’ gifts and the others’ glory’.9 Unsurprisingly, Baldwin Brown and Ruskin concurred that the objective of composition was the development of a system of interpersonal relations. Coming at it another way, a composition communicated most effectively when it functioned like a cooperative enterprise. Just as art was a form of social knowing, so the public artist was obliged to make work ‘not a single thing, but a part of a larger unity’.10 Baldwin Brown stopped at this point to take a pot shot at Pre-Raphaelitism, in its historical and conceptual incarnations: ‘Aiming, as he must do, at the general effect, [the mural painter] must abandon those searchings into detail dear to the old Netherlands artists and to their modern successors.’11 These comments may explain why Baldwin Brown dismissed the thinking behind the Manchester murals in one tart sentence: ‘This is not wall painting proper and represents an undoubted descent from the more manly practice of the frescoists.’12 Other well-placed and influential commentators were equally unimpressed by the fruits of Brown’s fifteen-year slog on the mural programme. D. S. MacColl, who went on to become Keeper at the Tate Gallery from 1906 to 1911, used a proto-modernist critical framework when claiming, in his popular and well-received Nineteenth Century Art (1902), that ‘the Manchester Town Hall paintings are a monument to the strange mixture of burly action, obstinate flabby dealings with the wrong matter, and angry love of romance’.13 By and large, m ­ odernist-leaning critics used Brown to illustrate the fact that the ­Pre-Raphaelites were unable to understand that true painting was an exercise in the display of sophisticated artlessness. R. A. M. Stevenson is another good example of this critical idiom. In a review of the exhibition of Brown’s works held at the Grafton Galleries in 1897, Stevenson opined that the recently deceased artist was ‘blind to the beauty of pictorial consistency’, and that his productions ‘contain so many subsidiary details and markings that the … masses are buried in confusion’. Brown could ‘revel in life and its reality’, yet he could not ‘read the language of … art’, which meant acknowledging that ‘a picture is flat … must show a single focus of ­interest … be composed to exhibit a gradation of importances, a unity of aspect, a harmony of pattern, a subordination of detail to mass’.14 These admonishments, supported by the Lessingesque pronouncement that pictures are revealed in space, not in time, may explain why Brown is studiously ignored in Bloomsbury art criticism, where the quasi-theological discourses advanced by Roger Fry and Clive Bell 216

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pitted a higher disinterested sensibility of formal purity against a lower nervous sensibility addicted to the illusion that painting is at the service of an extra-pictorial reality.15 For Fry and Bell, the Post-Impressionists displaced the Pre-Raphaelites as sovereigns of modern art by positing an intersubjective state available to all believers in the autonomy of aesthetic form.16 My point here is only to draw attention to the fact that the Bloomsbury response to bourgeois modernity overlaps with the modern characterisation of Brown as a representative of Victorian liberalism. A good example of the former position is John Maynard Keynes’s ‘National Self-Sufficiency’ (1933): The nineteenth century carried to extravagant lengths the criterion of what one can call for short ‘the financial results,’ as a test of the advisability of any course of action sponsored by private or by collective action. The whole conduct of life was made into a sort of parody of an accountant’s nightmare. Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder city, the men of the nineteenth century built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, ‘paid,’ whereas the wonder city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have ‘mortgaged the future’ – though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.17

Keynes’s striking remarks bring out the relationship between political mockery and aesthetic disdain found in Bloomsbury discourse.18 He takes a predictable pleasure in pointing out that the Victorian bourgeoisie presided over a period of cultural and intellectual declension. The impact of mercantile capitalism and rationalist individualism was, Keynes argued, to reduce evaluations of the quality of life to the ledger-like logic of business activity.19 The inheritance of ­twentieth-century Britain was end–means rationality, the bureaucratic world which Max Weber, a near contemporary, called ‘formal rationality’ in his immensely influential The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). To get a better grasp of Keynes’s argument, it is important to point out that similar economistic pronouncements feature in general accounts of Victorian painting, where painters are characterised as transient mediocrities, prone to calculating, fretting and obsessing about what the bourgeoisie might value in the world of culture.20 There are also connections between Keynes’s characterisation of Victorian liberalism and articulations of welfarism by late nineteenth-century social scientists. For instance, in 1884, the young Beatrice Webb (née Potter) revealed in her diary that, by the judicious organisation of facts, she could ‘imagine that before me lies a world of knowledge wherewith I might unite the knots of human destiny’.21 Webb, who would go on to become an influential exponent of the positivist strand of thinking about late Victorian administrational and business practices that coloured political debates in Labour, Liberal and Conservative circles, believed that morally responsible communities would be birthed from a rational-technical science of human life. If state bodies could 217

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be developed along similar lines, then human consciousness would be captured by statistical methodology. In turn, knowledge produced by bureaucratic systems would direct social policy through the operational actions of an army of diligent public servants. It is against this backdrop that we should remind ourselves of Brown’s attitude to the tradition of statist rationalism espoused by Webb and many other influential figures in this period. In essence, he questioned her belief in the apodictic nature of ‘facts’. Nowhere in the Manchester mural cycle is Brown sympathetic to the positivist subordination of historical life to scientific inquiry. Nor does he confound human progress with material prosperity. He sets out to depict a world where hope lies in change rather social closure. As I have demonstrated, he did not replicate the presentational codes of orthodox History Painting. On the contrary, he saw history as open process, and History Painting as engagement with social energies. Open process meant that human culture was not subject to the predictability of the synthetic bureaucratic procedures imagined by Webb and her ilk. This attitude explains Brown’s commitment to the authority of social activist History Painting – its capacity to contribute to the critical reimagining of the social matrix. More broadly, his division between ‘energy’ and ‘system’ provides a context for understanding the inventive palette of ideas and practices at work in the Manchester murals. Wherever we look, we encounter bristling panels trading in the flux and efflux of life.22 In this sense, Brown works might be seen as pictorial versions of what William James called ‘mosaic philosophy’, where the world is experienced as fluxional patterns without centre-periphery orientation.23 Whatever the case, for Brown, as for James, the real is grasped in the articulation of relations among dynamic forms and subjects. It is time to say a few words about Brown’s characterisation in critical literature in the 1890s and beyond. Truth to tell, he never appears as a neutral or generic character in this body of material. Harry Quilter, art critic, collector and proprietor of the Universal Review, is worth citing here: In a small house on the side of Primrose Hill, – without a studio save his sitting-room, without recognition from the public, the press, or the Academy authorities, in but indifferent health, and with narrow if not failing income, this great man lives, who for half a century has given the public work of absolutely unique quality, original, thoughtful, industrious, and beautiful. He lives there, poor, brave, and patient still, encompassed, I yet am glad to think, with the love and respect of a few true-hearted friends, and carrying out to the last the doctrines which he has shown alike in his painting and his life, of thorough work, independence, and honesty. In the mad competition for wealth and notoriety which surges round him, in the ingenuities of advertisement and the duplicities of commerce, he has, and has ever had, no part; above all has he lacked the will to conciliate or truckle to the powers that be: he has dared to live his honourable, kindly, industrious life after his own fashion, in truth and honour.24

