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.
Drawing on a wide range of sources, including museum guidebooks,
design manuals, illustrated newspapers, pattern books, and
government reports, Kriegel 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.
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