Victorian Material Culture
eBook - ePub

Victorian Material Culture

Deborah Wynne, Louisa Yates, Deborah Wynne, Louisa Yates

Share book
  1. 419 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Victorian Material Culture

Deborah Wynne, Louisa Yates, Deborah Wynne, Louisa Yates

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. This collection brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material and culture. This volume, 'Manufactured Things', will consider mass produced industrial and domestic objects.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Victorian Material Culture an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Victorian Material Culture by Deborah Wynne, Louisa Yates, Deborah Wynne, Louisa Yates in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Business & Commodities. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2022
ISBN
9781315400082
Edition
1
Topic
Business
Subtopic
Commodities
Index
Business

PART 1 The context of manufacturing in Victorian Britain

  • ‘Peel’s Velveteens’, Punch, Vol. 4 (1843), p. 36.
  • George Dodd, Days at the Factories, or the Manufacturing Industries of Great Britain Described [extract] (London, 1843), pp. 1–16.
  • Richard H. Horne, ‘The Female School of Design in the Capital of the World’, Household Words, Vol. 2 (15 March 1851), pp. 578–581.
  • Image: ‘Calico Printing’ in Charles Tomlinson (ed.), Tomlinson’s Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts and Manufactures, Vol. 2 (1852–1854), p. 279.
  • John Capper, ‘The Northern Wizard’, Household Words, Vol. 3, no. 189 (5 November 1853), pp. 225–228.
  • Anon, ‘Help for Women’, National Magazine (May 1861), pp. 32–34.
  • Karl Marx, ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’, Capital (1867) (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co. Ltd., 1902), pp. 41–50.
  • Anon, ‘Sewing Machines’, All The Year Round, Vol. 1 (new series), 27 March 1869, pp. 395–397.
  • Lyon Playfair, ‘On Patents and the New Patent Bill’, Nineteenth Century (April 1877), pp. 317–319, 321–323, 325–326.
  • J. T. Slugg, Reminiscences of Manchester Fifty Years Ago (Manchester, 1881), pp. 27–28, 37–38.
This section presents a selection of sources discussing some of the key features of manufacturing in the Victorian period, including legal interventions, finance and capital, urban development, labour and design, and the intellectual property associated with new inventions.1 Legislation in the form of import and export duties, along with a variety of taxes on goods, including windows and paper, informed the debates surrounding manufacturing in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Corn Laws of 1815 became a source of irritation to the manufacturing sector because they protected British farmers at the expense of free trade. The powerful Anti-Corn Law League, based in Manchester, lobbied Parliament tirelessly between 1838 and 1846 for changes in the law. The tactics of the League are evident in ‘Peel’s Velveteens’, published in Punch (1843), which reports a practical joke played on the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, who received a roll of printed ‘velveteen’ made by the Manchester manufacturer W. Barlow. Peel gratefully accepted the cloth as a gift, not realising that it was actually a political statement sent by the members of the Anti-Corn Law League, as the pattern on the fabric depicted ears of corn and the word ‘free’ in tiny letters. Once he discovered the trick played on him, Peel returned the cloth. This article highlights how manufacturing interests acted as a powerful political force in this period. The League’s ‘velveteen’ message is also referred to in the short extract from J. T. Slugg’s Reminiscences of Manchester Fifty Years Ago (1881), in which the author looks back nostalgically to the rapid expansion of calico manufacturing in Manchester in the 1830s and 1840s.2 The image ‘Calico Printing’ from Tomlinson’s Cyclopedia (1852–1854) depicts a worker operating a cylinder printing machine which prints an elaborate pattern on cotton.
Other sources in this section discuss political debates relating to the manufacture of goods. The dominance of mass production is emphasised by Karl Marx in his influential book, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, first published in German in 1867 and translated into English in 1887. Marx exposes the vagaries and exploitative nature of capitalism and, in the short extract reprinted here, analyses commodity fetishism, arguing that the realities of human labour are overshadowed by society’s obsession with the ‘magical’ properties of commodities. Capital was one of the first texts to analyse the social implications of mass production, and Marx’s approach to the analysis of manufactured objects as a component of commodity culture is rare in nineteenth-century writing. However, his ideas on the role of commodities, labour and capital became enormously influential as the twentieth century progressed. Manufacturing, entrepreneurship, intellectual property and the social role of the inventor are discussed in Lyon Playfair’s 1877 article, ‘On Patents and the New Patent Bill’. Playfair points up the anomaly whereby inventors receive little reward in comparison to the manufacturers who exploit their inventions. He highlights the need to reform the patent system in order to acknowledge fully the intellectual property of the inventor.
While Britain excelled in the development of machinery, the Great Exhibition of 1851 exposed to the world the inferiority of British-designed goods.3 This issue is raised in ‘The Female School of Design in the Capital of the World’, originally published anonymously in Household Words in 1851 (later identified as the work of Richard H. Horne). Narrated by a fictional Northern manufacturer who, seeking examples of good British design, visits a government-supported school of design for girls and young women in London. The article exposes how the good training the pupils receive and the high quality of their designs are not matched by the conditions in which they work, with the school being run in dilapidated rooms above a shop in an insalubrious area of the city. The narrator condemns the lack of interest in good design shown by manufacturers who are wedded to those ‘vulgar’ designs considered archetypically ‘British’.
Women’s relationships to manufacturing are also featured in two anonymous articles about sewing machines, ‘Help for Women’ in the National Magazine (1861) and ‘Sewing Machines’ in All The Year Round (1869). ‘Help for Women’ celebrates the invention of the sewing machine, arguing that women are freed from bondage ‘to the loom and the [spinning] wheel’ now that the ‘[s]ewing [m]achine does all that was wearisome and fatiguing in the manufacture of garments’.4 This view is contradicted in the later article ‘Sewing Machines’, which complains that women are now in bondage to this machine, forced to press pedals and ‘exert muscular efforts, to a degree never before required of them’. The author sees the additional food required to fuel this extra labour as a hidden cost, while the health of the seamstress is placed in ‘permanent danger’ by the effort of powering the machine. Plans to develop an electric motor are seen as a welcome innovation. These articles reveal anxieties surrounding women’s relationship to machinery and the processes of mass production.
The extracts from Dodd’s book Days at the Factories (1843) and the anonymous ‘The Northern Wizard’ in Household Words (1853) reveal the tone of wonder and curiosity characteristic of so much writing on manufactured items during the period. Both concern visits to factories and describe manufacturing processes in detail. ‘The Northern Wizard’ considers the manufacture of dyes, acids and bleaches in Glasgow, while the extract from Days at the Factories focuses on objects manufactured in London, including toys, musical instruments, printing and watchmaking. London is revealed as the financial powerhouse of northern manufacturing, rather than a centre of mass-produced goods. Many of the sources in this section reveal a north-south divide in the nation’s industrial life.

