Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain 2004013492

Citation preview

•

Wrt and Labour in Victorian Britain

TIM �BARRINGER ·•

Published for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press

New Haven & London

Copyright © 2005 by Tim Barringer.

AJ I rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in parr, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by CarolS. Cates Set in Adobe Garamond type by Amy Storm Printed in Singapore by C S Graphics Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barringer, T.

J.

Men at work: art and labour in Victorian Britain/Tim Barringer. p.

em.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-l 0380-8 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Labor in art. 2. Art and society-England. 3. Art, Victorian-England. l. Title: Art and labour in Victorian Britain. II. Title. N8219.L2B345

2005

704.9'49331'09034-dc22 2004013492

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FRONT I S P I ECE:

George Elgar Hicks, The Sinews

of Old Englaud, 1857·

Watercolour and bodycolour on paper, 30 x 21 '/sin. (76

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

x

53·5 em).

To my students-past,

present, andfoture-with thanks

•

CONTENTS

Preface

•

IX

I NTRODU CTIO N:

An Aesthetic ofLabour

Art, Religion, and Labour

cHAPTER

r.

cHAPTER

2 . The Harvest Field in the Railway Age

cHAPTER

3 . Blacksmith and Artist

CHAPTER

4·

Art and Industry

cHAPTER

5.

Colonial Gothic

co N c L us I o N :

21

133

243

Aestheticism and Labour

Notes

3 23

Index

373

Photo Credits

•

PREFACE

•

To consider the origins of this book is to reveal those autobiographical elements which permeate all scholarship but which are, perhaps, best left unspoken. It is my Ruskinian fan tasy that the germ of the book lies i n visual experience rather than words or ideas. Unforgettable, on the eve of its extinction in the early r98os, was the scorching panorama of Sheffield's furnaces and forges against the dark Yorkshire sky, viewed (like so many scenes of labour in this book) from a position of comfortable detach ment-a school bus on the motorway. Equally memorable at the end of a rail trip from Bradford over the Pennines was a first sight of Ford Madox Brown's W0rle, whose visual and conceptual richness remains inexhaustible two decades later. In London, it was the fabric, rather than the objects, of the Victoria and Albert Museum that provided a real sense of Victorian culture waiting to be revealed- illegible sgraffito and obscured mosaic; soot-coated terra-cotta and dusty gilt mouldings; giant figures of labourers i n Leighton's ill-lit frescoes. Many years later, similar forms of decoration caught my eye against very different skies in Madras and Bombay. Art and labour, north and south, metropole and (in Victoria's reign) colony: they are the matter of this book. DURING THE TWO DECADES

that I have been preoccupied by the Victorian

spectacle of labour, I have accrued a formidable list of debts, only some of which can be acknowledged here. In I lldey, M ike Selina encouraged a teenager to write an A-level essay about Victorian images of work. At Cambridge I was fortunate to have Neil McKendrick and Graham Howes as supervisors while making first acquaintance with Victorian prose criticism and the history of patronage. Rosali nda Hardiman, at Portsmouth City Art Gallery, invited me - to my amazement- to curate a major exhibition fresh from college. The second chapter of this book took its starting point from conversations with her about George Vicat Cole's Harvest Time. The project took scholarly form as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Sussex. I owe an incalculable debt to the supervisor of that work, Marcia Painton, for her

intellectual rigour, creativity, and generosity. Stephen Daniels and Geoff Hemstedt, examiners of the thesis, made many useful suggestions.

X

PR E F A C E

Research for parts o f the second half o f the book was begun while I was a post­ doctoral fel low in the Research Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the support of Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, Charles Saumarez Smith, Carolyn Sargentson, and Malcolm Baker materially aided its progress. Liz Miller, Margaret Timmers, and Susan Lambert welcomed an interloper in Prints and Drawings, and supported the acquisition of James Sharples's The Forge and its plate for the Museum. The late Clive Wai nwright proved a ben ign and beguiling guide to the poetics of South Kensington, whil e Rafael Denis, over a pint or two, unravelled i ts politics. The staff at i n numerable libraries and museums have aided my research, most notably those at the British Library, the National Art Library, and the Print Room at the V&A. The Frick Art Reference Library and the Wertheim Study of the New York Public Library provided ideal surroundings in which to complete the writing. I partic­ ularly thank Kim Streets, Kirsty Hamilton, and Anne Goodchild at Sheffield Museums and Phil Dunn and the staff of the People's History Museum in Manchester. At Records Offices i n Leeds, Sheffield, and Blackburn, the staff were unfailingly helpful, as were the local history librarians in those cities. Emily Rowland of the Surrey Records Service kindly helped untangle the complicated history of Joh n Linnell's land at Redstone Wood. Mike Millward, formerly Keeper of the Blackburn City Museum, aided my research on Sharples, and it was privilege to meet, through him, Marion Sharples, the artist's granddaughter, and his great-granddaughter Eileen Iwanicki, who made available to me the family's fascinating collections. The late Joan Linnell Burton, who shared her great-grandfather's quirky charm, was a gracious and charming host, and allowed me a memorable glimpse of her archive of John Lin nell's letters and manuscripts, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Christopher London generously allowed me to reproduce his own excellent photograph of the Victoria Terminal in Bombay. These chapters have been shaped and reshaped as papers given i n Britain, the United States, and Australia, and I am grateful to all those who have made me think harder by their questions and comments. In particular, I thank Caroline Arscott, Paul Barlow, Nicola Bown, Christopher Breward, Deborah Cherry, David Peters Corbett, Feli x D river, Peter Hoffenberg, Alison I nglis, Patrick Joyce, Patrick McCaughey, Lynn Nead, Christiana Payne, Louise Purbrick, Kim Reynolds, Norman Vance, Will Vaughan, Shearer West, Michael Wheeler, and A ndrew Wilton for challenging and e nriching my interpretations over the years. Jen nifer Graham generously shared information on Quentin Massys. Michaela Giebelhausen , Michael H art, Jason Rosenfeld, Alex Nemerov, Dian Kriz, and Saloni Mathur read sections of the manuscript, and I have greatly valued their comments, even where I have failed to respond to them. I owe an even greater debt to three friends who read the whole manuscript and materially improved it in numerous

P R E FA C E

XI

ways: Kristina Huneault and Janice Carlisle, both authors o f fi n e studies o f representa­ tions of labour, and Liz Prettejohn, whose m agisterial work on Aestheticism provides both complement and antidote to what is offered here. The manuscript has benefited fro m the stern editorial attentions of John Wells, in whom librarianly precision, grammatical pedantry, and a gift for generous friendship are happily met. The book has received generous support from many people over the years, among them Vanessa Graham and Alison Welsby. At Yale University Press, Patricia Fidler and her outstanding team have been ideal collaborators. I especially thank Michelle Komie and John Long and expert editor Laura Jones Dooley. I 'm grateful to Carol Cates for creatively incorporating Godfrey Sykes's Victorian whimsies i nto her elegant designs. The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art has generously provided support for the book's production, and I thank Brian Allen, Frank Sal mon, and the members of the publications com m i ttee for their faith in this project. At Yale, I owe a particular debt

to

the en tire staff of the Center for British Art and

especially to the Director, Amy Meyers, for her unfailing enthusiasm, friendly encour­ agement, and practical support. Thanks also to the librarian Susan Brady and the Study Room staff. Gillian Forrester's unusual gifts for scholarship, editorial ising, friendship, and hospitality have all left thei r mark on this book. Yale can be an extra­ ordinary place; this book and its author have been enl ivened by proximity to a cast of remarkable characters, i ncluding Susan Greenberg, Noa Steimatsky, Angus Trumble, Jennifer Tucker, and Kariann Yokota. This book is dedicated

to

my students, because teaching, the most consistently

stimulating aspect of my pro fessional life, has provided the refiner's fi re for my ideas about art and labour. In particular, final-year undergraduate classes on Pre-Raphaelitism at Birmingham and at Yale, and a graduate semi nar on Ruskin, saw lively debates of the issues. It may be unwise to single out individuals, but among the doctoral stu­ dents with whom I have discussed this book I thank that closet Victorianist, Douglas Fordham, and especially Morna O'Neill. I have learned m uch fro m her revelatory study of Wal ter Crane, another chapter in the history of art and labour. Emily Weeks and Kristin Henry have been expert picture researchers as well as fine scholars. Rebecca McGinnis has lived through the creation and re-creation of this book, fol­ lowing its trail to Burnley, Blackburn, and Bombay; Abinger and Attercliffe; Salford and Sydenham. I can only hope that she feels the long journey has been worth it.

•

INTRODUCTION

•

An c.Aesthetic ofLabour

N D E R T H E M OT T O

"The workers, o f all types, stand forth as

the really great men," 1 the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened on

r

May 1851, i naugurating the

historical period examined in this book. Prince Albert, patron of the Exhibition, announced the emergence of "the dignity of labour" as a "proud and valuable watch-word" for Victorian England.2 Henry Mayhew, journalist and social investigator, went further, discerning a new phenomenon, the "artistic quali ty of labour. " 3 Such pronouncements enshrine the celebration of labour at the heart of Victorian public discourse: the concept of work was acknowledged as a bench mark of value encompassi ng the economic, the moral, and the aesthetic. But although "work in general" could be celebrated in quasi-religious terms, the particularities and conditions of labour for most of the workforce in the Britain of 1 8 5 1 were harsh.4 The new world of work produced by the division of labour and the advent of machine production offered l ittle cause for cele­ bratio n . Memories were fresh of 1848, year of European revolutions and of the fi nal Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common. Labour had presented itself there as a collective body, an organised movement demanding political representation and an end to the economic and social deprivation resulting from rapid industrialisation . 5 Despite the rhetoric surrounding the Great Exhibition, the labour question remained unsolved i n 185 1 . Histories of the period have acknowledged the ideological importance of the "gospel of work" and of the "languages of labour" in Victorian culture.6 I n th is book I argue that the sphere of the visual image, and more specifically the representation of the male labouring body, provided the most powerful and significant formulation of work

O P POSITE:

Detail of fig.

r.