The force of these comments is directed at the reader of Quilter’s book. In effect, he reformulates the rhetoric of failure to imply that Brown’s art project, which 218

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dealt not with imitation of external appearance but with the shaping of human life, was prematurely blighted by the emergence of an art system driven by corporate demands.25 Predicting some features of Keynes’s discourse, Quilter describes an institutional situation where practical innovation is eradicated by the machinic logic of market-driven culture, and where the stuff produced by the artist is deemed to be little more than routinised self-advertising. Brown’s purpose, within Quilter’s elegiac narrative, is to resist unthinking stereotypes of artistic behaviour through a combination of agentive force and moral indictment. At the same time, the pathos of Brown’s career confirms that his form of creativity is not compatible with the main currents of social modernity. A highly ambitious attempt to illustrate how the distinctive conditions of the modern world tend to detach expressions of individual social creativity from the aesthetic norms favoured by Quilter and Keynes occurs in a novel co-written by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer. The Inheritors (1901), a deliberately bizarre mixture of political thriller, science fiction and culture critique, presents Brown as the antitype to a world where feverish activity and replication have become the main signs of authenticity. In a literary production in which everything is driven by the meliorism of time-travelling Nietzschean super beings, Brown appears in the guise of an enigmatic and reclusive artist called Jenkins, whose ‘long struggle with adversity’ is contrasted to the glitzy world of modern culture.26 This mysterious, revenant-like, being is named ‘The King of Hearts’ (Brown’s familiar sobriquet).27 In a restless world of cultural bombast and social intrigue, Brown’s textual doppelganger is an unmistakable sentinel of true value and enduring experience. The uncompromising Jenkins, who does not possess ‘the knack of getting on’, is detached from the main subjects in the novel, all of whom are equated with soaring and distorted claims about channelling, controlling – or improving human life.28 The untimely and ‘broken-down’ Jenkins scrapes his living on the other side of social modernity, which Conrad and Hueffer equate with novelty, publicity, flashiness and the jarring speculations of rival networks of journalists, blaggers, politicians and their status-addicted followers.29 The non-human zest, and bounciness of these groupings are signs of a consumer system which seeks to absorb all substance into itself. By contrast, the hermit-like Jenkins appears to be immobilised by these manifestations of sub-Dionysian frenzy.30 His intimate relations are with his own creations; their internal light is the main sign of agency in the tenebrous space of his old house. Jenkins’s creations, never described or analysed, stand apart from the phosphorescent forms of the new social realm. Once upon a time these creations might have been a bridge to the world of public service, but now they confirm his obscurity in a modern world marked by the decay of experience. Jenkins is a stranger to a set-up in which people enhance themselves by forming networks where ‘life’, ‘career’ and ‘celebrity’ are at once signs of truth and self-sterilising social practices. This becomes evident when, confronted by well-connected and wealthy visitors, the curmudgeonly and recalcitrant artist is ‘reluctant to show his best work, the 219

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forgotten masterpieces, the things that had never sold, that hung about on the faded walls and rotted in cellars’. In fact, ‘he would not be his genial self; he would not talk … He had fought a hard fight and had been worsted … [But], whilst all his belongings were rotting into dust, he retained an extraordinary youthful and ingenuous habit of mind.’31 We see here that Jenkins’s world, at once commonplace and mysterious, is not compatible with the social world forever bursting into life throughout the novel. All in all, this dyspeptic iconoclast is antecedent to, and more real than, the glittering figures around him: ‘He happened to leave the room – to fetch some studies … Bereft of his presence the places suddenly grew ghostly. It was as if the sun had died in the sky and left us in that nether world where dead, buried pasts live in a grey, shadowless light. Jenkins’s palette glowed from above a medley of stained rags on his open colour table.’32 Precision and vagueness are the interlocking signs of the homely pantheism of Jenkins’s energy-drained domain. The discursive form of The Inheritors is organised around signs of dash and immobility. It zigzags between narrative settings; it outlines a vision of society in which self-fracturing groups struggle to assert control over historical records and historical representation; and it suggests that the modern world cannot be framed in accordance with the terms devised by Victorian liberalism, which predicted a new age of stability and prosperity. Nevertheless, it is worth noting why Jenkins’s presence lingers over the rest of the work. In a world in which everything is exaggerated this social misfit represents a condition of old-fashioned normality, a condition where ontological security is derived from routine itself. Quite simply, his home is one place in which inflationary powers do not prevail. There are no immensities here, just a kind of glorious, mordant, monotonous ordinariness. Nor is anything pushed out of shape. In the face of lofty achievers and their acolytes, Jenkins remains an inscrutable maverick ticking away outside the privileged stratum of society, a living sign of depleted collective experience. Was Hueffer obsessed by the idea that Brown was a custodian of threatened values? Well; maybe; that is an option we should entertain when examining ‘Nice People’, published in Temple Bar (1903), in which his grandfather is wedged into an argument about how nice people tend to be indifferent or unkind about other representatives of niceness. During his meandering, impressionistic musings, a blend of fact and fiction, Hueffer breaks off to make a striking announcement about Brown’s work on the Manchester murals: he accepted a commission to decorate with wall-paintings an immense town hall in the North of England. The commission appealed to him because it was the sort of thing they do in France. He was away there for nearly twelve years. When he came back he found himself forgotten, his friends dead or grown prosperous, his buyers dispersed among other painters. The corporation for whom he had worked in the North detested the work he had done, and began a system of worries that ended only in his death. They proposed at one time to paint out his frescoes and use the wall-spaces for advertising the products of the city.33

