Research Catalog

Title

Manufacturing culture : vindications of early Victorian industry / Joseph Bizup.

Author

Bizup, Joseph, 1966-

Publication

Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2003.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xii, 229 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.

Summary

"From Robert Southey to William Morris, British social critics in the Romantic tradition consistently stigmatized industry as a threat to aesthetic or humanistic "culture." Joseph Bizup argues that early Victorian advocates of Industry sought to resist the power inherent in this opposition by portraying automatic manufacture itself as a cultural force or agent. He traces the contours of this new preindustrial rhetoric as it coalesced in two mutually reinforcing discourses: the contentious debate over the factory system and its social consequences that raged throughout the 1830s and 1840s, and the extensive discussions of the social and commercial benefits of good design, that culminated in the Great Exhibition of 1851." "Through careful readings of a diverse array of texts, including treatises on factories and machinery, medical studies of the working classes, theoretical discussions of the decorative arts, and lectures on the Great Exhibition, Bizup shows that liberal proponents of industry such as Andrew Ure, Charles Babbage, James Phillips Kay, and Henry Cole aestheticized manufacture by interpreting its concrete agents and products - whether they be factory operatives, systems of machinery, mass-produced copies, or elaborately crafted "art manufactures" - as emblems of a prior conceptual unity or beauty. They thus allied industry with culture by portraying industry as one realization of the organic ideal central to the idea of culture. Bizup concludes with an examination of John Ruskin's and William Morris's efforts to counter this sort of rhetorical maneuvering by treating cultured manliness as a figure for the cooperative impulse they both hoped would replace competitive self-interest as society's organizing value."--BOOK JACKET.

Series Statement

Victorian literature and culture series

Uniform Title

Victorian literature and culture series.

Subject

• English literature > 19th century > History and criticism
• Great Britain > Civilization > 19th century
• Great Britain > History > Victoria, 1837-1901
• Great Exhibition (1851 : London, England)
• Industries > Great Britain > History > 19th century
• Industries in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-220) and index.

Contents

Introduction: Industry as Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain -- 1. "One Co-operative Body": The Rhetoric of the Factory System -- 2. "Beautiful Combinations": Abstraction and Technological Beauty in the Works of Charles Babbage -- 3. "A Debilitated Race": Savageness in Social Investigation and Design Theory -- 4. "Appropriate Beauty": The Work of Ornament in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction -- 5. "What You Ought to Learn": Industrial Culture and the Exhibition of 1851 -- 6. "Only a Machine Before": Manliness and Mechanism in Ruskin and Morris.

ISBN

0813922461 (cloth : alk. paper)

LCCN

2003009463

OCLC

ocm52271528

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries