Building reputations

Architecture and the artisan, 1750–1830

Conor Lucey

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526159571
  9781526119940
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526119964
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Taking a cue from revisionist scholarship on early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this book rehabilitates the reputations of a representative if misunderstood building typology – the eighteenth-century brick terraced house – and the artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers responsible for its design and construction. Opening with a cultural history of the building tradesman in terms of his reception within contemporary architectural discourse, chapters consider the design, decoration and marketing of the town house in the principal cities of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Atlantic world. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of architectural design and interior decoration specifically, and of eighteenth-century society and culture generally.

1

Building reputations: a genteel life in trade

While the social and economic histories of the building artisan have long been established, specifically in terms of professional mobility through financial prosperity and the challenges faced by industrialization and systems of wage labour, there has been relatively little appreciation of the house builder as an agent of architectural taste. Now recognized as having possessed both technical and supervisory skills, as well as being a successful employer and businessman, the building mechanic’s grasp of design and taste remains historically underdeveloped. At the root of this lacuna lies the apparently antonymous relationship between a life of refinement and a life of trade: a dichotomy between gentility (politeness) and industry (usefulness). But this belies an inherent irony in the history of the Georgian town house: ‘useful’ people built and decorated houses for ‘polite’ people. Builders, not architects, raised the houses that formed the ‘enlightened’ mosaic of streets and squares inhabited by the taste-conscious elite (the subject of Chapter 2); and from the 1780s, the house builder, not the consumer, customarily dictated the design and decoration of the interiors that constituted the requisite backdrop to a life of genteel refinement (discussed in Chapter 3). It follows then that builders had a vested interest in design: at the very least, their success in business depended on the appeal of their product in a flourishing marketplace.

The pertinent question is whether the building tradesman, as a figure of trade and commerce, might successfully negotiate the polite world of architectural connoisseurship: whether it was, in fact, appropriate for tradesmen to dictate polite taste. The ‘problem’ associated with this perception of the building tradesman was, as we shall see, related to the particular product of his industry: the speculatively built brick house. Loudly condemned in architectural discourse and the public press, its inadequacies were both materially and ideologically related to the circumstances of its production and to the perceived social rank of its producer. But as recent scholarship has emphasized, the ‘production-centred definition’¹ of artisanal identity is no longer tenable, and ‘the complexity and richness of the lives of early modern craftsmen should not be reduced simply to their labour in the workshop’.²

Did artisans from the building industry, from sawyers and lumber merchants to carpenters, bricklayers and house painters, generally belong to the middling or lower ranks of society? As discussed in the Introduction, the use of the term ‘artisan’ was often imprecise in eighteenth-century social discourse, embracing the different strata of professional organisation that existed between a master craftsman and a jobbing labourer.³ Indeed, despite its origins in aristocratic court culture, and mediated by its relationship to commerce, gentility facilitated social mobility and blurred social distinctions.⁴ Taken together, histories of social class in the eighteenth century confirm the changing patterns of identity and exchange relations predicated on improving material circumstances.

With the terraced house as the focus of this narrative, we are here particularly concerned with those individuals from the building trades who had the ambition to set up in business as house builders, the capital (or means to obtain credit) to facilitate that ambition and the agency and volition to engage with the protean world of architectural style(s). The point of this chapter is to examine the place of the artisan in the wider social spectrum; the textual and visual representations of the house builder in print culture; and the means by which the builder promoted and self-fashioned as an arbiter of architectural taste.

An artisan class?

In his Anecdotes of the manners and customs of London, during the eighteenth century (1810), James Peller Malcolm identified four social classes: ‘journeyman’, ‘tradesman’, ‘opulent tradesman and merchant’ and ‘nobility’. While the particular descriptions of each class that follow do not permit an easy association with the building capitalist that forms the focus of this study, the fact that the ‘opulent tradesmen’ is further qualified as one ‘that has retired from business’ permits the historian some scope to view the late eighteenth-century tradesman in terms other than his ‘degrading’ manual vocation.⁵ In fact, the status of what we may term the ‘opulent building tradesman’ – many of whose names are preserved in the historical record – suggests a social designation akin to the modern middle classes.