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There is no evidence that Manchester Corporation planned to obliterate Brown’s murals. All the same, Hueffer’s overarching supposition – that the idea of public wealth distinguished Brown from advocates of a liberal worldview in which wealth meant seeing art as productivity opportunity – is a reliable way of explaining the nature of Brown’s commitment to a culture of civic life based on the values of human sympathy. Described by Hueffer, Brown’s entire career was an attempt to hold at bay the commercial-utilitarian logic Keynes discovered at the heart of Victorian society, a type of thinking in which the value of the political nation was determined by a monetary system of goods, services, machine production, and capital formation and accumulation. As a consequence, perhaps, Brown’s home is described as an environment opposed to the orderliness of the liberal mind: ‘There was a row of dusty casts on the mantelpiece, a Hercules raising a club, fighting horses intertwined and biting; a contorted, flayed figure … an ancient lay figure with a papier mâché head that was brown with age … a large oak table covered with odds and ends, little coils of string, rusty screws, the knobs from ends of curtain poles.’34 Energy and inertia shape the aesthetic character of an ‘intertwined’ room where collectibles, handicrafts and humdrum reproductions sit alongside industrial household knick-knacks and half-forgotten industrial detritus. For Hueffer, the point is to find signs of creative life in the ­self-exhausting objects that rub up against each other in a space defined by heterogeneity and superfluousness. Neither Hueffer nor Brown conceived of the image as a static ­phenomenon. Movement, or the appearance of movement, was the name of the game. Movement meant many things, of course, including authorial movement, the ability to be attentive to the relationship among things in a particular location. To see meant to reconstruct space as a living environment of people and objects. To see meant formulating an aesthetics of life. To see, to look at things, meant the reflexive movement of endless examination. It meant the will to resist the disenchantment of the modern world and insist that art offered the possibility of change. What Hueffer and Brown sought, however idealistically, was a condition of phenomenological knowledge, a condition of framing the subject in an object world brimming with energy. Which is to say, in the final instance, they produced symbiotic models of the ‘Eye of History’: one created a discursive system where omnivorous observation was the distinctive characteristic; the other created a plastic system where the image was supposed to be a meeting place for a multitude of lives. Notes  1 Moncure Conway graveside oration, as reported in ‘Funeral of Mr. Ford Madox Brown’, Pall Mall Gazette (11 October 1893).  2 Anon., ‘Ford Madox Brown’, The British Architect (13 October 1893), 253.  3 F. W. Maitland, Doomsday Book and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), p. 520.

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 4 W. B. Yeats, ‘Certain Noble Plays in Japan’ [1916], in R. J. Finneran and G. Bornstein (eds), The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Early Essays (New York, London, Toronto and Sydney: Scribner, 2007), vol. 4, p. 167.  5 These works, like The Trial of Wyclif and Chetham’s Life Dream, were in oil on canvas.  6 G. Baldwin Brown, ‘Mural Painting and its Present Prospects in this Country’, Transactions of The National Association for The Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry, Liverpool Meeting, 1888 (Liverpool: Lee and Nightingale, 1888), pp. 327–8, 326.  7 Baldwin Brown, ‘Mural Painting’, Transactions, p. 328.  8 Baldwin Brown, ‘Mural Painting’, Transactions, p. 328.  9 JR, vol. 11, pp. 23–4. A few pages later, Ruskin bemoans the replacement of this medieval arrangement of environmental design by a style where ‘the framework of the building was little more interesting than that of a Manchester factory’ (p. 29). 10 Baldwin Brown, ‘Mural Painting’, Transactions, p. 329. For a succinct account of the aesthetic model favoured in the promotion of public mural painting in Victorian Britain, see PB, pp. 86–7. 11 Baldwin Brown, ‘Mural Painting’, Transactions, p. 329. 12 Baldwin Brown, ‘Mural Painting’, Transactions, p. 331. A related account of modern art was proposed at the congress by William Holman Hunt, who adopted a Foggolike perspective when he argued that British painting had been supported by the ‘industrious classes’. See W. H. Hunt, ‘Art Education’, in Transactions, p. 67. 13 MacColl, Nineteenth Century Art, p. 123. ‘His fundamental character, as I read it, was Hogarthian, a love of grotesque dramatic incident, a humour rather grim, odd, crossgrained, even ugly’ (p. 120). 14 See R. A. M. Stevenson ‘Madox Brown’, Pall Mall Gazette (28 January 1897), p. 17. 15 Do we apprehend a shadowy parody of Brown, mixed with a dollop of her father, Leslie Stephen, in the figure of Eusebius Chubb, in Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s wonderfully knowing modernist reinvention of the historical life dream? 16 Elizabeth Robins Pennell agreed that Brown’s individualism explained his failings as a painter: ‘you feel this when he overloads his landscape with tedious superfluous facts … when his preoccupation with detail leaves him no eyes for the aspect of the scene before him. You begin to question if it is worth while for the artist to be individual, to be independent, if it is mainly to achieve ugliness or eccentricity.’ See MB, vol. 2, p. 591–2. 17 J. M. Keynes, ‘National Self-Sufficiency’, Yale Review, 22:4 (June 1933), 756. 18 See, for instance, the characterisation of Ruskin in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). 19 Keynes, ‘National Self-Sufficiency’, p. 764. 20 See, for instance, Bland, ‘The Academy and the Avant Garde’, pp. 35–47. 21 B. Webb, My Apprenticeship (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926), p. 137. She married Sydney Webb, the economist and Labour politician, in 1892. 22 In a parallel art historical world, Aby Warburg’s quasi-Nietzschean notion of Pathosformel, which he devised to describe the mixture of hybridity and vitality that enters the conceptual and compositional spheres of early Renaissance art, and thus counters its nascent humanist-Apollonian characteristics, would have been deployed after 1900, at the nadir of Brown’s reputation, to account for the world of gusto depicted in the Manchester mural cycle. Alas, Warburg had a massive mental breakdown, and Julius Meier-Graefe, Warburg’s most successful contemporary, ignored

