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-1 THE VICTORIAN GOSPEL OF WORK

JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 2009)

Ford Madox Brown, Work (1852-65). Oil on canvas. Manchester City Art Gallery.

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All true work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labour, there is

something of divineness. Labour, wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven ... the

mandate of God to His creature man is: Work!

Thus spoke Thomas Carlyle, the sage of Chelsea, in his book Past and Present

(1843) a passionate critique of the condition of England in the early 1840s. In the

Autumn of 1842 Carlyle had visited a workhouse in St Ives, Huntingdonshire, and


had been shocked by the sight of so many able-bodied paupers condemned to

poverty and idleness.

Juila Margaret Cameron, Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, (1867). Albumen print.

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(At that time there were two million unemployed out of a working population of

fifteen million.) Carlyle's view was that happiness is a paltry goal for humankind.

We are not placed on this earth to be happy but to work. In work humans find

fulfilment; consequently, the only happiness they should be concerned about is that

associated with work. Happiness is a transient, subjective phenomenon which


vanishes when we die, but the fruits of our labour remain. Our present material and

cultural achievements are the culmination of centuries of human labour; hence, the

overriding importance of work. The gospel of work - the ideology of the nobility of

work - so relentlessly expounded in Past and Present was to prove extremely

influential amongst the Victorian intelligentsia and middle classes.

For example, the English painter Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) owned a copy of

Past and Present in which the passages about work were underlined. Brown had

been trained in academies in Belgium and France where he had acquired the skills

of a history painter. Initially, his aim was to make a career as a painter of large scale

murals in public buildings dealing with subjects from English history. By the 1850s

he had developed a more realist approach to art and an interest in contemporary

life. It was during a stay in Hampstead in June 1852 that the idea for an ambitious

figure painting - a contemporary history painting - on the theme of human labour

came to him. At that time excavations were taking place in the streets in connection

with water supplies. Brown admired the manliness of the British navvies digging the

trenches and decided to make them the heroes of his picture, to use them to

personify the nobility of work. At once he began to produce an oil sketch of the

setting in which he intended to place his figures: the Mount and Heath St looking

northwards (remarkably, this setting has changed little since 1852). 'Work', as the

picture was inevitably called, proved very difficult to execute and to complete. It

engaged Brown on and off for the next eleven years. It was finally publicly exhibited

as the centre-piece of Brown's London retrospective in 1865.

Besides the artistic and technical problems posed by such an elaborate


composition, Brown was hindered by domestic and financial difficulties. Visits to

the pawnbroker were a regular occurrence in the Brown household. He could only

make steady progress on 'Work' with the support of patronage. Eventually this was

supplied by Thomas E. Plint a pious Leeds stockbroker who, from November 1856,

paid Brown a monthly salary to complete the picture, and by James Leathart a

wealthy industrialist from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne who in 1859 commissioned a

smaller replica of 'Work' which is now in Birmingham City Art Gallery. (Both these

men were patrons of Brown's artist friends the Pre-Raphaelites.) The ideology of

the nobility of work embodied in Brown's picture obviously appealed to the

emergent merchant and industrialist classes of Victorian England. Changes to the

picture were necessitated by the advent of Plint: he asked Brown to include the

figures of two intellectuals - Carlyle and Charles Kingsley - whose ideas were

sympathetic to work and to workers. Brown included Carlyle but substituted the

Rev. F. D. Maurice for Kingsley. Maurice and Kingsley were leading figures in the

Christian Socialist movement which developed in the aftermath of the French

revolution of 1848 and the mass demonstrations of the English Chartists in the

same year.

'Work' is frequently reproduced in books on the Victorian period but few

historians bother to analyse it in any detail; they seem unwilling to treat it as a

historical document in its own right even though Brown derived the content and

characters of the painting from the world around him and attempted to synthesize

within it all kinds of contemporary issues and debates. In seeking to understand

the painting's iconography and symbolism, the modem viewer is drawn inexorably
into the complex world - the people, classes, ideas, ethics, conflicts - of Victorian

society. The painting, therefore, is a relic which enables us to engage with a bygone

age but one which has many parallels with our own (the issues of work and

unemployment, for example).

The composition of 'Work,' is crammed with human bodies; the wide variety of

types and dress depicted directly communicates a sense of the complex structure of

Victorian society and the teeming street life of the metropolis. Brown's cast of

characters includes manual labourers, street urchins, two ‘brainworkers’, various

street sellers (a herb gatherer, an orange girl, a pastry delivery boy, a beer seller),

fashionable ladies, a rich man and his daughter on horseback, unemployed

agricultural labourers, a policeman, soldiers, figures advertising an election

candidate, and four dogs (these animals are differentiated as to type and character

in order to exemplify the various social classes of their respective owners).

