RevieUJs

Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 20°5), £4°.00

hbk, ISBN °3001 03808.

'I have only one subject to lecture on, the relation of Art toLabour', declared William Morris in October 1883. Much thesame might be said of Tim Barringer's sumptuously illustratedMen at Work, which is a powerful analysis of a rich variety ofmid-nineteenth-century visual images of the labouring male body.Influenced by Marxism ('the erasure of class ... has gone too far')and working within the tradition of Francis Klingender's Art andthe Industrial Revolution (1947), Barringer none the less findsMarxist categories and Klingender's celebration of a heroic andunified Victorian proletariat too simplistic to capture the fullcomplexity of the aesthetic images and social groups he discusses.His approach thus has much in common with a Marxist sociologyof culture in its intention to 'reject a polarity in which contextualreadings and formal analysis are seen as mutually exclusive', butin the end he operates a New Historicist procedure of 'thickdescription' as he returns artefacts to the complex historicaldiscourses and practices of their moment of production ratherthan a Marxist model of 'reflection' or 'mediation' in whichartworks are determined by other, more fundamental levels ofsocial reality. Moreover, in addition to class, Barringer wants toset the concepts of masculinity, Empire, religion and region at theheart of his cultural analysis.

The result is a fine study which starts its chapters withmemorable iconic images - Ford Madox Brown's Work (1852­

65), George Vicat Cole's Harvest Time (1860), James Sharples'sThe Forge (1859) - and then moves out from them into the densemesh of contemporary discourses and practices that they engageand transform in their own artistic labour. The reading of Brown'sgreat image is something of a methodological tour de force,constantly making illuminating linkages between the painting andwider societal images and investigations of labour. The genreof history painting, Christian Socialist views of Christ's body,Brown's own five-page 1865 essay on Work, Mayhew's socialexplorations, Thomas Edward Plint, the Leeds evangelical

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stockbroker who was the painting's original purchaser, anxietiesover the masculinity (or lack of it) of intellectual labour: all openfurther dimensions of meaning in Brown's busy and unforgettableImage.

Barringer's chapter around Vicat Cole's Harvest Time - Paintedon Holmbury Hill takes us into the world of rural rather thanurban labour. Cole's picture is a step beyond Ruskinian landscapepainting, which privileges the artist's response to nature overthe representation of work in the countryside, yet it celebratestraditional forms of agricultural labour which, as Barringerdemonstrates, were increasingly discrepant with the industrialised'high farming' or 'second agricultural revolution' that wastransforming the English countryside (indeed, one of the ironicalundercurrents of Men at Work is that art seems capable ofarticulating particular modes of labour only at the momentof their historical supersession). Only in such 'backward' countiesas Surrey did traditional rural work still survive, though theenterprising middle-class artist could always buy himself an estateto ensure that they lived on just a little bit longer; Barringer tracesthrough the intriguing case of John Linnell who himself didexactly this in July r8p.

If James Sharples's The Forge takes us into the very heart ofindustrial labour, contrasting fa vourably in its precision and detailwith a more external 'theatrical imagery of the industrial sublime',it too is subject to a law of aesthetic irony, offering 'a utopianfantasy of craft autonomy at precisely the historical momentwhen the last vestiges of that autonomy were being demolished'.Sharples himself, industrial blacksmith by day and self-taughtartist by night, is a liminal figure who puts many binary Victorianaesthetic concepts into crisis; and with this meditation on a life aswell as an artefact Barringer's book opens towards the broaderthemes of its closing chapters.

The career of Godfrey Sykes, painter and designer, links theworlds of Sheffield manufacturing and South Kensington artinstruction and museums, and broaches more general questionswhich have, naturally, been implicit in Barringer's accountthroughout: what kind of art and art education is appropriate tothe labouring classes; how much art can industrial products

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embody; what kind of labour is the practice of art itself? Centralto Victorian meditations on such issues is John Ruskin, whoseown transformative museum and land settlement schemes forSheffield feature here too.

Ruskin's thought opens out into what Barringer intriguinglyterms 'Colonial Gothic'. Both the Indian displays and Pugin'sMedieval Court at the Great Exhibition of r 8SI were implicitcritiques of the industrial modernity centrally celebrated there; andMen at Work demonstrates persuasively how a discourse of Indiancrafts and traditional village life intersects with the more familiarRomantic anti-capitalist Gothic of Carlyle and Ruskin. From thisfruitful cross-breeding of ideas and values there emerges, in onedirection, aspects of Morris's artistic practice - for in Barringer'sview, Morris's 'textile designs form the aesthetic culmination ofColonial Gothic' - and, in another direction, Mahatma Gandhi'santi-imperialist politics of swaraj (self-rule) and swadeshi (homeindustry).

Barringer closes his book with a brief glimpse at the Ruskin­Whistler trial of r878 which for him is the moment when tense butproductive mid-Victorian interactions between art and labourbreak decisively apart; for Aestheticism not only turns against therepresentation of active labouring bodies but also seeks to banishall traces of labour from the actual making of the artefact itself.We don't necessarily have to accept this rather arbitrary closingpoint. Morris himself, after all, was about to embark on a majornew venture in his thinking about art and labour from r883onwards when, as a socialist, he tries to fuse the Marxist andRuskinian critiques of industrial modernity which in Barringer'saccount appear merely as non-communicating opposites. And wecertainly don't have to accept the quality of proof-reading that thisbook displays, for it is marred by an inordinate number of minorerrors. But these cavils aside, Barringer has given us a formidablebook on the Victorian visual culture of labour, one that we shallbe returning to and no doubt critically building on for decades tocome.

Tony Pinkney