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Brown’s murals, but claimed that Work, ‘with its innumerable symbolical allusions, produces the effect of a collection of hieroglyphs’, and so ‘the eye is tortured by the effort to understand’. See J. Meier-Graefe, Modern Art, trans. Florence Simmonds and George W. Chrystal (London: William Heinemann, 1908), vol. 2, p. 188. 23 W. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), p. 41. 24 Quilter, Preferences in Art, p. 8. 25 Quilter, one of the most popular and influential late Victorian art critics, came to the same conclusion in an earlier publication when he complained that modern painters were nothing more than ‘tradesmen of a certain kind, who supply the wants of their customers.’ See H. Quilter, Senentiae Artis: First Principles of Art (London: Wm. Isbister Limited, 1886), p. 9. 26 J. Conrad and F. M. Hueffer, The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (London: William Heinemann, 1901), p. 45. For an overview of the cultural modelling of Nietzsche in this period, see Colin Trodd, ‘The Energy Man: Blake, Nietzscheanism and Cultural Criticism in Britain, 1890–1920’, Visual Culture in Britain, 19:3 (2018), 289–304. 27 See F. M. Ford, ‘The King of Hearts’ [1910], in Memories and Impressions (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 99–105. Ford Madox Hueffer changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in 1919. 28 Conrad and Hueffer, The Inheritors, p. 53. 29 Conrad and Hueffer, The Inheritors, p. 17. 30 One commentator described Brown as ‘the most isolated of the independent artists of our time’. See MB, vol. 1, 333. 31 Conrad and Hueffer, The Inheritors, p. 53. 32 Conrad and Hueffer, The Inheritors, p. 53. In ‘The King of Hearts’, p. 103, Ford recalls ‘old evenings’ in the studio with Brown, who ‘resembled an animated king of hearts’. 33 F. M. Hueffer, ‘Nice People’, Temple Bar, vol. 128 (November 1903), p. 573. As early as 1893, one critic believed that the murals included Stages of Cruelty (1856–90). See Anon., ‘Ford Madox Brown’, The British Architect, 253. By the 1950s it was being claimed that Brown completed the last panel in 1902 (nine years after his death) in conjunction with two assistants. See Anon., ‘History in Murals’, Manchester Guardian (20 March 1959), p. 5. 34 F. M. Hueffer, ‘Nice People’, Temple Bar, vol. 128 (November 1903), p. 572. In ‘The King of Hearts’, p. 101, Ford remembers that Brown’s ‘walls were covered with gilded leather; all the doors were painted dark green; the room was very long, and partly filled by the great picture that was never to be finished, and, all in shadow, in the distant corner was the table covered in bits of string, curtain-knobs, horseshoes, and odds and ends of iron and wood’.

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Thompson, E. P. The Making of The English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963). ——. Customs in Common (Pontypool: Merlin Press, 1991). Toynbee, Arnold. Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (London: Rivingtons, 1884). Treuherz, Julian. ‘Ford Madox Brown and the Manchester Murals’, in J. Archer (ed.), Art and Architecture in Victorian Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 162–207. ——. Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011). Trodd, Colin. ‘The Authority of Art: Cultural Criticism and the Idea of the Royal Academy in mid-Victorian Britain’, Art History, 20:1 (1997), pp. 3–22. ——. ‘Culture and Energy: Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and the Cromwellian grotesque’, in Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow and David Amigoni (eds), Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 61–80. ——. Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World, 1830–1930 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). ——. ‘Ford Madox Brown and the William Blake Brotherhood’, in Colin Trodd and Julie Sheldon (eds), Ford Madox Brown and the Victorian Imagination, 15:3 (2014), pp. 277–98. ——. ‘William Blake, the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Mythography of Manufacture’, in Kate Nichols, Rebecca Wade and Gabriel Williams (eds), Art Versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 81–100. ——. ‘The Energy Man: Blake, Nietzscheanism and Cultural Criticism in Britain, ­1890–1920’, Visual Culture in Britain, 19:3 (2018), pp. 289–304. ——. ‘Ford Madox Brown, Cultural Experience and the Promise of the Replica’, in Julie F. Codell (ed.), Victorian Artists’ Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 94–107. Trodd, Colin, Barlow, Paul, and Amigoni, David. ‘Introduction’, in Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow and David Amigoni (eds), Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 1–20. Trodd, Colin and Sheldon, Julie. ‘Introduction: Ford Madox Brown and the Victorian Imagination’, in Colin Trodd and Julie Sheldon (eds), Ford Madox Brown and the Visual Imagination, Special Issue of Visual Culture in Britain, 15:3 (2014), pp. 227–38. Tromans, Nicholas. David Wilkie: The People’s Painter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). ——. ‘Drawing Teeth: Reflections on Brown’s Mouths’, Visual Culture in Britain, 15:3 (2014), pp. 299–312. Viscomi, Joseph. ‘Blake after Blake: A Nation Discovers Genius’, in Steve Clark and David Worrall (eds), Blake, Nation and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 214–50. Walker, John A. Work: Ford Madox Brown’s Painting and Victorian Life (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2006). Webb, Beatrice. My Apprenticeship (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926). Wellington, Hubert (ed.). The Journal of Eugène Delacroix (Oxford: Phaidon, 1951). Wilde, Oscar. ‘The Critic as Artist, in Intentions (London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1894).

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Note: ‘n’ after a page reference indicates a note number on that page academic art theory 58, 102, 141 activist art 1, 4, 9, 11, 24n52, 37, 43, 72n95, 75, 77, 80–5, 93, 101–8, 154n8, 163–74 passim, 192, 194, 197, 206, 218 activist vision 77, 101, 177, 187, 192–3 Albert, Prince 26–7n71, 154n8 Alberti, Leon Battista 19n6 Ancoats Brotherhood 50, 137 Andrieu, Jules 89, 134 Aristotle 53, 110n19, 163 Arnold, Matthew 158n88 art market 12, 17, 26n68, 99 Arts and Crafts Movement 18, 24n52, 25n61, 50, 85, 206 Art Union of London 81 Ashbee, C. R. 24n52, 177, 206 Avery-Quash, Susanna 111n30 Axon, William 56–7, 59–60, 72n99, 129, 169, 182n43, 202–3 Barlow, Alfred 210n19, 210n20 Barlow, Paul 20n10, 22n28, 23n44, 36, 43, 64n12, 64n18, 66n34, 67n41, 68n50, 68n55, 68n56, 72n100, 73n105, 73n107, 111–12n30, 112n31, 121n120, 121–2n125, 123n137, 124n144, 140, 144, 145, 150, 158n81, 158n83, 158n85, 164, 171, 181n27,