2

I NTRODUCT I O N

as the nexus of ethical and aesthetic val ue. I t is not my i n tention merely to chart and describe an important Victorian trope, less still to endorse or promote it. Rather, i n presenting a series o f case studies towards a critical iconography o f the working man, I locate images of labour in a broad historical and cultural matrix that reveals their complexities and fragilities. The ownership of the meanings of labour was contested across a range of visual media, from history paintings to union emblems, from maga­ zine illustrations to monumental sculptures. The mid-Victorian period formed a pivotal moment in the histories both of labour and of art, in Britain and across its empire. Coterminous with the energies of economic growth and imperial expansion were the destabilising effects of economic, social , and cultural modernisation. As the machine threatened to replace the labour of the body, to emasculate the heroic worker, so also, in an age of mechanical reproduction, the privileged category of art was placed under pressure by the massive profusion and popularity of the reproductive image. Modernity implied redundancy for history painter and handloom weaver alike. My second strand of inquiry, intimately related, examines a broader problem: the complex relationship between art and labour in theory and practice i n the mid-ni ne­ teenth century. The Victorian dialectic of art and labour influenced artistic identity, aesthetic theory, art education, the formation of museums, and even the critical for­ tunes of artistic styles. Art and labour are the two great preoccupations in the writings of John Ruskin, whose thinking permeates every chapter of this book. Ruskin empha­ sised the importance of artistic elements within labour and denounced art made eas­ ily, without work. For Ruskin, aesthetics and eth ics were inseparable, and the idea of work was central to both: "So far from Art's being immoral, in the ultimate power of it, nothing but Art is moral : Life without I ndustry is sin, and Industry without Art, brutality. "" Ruskin and his followers conj ured up the possibility of a utopian future and an ideal past, in both of which art and work were seen as i nextricably linked. His major publications, from Modern Painters (r843 - r86o) to Fors Clavigera (r87r-r 884) , straddle the historical period under consideration, and the Ruskin-Whistler trial of r878, I suggest in the Conclusion, was the moment when the mid-Victorian aspiration to

unite art and labour lost its force. Never had thinking about art and labour been so profoundly enmeshed, or so provocatively j uxtaposed, as in mid-Victorian visual culture. To examine the dialectic of art and labour is to ask: What is the value of artistic labour in relation to other forms of work? What is the relationship of labour to beauty, to aesthetic value? What is the status of the labouring body as the subject of art? To what degree does the amount of labour expended on a work of art determine its worth? How can the artist's styles and techniques best acknowledge the concept of labour and express its value? These subsidiary questions cluster around the central issue: How did artists in mid-Victorian Britain create meanings for work?

I NTRO D U C T I O N

3

FIG. r

l11e Titmsept. Chromolithograph, with added hand-colouring, from Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures ofthe Great Exhibition ofr8y, fiwn the Originals Paintedfor His Royal Highness Prince Albert by Messrs Nash, Haghe, and Roberts R.A., 2 vols. (London: Dickinson, r854), 2: frontispiece. Yale Center fo r British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

MANY OF THE

major themes and concerns of this book are presaged in images avail­

able to the London public in May r85r. A glimpse of the visual cul ture of that extraor­ dinary month will serve to introduce the principal ideas and the range of objects to be explored in later chapters. Where else to begin , but under the great glass roof of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition? Turn ing to "The Transept" from

Dicleinson's Comprehensive Pictures (a series of large chromolithographic views of the Exhibition and its visitors printed in vibrant colours), we emer a world of silks, I ndian armour, statues, fountains, chandeliers, and carpets-each one the product of labour, most the labour of many hands (fig. 1 ) . Machine operatives, rural hand­ craftsmen, artisans in workshops, industrial engineers, designers, and artists: all were represented by their work. Yet despite the cornucopia of objects, manual labourers are

4

I NTRO D UCTION

"

Whoever Thought of Meeting You Here?"

f 1G . 2

John Leech, The Pound aud the Shilling. Wood engraving, Puuch, '4 June

1851. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

conspicuous by their absence in Dickinson's image. On this day, when the entrance fee of either five shillings or a pound allowed only the well-off to enter, the Crystal Palace appears to be a consumer's utopia, a spectacular republic of things populated only by the middle classes, the women in crinol i nes and the men in black.8 Despite the public pronouncements of i ts organisers, the works of industry of all nations could more comfortably be pictured than the workers who made them. Labourers did visit the Exhibition, however, on "shilling days," resulting in unex­ pected encounters such as that portrayed in The Pound and the Shilling, a comic wood­ engraving after John Leech. It appeared in Punch, a satirical magazine with a broad middle-class readership (fig. 2) . Thick, black lines, heavily inked, and roughly printed by steam-press, reveal a working-class group on the left, domi nated by a navvy - a manual labourer whose heavy work incl uded digging trenches and excavating bui ld-

I N T R O D U CT I O N

5

ing sites--and a carpenter wearing the square paper hat typical of that trade. They confront an aristocratic party, on the right, grouped around the Duke of Wel l i ngton.9 Mr. Punch looks on from the balcony, sardonically amused by the turn of events below. On ro April 1848, Wellington had been on hand at Kennington Common and may even have commanded the troops deployed to contain the Chartists, but the subtitle of the wood engraving, "Whoever Thought of Meeti ng You Here?" restages this con­ frontation in amicable terms. 1 0 The working men appear self-confident and stand united, ann-in-arm: their hats remain firmly on their heads, having not been defet·en­ tially removed. Particularly significant for this study is the grandeur of the navvy's form: the heft of his body, hand on hip, renders him the dominant figure in the composi­ tion and able to engage the fascinated, perhaps even desiring, gaze of the ladies in the Duke's party. Punch leaves us in no doubt that the working man, respectable enough to enter the Crystal Palace, was a force to be reckoned with. It was such a navvy, " i n the pride o f manly health a n d beauty" whom Ford Madox Brown would place as the hero of his great painting Work (r852-r865, Manchester City Art Gallery) , begun the next year. This most sophisticated and complex of meditations on labour is the subject of chapter I. Worle lays out a compendium of representative labouring figures, offering a powerful i ntervention into debates about labour, masculinity, and rel igion. The Great Exhibition was mediated by a contrasting mode of representation in John Tenniel's design for the tide page of its Official Descriptive and ILLustrated Catalogue (fig. 3 ) . Tenniel responded to this great taxonomy of objects with an allegorical repre­ sentation of the workers who fashioned them. All are men. It is notable that the fore­ ground group of labourers - i ncluding blacksmiths, a harvester, and a carpenter - is distanced from the rest of the composition by a formal device that finds an unmistak­ able visual form for class difference. The lower classes are, li terally, positioned at a level beneath the practitioners of the liberal arts. In the middle register, from left to right, are the musician, poet, and author, and from right to left, the painter, sculptor, and architect. Styles of masculinity, as well as social status, enforce the distinction. Youthful and refined, these men are of a different bodily type than the manly labourers below. Art and labour almost meet i n this composition, as they were supposed to meet in the objects on view in 185 1 . But the architectural and spatial devices employed by Tenniel ensure that the two groups remain separate. 1 1 In the foreground, placed centrally among the working men, is an agricultural labourer, seated on the rich harvest of wheat he has reaped. He holds a siclde, with a plough and a scythe beside him. Ten n iel's allegory is important in accommodating this figure, out of place in the dense, urban fabric of London, yet essential to its very survival. More than others, the agricultural labourer could still seem to belong to an idyllic past. The discussion of Victorian harvesting imagery in chapter I I reveals,

6

I NT R O D U CT I O N

®��rR®� ®w�mJrffiliD� ana u��m!M!l!ht� CC�(RJll())S(QfCE ijTX®T

FIG. 3

�? tJ'jf

Mason Jackson afrer John Tenniel, Title-page. Wood engraving

from Raben Ellis, ed. , Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue

ofthe Great Exhibition ofthe f17orks of!ndusiiJ ofAll Nations, r8y, 3 vols. (London: Spicer Brorhers, r85r). Yale Center for British An, Paul Mellon Collection

however, that even the most insistently idyllic landscape paintings of the period can­ not entirely eschew the industrialisation of agriculture and the concomitant transfor­ mation of rural labour. At the Crystal Palace, agricultural machinery was prominent (see fig. 36), and agricultural p roducts were also on display. O n 15 July 1 8 51, with the Great Exhibition at its height, John Linnell, the painter who is the focus of chapter I I , moved out of London "for good," to Redhill in Surrey, hoping to leave the world of urban modernity behind him. But as he pain ted reapers at their timeless work in fields he owned, using sicldes such as Ten niel depicts, Linnell could hear the trains o n the London t o Brighton l i ne. To the right of the reaper in Tenniel's emblem is a fine group of two smiths: muscular, with shirt sleeves rolled up for work, they are the composition's heroes, emblematic

7

I N T R O D U CT I O N

0 }'

FIG.

4

The

T II J.;

C II Y ST.\

f.

P ,\I.,\(.' J; -ll J:; li :-II S.

II Ill H }; II r,

I' LA T T,

A:'\ J)

C 0. :o'f'-4M-� i

{,,/f(t.W�It-(i.,;.� .

h '· � \t.i.� h.tt.f:.•tt frotn a !'aimed :\·ltt�i'llm. (:\n, 1G:17.-'72.)

,c•n:'H'tllt:l pT0Hp in

1he

The.Jewefler. Wood engraving from Henry Hardy Cole,

CataLogue ofthe ObjectJ of!Jldian Art in the South Kensington Museum

(London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), 153. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Kensington. In 1874, Henry Hardy Cole, son of Sir Henry and a former Superintendent of the Archaeological Survey of India's Northwest Provinces, had produced a substan­ tial scholarly Catalogue of the Objects ofIndian Art in the South Kensington Museum. 152 Cole's work as first a colonial administrator and then a museum curator- the reverse of Kipling's trajectory- indicate the interpenetration of metropolitan and colonial bureaucracies; the two lives demonstrate the fundamentally imperial character of South Kensington. It was by now taken as common knowledge that "by the suggestiveness of Indian art objects, the vulgarities in European art objects may be corrected, " and, here too, connections between the identity of the Indian artisan and the quality of Indian art were emphasised.15·3 Prominent among the illustrations are engravings of a series of painted terra-cotta models of emblematic figures of craftsmen, such as The

jeweffer (fig. 132). These figures (about eleven inches tall) were perhaps made "at Poonah in the Bombay Presidency to illustrate the castes and trades of Western India " and intended for the tourist market.154 Placed in the galleries at South Kensington, they reiterated the connection between the processes of craft labour and the excellences of Indian jewellery, which Cole singled out for praise as an Indian art form superior to its counterparts in Europe.155

C O L O N I AL G O T HIC

The impact of the colonial Gothic critique became more visible in the imperial centre when Birdwood was asked to reinstall the Indian collections at South Kensington in r879-r88o, following its annexation of the large collections of the India Office Museum. Birdwood's installation was informed by his thesis that the beauty of Indian art was the direct and inevitable result of its roots in village life. "In India, everything is hand wrought, and everything, down to the cheapest toy or earthen vessel, is therefore more or less a work of art."156 The new galleries included significant didactic material; there were photographs and casts of Indian architecture, and Kipling's "Sepia draw­ ings of native handicraftsmen" from the India Museum (including figs. 125, 126, 1 28, and 130) were displayed alongside original objects, absorbed into the Museum's con­ struction of India and reproduced in the Museum's Portfolio ofIndian Art (r88r) and the journal ofIndian Art and Industry, achieving a wide audience. Where in r85r rep­ resentations of the body of the Indian labourer had formed a disturbing contrast to the opulent works on show, by the r88os it was as much the process and the context as the products of Indian craft labour that were considered exemplary. And rather than merely imitating the formal patterning of Indian goods for replication by steam­ powered machinery, as Henry Cole senior had insisted, Birdwood looked to the social construction of labour in India for solutions to Britain's labour and design problems. This was the "remarkable reality" that Kipling's drawings were ultimately intended to reveal.The idea that the merits of Indian art derived from the simple life of the Indian village now carried the full weight of an imperial orthodoxy.

