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Victorian Material Culture
Adelene Buckland, Adelene Buckland
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Victorian Material Culture
Adelene Buckland, Adelene Buckland
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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. The fourth volume will look at raw materials that were handled and used by Victorians including blubber and coal.
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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I Raw materials
DOI: 10.4324/9781315400143-2
Though unprocessed materials â vegetables, grains, animal products and fuels â have been put to a variety of uses for the duration of human history, the raw material was a specific invention of industrialisation and of empire.1 And even as there was an explosion in the sheer range and volume of âraw materialsâ mobilised in the service of economic and imperial growth in the nineteenth century, raw materiality also became a metaphor for all kinds of matter and their potential for transformation into things of commercial value. By the mid-nineteenth century, people could be imagined as the raw materials of armies, factories and nations; blood and sweat the raw materials of power or of wealth; ideas or archives as the raw matter from which to build poems, novels or works of art.2 Raw materials were the basic stuff from which vast abstractions â empires, wealth, power, art and literature â could at least potentially be built.
As is well-known, at the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in 1851, âraw materialsâ formed a major part of the exhibits.3 At the Colonial and Indian Exhibition 35 years later, âraw materialâ had become a key term for describing and legitimating British colonial and commercial power. The 1886 exhibition was designed to display Indian superiority (over Britain) in art, textiles and handicrafts, but its courts were filled with timber and bamboo trophies and archways, palms, grains, fruits and vegetables, sugars and narcotics. The catalogue waxed lyrical about what it saw as the recent and rapid transformation of the earthâs matter into currency â of ânatureâ into âcapitalâ. While in 1828, for instance, only ÂŁ62 worth of âraw juteâ had been exported to Europe, new jute mills in Dundee had transformed the value of those exports to ÂŁ6,241,568 in under 40 years. Other examples abounded: the value of oil seed exports from India had apparently increased by 78.5% in the five years from 1879â1880 to over ÂŁ10 million in 1884â1885, and Robert Fortuneâs government-sponsored âcollect[ion]â (i.e. theft) of Chinese tea plants had turned Indian tea into a ÂŁ4 million export.4 The story of the exhibition was as comforting as it was compelling: British industry was globally powerful and was on a mission of planetary import. A key function of empire would be, so the story went, to realise the value of colonial lands whose potential had hitherto lain in waste, squandered by those who lacked the economic foresight, intelligence, industry or political organisation to make their own lands pay. If Britain was the most successful empire in the world, this was precisely because within living memory it had learned to unleash the raw materials of the earth on a scale that had never yet been witnessed and to the supposed benefit of all mankind.
In this sense, the raw material as concept materialised an imaginative fusion of both industry and empire, grafting them into a shared narrative of the transformation of the earth to its highest potential. The raw material was an especially tantalising kind of stuff upon which to build this narrative because it possessed, as Nicole Shukin has put it of the animal, âthe raw facticity of the specimenâ.5 Apparently unmediated and unprocessed, raw materials could be imagined to lie across and within the earth as natureâs bounties â free gifts to humanity, ripe for the taking by whomever had the ingenuity or skill to gather them, their value intrinsic and obvious to all with the intelligence to apprehend it. As such, the raw material was an ideational mechanism by which to teach young white men âto regard the world at large as a vast storehouseâ, as John Yeats put it in The Natural History of the Raw Materials of Commerce.6 It facilitated a vision of a planet of riches just waiting to be turned to account by those with enough industry and imagination to do it and of nature as made up of âlatent elements of wealth only awaiting the labour of man to become of use, and therefore of valueâ.7
The concept of the âraw materialâ, then, implied an anthropocentric narrative of the Providence of industry, of humanity as God-the-potter powerfully reshaping the earth to its divinely ordained ends. Drawing on the kind of natural-theological thinking that underpinned this ideology, the Oxford geologist William Buckland put it this way:
however remote may have been the periods, at which ⊠materials of future beneficial dispensations were laid up in store, we may fairly assume that, besides the immediate purposes effected at, or before the time of their deposition in the strata of the Earth, an ulterior prospective view to the future uses of Man, formed part of the design, with which they were, ages ago, disposed in a manner so admirably adapted to the benefit of the Human Race.8
Here Buckland is talking about coal, the useful (rather than âmerely ornamentalâ) âblack diamonds of Englandâ, which was bringing prodigious national wealth and power and had come to symbolise industriousness as a national character trait. He articulates very precisely the sense that possession of a material like coal was to be understood as the receipt of a divine mandate to realise its wealth: British people could be supposed to occupy the historical and intellectual vantage point required to see the value of coal and the political and organisational power to mine a resource which had lain for millions of years âin the strata of the earthâ, just waiting for the fateful moment at which it would be released. For Buckland and others, Britain seemed to have so much coal in its strata because God knew it would be the British who would learn first how to use it. Of course, by a cruel but predictable extension of this logic, those whose lands contained similar treasures, but who had failed to exploit them for wealth, were deemed accessories to history, having no role in guiding the future of the earth or of the human species. Under the guise of its neutrality and âfacticityâ then, the raw material also had the power to define who possessed full humanity, and who did not.