182n45, 184n58, 191, 208, 211n37, 212n39, 222n10 Barrell, John 73n105, 111n30, 112n34 Barringer, Tim 62–3n5, 123n134, 123–4n144 Barry, James 57, 72n102, 121n123 Baudelaire, Charles 10, 205 Bell, Clive 216–17 Bendiner, Kenneth 21n26, 122–3n132, 123n143 Bennett, Mary 23n36, 27n72, 63n5, 66n34, 69n65, 70n70, 71n88, 112n23, 123n134, 124n146, 156n41, 158n104, 164, 168, 181n21, 182n33, 183n50, 183n53, 184n68, 185n75, 209n11, 210n21, 210n22, 211n35, 212n48, 212n53, 213n68, 222n16, 223n30 Bentham, Jeremy 72n93, 113n45, 123n135 Berg, Maxine 25n59, 68n59, 73n113 Blair, Tony 185n74 Blake, William 4, 6, 17, 18, 21n21, 21n25, 50, 52, 58, 71–2n91, 79, 89, 96, 118n97, 119n108, 121n123, 133, 135, 155n28, 158n79, 178–9, 184n70, 205–7, 213n63, 213–14n72 Blanc, Charles 74, 76 Bland, Josie 123–4n144, 222n20

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Blind, Mathilde 133–4, 155n28, 155n28, 155n29, 184n70, 190, 209n16, 211n31, 213n62 Manchester by Night 133 Bloch, Ernst 180, 205 The Principle of Hope, 205 Bloomsbury Group 216–18 Boddington, Henry 52 Boime, Albert 12–16, 24n52, 24–5n56, 25n63, 123–4n144 Boyce, Joanna 117n92 Bradshaw, Captain 188 Bradshaw, John 188 Bright, John 49–50, 68n53, 129 Brooks, Peter 63n5 Brown, Ford Madox and ‘Eye of History’ 1, 10 40–7 passim, 57, 59, 62, 107–8, 152, 165, 171–9 passim, 202, 205, 207, 221 and ‘Life Dream’ 1, 38, 60–2, 93–108 passim, 135–7, 173–6, 178–9, 182n41, 183n56, 185n74, 207 The Baptism of Edwin, A.D. 627 41, 134, 147–50, 165, 166 Blind Beggar and Son 77 The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror 31, 72n94, 106–7, 123n139 Bradshaw’s Defence of Manchester A.D. 1642 44, 55, 141, 187–9, 203 Chetham’s Life Dream, A.D. 1640 39–40, 44, 58, 60–2, 75–6, 80, 83, 92, 99, 151, 155n19, 171–80, 181n41, 182n45, 183n50, 183n53, 184n70, 184n71, 199, 205 Colonel Kirke 77 Crabtree Watching the Transit of Venus, A.D. 1639 47, 58, 169–72 Cromwell on his Farm 97, 187, 209n10 Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois 7–11, 187, 209n10 Dalton Collecting Marsh-Fire Gas 43, 46, 47, 80, 141–2, 203–8, 214n74 The Diary of Ford Madox Brown 11, 18, 24n47, 24n49, 49n72, 55, 63n8, 67n43, 67n49, 72n95, 87–8, 93–9, 109n8, 109n9, 110n16, 111n21, 112n31, 113n44, 114n46, 114n51, 237

114n52, 114n53, 115n46, 115n66, 116n70, 116n73, 116n82, 117n84, 117n92, 118n95, 118n96, 118n98, 118n100, 118n103, 119n106, 119n107, 119–20n109, 120n114, 120n116, 121n121, 121n122, 122n127, 122n130, 124n147, 167, 169, 182n44, 184n63 The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in Manchester, A.D. 1363 39–40, 43, 44, 46, 57, 68n53, 105–6, 134, 151–3, 166, 168, 169 The Exhibition of Work, and Other Paintings 90, 97, 124n149, 146, 174, 176 The Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester, A.D. 910 2–3, 44, 58, 80, 134, 141, 149–51, 167, 199 The First Translation of the Bible into English 83, 161, 181n10 The Fisher Boy 77 Friday of the Poor 76–7 Geoffrey Chaucer Reading the ‘Legend of Custance’ to Edward III and his Court 107 Head of a Flemish Fish Wife 76–7 Head of a Humpback 76–7 Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet 136, 211n31 John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, A.D. 1753 5, 39, 43, 44–7, 58, 75–6, 80, 133, 141, 151, 160n110, 189–204, 206, 210n27, 211n33, 215 King Lear (drawing) 77, 110n17, 157n76 King Lear 136, 159n102 Ladye of Saturday Night 115 The Last of England 97–8, 159n102, 211n31 The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal, A.D. 1761 5, 42, 44, 46–7, 55, 202–4 The Proclamation Regarding Weights and Measures, A.D. 1556 3, 44, 75, 160n110, 166–9, 172–3, 178, 181n21, 188 The Romans building a fort at Mancenion, A.D. 80 2–3, 42, 44–5, 80, 134, 142–8, 150, 158n79, 158n83, 158n85, 162, 165, 167, 171, 188, 207 The Slade Professorship 109n7, 177, 184n64, 184n69

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Brown, Ford Madox (cont.) Spirit of Justice 18, 31, 99–106, 108, 123n134, 123n139, 162, 165, 203 The Trial of Wyclif, A.D. 1377 5, 41, 44, 58, 68n53, 75, 83, 101, 161–7, 169, 171 Work 12–16, 50–1, 92–3, 97–8, 223n2 Brown, Gerard Baldwin 215–16 Browning, Robert 39 Brougham, Lord 89 114n47, 116n78 Burke, Edmund 56, 70n79 Burrow, John 157n77, 159n99 Byron, Lord 76, 77, 79, 110n16, 111n26, 183n57 capitalism 12, 14, 18, 36–7, 44, 49, 84, 92–3, 133, 192, 202, 217 Carlyle, Thomas 6–10, 18, 22n33, 22n34, 22n39, 32, 37–8, 40–2, 45, 56–60, 62, 65n29, 65n30, 65n31, 67n42, 67n43, 67n47, 73n107, 75–7, 79, 83–5, 89–108 passim, 113n42, 114n57, 115n64, 116n73, 128–53 passim, 159n99, 164–79 passim, 179, 181n10, 184n64, 184n65, 187–204 passim and ‘Eye of History’ 40–2, 62, 107–8, 141, 152, 171, 179, 193 Past and Present 84, 107, 113n42, 114n57, 115n64, 117n89, 132–3, 166, 168, 171 Sartor Resartus 13n42, 211n30 ‘Signs of the Times’ 89, 132–3 The French Revolution 40, 67n42, 117n87, 124n145, 159n108, 161, 166 Casey, Daniel 121n118 Chadwick, Edwin 128 Champfleury 74, 76 Chartism 15, 25n62, 25n63, 83, 85, 103, 107, 116n83, 169, 183–4n57, 203, 212n42 Chesneau, Ernest 149 Chetham, Humphrey 60, 83, 151, 174, 182n40, 182n43, 183n55, 183–4n57 Clarke, Henry G. 112n44 Cobbett, William 25n63, 87–8 Cobden, Richard 121n122, 129 Cole, Henry 96, 119n105, 119n106, 169 Collingwood, R. G. 184n72