MoRRIS AND CoMPANY

Birdwood's colonial Gothic treatise, The Industrial Arts ofIndia, was first published as the catalogue to the Indian Section of the Paris Exposition of 1878, which won immedi­ ate and widespread acclaim. On r May 1879, a public letter of appreciation was pub­ lished in London, signed by leaders of aesthetic taste including Sir Frederic Leighton, Sir Coutts Lindsay, proprietor of the Grosvenor Gallery, and the artist and designer Walter Crane. Perhaps most significant were the signatures of Edward Burne-Jones and, above all, William Morris, who as undergraduates had taken Ruskin's "The Nature of Gothic" to heart.The signatories claimed to have "seen and lamented the rapid deterioration that has of late befallen the great historical arts of India: We do not doubt that all men of culture will agree that the welfare of the arts in question is important both to India and to Europe, and that the loss of them would be a serious blow to civilisation, and an injury to the pleasure and dignity

COLO N I AL G O T H IC

29 3

of life; and if this importance be at once admitted, together with the danger to them that comes of the manner in which they are now being dealt with by Europeans that are brought into contact with the Asiatic workmen, we cannot conceive that any thoughtful person will deny England's responsibility in this matter, or the duty which a great country owes to the arts of exercising foresight and patience, less for an apparent commercial gain she and the world in general should lose industries which had for ages made India famous, industries whose educational influence on the arts of the West is so universally acknowledged by all the students of Art and History. 157 There is little doubt that Morris was the instigator, perhaps even the author, of this letter. The late r87os saw Morris's immersion in the politics of empire, through activism on the Eastern Question (opposing British imperial policy in the Balkans), and subsequently his conversion to socialism. Elsewhere, Morris was far more explicit in his denunciation of the impact of both empire and industrialisation, which, together, had "ruined India, starved and gagged Ireland, and tortured Egypt."158 Although Morris would be profoundly influenced by Marx's Capital upon reading it in r883, his continuing allegiance to Ruskinian notions of the Gothic allowed him to sidestep Marx's commitment to economic modernisation as an inevitable step towards revolution. Marx, although an opponent of imperialism and the author of a powerful account of the "Mutiny," in The First Indian Wt-tr ofIndependence, observed that the impact of the British Empire in India was simply to propel Asia further down the road of modernisation towards the inevitable forthcoming revolution.159 Morris, on the other hand, believed that British imperialism-which he otherwise opposed­ should operate in a paternalistic fashion to preserve in aspic the pre-industrial forma­ tions of labour and creativity that survived in India, rather as Ruskin's Guild of St. George aimed to create an oasis of communitarian labour in modern Britain.160 The idea of an imperial duty to preserve Indian arts and crafts, as well as Indian monu­ ments, paralleled the movement (passionately supported by Ruskin and led by Morris) to preserve ancient, and especially Gothic, architecture both from destruction and from the overzealous restoration of contemporary architects. 161 But far from fulfilling this function, economic imperialism was destroying Indian art, as Morris pointed out to a Birmingham audience in 1879 (almost forty years after Pugin's assault on the manufacturers of"Brumagem Gothic"), in his address "Art for the People." It was the experience of reading Birdwood's guidebook to the Indian Section of the Paris Exhibition of 1878, Morris acknowledged, which had drawn his attention to the tragedy befalling Indian craft traditions. "Now, it is a grievous result of the sickness of civilisation that this art is fast disappearing before the advance of western conquest

294

CO L ON I A L G O T H I C

and commerce. . . . While we are met here in Birmingham to further the spread of education in art, Englishmen in India are, in their short-sightedness, actively destroying the very sources of that education- jewellery, metal-work, pottery, calico-printing, brocade-weaving, carpet-making- all the famous and historical arts of the great peninsula have been for so long treated as matters of no importance, to be thrust aside for the advantage of any paltry so-called commerce." 162 Echoing the earlier arguments of the South Kensington design reformers, Morris acknowledged in this passage that Indian art, and more generally Islamic art as a whole, could be the "source " for a renaissance of British design.The other great "source" of this rebirth was, of course, the Gothic as represented particularly by the textiles being assiduously collected by the South Kensington Museum that he claimed to have used "as much as any man living." 163 Morris became an "Art Referee" of the Museum, recommending works for purchase, including both medieval European and Indian specimens, and his profound debt to its collections of medieval textiles has been widely acknowledged. He particularly admired medieval textiles that incorporated Islamic influences, such as the Sicilian silks, "the very crown of design as applied to weaving, " which were "designed in the heyday of mediaeval art, uniting the wild fantasy and luxurious intricacy of the East with the straight forward story telling and clear definite drawing of mediaeval Europe." 164 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company, an association of "Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture and the Metals" 165 led by Morris but including Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was founded in r86r, a pivotal moment for the revival of arts and crafts in Britain. The company's display at the r862 Exhibition in South Kensington provided a worthy successor to Pugin's Mediaeval Court. The exhibits included]. P. Seddon's King Rene's Honey moon Cabinet, which was decorated by Brown, Burne-Jones, and Rossetti and included panels depicting fanciful medieval figures engaged in the very crafts-embroidery, pottery, weaving, and woodwork- in which Morris and his associates would engage. In r867, Sir Henry Cole commissioned from the firm a neo-medieval dining room for the Museum, which can be seen today, adjacent to Godfrey Sykes's great ceramic Refreshment Room (see fig. ror). Morris was also deeply interested also in the Indian collections at South Kensington. It was he who presented the Museum with its first significant Indian sculpture, sug­ gesting that unlike most of his contemporaries, he saw merit in the fine, as well as the decorative, arts of India.166 Patrick Brandinger has provided an eloquent analysis of the few passages in which Morris discusses Indian art, concluding that he found it "superior to most Western equivalents. " 167 But Brandinger misses the most compelling evidence: Morris's own work as a designer. It is here that we find a utopian conflation of Indian

29 5

CO L O N I A L G O T H IC

FIG.

133

William Morris, Madras MusLin, r 88o-r88 1 . Manuf�crured for Morris and Company by Alex ander

Morton and Company, Darvel, Scorland. Woven corron and silk lena, 23 - ;.

x

68 'h i n . (60.9

x

'73 · 9 em). Vicroria

and AJberr Museum, London. Gifr of Morris and Company

textile patterns and the Gothic. Almost all of Morris's designs for both woven and printed textiles betray both medieval and Islamic influences; the extent to which Indian design influenced his work has been underestimated, though it was sometimes explicitly acknowledged as in the Indian Diaper pattern of 1 877 or the Madras Muslin of r88o-r88r (fig. 1 33).168 Morris's textile designs form the aesthetic culmination of colonial Gothic, combining a rejection of modern production techniques and commercialised aesthetics with a refined sensibility drawn both from medieval and Islamic sources. Morris's interest in textiles ran counter to the dominant concerns of the era. Lecturing on Textile Fabrics in r884, at the International Health Exhibition in South Kensington, he announced his intention to treat the subject "as an artist and archaeologist, and not as a manufacturer."16 9 Despite his position as an employer and the director of a company, he considered himself to be a single creative individual, effectively a Gothic workman. After Morris and Company moved to Merton Abbey in r88r, Morris was able to preside over a worksh op that seemed to offer a modern equivalent of th e guild structure that had nurtured and protected the craftsman ideal of Ruskin's medieval

C OLO N I A L G O T H I C

21, YOU NO STREET, KENSINGTON SQUARE. W. · ,

J

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-,?/1

' tl!/ft

t

II''

�� -�

•' . . ,, F I G . 134

Edward Burne-Jones , Caricature of William Morris Giving a lecture on

1880. Graphite on embossed notepaper, 9 William Morris Gal lery, London

Weaving,

c.

x

6 'Is in. (22.9

x

17.5 em).

Venice but that also resonates with Kipling's images of wood-carvers and weavers in India. Morris described Merton Abbey as "a place which hangs doubtful between the past and the present." t:o Steam-powered machinery was banned, the River Wandie providing motor power through a waterwheel; hand-weaving was among the most prominent of activities conducted on the site. The handloom weaver had become the tragic symbol of industrial displacement in the early nineteenth century-an entire category of labourer made redundant by new machinery. The spinning and weaving of cotton had become the most highly automated of all industrial processes, as was demonstrated by Hibbert and Platt's cotton machines, shown at the Crystal Palace (see fig. 4) . 1 71 Morris's own manual labour became symbolic of the rejection of the machine and the return to traditional hand technologies. Burne-Jones's caricature of

CO L O N I AL G O T H I C

297

his friend demonstrating the technique of weaving, with his customary vigour and enthusiasm, in front of a mesmerised audience suggests something of the performative and polemical nature of Morris's work (fig. 134) . Recent scholarship has tended to emphasise that Morris's employees had rather less creative freedom than the Gothic ideal would require. And as Harvey and Press have demonstrated, the company was indeed run on modern commercial lines.172 None the less, Morris was concerned, not only about industrialisation but also, like Ruskin, about the division of labour and the resultant de-skilling of the workforce. Speaking to the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction, he lamented not only the social but the aesthetic effects of this: " I think it is rather a thing to be deprecated that (as in Lyons and Paris) there should be a class of mere artists . . . who furnish designs, as it were, ready made, to what you may call the technical designers, the technical designers having next to nothing to do with the drawing, but having what you may call the grinding work to do. The designer learns about as much as is necessary for his work from the weaver, in a perfunctory and dull sort of manner, and the result is not so satisfactory as it would be if a different system were adopted."n The Gothic stonemason would have control over the design and the manufacture of his sculpture, as would the Indian potter or weaver over his designs. The beauty of their product, Morris, Ruskin, and Birdwood had contested, reflected the beauty of the social structure and the joyfulness of the work that went into their making. "The thing which I understand by real art, " claimed Morris in 1879, "is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour.'T4