Even without God in the equation, history seemed to support the notion of the intertwined moral and material destinies of the raw material. John Locke had argued that âNature and the Earth furnished only almost worthless Materials, as in themselvesâ, meaning that, of âthe products of the earth useful to the life of man, 9/10 are the effects of labourâ. Because Locke believed that people laboured more efficiently for themselves than for others, this meant that private land ownership was a key to stimulating this global effort.9 Classical economists such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo emphasised the limited productive powers of the land and the raw materials it yielded, as well as the inevitable decline in returns on both capital and labour without the intervention of new tools and machines or colonial expansion into new territories. Stadial theories of history posited that human minds and civilisations were defined by their relation to the stuff of the earth: lowly hunter-gatherers were at the lowest stage of civilisation, lacking planning or foresight; agricultural communities deployed resourceful planning, storing and crop rotation â supposedly possessing a greater sense of history and greater powers of imaginative abstraction; and commercial societies at the pinnacle of history transformed the raw materials of the earth into an ever-wider range of commodities, often vastly abstracted and far removed from their original guises. As Yeats put it, âwe do not merely gather in the indigenous materials of the country where we live, but, by intelligent industry, we increase the natural productionâ through agriculture and industry, while âbarbarous tribesâ simply âpass their time in providing for their recurring appetites, and cannot be said to enjoy existence, in the sense of mental enjoymentâ.10
But the phrase âmental enjoymentâ reveals the fragility of the idea of the raw material as fact. To be a raw material was less, we might argue, to be in a state of nature than to be held in a particular state of mind, to be apprehended in a certain way at a certain stage of history by a certain kind of person; in being so, it was always already politicised and racialised: to be a raw material was to be a hitherto meaningless plant or rock or animal or person â often in a far-off land from the putative site of power â and to be imagined as actualised by the mighty intellectual, physical and spiritual powers of industry and empire. From geological âsermons in stonesâ to evolutionary narratives of human development, British thinking about matter drew together theological, historical, and scientific accounts of destiny â now understood as having operated over the course of millions of years of earthâs history â to make the extraction and transformation of raw materials one of the primary aims of the nation and one of the defining features of its character. This ideology at least aspired to making it all seem like little more than nature at work: the apparently guileless raw material implied the embodiments of capital in natural phenomena and the naturalness of the logics of capital.
Storied matter 11
Or so the story went. For, in reality, the raw material was a more elusive concept even for the Victorians than exhibition catalogues and colonial booster literature were likely to admit. In 1903, for instance, the imperially minded Joseph Chamberlain suggested that the tenets of free trade â to which many had adhered as a kind of religion in Victorian Britain since the abolition of the Corn Laws in the 1840s â were no longer sufficient to support the British economy. Chamberlain suggested the operation of a system of preferential tariffs within the empire, offsetting the effects of European and American taxes and boosting the empireâs economic competitiveness. In order to claim that consumers would not suffer at the hands of this system of taxation, Chamberlain pledged to keep foodstuffs and raw materials tax-free. But the raw material unstuck him. As one journalist pointed out, nobody actually knew what a raw material was: âsawn timber,â he wrote, âis both a âmanufactured articleâ and a raw material. If you tax it because it is manufactured, you âprotectâ one industry, but you injure ⊠many othersâ. Indeed, âa great many finished goods are but the raw materials of other industriesâ, the journalist went on, estimating that only around one-ninth of imports could actually be taxed at all under such a system.12 The previous month the same magazine had sought to âremindâ Chamberlain âthat of the 900,000 tons of sugar imported nearly half forms the raw material of the confectionery and cognate industriesâ. Indeed, perhaps âhalfâ of all âimports entered as manufactured goods are really the raw materials of British industriesâ.13
We might go further than this. Not only were many supposedly ârawâ materials already heavily processed or manufactured by the time they appeared, or were raw for one industry and finished products for another, but many naturally occurring materials were rarely defined as raw at all. Water and air, for instance, are largely (though not entirely) uncommodified and are rarely considered raw, despite their necessity in a wide range of industrial processes. The labour of the factory owner as opposed to the worker is rarely considered a raw material and neither is that of the colonial bureaucrat (as against the efforts of the labouring colonial subject). Many apparently raw materials have to be hunted, skinned, rendered, planted, fertilised, tilled, prospected, mined, polished or panned before they take their shapes as raw, âunprocessedâ materials in the first place. As Karl Marx defined them, âfish which we catch and take from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin forest, and ores which we extract from their veinsâ are not raw materials â they are mere âsubjects of labour spontaneously provided by Natureâ. Only if âthe subject of labour has, so to say, been filtered through previous labour, we call it raw materialâ, such as ore âalready extracted and ready for washingâ. For Marx, matter âcan only becomeâ raw, paradoxically, âafter it has undergone some alteration by means of labourâ.14 Again, we might go further: if a raw material had been planted or farmed, for instance â like apples, beef or wool â it is most likely that there would already have been deforestation, planting, domestication, selective breeding or grafting over a course of centuries to have brought that object into existence as a biological variety in the first place. Or again, as the famous âgolden dustheapsâ of Our Mutual Friend serve as reminders, many humanly manufactured commodities already bought and sold can become raw materials once more, by virtue of their discardment and sudden revitalisation when put to new uses. Taking all of this into account, to be raw might be less to be natural or unprocessed and more to occupy a certain position in a narrative, to embody a certain kind of narrative potential. To put it another way, the fantasy of the raw material is a fantasy of the earth and of almost all living things as at least potentially devoid of agency, purpose or narrative of their own, but on the cusp of a narrative transformation into capital â a transformation always to be enacted from without. Most importantly, perhaps, this fantasy is always at least subconsciously (and often consciously) just that: a fantasy, for the raw material only existed as a result of the vast imperial, industrial and imaginary technologies that produced it and depended on t...