Colquhoun, Patrick 48–9 Colvin, Sidney 5, 63n10, 213n63 Commonwealth 55, 172 Comtean thought 70n80, 108n5, 155n28, 185n75, 211n31 Conrad, Joseph 219–20 The Inheritors 219–20 Conway, Moncure 185n75, 211n31, 221n1 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 206 Corporation of Manchester 16, 34–7, 42, 44, 47, 50, 62n4, 65n25, 138, 139, 169, 181n21, 202–4, 206, 220–1 Decorations and Furnishings Sub-Committee 36, 47, 56, 69n66, 136, 138–9, 203, 204, 209n10, 213n68 Courthope, W. J. 21n11 Crabtree, William 45, 170, 171, 174, 189 Crane, Walter 21n17, 24n52, 52, 71n89, 115n61, 120n110, 136, 137, 138, 206, 211n31, 213n72 Craven, Frederick 136 Cromwell, Oliver 7–9, 11, 97, 115n58, 187–8 Cruikshank, George 194–6 ‘Tremendous Sacrifice’ 194 Cruise, Colin 123n133 Cunningham, Allan 181n12 Dalton, John 138, 204, 206, 213n68 Darwin, Charles 155n29 Davis, Joshua 25n66, 25n67 Davis, William 121n118 Delacroix, Eugène 76, 77, 97, 109n9, 110n17, 112n32, 116n81, 205 Dickens, Charles 48, 129, 159n105 Hard Times 129 Dickinson, Lowes 116n82, 118n103 Disraeli, Benjamin 85–7 Sybil 87 Eastlake, Charles 57, 111n39, 120n109 Eastlake, Elizabeth 21n18, 111n30 Eaves, Morris 113n39 Eliot, George 9, 65n30, 185n75, 211n31 Elliot, Robinson 113n44

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Engels, Friedrich 12, 15, 26n65, 128, 154n10, 208n3 The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 128 Etty, William 109n9, 121n128 everyday culture 41, 75, 174 everyday life 2, 31, 34, 39, 44, 57, 74, 93, 103, 142–51 passim,165, 191, 202, 204, 208 everyday vision 39–40, 44, 53, 55, 62 everyday world 75, 105, 107, 141, 148, 172, 180 Ewart, William 80, 113n40 expressive labour 11, 15–18, 50, 52, 72n104, 85, 106, 151 Factory System 11–15, 44, 49–50, 127–33 Fairbairn, William 159n104 Faucher, Léon 131–2 Foggo, George 18, 80–3, 85, 90, 92n104, 112n31, 112n32, 113n38, 113n40, 113n42, 113n44, 117n85, 222n12 Forster, E. M. 222n18 Foucault, Michel 67n48 Freeman, E. A. 158n86, 213n73 Freud, Sigmund 118n97 Fried, Michael 109n6, 109n10 Fry, Roger 216–17 Gallop, Jane 22n27 Géricault, Théodore 76, 109n9, 116n81 Gilchrist, Alexander 71–2n91, 85, 115n60 Life of William Blake 85, 115n58 Gillray, James 89–90 Gladstone, William Ewart 65n25, 120n110, 127, 153n4 Godwin, William 72n94, 162–3 Gosse, Edmund 134, 139 Green, J. R. 214n73 Green, Philip 185n74 grotesque 10, 14, 57, 66n34, 72n104, 85, 119n106, 123n139, 193–4, 198–9, 210n23, 210n25, 222n13 Guscott, S. J. 73 n112, 182n40 gusto 1, 39, 55, 57–8, 79–80, 101, 105, 107, 143–4, 146, 165, 171, 175, 178, 197–203, 214n48, 222n22

handloom weavers 151, 153, 191, 194, 212n42 hands 46–7, 96, 151–2, 159n102, 159n108, 178 Hartley, Lucy 72n104 Haydon, Robert Benjamin 99, 122n127 Hazlitt, William 55, 57, 58, 72n94, 76, 79, 80, 108n5, 144, 198 Heidegger, Martin 143–4 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 10, 75 Herkomer, Herbert 56, 72n95 Heywood, Abel 37, 64n24, 129, 140, 209n9 History Painting 2–18 passim, 31–4, 38–41, 46–7, 52–3, 57, 59–60, 75, 80, 103–4, 107, 141–50 passim, 165–6, 168, 179, 184n65, 190, 202, 218 Hogarth Club 97, 159n106 Hogarth, William 2, 4, 17, 19n6, 21n21, 80, 92, 96, 103, 143–4, 148, 149, 158n78, 158n81, 163, 166–7, 170, 175, 181n12, 184n58, 190, 192–200, 204, 222n13 The Enraged Musician 163 Holbein, Hans the Younger 76, 109n11 Horrocks, Jeremiah 170–1 hospitality 19n5, 98, 114n59, 152, 168, 175–6, 200 Hueffer, Ford Madox 2, 9, 11, 22n34, 24n48, 26n68, 26n69, 26n70, 27n73, 32–4, 41–2, 63n7, 63n8, 63n9, 64n17, 64n23, 65n27, 65–6n31, 66n34, 71n85, 71n88, 71n90, 72n91, 72n95, 72n99, 88, 94, 109n8, 109n11, 110n14, 110n17, 111n26, 115n60, 115n66, 117n84, 117n87, 117n89, 117n94, 118n98, 118n104, 119n108, 120n109, 120n110, 120n114, 121n119, 121n121, 121n124, 123n140, 147–8, 154n8, 154n14, 156n30, 155n37, 156n46, 157n63, 158n78, 184n65, 185n69, 203–4, 208, 208n3, 209n5, 211n29, 213n57, 213n62, 219–21 Hugo, Victor 10, 76, 77, 108n5, 111n24 Hume, Joseph 81, 113n40, 154n8 Hunt, Tristam 20n16, 68n60, 182n29 239