LA B O U R AND 0 RNAMENTAL I S M

Two subsequent developments throw a significant retrospective light on mid-Victorian colonial Gothic, revealing the ambivalent nature both of the Gothic revival and of British colonialism in India. The first, directly involving Queen Victoria, might be considered a neo-feudal appropriation of colonial Gothic; the second traces a direct link between the concept of colonial Gothic and perhaps the most significant anti-imperial narrative of the twentieth century, the movement towards Indian independence dominated by Mahatma Gandhi. India played an increasingly important role in celebrations of the invented traditions of the British Empire, becoming central to the "Ornamentalism" that David Cannadine has wittily identified as a central trope of late-Victorian and twentieth-century British imperialism.1 �5 Medieval society had, after all, been characterised by the absolute rule of hereditary monarchs, by strict social hierarchies and (so the romanticised Tory view

C O L O N I AL G O T H I C

of history insisted), by vertical friendships that bound lord and serf i n a familial relation of mutual respect and duty. No longer a tenable ideal in liberal Britain after the Reform Acts of 1832 and r867, in which traditional cultures of deference had all but disap­ peared, this feudal ideal could still- it was argued- be found in India. The Victorian Raj appropriated formal rituals of power, such as the dw'bar, from th e Mughal Empire, adopting visual forms that attempted to present a regime based on mercantile imperi­ alism as a legitimate feudal dynasty. The rigidity of the caste system, as it was perceived and formulated by colonial officials and theorists, seemed to echo the class hierarchies of the medieval era.n The "native princes, " like the barons of the Plantagenets, would swear fealty at court and, if necessary, lead their troops into war behind the monarch. The humble labourer, it seemed, contentedly occupied his place in the social hierarchy, unlike his unionised and militant counterparts in Manchester or Sheffield. When the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) visited India in 1877, following Victoria's coro­ nation as empress the previous year, Kipling was commissioned

to

rig up a colourful

neo-feudal colonial Gothic durbar at Delhi, with mock heraldry (which Kipling him­ self concocted) and banners sewn by an army of imperial needlewomen.c Nearer to home, Queen Victoria revelled in opportunities to express "her Majesty's affection for her Indian children " 178 and found in Abdul Karim, known as the Munshi, the perfectly discreet servant. The Colonial and Indian Exhibition was the largest of all the i mperial jamborees to be held in London and the last at South Kensington, an apogee of Ornamental ism and the apotheosis of colonial Gothic. It was visited by an astonishing total of over five million people. The opening on 4 May r886 was one of the culminating pageants of empire.1 -9 The Queen-Empress entered via the lavish, Orientalist interior of the vestibule (fig. 135), dominated by Joseph Edgar Boehm's equestrian statue of the Prince of Wales. The decorations were crowned by three large impasto ceramic plaques, manufactured by Doulton's, implicitly comparing the Indian potter (in a scene almost certainly taken from a Kipling drawing), the English smith, and the Australian farmer, implying an equivalence rather than a racial hierarchy. Indeed, the three plaques enshrined a colonial Gothic comparison, whose conclusion- the superior artistry of the Indian potter-would be revealed when the visitor, like Queen Victoria on the opening day, passed beneath these emblems, entered the Indian gallery to confront the fruits of the artisan's labour. Here was the Indian Silk Culture Court, organised by W illiam Morris's collaborator Thomas Wardle. 180 After examining the industrial arts of India, the Queen processed in the open air through the Exhibition's spectacular, hybrid architecture. The Graphic's double-spread of The Queen: 'Twixt East and West (fig. 136) positions Victoria between the "Gwalior Gate " on the left, commissioned by

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FIG. 1 3 5

/; � • L,.f '.·

I ! I E \"I �IIIH I.E. )". /1• l ;.r

J . D . Cooper, engraving after F. G. Kitron, Colonial and Indian E·d1ibitiou, The Vestibule. Artjournal (1886):

17 (suppl . ) . Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

FIG. 136

The Opening of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition b)' the Queen - Twixt l:.ast and West. Wood engraving,

Cmphic, 8 May I886. Yale Un iversit}' Library

300

CO L O N I A L G O T H I C

the Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior, and a stage-set simulation of "Old London" on the right, which was a bizarre survival from the International Health Exhibition of 1884. Once again, the colonial and the Gothic are brought into juxtaposition, and the spec­ tacular manifestations of modern technology, so prominent in 1851, have been banished to the margins. The Gwalior gateway, itself a peculiar hybrid of Western form and Indian motifs, was designed by Major ]. B. Keith on the basis of his study of local stonework and created in Gwalior by local stonemasons whose traditional forms of patronage had dried up.1 8 1 The "object" in creating this "eclectic piece . . . was to assist some 2,000 starving artisans," as Keith noted in 1886. 1 82 Beneath it, in the Graphic's plate, is placed a row of Indian craftsmen and servants, bowing loyally, who "heartily joined in the welcome given as Her Majesty passed by. " 183 These colonial subjects are balanced by the preposterous, historicist spectacle of the yeomen of the guard opposite. The Graphic's plate emphasises Victoria's position at the symbolic nexus of Indian and British histories and peoples. Passing through the Gwalior Gate, the Queen encoun­ tered elaborate dioramas of "Jungle Life" and "the Elephant Hunt," and encountered a bazaar, with "shops similar to those found in average Indian villages." 184 She processed through Birdwood's Indian galleries of the South Kensington Museum, where Kipling's drawings of artisans were displayed, and th e event concluded in a ceremony at the Albert Hall. 183 As in 1851, there were models of Indian figures, this time a set of full-size waxwork casts of nonwhite figures from across the British Empire.186 This time, however, they served the purposes of illustrating a scheme of racial typology and gave little informa­ tion about cultural practices or l abour. The comparative study of labour, however, with Indian crafts being offered as a significant alternative to British industry, was central to the exhibition. The most spectacular innovation was the inclusion of a group of thirty-four living Indian craftsmen- "native artisans . . . at work as they would be in India. "187 The presentation of these "brightly costumed Indian artificers" in 1886 was far more theatrical than in previous London exhibitions. The Illustrated London News draughtsman depicted Carpet Weaving in this setting, though here the weavers are glimpsed from a viewpoint to the right, an informal, picturesque composition suggesting that the viewer might be chancing upon this scene in an Indian marketplace (fig. 137) . The illustrator also ensures that the woven carpets to the left and in the foreground can be clearly seen. The engraving thus offers the Victorian viewer a morally satisfying glimpse of creative artisanal labour protected and endorsed by the British Empire, a process whose untroubled excellence is demonstrated by the quality of its products. The carpet weavers formed a particularly picturesque spectacle, aural and visual, and became for the Graphic th e "favourites of the season": "Five happy boys, three or four

COLO N I A L G O THIC

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301

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Carpet- Weaving (Courtyard ofIndian Palace). Wood engraving, Illustrated London News, r7 July r886.

Yale Cenrer for Brirish An, Paul Mellon Collection

of whom who sit on a stick with their backs to the visitor, and listlessly sway their bodies, and every now and then clap together their large shoes as they respond to the pattern-song of their head-mate Petharam. 'Three reds and one blue' Petharam sings, in a high-pitched voice, and this is n ot only repeated by the assistant concerned, but as soon as said, nimble fingers seize the red and the blue, and with the swiftness of buoyant youth, dash the coloured threads through the warp, and with a sudden jerk tie a knot just in time, for in a second the other hand brings down the circular knife that severs the remainder of the thread. "188 Continuing a long tradition of staged per­ formances of exotic ethnic groups reaching back to and before George Catlin's famous American Indian shows of the r84os, the presence of these skilled craftsmen alongside their products indicated that labour itself (rather than the familiar dancing and enter­ tainments) constituted the central theatrical performance.187 Whereas at the Great Exhibition of 1851 the labour of m achines had held centre stage, by r886 Indian craft labour itself played an exemplary role at the heart of South Kensington. The authorities made little acknowledgement of the village system as an alternative to the cash nexus and commodity trading, however. Their products were not only on display but very

302

FIG.

C O L O N I AL G O T H I C

138

in. (25.3

x

john Lockwood Kipling, Carpet Loom, Umritsurjail. Pencil, pen, and ink with watercolour, 10

x

14 1 /s

36 em). Victoria and Albert Museum, London

much on sale, and the artisans made objects

to

order for the exhibition visitors.190

As Saloni Mathur has noted, the spectacle of craft labour and the portrayal of "the Indian craftsman" at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition was in no sense "authentic, " though it was symptomatic of the hybrid culture of colonialism. The figures on dis­ play, in fact, included a group of prison inmates from Agra gaol who had been taught handicrafts while incarcerated in the colonial penal system, under the supervision of Dr. J. W Tyler, the Superintendent. Also among their number was a destitute Indian who had spent years wandering the streets of London.19 1 The teaching of artisanal skills in the prison system was part of a broader policy of punitive re-education directed at castes and tribes identified by British ethnography as predisposed to criminal activity, which successive Criminal Tribes Acts attempted to control. 1 92 It was hoped that hand­ io·aft, as an exemplary form of labour, would effect a moral transformation in these individuals.1 93 Kipling had drawn convicts ar work at the carpet loom in the Amritsar gaol in the Punjab as early as r872 (fig. 138) , in a strikingly similar composition to that in the Illustrated London News (see fig. 137) . 1 94 As an influential advisor for the r886 Exhibition, Kipling may have been instrumental in proposing the inclusion of the Agra inmates, although he publicly expressed his scepticism about the quality of the