Historians of social class in Britain, Ireland and the United States agree on the difficulty in determining a ‘middle’ class in early modern urban settings generally, pointing to the social and economic mobility embodied in the type of commercial enterprise that formed an important aspect of the eighteenth-century building industry. In his account of the emerging middle classes and their impact on English national identity, Paul Langford notes that, ‘When contemporaries talked of the “middle sort”, they generally had in mind a wide range of incomes and a great variety of occupations.’⁶ Reflecting on the fact that social standing depended on a diversity of circumstances and considerations, from the material (property and employment) to the abstract (politeness and breeding), Langford argues that individual positions were further ‘amplified or diminished by the traditions, perceptions, and outlook of the communities in which they were set’.⁷

On the other hand, the artisan is also understood under the rubric of the ‘labouring’ class or ‘working’ class, a distinction that creates further difficulties in establishing his place within the social hierarchy. E.P. Thompson’s classic account of the formation of the English working classes, citing early nineteenth-century discourses on the place of journeymen and labourers in the social order, confines the generic ‘artisan’ to this station. Noting that the occupational tables of the 1831 census make ‘no effort to differentiate between the master, the self-employed, and the labourer’, Thompson is nonetheless anxious to point out that ‘there were great differences of degree concealed within the term “artisan”, from the prosperous master-craftsman, employing labour on his own account and independent of any masters, to the sweated garret labourers’.⁸ This interpretation finds accord with historians of class, taste, gentility and social mores across the early modern English-speaking world.

The difficulty attending the ascription of tradesmen to the middling, as opposed to lower, sorts relates to their lives in trade and commerce. Recent accounts of the eighteenth-century middle classes by Stuart Blumin (on America) and Fintan Lane (on Ireland), underscore this complexity. Lane defines the term middle class as ‘an ambiguous locution’ generally, but squarely situates the ‘self-employed artisan’ in Ireland among the petit bourgeoisie of small businessmen and independent professionals: the haute bourgeoisie being made up of wealthy merchants and industrialists.⁹ Blumin, while underlining the distinction between American and European attitudes to social hierarchies, acknowledges a commonly held prejudicial association between types of work and social worth that was observed throughout the anglophone world: ‘work with one’s hands, even in a skilled and valuable craft’, being recognized as ‘distinctly degrading’. This was in spite of the ‘close identification of middling status with skilled manual work’ in cities throughout early national America.¹⁰ What emerges from these collective histories is the fluidity of social class during this period, and the corresponding understanding that ‘classes were made not inherited’.¹¹

Early to mid-eighteenth-century commentators on socio-economic groupings, including Daniel Defoe and Joseph Massie, placed the ‘working Trades’ in the middle of a system that was based on occupation, income and patterns of consumption as opposed to inherited social rank.¹² Significantly, the then common linguistic triad of ‘higher’, ‘middling’ and ‘lower’ classes was reconfigured at this time, and ‘lower class’ was replaced with ‘working class’. This was symptomatic of a growing awareness of the social and economic significance of labour, a position given theoretical legitimacy by Adam Smith in The wealth of nations (1776). Indeed, just as social commentators became conscious of the new ways in which wealth and status was acquired, censuring its distribution among the widening ‘middling’ sorts and its effect on social differentials like dress and manners, conversely these positions reflected ‘a belief in change and social mutability, rather than in a strictly graded or strictly denoted social hierarchy’.¹³ This had wider repercussions in cultural terms. Although historically disparaged as members of the ‘lower orders’, the labourer and the craftsman were elevated within the social pecking order by eighteenth-centu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: a new apology for the builder
• 1 Building reputations: a genteel life in trade
• 2 Designing houses: the façade and the architecture of street and square
• 3 Decorating houses: style, taste and the business of decoration
• 4 Building sales: advertising and the property market
• Conclusion: the builder rehabilitated?
• Select bibliography
• Index
• Plates