Preface

Barringer, Tim

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Preface

Tim Barringer

Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain

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 fantasy that the germ of the book lies in visual experience rather than words or ideas. Unforgettable, on the eve of its extinction in the early 1980s, was the...

Author

Tim Barringer

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23835

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 fantasy that the germ of the book lies in visual experience rather than words or ideas. Unforgettable, on the eve of its extinction in the early 1980s, 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 detachment—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 Work, 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 in 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 Ilkley, Mike 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. Rosalinda 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 Pointon, for her intellectual rigour, creativity, and generosity. Stephen Daniels and Geoff Hemstedt, examiners of the thesis, made many useful suggestions.

Research for parts of the second half of the book was begun while I was a postdoctoral fellow 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 Wainwright proved a benign and beguiling guide to the poetics of South Kensington, while Rafael Denis, over a pint or two, unravelled its politics.

The staff at innumerable 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 particularly 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 in 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 John 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 Linnell’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 in 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, Felix Driver, Peter Hoffenberg, Alison Inglis, Patrick Joyce, Patrick McCaughey, Lynn Nead, Christiana Payne, Louise Purbrick, Kim Reynolds, Norman Vance, Will Vaughan, Shearer West, Michael Wheeler, and Andrew Wilton for challenging and enriching my interpretations over the years. Jennifer Graham generously shared information on Quentin Massys.

Michaela Giebelhausen, Michael Hatt, 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 ways: Kristina Huneault and Janice Carlisle, both authors of fine studies of representations of labour, and Liz Prettejohn, whose magisterial work on Aestheticism provides both complement and antidote to what is offered here. The manuscript has benefited from 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 into 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 Salmon, and the members of the publications committee for their faith in this project.

At Yale, I owe a particular debt to the entire staff of the Center for British Art and especially to the Director, Amy Meyers, for her unfailing enthusiasm, friendly encouragement, and practical support. Thanks also to the librarian Susan Brady and the Study Room staff. Gillian Forrester’s unusual gifts for scholarship, editorialising, friendship, and hospitality have all left their mark on this book. Yale can be an extraordinary place; this book and its author have been enlivened by proximity to a cast of remarkable characters, including 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 professional life, has provided the refiner’s fire for my ideas about art and labour. In particular, final-year undergraduate classes on Pre-Raphaelitism at Birmingham and at Yale, and a graduate seminar on Ruskin, saw lively debates of the issues. It may be unwise to single out individuals, but among the doctoral students with whom I have discussed this book I thank that closet Victorianist, Douglas Fordham, and especially Morna O’Neill. I have learned much from her revelatory study of Walter 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, following 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.

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