C O L O N I AL G O T H I C

gaol manufactures. It is, of course, richly ironic that "traditional" handicrafts, admired by theorists of colonial Gothic for their rootedness in simple village communities, were inculcated in a city prison by the Benthamite machinery of colonial reformism. And it is little short of grotesque that the products of this system should be paraded in London as the scions of the ideal Indian village. Yet so it was. Doctor Tyler conducted the correspondent of the Illustrated London News through the "dense masses of spectators" in the Indian courts to inspect "this colony of busy Indian bees." Presented as "Indian artists and artisans," their convict origins were not publicly acknowledged; the doctor had, the paper merely noted, "exercised great care and discrimination in selecting the men." Eventually, in "niche

n,

"

the journalist was

i ntroduced to "the venerable Buxshiram" who "turns the potter's wheel with remarkable dexterity for a 'centenarian."' 195 Generally known as Bakshiram, and claiming an age of 102, he produced the kind of small clay models of village types as could be seen on display in the South Kensington collection (see fig. 132). Bakshiram was himself to become an exhibit in more than one context. As Mathur notes, he was among the "natives" brought to the exhibition from India, Ceylon, Hong Kong, Cyprus, British Guiana, Australia, and the Cape who were invited to Windsor Castle for a luncheon given by Queen Victoria.196 Victoria enjoyed this kind of stage­ managed spectacle in which she directly encountered her most humble yet picturesque subjects. After this event, the Queen commissioned portraits of a select group of eight of these figures from Rudolf Swoboda, a young Austrian artist whose work displayed remarkable painterly bravura. If his portrait of Princess Victoria of Hesse was, in the Queen's view, "pretty," Swoboda proved far more original in his portrait heads on small panels, measuring just over ten-by-six inches.1 9- With broad, swift brushstrokes and rich colours, he modelled not mere ethnographic types, but compelling portraits of individuals such as Muhammad Hussain, the Delhi coppersmith, who is seen in profile; Ramlal, a melancholy nine-year-old carpet weaver from Cawnpore, his head l eaning wistfully to the left; and finally the static figure of Bakshiram, the distant look in his rheumy eyes suggesting disdain or disbelief at h is peculiar surroundings (fig.

139) . Although Swoboda's images represent labourers, they are no longer images of labour but rather character heads of exotic individuals in the Romantic tradition of Delacroix, compelling sketches of the Queen-Empress's loyal feudal subjects. In a final and complex demonstration of colonial hybridity, Queen Victoria com­ missioned Kipling's principal protege, the Sikh woodcarver Bhai Ram Singh, to decorate a breakfast room at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, a large neo-Renaissance villa created by Prince Albert as an antidote to the formalities of London and Scotland. Ram Singh provided Victoria with an lndo-Saracenic durbar hall, a spectacular back-

FIG. 139

Rudolf Swoboda, Bakshimm, 1. 886. Oil on panel, w 1 /.,

x

6 ' /., in. (26

x

1 5 . 9 e m ) . Royal Collection

C O L O N I AL G O T H I C

FIG. L 4 0

The Durbar Room, Osborne House, Isle of Wight

drop to the increasingly Indianised court of the r89os (6g. 1 40) . Although this may seem the perfect example of a colonial Gothic work of art, in which a loyal troupe of medieval Indian workers pay obeisance to the Queen-Empress descended from the Plantagenets, there was no such happy resolution to the dilemma of craft labour under the conditions of modern imperial capitalism. Traditional woodcarving methods were too expensive for the Queen's privy purse, and as a result of extensive industrialisation in the area, there were too few woodcarvers with the requisite skills left in Amritsar, Ram Singh's home town in the Punjab where Kipling had sketched textile workers a decade earlier. Plaster casts of wood carvings were eventually installed into the breakfast

CO L O N I A L G OTHIC

room a t Osborne, a chalky simulacrum revealing all too vividly t h e fragile and illusory character of Victoria's dreams of new feudal kingdom in South Asia.

CoL O N I A L GoT H I C AND I ND I A N I ND EP E ND E N C E

Leaving Johannesburg station for Durban in October r894, a young Indian lawyer based in South Africa, Mohondas K. Gandhi, was handed by a friend a copy of Ruskin's

Unto This Last. So profound was its impact that, as Gandhi recalled in his autobiography, "I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book. "19 8 The resulting"instantaneous, practical transformation, " I suggest, constitutes a final reve­ lation of the radical, though self-contradictory, implications of the theory of colonial Gothic, which its original proponents were unable to recognise. The first results were modest: Gandhi moved the production of Indian Opinion, the journal for South Africa's Indian community he oversaw, from offices in the city of Durban to"a farm, on which everyone should labour, drawing the same living wage, and attending to the press work in spare time."199 This closely echoes Ruskin's utopian land schemes for the Guild of St. George. But Gandhi absorbed the underlying implications of Ruskin's thinking and moved far beyond the Englishman's own tentative practical initiatives. In 1908 he translated

Unto This Last into Gujerati, creating"a paraphrase" entitled Sarvodaya- "the uplift of all" - the term he adopted to describe his own unique brand of Indian socialism.200 The "teachings of Unto This Last" he summarised as: r.

That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2. That a lawyer's work has the same value as a barber's, inasmuch as all h ave the same right of earning their livelihood from their work.

3· That a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman, is the life worth living.20 1 These conclusions were more starkly drawn than Ruskin's, though the liberation of rates of pay from market mechanisms (Gandhi's second point) was one of the most radical claims made in Unto This Last. For Gandhi, these revelations, particularly as contained in the third point (which he recalled"had never occurred to [him ] " before the encounter with Ruskin), provided a manifesto for the rediscovery of a village India closely resembling the arts and crafts idyll presented by George Birdwood. Like Ruskin, Gandhi denounced the machine, the division of labour, and the competitive system that it fostered; moreover, like Birdwood and Morris, he especially lamented its ruinous

C O L O N I AL G O TH I C

effects in India through the colonial economic system: " It is machinery that has impoverished India. It is difficult to measure the harm that Manchester has done to us. It is due to Manchester that Indian handicraft has all but disappeared. " 202 In lan­ guage reminiscent of Unto This Last, Gandhi proposed a complete rejection of indus­ trial modernity: "You cannot build non-violence on a factory civilisation, but it can be built on self-contained villages. Rural economics, as I have conceived it, eschews exploitation altogether, and exploitation is the essence of violence. You have, therefore, to be rural minded before you can be non-violent, and to be rural-minded you have to have faith in the spinning wheel."203 Gandhi thus focused his redemptive plans for India on the exemplary figure of the village labourer, the craftsman documented in Kipling's vignettes and idealised in Birdwood's Industrial Arts ofIndia. Gandhi's ideal was the regeneration of the Indian village, a community in which "economics were organised on the basis of non-violent occupations, not on the basis of the rights of man but on the duties of man."204 This image of the self-contained, self-sufficient village is, however, closer to the vision of late-nineteenth-century anarchists such as Paul Kropotkin than to the neo-feudal vision of Maine or to the strict author­ itarianism licensed by Ruskin and Carlyle. Furthermore, Victorian advocates of colonial Gothic- even the anti-imperialist William Morris-had assumed that the preservation of village India could occur only through paternalistic governance by the British. Gandhi's great political insight, however, was that although a return to the handicrafts will "exclude exploitation and slavery, " the ideal India he envisaged in a state of true freedom could only come into existence as an independent nation, liberated from the British Empire. 205 His view of the struggle for independence stood apart from that of his allies in the Congress Party: "If Swaraj [independence or self-rule] cannot be attained by the sin of killing Englishmen, it cannot be attained either by the erection of huge factories. Gold and silver may be accumulated but they will not lead to the establish­ ment of Swaraj. Ruskin has proved this to the hilt. " 206 Gandhi's message-a difficult one for his Marxian fellow nationalists such as Jawaharlal Nehru to accept- was that a renunciation of industrialisation (not merely its capitalist forms) and of empire were one and the same. In the end, a re-examination of the question of labour, such as Ruskin had undertaken, reveals both the interdependence and the fundamental malignity of industry and empire. Gandhi rejected the idea, shared by theorists of colonial Gothic and the adminis­ trators of the Raj, that in comparison with Europe, India represented an anterior, inferior state of cultural development. Rather than illustrating Europe's past, as Maine had suggested, Indian village life for Gandhi offered a utopian vision of the future, much as Morris had posited a neo-medieval future in News .from Nowhere. Gandhi believed,

308

CO L O N I AL G O T H I C

above al l, that " if I ndia, and through I ndia, the world, is to ach ieve real freedo m, then . . . we shall have to go and l ive in the vil lages - i n huts, and not palaces. "20- I ndeed, India's lack of "development" on a Western model, which was considered a fatal weak­ ness by the organisers of the Great Exhib i tion, to be corrected by B ri t is h colonial interven tions, was fo r Gandhi the conscious result of the wisdom of earlier ages: " We have managed with the same kind of plough as existed thousands of years ago. We have retained the same kind o f cottages that we had i n former times and our indige­ nous education remains the same as before. We have had no system of l i fe-co rroding competition . . . . I t was not that we d id not know how to i nvent machinery, but o ur forefathers knew that if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fi b res. They, therefore . . . decided that we should o nly do would we could with our hands and feet. "208 The only solution was to close I ndia to outside i nB uences. In a world where the moment o f Gothic perfection was sti l l - outside the maj o r ci ties - apparently in place, i t must b e preserved and celebrated. Questions of labour were central to Gandh i's philosophy. His invocation of a divine law stating "that every man must earn his b read by labouring with h is own hands"209 resonates with Ruskin's invocation in

Crown of Wild Olive of Genesis 3.19,

" I n the

sweat o f thy face thou shalt eat bread," words inscribed also on the frame of B rown's

Work·.