Notes

  • 1 For good overviews of the social, economic and cultural development of industrial Britain, see Emma Griffin, A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009).
  • 2 For a detailed discussion of the important role of Manchester in the development of British manufacturing see Alan Kidd, Manchester: A History, 4th ed. (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2011).
  • 3 For comprehensive discussions of the 1851 Great Exhibition, see the essays in Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg (eds.), Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: Routledge, 2008).
  • 4 For a discussion of the development of the sewing machine, see Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750 (London: Pantheon Books, 1986), pp. 94–95.

1 ‘PEEL’S VELVETEENS’ Punch, Vol. 4 (1843), p. 36

DOI: 10.4324/9781315400105-3
THE ingenuous Sir ROBERT has been the victim of a shameful trick. For ourselves, we have not the slightest doubt that the Corn-Law Leaguers are at the bottom of the transaction, which we only hope it is within the reach of Parliament to punish. The conspiracy displays such subtlety – has in it such a wicked animus – that did we merely consult our own feelings, we should devote the whole of our present number to discuss the iniquity, in its every shade of turpitude; in its depth, length, and width. The careless world, however, has not the same interest as PUNCH in the feelings of a Prime Minister – has, of course, not the same intimate sympathies with the private emotions of a politician. We shall therefore narrate, with all our characteristic brevity, the circumstances of as dark a political conspiracy as ever blackened the human heart – will show how the peace – nay, more the consistency of a Prime Minister, has been aimed at in his hour of social confidence, threatened in his whole anatomy.
A week or two since, Mr. W. BARLOW of Ancoats-vale having – we are convinced of this truth – by the instigation of the Corn-Law League, perfected “some printed velveteens” of a most novel and beautiful fabric, sent a few yards of his handiwork as a present to Sir ROBERT PEEL. Gracious, unsuspecting Minister! No artless milkmaid on Drayton Manor could have received with less suspicion a bunch of ribands from Hodge, the carter; albeit given for the basest after-purposes by the designing clown. Sir ROBERT gazed upon the velveteen “made to look like silk,” although of cotton, – gazed, and was lost. (Mr. BARLOW has the honesty to allow that one of the excellences of the fabric is, that it appears much better than it really is; that it has a glossy, silky outside look, to captivate unthinking eyes; although, indeed, the stuff itself be of an inferior yarn – a thing of very cotton. Why, believing this, Mr. BARLOW should have thought fit to select such a politician as Sir ROBERT to patronize his velveteen, we leave to the man’s conscience to answer; and proceed with our story.) Sir ROBERT – courteous victim! – lost no time in acknowledging the present of velveteen, and – (how the Corn-Law League must have chuckled!) – further assured Mr. BARLOW, that Lady PEEL was so delighted with the stuff, that she purposed “having a cloak” made of part of it, whilst he, Sir ROBERT, would devote the remnant to his own bodily comfort, in some other fashion!
Reader, pause for a moment, and imagine the smothered laugh shaking the ribs of the League! How the master manufacturer grinned with all his heart and all his soul! Nay, it is said, that feeble smiles did “shoot and circulate” in the tax-ground faces of the tenants of Manchester cellars – that the very ghastliness of want was irradiated with the dim sense of a joke played upon the Prime Minister! Indeed, everywhere throughout Manchester, laughter abandoned. It is said, the very knockers on the manufacturers’ doors were dimpled with smiles – that the church vanes no longer creaked, but laughed audibly! Wherefore? Why this exultation at the courtesy of the most courteous of Prime Ministers? Why this rudeness of merriment at an act of gentlemanly condescension? With mingled feelings of contempt and pity for our species, we tell the why.
The velveteen was made into a cloak – (this we know from Lady PEEL’s mil-liner,) – the remainder stuff was worked into trousers for the Prime Minister – (this we know from Sir ROBERT’s tailor, the same man who has made our own motley for many years), – when the fraud, the iniquity, lurking in the fatal gift was discovered.