For his sources Brown relied on popular imagery as well as direct observation:

there are a number of striking similarities between details of 'Work' and Hogarth's

prints of London street life, and engravings of similar scenes appearing in such

magazines as Punch and the Illustrated London News. Also influential, it seems

probable, was Henry Mayhew's survey of the social, economic and cultural

conditions of London's workers and lumpen proletariat first published as a series

of newspaper articles in 1849-50. Mayhew was a journalist with ambitions of

becoming a sociologist or anthropologist: he made great efforts to order and

classify the large amount of raw data he and his collaborators assembled. See, for

example, his classification of London's population in terms of workers and non-


workers (the latter subdivided into 'those who cannot work', 'those who will not

work', and 'those who need not work'). The opposition between industry and idle-

ness, first treated as a pictorial theme by Hogarth, also underpins Brown's paint-

ing: the honest toil of the navvies is juxtaposed against the less worthy labour of

the street folk and the even worse idleness of the rich. Indeed, all the characters of

'Work' can be mapped onto Mayhew's classification scheme. Both journalist and

painter, then, aimed to provide a scientifically accurate description of Victorian

society by means of representative types arranged in a hierarchy. Brown deserves

credit for this achievement but it also has to be recognised that a typology - a

representation restricting itself to a single moment in time - yields a static image;

what is missing from 'Work' is any sign of social change or class struggle. This is

why some art historians have found the picture 'uncommitted' and rather mild in

its social criticism. (Brown was a left-winger but a reformist rather than a

revolutionary.)

Brown's ambition was to grasp Victorian society as a totality. The question

arises: How accurate, complete was his representation? Judging from the reviews of

'Work' which appeared in 1865, Brown's contemporaries seem to have found it an

accurate picture. The issue of completeness turns upon the representativeness of

Brown's cast of characters, and in particular those that personify noble toil. The

group of semi-skilled labourers known as 'navvies' were highly respected by the

Victorians because their muscle power built the roads, canals, public works, and

railways of industrial Britain. They were an elite amongst manual labourers: they

were stronger, more highly paid, and better fed than most other workers. (Always
providing they avoided being killed or injured at work or worn out with toil early.)

They dressed picturesquely, enjoyed a good deal of freedom and independence,

lived an outdoor life, worked, played and drank hard. Railway navvies were to

some extent feared by the public because they assembled in large gangs far from

the centres of authority. Small armies of navvies could and did terrorize rural

areas with virtual impunity from the law and riots between rival gangs of English

and Irish navvies were commonplace. But, as time passed, they became an efficient

and disciplined workforce which the country was proud to send abroad. During

the war against Russia - which occurred whilst Brown was designing 'Work' - a

team of navvies was sent to the Crimea to build a rail supply link for the British

troops. Cartoons of the period show that public opinion regarded them as more of

a threat to the enemy than the army.

Brown's choice of the navvy as the personification of labour was, therefore, an

apt one even though from the perspective of the twentieth century the more typical

manifestation of industrial Britain was the factory hand. (By 1900 very large bodies

of navvies were no longer needed; their tasks were completed and muscle power was

increasingly being replaced by machine power.)


Children and women employed in factories and down the mines.

Industrialisation is the principal absence of 'Work'. It forms the background to

the picture even though its most characteristic manifestation - factory production -

is not represented. It was the North of the country which experienced a really
violent transformation, hence Londoners such as Brown were shielded to some

extent from its impact. This may be one reason why Brown picked the navvy as the

archetypal representative of British workers rather than the less glamorous factory

hand or men, women and children employed in London’s sweatshops. A high

proportion of factory workers were women, adolescents and children. In order to

obtain a cheap and tractable workforce, mill owners frequently recruited their

labour from workhouses and orphanages. 'Work' is an overwhelmingly masculine

picture: the only women workers depicted are marginal figures (the orange girl, an

old woman carrying an election board); the three major female characters arc all

ladies of leisure. If Brown had chosen factory hands as the epitome of noble labour,

his task would have been much more difficult; furthermore, he would have had to

abandon the outdoor setting because factory work did not take place in the fresh air

under blue skies. On the other hand, an indoor location would have prevented

Brown from exploring the issue of urbanisation which is an important subsidiary

theme of 'Work'.

A whole book would be required to examine the significance of all the characters

in 'Work', therefore, in this article, I will focus on the topic of the ideology of work.
Stitching in a tailor’s swaetshop

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Work-work-work

Till the brain begins to swim;

Work-work-work

Till the eyes are heavy and dim.

Stitch-stitch-stitch,

In poverty, hunger and dirt,

Sewing at once with a double thread,


A shroud as well as a shirt.

Thomas Hood, 'The Song of the Shirt', Punch (1843).