Gandhi, in fact, like Ruskin and B rown, adopted an expressive theory of labour

in which labour is performed as both a duty and as the outward exp ression of inner moral rectitude, rather than as a mere means to reap financial rewards. Gandhi's con­ ception of labour, however, was also profoundly inBuenced by H indu traditions of meditation and asceticism, a spiritualism that had no counterpart among the essentially bourgeois theorists o f colonial Gothic. Gandhi also played an important role i n the

swadeshi

(variously translated as

"indigenousness" or " home industry") movement, which advocated a thorough rejection of industrialism, and the boycotting English goods and promoting indigenous manu­ factures, in pursuit of swaraj (self- rule) . The swadeshi critique was not only moral, political , and economic but also aesthetic. I ndeed, in the hands o f the

E. B .

Havell, a

B ri tish teacher at the Madras and Calcutta art schools, and the brilliant I ndian art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, as well as such artists as Aban indranath Tagore, it consti tuted a full-blown artistic movement during the fi rs t decades of the twentieth

century. 2 1 0 I n his

Appeal to the Women of India,

Gandhi emb raced the Ruski nian con­

cept of the legibil ity of a society's moral state in the physical appearance of i ts prod­ ucts: "There is an art that kills and an art that gives l i fe. The fi ne fab ric that we have i mported . . . has l i terally killed m illions of our brothers and sisters . . . True art must be evidence of happi ness, conten tment, and purity of its authors. And if you wi ll have

309

C O L O N I AL G O T H I C

such art revived in our midst, the use of lehadi [homespun white fab ric] is obligatory o n the best of you at the p resent moment. " 2 1 1 I n "the art that kills" there is an echo of Ruskin's vivid awareness o f the deadly nature o f labour under capitalism, the loss of the "whole human being" in the processes o f work, and the "fatal newness" he detected in industrial products . 2 1 2 The division of labour and the industrial system, Gandhi and Ruskin agreed, merely fuel a "craving for excessive consumption."2 1 3 Ruskin had made uncomfo rtably clear the extent to which the luxurious comforts of bourgeois life are won fro m the suffering of o thers . 2 1 4 The burning of foreign, machine-made cloth organised by Gandhi i n

1929,

a symbolic renunciation o f the products of European

industrialism, carries with i t echoes of the Boston Tea Party and a l ong history of an ti-colonial demonstrations, and also o f the dissenting actions of B ritish working­ class radicals from the rick burning o f " Captain Swing" to the factory burning o f the Luddites. But the destruction of these vulgar i ndustrial fabrics, symbolic of the evils of industrialisation, also provides a spectacul a r enactmen t o f the aesthetic teachings of Ruskin's " Nature of G o th ic" and even o f Henry Cole's " Gal lery of False Principles . " Gandhi's most poignant and effective gesture, however, was o n e of self-transformation. Rather than merely advocating the work of the I ndian village labourer, he actually became one. In

1908,

Gandhi had promoted the ideal of hand-spinning and hand­

loom weaving in his text

Hind Swaraj ( I ndian

self-rule) as both a metaphorical figure

and a practical p roposal . But as Gandhi candidly acknowledged in his autobiography, when the

Saytagraha Ashram

(the working community named "Firmness in the Truth")

was founded, "we introduced a few handl ooms there. But no sooner had we done this than we found ourselves up against a difficulty. All o f us belonged either to the liberal p ro fessions or to business: none was an artisan. We needed a weaving expert to teach us to weave." Most significant was the plan to "be able to clo the ourselves entirely in cloth manufactured by our own hands. We therefore forthwith discarded the use of mill-woven cloth and a l l the members of the Ashram resolved to wear hand-woven cloth from Indian yarn only. " Gandhi continues: "The adoption of this practice brought us a world of experience, " 2 1 5 leading h is group of highly educated fol l owers to seek enlightenment through craft skills. William Morris had learned the ski l ls of the weaver and the printer, his arms and hands often s tained with inks and dyes, whil e nonethe­ less remain ing ineluctably bourgeois i n his l i fe and habi ts. But Gandhi , the dapper, sophisticated lawyer of London and Durban, renounced absolutely the l uxuries of middle-class life and painstakingly adopted the persona and the skills of a village spinner. I t was during his imprisonment by the B ritish Raj between adopted the act of spinning cotton and weaving of his redemptive p roject. He declared that the

1922

and

1924

that Gandhi

Khadi as the most powerful symbol charka, or spinning-wheel, was the

310

COLO N I A L G O T H IC

F I G . 141

Mahatma Gandhi De111onstmting Cotton-Spinning on His Own Charka in Mirazpur, 1925

"only device" that could u n i te all Indians as "children o f the same land."2 1 6 Opening i n I927 a national exhibition of Khadi i n Bangalore, he declared: "I stand before you as a self-chosen representative of the dumb, semi-starved . . . m illions of India . . . God wil l i ng, at no distant time, we will find our vil lages, which at the p resent moment seem to be crumb l i ng i n to ruins, becoming h ives of honest and patient i ndustry . . . . I n the work of God, as I venture to suggest i t is, the harvest is indeed rich . "n- H e genuinely hoped to return I n d i a t o the paradisiacal condition where "the village worker will . . . be a living embodiment of industry," a colonial Gothic utopia envisaged by his Victorian p redecessors.2 1 8 A photograph of Gandhi in 1925 (fig. 141) shows h i m as he wished to be seen: a labouring figure, cross-legged on the floor. Gandhi self-consciously assumed the posture of the models of potters and spinners at the Crystal Palace o f

r85r,

those "squalid beggars, half naked, o r w i t h scanty fold of coarsest cotton fl ung

around their wasted limbs"21 9 so troubling to mid-Victorian taste. By adopting the appearance and the pursuits of such village artisans as Kipling had observed half a century before, however, Gandhi was able to mobilise an ideology of the overwhelming

C OL O N I AL G O T H IC

3II

power. H is fragile body, suppo rted o n a n increasingly meagre diet, clad only i n simp le handwoven cloth, became an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist emblem for the twen­ tieth century, a statement of faith in the values and virtues of the village artisan, an anti-industrial icon of labour. Gandhi's recognition of the radical potential of colon ial Gothic as a critique both o f capitalism and imperialism enabled h i m to play a pivotal rol e in the dissolution of the British Empire at whose heart the idea had originated.

•

C O N C LU S I O N

•

LAestheticism and Labour

E A S T U N D E R S T O O D , b u t most famous, among Ruskin's p ro­

nouncements must surely be this:

" I have seen,

and heard, much

o f Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred gui neas fo r fl inging a pot of paint in the publ ic's face. " 1 Despite the graphic image of flung paint, curi­ ously prophetic of later modernist facture, Ruskin's denunciation of the painti ngs of James Abbott McNeill Whistler at the Grosvenor Gal lery in

r877 was

concerned not with style b u t rather with the relationship of labour and art. I shall suggest i n concludi ng this book that the famous trial of November

r878,

in which

Wh istler s ued Ruski n fo r libel, may be taken as a symbol i c endpo int of the m id­ Victorian moment.2 Ruskin's much-quoted passage derives from an otherwise l i ttle- read text entitled " Li fe G uards of New Life , " from

Fors Cfavigera. As with

many of h is " Letters to the

Working Men of Great B ritain , " the composition of the seventy-ninth issue, completed at Herne H i ll on

r8 June r877, was spurred

by a cutting. Ruskin will only reveal that

this fragment originated in a "pamphlet on social s ubjects" by "an extremely foo lish, and altogether insignificant person." I t read: "It is indeed a most blessed provision that men will not work without wages; i f they did, society would be overthrown fro m i t s roots. A m a n who woul d give h is labour for nothing would b e a social mo nster. " These sentiments were the absol ute anti thesis of Ruski n's ethical theory of labour, laid out most clearly in

Unto This Last,

which altogether rejects the market as an arb i ter of

the value, i nsisting instead o n social duty and self-exp ression as p roper motivations for work and fai rness as an arbiter of price. 3 He expected "free-heartedness of unselfish toil " from the participants in the G uild of St. George's farming venture at Torley in

O P P O S IT E :

Derail of fig. t.H

A E S T H E T ICI S M AND L A B O U R

Derbyshire, whom he directly addressed in this issue of Fors as "my Sheffield workm en . " They, perhaps, were the " Li fe G uards o f New Life . "4 Observance o f this system o f values, based o n h onesty, duty, and fair exchange, m ight, Ruskin con tinued, be expected above all of artists. Yet the commercialisation o f the art world, from the "abortion and falsehood" taught by Sir Henry Cole at South Kensington to "the Professorsh ips also o f Messrs. Agnew at Manchester" (a satirical reference to the fam ous art-deali ng dynasty) , had reduced art to "exchangeable prop­ erty. "5 I n chapters I , I I I , and I V, I discussed of Ruski n's own solutions to the p roblem of art education, and chapter V explored his belief that only a return to a p re-capitalist system could remove the tain t o f commercialism and the division of labour, leading back to a pure and d i rect relationship between producer and product. " Li fe Guards of a New Life , " therefo re , was a tart reiteration of Ruskinian orthodoxies, summarising many of the issues raised in this book. It was only after most of the letter was d rafted, that Ruskin visited the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery, a private venture organised by Sir Coutts Lindsay, in which advanced modern painting was displayed in an interior artfully arranged with textiles, ceramics, and plants deployed to create the effect of a palace of art insulated from the outside world.6 Although a wide range of work was on show, the Grosvenor gave pride of place to artists associated with the Aesthetic Movement. A complex and nebulous phenomenon, Aestheticism's project is aptly sum marised by Sidney Colvin's sentiment of

r86y:

"perfection of forms and colours - beauty, in a word - should be the prime object

of pictorial art. "- These ideas attained wide circulation through Wal ter Pater's essay "The School of Giorgione," published in

1877,

precisely the same moment as Ruskin's attack

on "The Social Monster." According to the siren voices of Aestheticis m - Charles Baudelaire in France, and later Algernon Charles Swinburne and Wal ter Pater in Eng­ land- art must be removed from the sphere of morality and truth, and must occupy its own, purely aesthetic realm of "art for art's sal 1 66 , 1 84; South Kensington Museum project and, 226 - 228; Sykes and, 187- 188,

198, 224, 227; Wh istler and, 3 1 9 - 3 20

Art journal, 120, !JO, 140 - 141, 154, 1 5 5 , 299 Arts an d

Crafts Movem en t, 3 18

Athenaeum, 59, 1 24, r28, 133 Atkin,

Edward, 215

•

Baron, J osep h , ' 5 3 - 1 54, r8o

Barrell, Jo h n, 40

Barr y, James, The Thames, 35 Baucom, ian, 276 Bau Daji Lad Museum. See Vic to ri a and Albert Museum i n Bombay

Bayl ey, R. S . , 2 1 8 , 359nn8 Benrinck, Will iam, 262

Berg, Maxine, 359nm Bermingham, Ann, JJ8m6

Ber n i n i , Giovanni Lorenzo, 219 Bhabha, Homi , 250, 2 62 - 263

biblical allusions, 29, 70, 107, 1 2 8 - 129, 280, 308, J r 8 - 3 1 9 Birdwood, George, 269, 2 7 0 , 287, 290, 292, 297, 306; The !ndwtrial Arts ofIndia, 278- 279, 280 - 28), 284, 292 - 293> 307

Blacksmiths F01ge and Bellows of Goatskin (engraving), 284, 285 Blake, William, 1 1 1

