Grand designs : labor, empire, and the museum in Victorian culture / Lara Kriegel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kriegel, Lara, 1968-

Series:

Radical perspectives

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Industrial design--Great Britain.

Industrial design.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

xviii, 305 pages, 8 pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 2007.

Summary:

With this richly illustrated history of industrial design reform in nineteenth-century Britain, Lara Kriegel demonstrates that preoccupations with trade, labor, and manufacture lay at the heart of debates about cultural institutions during the Victorian era. Through aesthetic reform, Victorians sought to redress the inferiority of British crafts in comparison to those made on the continent and in the colonies. Declaring a crisis of design and workmanship among the British laboring classes, reformers pioneered schools of design, copyright protections, and spectacular displays of industrial and imperial wares, most notably the Great Exhibition of 1851. Their efforts culminated with the establishment of the South Kensington Museum, predecessor to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which stands today as home to the world's foremost collection of the decorative and applied arts. Kriegel's identification of the significant links between markets and museums, and between economics and aesthetics, amounts to a rethinking of Victorian cultural formation. She brings to life the many Victorians who claimed a stake in aesthetic reform during the middle years of the nineteenth century. The aspiring artists who attended the Government School of Design, the embattled provincial printers who sought a strengthened industrial copyright, the exhibition-going millions who visited the Crystal Palace, the lower-middle-class consumers who learned new principles of taste in metropolitan museums, and the working men of London who critiqued the city's art and design collections-all are cast by Kriegel as leading cultural actors of their day. Grand Designs shows how these Victorians vied to upend aesthetic hierarchies in an imperial age and, in the process, to refashion London's public culture.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Configuring Design: Artisans, Aesthetics, and Aspiration in Early Victorian Britain 19

Chapter 2 Originality and Sin: Calico, Capitalism, and the Copyright of Design, 1839-1851 52

Chapter 3 Commodification and Its Discontents: Labor, Print Culture, and Industrial Art at the Great Exhibition of 1851 86

Chapter 4 Principled Disagreements: The Museum of Ornamental Art and Its Critics, 1852-1856 126

Chapter 5 Cultural Locations: South Kensington, Bethnal Green, and the Working Man, 1857-1872 160

Afterword: Travels in South Kensington 191.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [253]-292) and index.

ISBN:

9780822340515

0822340518

9780822340720

0822340720

OCLC:

123377360