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Hunt, William Holman 70n80, 115n61, 117n94, 120n109, 121n118, 123n139, 159n104, 222n12 imagination 2, 15, 16, 18, 22n30, 40–1, 60, 76–7, 79, 89, 95–6, 104, 152, 172–80 passim, 182n41, 205, 207 India 206, 213n69 industrialisation 14–15, 25n58, 36–7, 43–50, 53, 83, 93, 127–35, 151–2, 159n104, 187, 190–207, 208–9n3, 209n6, 210n22, 213n67 Industrial Revolution 15, 25n61, 26n65, 187, 197, 209n23 industrial society 5–6, 15, 84, 128–9, 131–2, 169 James, Henry 66n34, 118n94 James, William 216 Jones, Ernest 52, 64n24, 183n57 Joyce, Patrick 25n62, 68n59 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 67n48 Kay, James 128 Kay, John 45, 189–90, 200, 209–10n18, 210n28 Keats, John 76, 77, 79, 95, 110n16, 111n22, 122n127 Kemble, John Mitchell 158n86 Keynes, John Maynard 217–19, 221 Lancashire Cotton Famine 36, 71n85, 197 land reform 206–8, 214n76 Leathart, James 24n53, 27n73, 121n122 Leighton, Frederic 53, 117n92, 149 Arts of Industry as Applied to War 53 liberalism 4–5, 12, 16, 18, 21n18, 37, 48–50, 53, 61, 82–3, 127–9, 131, 153, 154n11, 180, 193, 202, 217–20 Linton, John 93 Linton, William James 18, 85–6, 88, 112n33, 114n56, 115n58, 115n59, 115n61 Bob Thin or the Poorhouse Fugitive 85 Lushington, Vernon 185n75, 211n31

MacColl, D. S. 20n14, 74, 108n1, 216, 222n13 McCarthy, Justin 134–5 McCracken, Francis 99, 121n122 McCulloch, J. R. 159n104 McGann, Jerome 182n41 Mackintosh, James 55–6, 72n93, 72n94 Mackmurdo A. H. 39, 52, 71n83 Maidment, Brian 71n86, 114–5n57, 116n79 Manchester Academy of Fine Arts 130, 138 Manchester Art Gallery 22n27 Manchester Art School 52 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition 128, 136, 211n31 Manchester Guardian 50, 114n47, 130, 171, 203 Manchester Jubilee Decorations 52 Manchester Literary Club 130 Marshall, Alfred 214n78 Marshall, John 90, 116n82 master craftsman 17–18, 52, 62, 176–7 Marx, Karl 12, 14, 15, 24–5n56, 26n65, 155n25, 159n105, 213n69 Meier–Graefe, Julius 222–3n22 Meisel, Martin 66n52, 111n26 melodrama 18, 103–7, 124n147, 192–4, 201 Mill, J. S. 14–15n61, 25n60, 26n65, 65n30, 79, 88, 132, 185n75, 206, 208 Miller, Hugh 130–1 Miller, John 99, 121n122, 136 Mills, Ernestine 47, 121n118 modernity 7–18 passim, 20n9, 44–7, 62, 84–5, 93, 129–34, 143, 151, 168, 191–8, 201–2, 204, 217, 219 Monbiot, George 214n76 Morris, William 6, 18, 24n52, 25n61, 32, 50, 63n5, 88, 136, 153, 159n105, 159n106, 172, 174, 177, 183n54, 187, 208, 208n3 mural painting 215–16, 222n10 Muther, Richard 3, 4, 74 Myrone, Martin 111n30, 112n34

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National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry 215–16 National Federation of Associated Employers of Labour 70n78 National Gallery, London 81, 113n40, 117n86 Newman, Tessa 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich 38–9, 59, 66n36, 178, 193, 210n26, 219, 222n22, 223n26 Noble, Matthew 187 Palmerston, Lord 88, 116n70 parataxis 132, 167 Paris Commune 134 Paxman, Jeremy 20n16 People’s Journal 83–4, 114n52, 181n10 Peterloo Massacre 36, 48, 58, 114n47, 138, 154n19, 165, 197, 205 Phillips, David 7–12, 15–16 pictorial composition 3–6, 9–14, 18–19, 19n5, 19n6, 34, 38–41, 58, 101–8, 132, 136, 140–2, 145–51, 164–5 173–80, 188–208 passim, 209n12, 216–17, 222n22 Plint, Thomas 26n73, 99, 120n116 Plug Plot 131, 154n18 politics 6, 10–12, 15, 18, 32, 50, 55, 77, 82, 85–90, 99, 103, 106, 115n66, 123n140, 153, 163, 166, 173, 203 Post-Impressionism 217 Poovey, Mary 159n105 Pre-Raphaelites 3–4, 23n43, 58, 63n9, 66n34, 71n84, 77, 80, 97, 99, 109n6, 111n30, 122n31, 144, 145, 157n81, 181n19, 198, 216 Quilter, Harry 34, 65n27, 66n35, 218–19, 223n25 Quin, Malcolm 70n80 Quinn, Malcolm 112n34 Rabin, Lucy 68n52, 181n17 Rae, George 109n7, 121n122, 136, 156n37 Raphael 70n80, 196 Rathbone, Harold 2, 177 realism 14, 55, 75–7, 103, 108n5, 109n7, 110n18, 155n22, 190, 205