Blore, Edward, 241; Sheffieldfiwn the Attercliffi Road (engraving), r89- r9o

Bombay Pioneer, 286 Brailsford, 192, 2 1 2

Bra nt l i nge r, Patrick, 294 Brassey, Thomas, 40-41 B rett , Jo h n , T he Stollebrealur, 97-99, 98 B rooks , Chris, 44 Brown, Fo rd Madox, 34-35, 41 -44, r41, 1 59, 166- r67, 229-230, 294. Sec also Work -works: The Body of Harold Brought before William the Conqueror, 42, 43, 48; Canying Corn, 1 02 ; Geoffiq

Chaucer Reading " The Legend ofCustace. . . , " 42 - 44, 43; He Hayfield, n, J8, 102, 1 3 3 > 14 1 ; Heath Street; Hampstead, 25; jesus Washes Peters Feet, 6o, 6 r , 63; Tl1e Last ofEngland, 3 2 - J4, 33, 39, 79; Portrait ofjames Leatbart, 68, 69; 'X/aiting: A n English Fimide of1854- 5, 52> 53

Bruegel the Elder, P ieter, 99; The Han;esters, 83, 85, r 2 1 Bui!deJ; The, t97 Building News, 272, 273

B u lme r, H e n ry Taylor, 2 1 8 Burden, Jane. See Morris, Jane Burn, W L. , !J Burne-Janes, Edward , 255, 315; Caricature of William Morris Giving a Lecture on Wleaving, 296-297

Baden-Powell, ll. H . , 287 Baksh,

Amir, 289, 290

Bakshiram (Indian artisan), JOJ,

304

Bu r ne tt , W. H., 1 51, 1.53 But l e r, J ud it h, 29 Butterworth, George, 3471156

374

I NDEX

Caird, James, 89, 90, 104, 1 22, 338n14 "Calorifere," 215, 2I6 Cammel, Charles, 190, 192, 1 93-194, 1 9 5 Cannadine, David, 297 Carlisle, Janice, 323n9 Carlrle, Thomas, 41 , 44, 76, 8o, 266, 33511183; Gothic revival and, 277- 278; images of Christ and, 57-58, 6 t ; l i g h r a n d , 4 8 , 4 9 ; moral discourse of labour and, 28 - 29 , 145, 246, 248; representation of, 25, 5t, 70, 73-74> 75 -works: On Heroes, Hero-Wonhip and the Heroic in His101)', 75; Latter-Day Prmzpblets, 67; Past and Presen t , 8, 28, 29, 44, 58, 67, 149, 252, 27 7, 330n56, 333n u 4; Sar­ tor Resartus, 74, 95, 336 n 2 LO Cassell, John, 246 Chambers, J. D., 89 Chantrey, Francis, 219 Chartism, t , 57, 217, 3351H83 child labour, 93, t72, 206- 207, 357n64 Christian Social ism, 56-63, 75, t42, t72, 33511186; labour relations and, 177- 178, 352nt8r Clark, Frederick, 208 Clark, T. J . , q - 18 class identity, 332n98; as category of enqui ry, 12, 1 4 - t 5 ; Christ as working man and, 56- 57, 58-63; hierarchies of value and, 5 3 - 56, 297 - 298; Indian craft and, 297 - 298; Sharples and, 1 3 8 - 1 3 9 , 14t, t48 - t49, 153 - 1 55 Cobbett, William, 252 Cohn, Bernard, 267 Cole, George Vicar, 90, 98, 99, 104, 107; Harvest Time, 83- l08, 84 Cole, Sir Hen ry, t o - n , 188, 215, 234, 267, 294; art educa­ tion and, 223- 226; Gallery of False Principles, 309; reformist project and, 263 - 265; Ruskin and, 237, 24 1; South Kensington Museum and, 222-223; Sykes and, 224 - 22 5 . See also South Kensington Museum Cole, Henrr H ardy: Catalogue by, 29I; The jel/Jeller (engraving), 29t Collingham, E. M . , 262 Collins, E.J.T., 338n 1 7 Colonial a n d Indian Exhibition o f r886 (South Kensing­ ton), 16, 298-303 colonial Gothic, 243 - 3u; British policy and, 267- 276; concept of, 248-250; Gandhi and, 250, 306-31 1 ; Grear Exhibition displays and, 243 - 250; I ndian design and, 243, 244, 246, 258-265; Morris and, 292 - 297; Orna­ mental ism and, 297-306; Sconish vs. Indian labour and, 265- 267; village communities and, 276-292, 303. See also Gothic revival Colvin, Sid ney, 3 ' 4 Committee o f the Co-operative Conference, 1 8 3 compensation for labour: agricultural workers and, 89, 94-98, t 2 t - t22; artworks and, tt7, 1 46 - 147; p iece­ master system and, t70; tradesmen and, 348n75. See also valuation of labour conditions of labour, t , 8 - 10; agriculture and, 88- 102; Brown's i magery and, 22, 24; health and, 208- 2 1 3 , 3 5 t , 357n82; Sheffield steel industry a n d , 9 - LO, 1 9 5 - t97; textile industry and, L94 - L9 5 ondor, Eustace, 66

Coningham, Wi lliam, 228 Constable, John, The Wheatfield, 1 04 - 1 06, 105 Cooke, George, Sheffieldfi"om the Atterdiffe Road (engraving), 189- 190 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 308 Cooper, J. D., Colonial and fndian Exhibition, 299 Cooper, Thomas Sidney, 341n73 co-operative movemen t , 177- 185 Copland, Samuel, Agriculture A11cient and Modern, 99 - IOO, l l 9 Corbyn, Frederick, 268 Cordingley, David, 98 Cornelius, Peter, 42 Cornhill Magazine, 2]!, 232, 236 Corn Laws, 90, 339n26 Courbct, Gustave, 1 7 Cousen, H., Labour (engraving), 131 Crawford, Arthur, 272 Crawford Markers, Bom bay, 272, 273, 274 Creswick, Benjamin, Bust ofjohn Ruskin, 239 Crossland, James, 146 - 148, 1 70, 349n77 Crowe, Eyre, The Found1y, 159 - 16 t , 160 Crowe, Joseph, 268 Cuff, R. I�, 254 Curtis, Gerard, 5 1 Cyclops Works, The (unknown artist), 190- 197, 191, 240, 241 Daniels, Stephen, 104, 156 Da,· id, Jacques-Louis, 36 de Forest, Lockwood, 287 de Loutherbourg, Philip James, 165, 198; Coalbrookdale by Night, t56- 1 58, 157 Denis, Rafael Cardoso, 225 Dent, John Dent, t22 Dickens, Charles, 59, 221, 334n 1 47, 36on130; Great Expec­ tatiom, 1 50; Hard T imes, 69-70 Dickinson$ Comprehemive Pictures, 9 - 10; Agriculture, 8 6 - 87 ; hot-air swvc, 2 1 5 , 216; India display, 244; The Mediaeval Court, 245, 248; Moving Mflchine�y, 245; Sheffield Hardware, 9 - 1 0 , II, '93- 194; transept, 3- 4 Didcrot, Denis, Ei1cydopedie, 1 6 5 Donarello, Dm;id, 7 3 Dare, Gustave, illustrations to London: A Pilgrimage, 2 1 2 Driver, Felix, 94 Duranrv, Edmond, 164 Durrant, Henry, 2 1 4 Dyce, William, 1 28, 214 Dyson, John, 202 Earlom, Richard, 155, 156 East Parade Congregational Chapel (Leeds), 63-64 Ellis, Sarah Stackncy, 32 Elron, Arthur, 1 2 Ely, John, 66 Emerson, William, 27 2 empire, concept of, 1 1-12, 16. See also colonial Gorhic; I ndia Engels, Friedrich, t 97, 204, 217 engineering industry. See Amalgamated Societ)' of Engi neers; F01ge, 711e equipoise, concept of, 1 3 , 17

375

INDEX

Ewart, William, 222 27, 28 - 29. See also Brown, Ford Mad ox; C arlrle , Thomas; moral discourse of labour; rel i gio n ; Ruskin, John

exp ressive t h eo ry of' work,

Fairbairn,

Thomas, 176, 177

f'alse consciousness, concept of',

261

Farmers Magazine, 340n54

!'arrar, Frederick William, 62 Fe rguso n , s; · Samuel, The F01giug ofthe Anchor (poem), 1 68 - 169 Flaxman, Joh n , 219 Ford, Sarah Ann, 153 F01ge, The (S harp les) , 8, 133- 1)6, 134· IJ 5, 167, 203- 204; a na l ys i s of, 164- 1 69; compa red with other works, 1 5 5 - 1 64, 284; co-operative movement a n d , 177- 185; hiera rchy of labour and, 182; labour relations and, 1 69 - 177 Foster, John, 177, 341n73 Fourier, Charles, 178 !'owke, Francis, 223, 234; Design for the Leclltre Theatre Farade, 224 Frere, Sir Bartle, 269, 272 Fried, Michael, 164 Fro u d e, J. A., 348n62 Furni va l l , F J . , 144, 255 328n3' Gan dhi, Mo han d as K. (Mahatma), 278, 297, )06-JII, JIO gargovles, 256, 272, 275 G any, Alfred, 192 gender, 41, ros, 154; agricultural imagery and, 90, 9 1 -94, 104-105, 339n32; as category o f analysis, r s - r 6; co­ operatives and, 182 - 1 83; Ford Madox Brown and, 29-30, 32- 34, JJ, 50- 53; H icks's imagery and, 30- )2, ;r; hierarchies of value and, 50-53· 6 5 - 66, 1 82 - 183; "separate spheres" concept and, 29-34 , 147, 148; unions and, I72- 173, 175 G erma n Na tio r 1 al G a l lery, 164 Ghiberri, Lorenzo, 216 Goethe, Johann Wol fgang von, 252 Gogh, Vincent van, 212 Gombrich, E. H., 5 5 Gothic revival, 250-252, 252-258. See also colo n ia l Gothic; R usk i n , J oh n "Giitzism," 252- 254, 255 Govier, Samuel Edward, 321 Gramsci, Antonio, 1 38 Graphic, l'l1e (publication), 92, 93; Amateur Navvies at Oxjiml . . . , 72-73; I!Je Queen : 'Tivixt East and West; 298, 299· )00 Gambart, Ernest,

Grearbach, William, IJ4

I n du stry of All Nations 1 , 99; critique of, 258-265; f'a rm i n g i m agery and, 8 6 - 87; hierarchies of value and, 3 - 5 , 259 - 265; Indian exhibits at, r r - 12, 243, 244, 246, 247, 259- 260; labouring body and, 246, 248 - 250; m a ch ine ry and, 7-8, 245, 246, 248; manu f'acrured products and, 216, 253; Mediaeval Court at, 1 2 , 245, 248, 250; O.fficirtl Descriptit;e and !llustmted Camlogue, 5 - 7. 6, 8, lO, ll;