It is clear from this quotation that not all Victorians subscribed to Carlyle's

gospel of work which Brown's painting relayed so uncritically. The questions arise:

To whom was this gospel addressed? Who were the audiences for Past and Present

and 'Work'? Who felt the need of such a gospel? It seems highly unlikely that

workers required an ideology of the nobility of labour to persuade them to work

because they had to work to live (being landless and propertyless, they had only

their labour-power to sell in the marketplace). If they refused to work their only

options were starvation, begging, crime, the poorhouse or emigration. It seems

reasonable to assume that the gospel of work was produced by and for a middle

class which, having presided over, and benefited from, the creation of an

industrialised society characterized by over-work, by unpleasant, boring, unhealthy

and dangerous jobs, wished to justify to itself all forms of labour. Some middle class

Victorians, of course, were genuinely concerned about the poverty, inequality and

exploitation which marred their society, but they differed amongst themselves as to

what remedies were needed. A number were in favour of doing nothing because any

interference with the laws of the marketplace and free trade would aggravate

matters. Some were in favour of no-strings acts of charity and philanthropy. And

some were in favour of limited acts of assistance, for example loans, and legislation

to control trade. The great fear of the first and last groups was that of undermining
the nation's economy and the self-reliance of the workers by means of excessive

charity. (If workers learned that they could live on charity, then they would lose the

desire to, and habit of, work.) The puzzle was how to help the workers to help

themselves without in the process making them dependent upon their benefactors.

(All these issues and problems arose again in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Neither Carlyle nor Brown were sufficiently conscious of the differences between

work and play, between forced and voluntary labour, and between useless and

useful toil. The work/play, or work/leisure, distinction was greatly sharpened by

industrialisation and the increased division of labour associated with it: factory and

sweatshop work was regimented and repetitive; consequently, as pleasure in work

decreased, workers increasingly sought enjoyment during leisure hours. During the

1840s, the difference between forced and voluntary labour was discussed but by a

German writer, socialist and Manchester businessman - Frederick Engels:

Another source of demoralization among the workers is their being condemned to

work. As voluntary productive activity is the highest enjoyment known to us, is

compulsory toil the most cruel. degrading punishment. Nothing is more terrible than

being constrained to some one thing every day from morning to night against one's

will. And the more a man the worker feels himself, the more hateful must his work be

to him. because he feels the constraint. the aimlessness of it for himself. Why does he

work? For love of work? From a natural impulse? Not at all! He works for money. for

a thing which has nothing whatsoever to do with work itself, and he works so long.

moreover, and in such unbroken monotony. that this alone must make his work a

torture ... The division of labour has multiplied the brutalizing influences of forced
work. (The Condition of the Working Class in England; 1st German edition 1845.)

The distinction between productive and unproductive labour was elaborated

some decades later by William Morris in his pamphlet Useful work versus Useless

Toil (1885).

Portrait of William Morris, (1877). Elliot and Fry. Walthamstow, William Morris

Gallery.

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He begins by questioning the validity of Carlyle's gospel of work (though he does

not mention Carlyle by name): it has become an article of the creed of modern

morality that all labour is good in itself - a convenient belief to those who live on the
labour of others. He then undertakes a socialist critique of capitalism and blames the

existence of so much useless toil on this economic system. Morris argues that work

should be pleasurable in itself, and result in socially useful goods. (That Brown was

aware of Morris's point is indicated by the fact that in a commentary he wrote

explaining 'Work', he cites the classic example of useless work in Victorian times -

the crank. This was a machine with a handle which criminals in prison were

compelled to turn as a form of exercise and punishment; the crank had no other

positive function or output.

Morris's aim as a designer and manufacturer was to produce well-designed,

beautiful artefacts made from sound materials in order to provide an alternative to

the mass of kitsch and shoddy goods so prevalent in Victorian times. The work ideal

which Morris had in mind when making his criticisms was, of course, his own

multifarious practice as poet, prose writer, lecturer, designer, craftsman, printer and
political activist. His essay includes a number of sensible and practical suggestions

as to how this state of affairs could be achieved and the problem of unpleasant tasks

overcome.

Work, for Victorian manufacturers, (their own and that of their employees) was

the means to self-enrichment and self-improvement; hence, the logical necessity for

an ideology affirming the intrinsic nobility of work. While Britain enjoyed a

monopoly as the workshop of the world, that ideology was justified by the

unprecedented increase in Britain's wealth brought about by industrialisation and

empire. Today, that monopoly has gone for ever and with it the certainty that work

is noble. On the one hand, those in work. are urged to become more productive, to

work harder, in order to save the country's economy from ruin, whilst on the other

hand, a growing army of unemployed are expected to adjust calmly to a no-jobs

situation. (Or compelled to seek work which does not exist.) Workers are also told

that as a result of automation and new technology, jobs are disappearing and that in

the future work as we know it will be performed by only a small minority. The

ideology still holds sway amongst many politicians, employers and trade union

leaders, and it is still directed at the labour force. However, it is an especially cruel

ideology when received by the unemployed: if men and women achieve nobility

through work, then what is the fate of those for whom there is no work? If work is

becoming a scarce resource, should it not be more fairly distributed among the

populace along with wealth? If that were to occur, then all workers could enjoy a

shorter working week.

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--

This is a revised version of an article that was first published in the British art

magazine Artery, Vol 8 nos 1/2, May 1984, pp. 17-19. It was written during the

course of researching a detailed book about Brown’s painting ‘Work’ later

published as Work: Ford Madox Brown’s Painting and Victorian Life, (London:

Francis Boutle, 2006).

John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of many books and

articles on contemporary art and mass media. He is also an editorial advisor for the

website:

"http://www.artdesigncafe.com">www.artdesigncafe.com</a>

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