Rembrandt 76, 109n11, 109n12 Renan, Ernest 185n75 replication 7–18 passim, 26n68 Reynolds, Joshua 19n6, 34, 40, 53, 57–9, 63n9, 66n35, 119n106, 199, 201 romanticism 6, 55, 60–1, 74–80 passim, 95–7, 103, 109n9, 110n16, 111n23, 128, 133–4, 151, 153, 155n29, 169, 172, 176, 179, 184n72, 193, 196, 205 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 17, 23n40 23n42, 27n73, 32, 52, 63n7, 64n17, 69n63, 71n91, 72n95, 85, 90, 94, 96, 98, 115n58, 115n61, 115n66, 116n82, 117n88, 118n98, 119n107, 121n119, 122n127, 122n128, 134, 135, 153, 182n41 Rossetti, William Michael 3–4, 39, 63n7, 65n29, 69n68, 85, 88, 109n8, 110n14, 110n16, 110n17, 114n58, 114n61, 116n82, 123n149, 135, 149, 157n78, 181n17, 186, 210n25 Rowley, Charles 36, 50, 70–1n82, 110n14, 135–8, 140, 155n26, 156n52, 204 Royal Academy, London 16–17, 26n69, 27n74, 56, 58, 80–2, 90–1, 97, 104, 112n34, 114n46, 116n81, 117n84, 117n85, 120n109, 135–6 Royal Manchester Institute 52, 130, 136, 154n12 Ruskin, John 6, 10, 18, 19n5, 21n21, 23n42, 50n52, 57, 65n30, 71n86, 72–3n104, 77, 88, 109n6, 113n45, 129, 133–4, 135, 153, 157n53, 159n105, 175–6, 178, 187, 208, 209n6, 214n78, 216, 222n9, 222n18 The Crown of Wild Olive 183n56 The Political Economy of Art 154n11 The Stones of Venice 216 Unto this Last 175–6 Sanders, Michael 123n137, 183–4n57 Scott, C. P. 50–1, 71n83 Scott, David 121n123 Scott, William Bell 57, 114n56, 115n59, 119n106

241

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Index

Seed, John 154n13 Sells, Christopher 112n32 Seymour, Robert 89–90 The March of Intellect 89–90 Shakespeare, William 2, 31, 76–7, 109n8, 110n16, 110n17, 111n22, 111n24, 118n103, 155n22, 157n76 Sharp, William 66n34 Shaw, George Bernard 39, 109n12, 136, 204 Shields, Frederic 16, 36–7, 47–56 passim, 64n17, 64n20, 71n90, 71–2n91, 121n118, 136, 138, 139, 157n53, 180n5, 186, 189, 206, 209n9, 212n53 Sheldon, Julie 21n18, 111n30 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 76, 110n16, 155n29 Sibson, Thomas 114n56, 115n59 Smiles, Sam 69n61 Smiles, Samuel 69n62, 177 social activist aesthetic 18, 37, 72n95, 75, 83, 99–108, 177, 187, 192–3, 209n10 Solkin, David 112n34, 123n142 Soskice, Juliet M. 71n85, 116n72, 156n39 sovereignty 1, 67n48, 84, 93, 98, 187 and liberalism 4, 93, 196 and politics 10, 80, 99, 104, 147, 187 and populism 21, 81, 84–5, 93, 97, 98, 102, 175, 187, 207 and the state 37 Spielmann, M. H. 71n84, 71n85, 213n58 Stanley, Lord 49, 70n75 Stedman Jones, Gareth 25n62, 25n63, 155n25 Stendhal 76, 109n8 Stephen, Leslie 211n31, 222n15 Stephens, F. G. 27n72, 59, 139, 142, 169, 171 Stevenson, R. A. M. 216 Strauss, David Friedrich 185n75 Stubbs, William 158n86 style 1–2, 31, 38, 43, 46, 55, 68n55, 76, 80, 90, 107, 140, 144, 158n85, 181n27, 190–1 Surtees, Virginia 114n52 Swinburne, A. C. 71n90, 119n107, 134

Taylor, William Cooke 49 Terry, Ellen 204 The Times 7, 74, 142, 152, 170 Thirlwell, Angela 20n16, 22n32, 118n101, 155n22, 156n31, 156n41, 157n65, 159n102, 213n62 Thomas, William Cave 96, 116n82, 117n84, 119n107 Thompson, Dorothy 65n24, 203 Thompson, E. P. 68n58, 155n24, 160n109, 211n36 Thompson, Joseph 47–8, 138, 169n65, 169n66, 181n11, 189, 203, 206, 209n10, 209–10n18, 214n73 Thoré, Théophile 74, 76, 108n5 Tönnies, Ferdinand 210n24 Toryism 50, 187 Toynbee, Arnold 15, 26n65, 187 Treuherz, Julian 21n26, 62n4, 66n34, 68n54, 69n69, 70n71, 123n133, 156n32, 156n45, 157n56, 157n58, 157n76, 158n83, 180n5, 181n23, 181n24, 182n32, 182n38, 183n48, 183n52, 184n62, 184n68, 197, 204, 209n12, 209n13, 210n23 Tromans, Nick 103, 111n30, 123n142 Turner, J. M. W. 110n20 Utilitarianism 72n93, 90, 96, 169, 179, 221 Viscomi, Joseph 115n61 Waddington, Joseph 52, 71n84 Wagner, Richard 109n12, 110n24 Warburg, Aby 222n22 Waterhouse, Alfred 22n27, 64n17, 130, 137–9, 159n101 Waterhouse, John William 22n27 Watkinson, Ray 43 Watts, G. F. 22n30, 121n118, 121n120, 137 Watts-Dunton, Theodore 153 Webb, Beatrice 217–18 Weber, Max 217

242

Index

Wright, Alastair Ian 122n129 Wright, Thomas 108n1, 211n31 Wycliffe, John 161–2 Yeames, William Frederick 21n19, 138 Yeats, W. B. 148 Young England 85–6, 90

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Westminster Hall competition 81, 99, 102, 141 White, D. T. 98, 120n115, 121n121 Woolf, Virginia 222n15 Woolner, Thomas 88, 115n66, 116n82 Wordsworth, William 79, 110n16, 122n127

243

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Plate 1  Ford Madox Brown, The Romans building a fort at Mancenion, A.D. 80, 1880

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Plate 3  Ford Madox Brown, The Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester, A.D. 910, 1881

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Plate 4 Ford Madox Brown, The Establishment of the Flemish Weavers in Manchester, A.D. 1363, 1882

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Plate 5  Ford Madox Brown, The Trial of Wyclif, A.D. 1377, 1885–86

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Plate 6 Ford Madox Brown, The Proclamation Regarding Weights and Measures, A.D. 1556, 1883–84

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Plate 7  Ford Madox Brown, Crabtree Watching the Transit of Venus, A.D. 1639, 1882–83

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Plate 9  Ford Madox Brown, Bradshaw’s Defence of Manchester, A.D. 1642, 1893

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Plate 10  Ford Madox Brown, John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, A.D. 1753, 1888–90

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Plate 11  Ford Madox Brown, The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal, A.D. 1761, 1891–92

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