It appears that some ears of wheat were gracefully worked into the pattern adorning the velveteen, and further, that the dreaded mono-syllable “fREE,” – those four damning letters, like tares and poppies, threw among the corn, thus insidiously presented to the Minister. Lady PEEL, with the quick feminine eye, discovered the device at once. Why, then, it may be asked, did so many days elapse ere Sir ROBERT returned the stuff – for return it, he did – to Mr. BARLOW? Ere we answer, we subjoin the missive that accompanied the rejected velveteen: –
“Drayton Manor, Jan. 7, 1843. – Sir: I was not aware, until to-day, that the specimen manufacture which you requested me to accept bore any allusion to matters that are a subject of public controversy. No mention whatever was made of this in the letter you addressed to me; and I thought it would be ungracious to reject what appeared to be a pure act of civility on your part. I must beg leave to return to you that which I accepted under an erroneous impression.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant, ROBERT PEEL – W. Barlow, Esq.”
Lady PEEL, like an excellent, devoted wife as she is, with a full knowledge of the wheat, and of those “idle weeds,” the letters f. r. e. e. that “grew among the sustaining corn,” – ordered her cloak to be made; and wherefore? Simply, because she knew that Sir ROBERT had, at the last election, used a cloak with some sort of corn-ear device upon it, and that therefore, like a good wife, she could do no better than follow the example of a virtuous and beloved husband. How different the case with Sir ROBERT, the Prime Minister!
We have no doubt whatever, that as far as a cloak might have been got out of the stuff for himself, Sir ROBERT would have had no objection to retain the velveteen as a provision for future accidental keeping it on, or putting it off as the wind might blow, or the sun might shine; but when once the velveteen was made into trousers when once the minister had donned so succinct a garment, it must become to him a sort of tight-fitting principle, not under any circumstances to be cast aside, with the least respect for the usages of honourable society. It was then Sir ROBERT saw the trap that had been laid for him; it was then that, looking with an instructed eye upon the velveteen, he felt the full force of the political plot got up in a pair of trousers:
“The seed was cursèd that did grow the web,
And it was dyed in mummy, which the Corn Laws
Conserved of broken hearts!”
Such, then, appeared the velveteen presented by Mr. W. BARLOW, and the Prime Minister immediately resolved to put no foot in it.
We hope there is no admirer of Sir ROBERT who will not feel grateful for the escape of the Minister. Spells and incantations have been woven in a web ere now; and these, we are convinced of it, lurked in every ear of law-taxed corn.
“See the griesly texture grow,
(’Tis of human entrails made,)
And the weights that play below,
Each a starving Briton’s head!”
Might not the velveteen, the produce of Corn-law looms, have been manufactured from such horrid materials – by such ghastly machinery? Indeed, we fear it.
And then that fatal word “FREE.” In the Gesta Romanorum there is a story of a beautiful girl who, having been nurtured upon serpents, was sent as a slave to a certain king; the monarch kissed the rosy venom, and straightway died. We have not the slightest doubt that the word “free” in PEEL’s velveteen was composed of serpents – and that no sooner should the Prime Minister have taken the trousers to himself, than that the petty reptiles would have grown into boa-constrictors, and poor Sir ROBERT, the unwilling Laocoön of “free” corn, would, as Minister, have been strangled by opposing principles!
However, thanks to the late sagacity of Sir ROBERT, our minister is saved. We have, let us be grateful for it, another plot to add to the unsuccessful machinations of democrats and knaves. We have had the Gunpowder Plot – the Rye-house Plot – the Thistlewood Plot – and now, as a crowning escape – the Velveteen Plot! Great, indeed, would have been the triumph of the League, if the Minister had donned the insidious trousers, and, taking his seat in them in the House of Commons, had, without knowing it, based his Ministry upon – “free” corn!
Q.

2 GEORGE DODD, DAYS AT THE FACTORIES, OR THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES OF GREAT BRITAIN DESC...

Table of contents