Great Exhibition of the Works of (1851),

Paxton's Crystal Palace p ri nts and, 243- 246, 244- 245, 248, 249 - 250; Sheffield Hardware display and, 9 - 10, II, t93- 194, 210; Sheffield Sch ool of Design and, 215, 2 r 6 ; "The Transept," ;-4, 243; wo r k i ng- class vis i tors and, 4 - 5 , 248 Green, Nicholas, 103 G regor i u s , Aelbert, 36 Grigson , R. A., r49- 1 50 G u i l d of' Sr. George, 235 - 241, 293, 306; T orley farmi ng an d , 313-3 14; Wa lk l ey Museum and, 2)5, 237 - 239, 238 Gurner, Peter, 1 78 M., Great lndiall Penimulrtr Railway Termimrs, 274 Joh n Charles, 188- r89, 197, 208 - ll), 209

Haig, A xel Hall,

H ardy, Thomas, 232- 233 H arrison, Brian, L22 Hart, Solomon, Maestro Gi01gio of Gubbio, ) 6 1 n 1 55 !-lamest 1ime (Col e) , 1 27; agricultural conditions an d , 88- 102; contemporary l a ndscape painting and, 10 2 - ro 8, ll1; desc ription of, 83-88, 84 Hart, Michael, 39, 330n44 Havel!, E. B., 308 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 35-36, 2r4 health co nd i ti o ns : gri n de rs and, 208 - 2 1 3 , 357n82; overtime work and, 351. See also conditions of labour H e m ingway, And rew, 337n9 heroic image ry, 37-41, 75, 159 H errin g, John Frederick, Harvest, 95, 97, 107, 120 Hewitt, Marr i n , 13 H i bbert and Platt of' Oldham, 7- 8

!-licks, George Elgar, The Sinews of Old E11gland,

]I, 1 47

)0-)2,

Brow n's WOrk a n d , 48 - 56; gender and, 50- 53, 6 5 - 66, 182- 183; G rear Exhibition and, 3-5, 259- 265; S h a rples and, r82; social class and, 53- 56, 297-298. See f/lso co mpen satio n tor labour; valuation of labour Higgins, Bobus (character), 67 Hilton, Ti m , t42 - 1 43 history pa i n t i n g, G rown's work as; heroism and, 34-44; labouring body and, 26-27; rea l i s m and, 44-48 H obsb awm, E. J . , 1 3, 137 Hoga rt h , William, Beer Street, so- 53, 52, 122 Holker, Sir John , 3 1 7 Holland, G . Calvert, 1 9 5 , 205, 208 Holyoake, George Jacob, 347n59, 353nr86; Self Help by the h ierarchies of value:

People,

r8o

Hood, Thomas, "The Song of' the Shirr" ( poe m ) . 182 Hoole, Henry Elliott, 358n99 Hoole and Co m p a ny, Green Lakes Works, Sheffield, 215, 216 Howard , Pe te r, 103 "hul ls," 204 Huneault, Kristina, 1 5 H u n t , William Holman, 4 2 ; Tbe Awake11ing Conscie11ce, 54; The Finding ofthe Sa11iot1r in the Te111ple, 63, 64; The Hireling Shephetd, 1 23 - 124 ; !l Dolce Far Niwte, 62; lmerior ofa Cf/l pmrer s Shop in Nazareth, 335nr6o; 7be Light oftbe World, 6o, 61; The Shadow of Death, 6r -63, 62 Hunter, Josep h , 198, 199, 204; Hrtllamshire, r88- r89, 197, 239

I N D EX

hybridiry, concepr of, 2 48 , 262-263, 300, 302; Dlll·bar Room, Osborne House and, JOJ, 305-306. See also colonial Gothic !llustrated Exhibitor, 247, 262 Illustrated London News ( ILN), 40, 141 , 210, 246, 247;

Carpet Weaving, 300- JOI, 302 ; engravings of machines and, 7 - 8 ; The "Hull, " 2 1 2, 2.£3 !LN. See Illustrated London News India: art education i n , 260 - 26 1 , 267- 269, 302; British policy in, 267- 276; class hierarchies and, 297 - 298; Gandhi and, 306 - 3n; Gothic architecture in Bombay and, 26 8 - 27 6, 273, 274, 275; impact of British p res­ ence in, 269 - 270, 279, 286, 289, 292- 294, 307; i n de­ pendence and, 250, 307-308; Mutiny-Rebellion of I857 i n , 16, 265 - 267, 268, 293; village communities and, 276 - 29 2, 301, 307 - 3 " I ndian craft traditions: Great Exhibition and, 243, 244, 246 - 2 50, 247, 258- 265; impact of modernity on, 2 6 9 - 2 70 , 2 7 9 , 2 8 6 , 28 9 , 292- 294, 307; superiority of, l l - !2 , 2 5 9 - 2 6 5 , 264 industrial capitalism: Aestheticism and, 314; agricultural labour and, 8 6 - 8 8 , 87; entrepreneurs i n Brown's Work and, 67- 69; Gothic as cririque of, 249, 250 - 258; Grear Exhibition machinery displays and, 7 - 8, 87, 245, 246, 248; rejecrion of (see colonial Gothic); slavery and, 2 5 3 - 254, 278; superiority of I ndian design and, 1 1 - 12, 259 - 265, 264. See also Sheffield lngres, J .A . D . , 214 instrumental theory o f work, 27 - 28 Ironside, Isaac, 217-218

Jackson, Mason, 323nH; The "Hull" (engraving), 212, 2r3; Saw-Grinding, ur, 212; Scythe-Cri11ding, 20 9 - 2 If James, John, 1 46 Jeejeebhoy, Jamsetjee, 268 Jefferies, Richard, 94, 1 21 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 35111159 Jones, Lloyd, 181 Jones, Owen, 260, 263, 264-265 Jordan, Max, 164 journal of !ndian Art, 289- 290 Joyce, Patrick, 14, 1 66 Keith, J. B., 300 Ki ngsley, Charles, 5 5 - 56, 74; Alton Locke (book), 72, r83; Cherrp Clothes and Nasty, r83

Kipling, John Lockwood, 234, 235, 271 - 272, 274, 275, 286; Blacksmith, 283- 284; Carpet Loom, Umritsur}ail, 302;

history painting and, 2 6 - 27, 37-41, 42, 44; Indian craft labour and, 246, 247, 300-303; living artisans exhibit and, 300-302, JOI; manual vs. mental forms of labour and, 67 - 7 6 , 161, 1 64; models o f craftsmen, 291, JOO, JOJ; rural workers and, 94, 95· See also conditions of labour; heroic imagery labour relations: co-operative movement and, 177-185; i n engineering industry, 1 69 - 17 7 . See rtlso Amalgamated Society of Engi neers Lad, Bhau Daj i , 26 9 , 270 land ownership: by artists, 107- 108, 109, rn- 1 12, l l 5 - l l7; rai lways and, 107-108, r r 2 - 1 14 landscape painting, 86; contemporary demand for, ro2-108; pastoral strle of Linnell and, no-m, .rr2, 113; railways and, 88, 103 - 108. See also Cole, George Vicar; Harvest Time ; Linnell, John Laroon , Marcellus, 332n88 Leathart, James, 66, 68, 69 Leech, John: T he Pound and the S!Jifling, 4 - 5 ; What Our Nm;vies Are Likely to Do, 4 r

Leighton, S i r Frederic: T he Arts of lndust1y as Applied to W0r, 228, 229; Daedafw and !cams, ;8, 39; frescoes by, 228- 229, 2 JO Lenin, V. 1 . , 137, 345n6 Lewis, John Frederick, 287 Linnell, John, 6, 207; artist as labourer and, IT4 - 1 1 5 , 1 2 6 - r27; land ownership and, 108- ro9, I ll - 1 1 2 , 115-II7; a t Redhi\1, 8 8 , 1 08 - u 4 -works: Canying Wheat, 1 29; T he Disobediem Prophet, 1 17; A Fiuished Study for "Rertping, " II5, r r6; Harvest Mooil, w , 112, II], 117: The Hayfield, 108; Haymakers' Reprtst, 1 2 6n - 127, 128; T he Keg, 1 2 2 - !2], 125, 1 ) 1 , r59; Kemington Cl'flvef Pits, 343n140; Labour, 1 2 9 - !JO, IJI; Landscape Sketchbook, 1 1 1 , II], r25, 1 26, 341 1178; The Last Load, 1 2 9 , IJO; Mowers in the !'ield in Porch­ ester Terrace, Bayswater, 108, 109; Noah: The Eve of the

n9, 120 - 126, 125; Rest, 1 2 9 , IJO- 131; Setting Up- Wheat, l l 7 - 1 20 , rr8; Shep­ lmd Boy Playing a Flute, .rro- 1 1 1 l iteracy, 3 59 11 I I I , 359nu8 Livingstone, Charles, 284, 285 Livingstone, David, 284, 285 London Labour and the London Poor (serial publication ) , 8 - 9 , 2 6 , 4 5 - 48, 41> 54 Langdon, Hen ry, 208-209 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth: "A Psalm o f L i fe," 154; "The Village Blacksmith," 154 - 1 5 5 , 201 Ludlow, J . M., 1 7 8 , 181, 3 35 11 r8 6 Luini, Bernardino, Christ Among the Doctors, 61

Deluge, 128; Reapen: Noon, 117,

Cold Embroidei]\ Delhi, 2 8 4 , 285; !11 a Good Seaso11, 271;

Indian craft and, 280- 290,

281, 283, 285, 288, 290,

302- 303; Woodcarver, 2 86 - 28 7 , 288

K i pling, Rudyard, 271 Kitton, F G . , Colonial and indian Exhibitio11, 299 [(]i ngender, Francis D., 37, 139, 166, r70, 3 5 ""53; Art and the IndustriaL Revolution, 12, 1 3 6 - 137, 1 5 1 labouring body: British class hierarchies and, 5 - 8 , 2 1 - 2 5 ; Christ a s working man a n d , 56- 63; forging and, 1 5 9 - 1 60, 166- 169; Gothic artisans at Oxford and, 256;

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 262 Macbeth, Robert Walker, A Lincolnshire Gang, 92, 9 3 - 9 4 machi nery, 2; Great Exhibition displays and, 7- 8 , 245, 246, 248; rejection of, 2 40, 295- 297, 308-3 r r (see also coloni