Talia Schaffer - Novel Craft. Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction PDF

Novel Craft
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Novel Craft
Victorian Domestic Handicraft and
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
TA L I A S C H A F F E R
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schaffer, Talia, 1968–
Novel craft : Victorian domestic handicraft and nineteenth-century fiction / Talia Schaffer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-539804-5 (cloth : acid-free paper)
1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Women in literature.
3. Domestic fiction, English—History and criticism. 4. Women and literature—England—
History—19th century. I. Title.
PR871.W6.S33 2011
823′.8093522—dc22 2010038537
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Dedicated to
Eliana Musser
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: How to Read Wax Coral, and Why 3
CHAPTER 1. Women’s Work: The History of the Victorian

Domestic Handicraft 27
CHAPTER 2. Ephemerality: The Cranford Papers 61
CHAPTER 3. Preservation: The Daisy and the Chain 91
CHAPTER 4. Salvage: Betty as the Mutual Friend 119
CHAPTER 5. Connoisseurship: Giving Credit

to Phoebe Junior 145
Postscript: The Novelty of Craft 177
Notes 193
Selected Bibliography 215
Index 224
L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
I.1 Wax Coral. Reproduced from Cassell’s Household Guide, vol. 1,

1875, 313.
I.2 Hair Jewelry. Reproduced from A. Bernhard and Company
Catalogue of 1870, rpt in C. Jeanenne Bell, Collector’s
Encyclopedia of Hairwork Jewelry (Paducah,
KY: Schroeder, 1998), 239.
I.3 The Bazaar. Reproduced from Illustrated London News, June 20,
1874.
1.1 Berlin-Wool Work. Reproduced from The Young Ladies Journal
Complete Guide to the Work-Table (London: E. Harrison 1885),
117.
1.2 Mary Delany, “Physalis, Winter Cherry, a paper collage”
1772–1788. Courtesy the British Museum. © Trustees of the
British Museum.
1.3 Shell Nosegay, mid-18th century. Reproduced from Jane Toller,
The Regency and Victorian Crafts, or, The Genteel Female –
Her Arts and Pursuits. London and Sydney: Ward Lock
Limited, 1969, 17.
1.4 Needlework portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, embroidered in
London by Mary Linwood, 1825. Courtesy of Textiles and
Fashion Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum. Bequeathed
by Ellen Markland.
1.5 Standing Workbasket. Reproduced from Household Elegancies by
C.S. Jones and Henry T. Williams (NY: Henry T. Williams,
1877), 165.
1.6 Textile pattern identified by Henry Cole as poor design, from
the “Gallery of False Principles.” False Principle No.51—
hydrangeas and tulips (ca. 1850). Courtesy of Textiles and
Fashion Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
viii
L i s t o f I l l u s t ra t i o n s ix
1.7 “Strawberry Thief,” textile pattern by William Morris (1883).

Courtesy of Textiles and Fashion Collection, Victoria and
Albert Museum. Given by Morris & Co.
2.1 Paper Spills. Reproduced from Cassell’s Household Guide, vol. 2
1875, 61.
2.2 Fine Embroidery on Paper, 18th c. Reproduced from Jane
Toller, The Regency and Victorian Crafts, or, The Genteel
Female – Her Arts and Pursuits. London and Sydney: Ward
Lock Limited, 1969, 47.
2.3 Rolled-Paper Tea Caddy, c.1800. Reproduced from Jane Toller,
The Regency and Victorian Crafts, or, The Genteel Female –
Her Arts and Pursuits. London and Sydney: Ward Lock
Limited, 1969, 43.
3.1 Ivy Frame. Reproduced from Mrs. C.S. Jones and Henry
T. Williams, Household Elegancies (NY: Henry T. Williams,
1877), 109.
3.2 Skeletonized leaves. Reproduced from Marjorie Henderson
and Elizabeth Wilkinson, Whatnot: A Compendium of
Victorian Crafts & Other Matters. NY: William Morrow &
Co, 1977), 161.
3.3 Pressed flowers. Reproduced from Household Elegancies by
Mrs. C.S. Jones and Henry T. Williams (NY: Henry
T. Williams, 1877), 70.
4.1 Knitting. Reproduced from The Young Ladies Journal Complete
Guide to the Work-Table (London: E. Harrison 1885), 43.
4.2 Taxidermy. Reproduced from Cassell’s Household Guide, vol. 1,
1875, 313.
4.3 Pit Frame. Reproduced from Household Elegancies by
Mrs. C.S. Jones and Henry T. Williams (NY: Henry
T. Williams, 1877), 111.
5.1 Hair Brooch. Reproduced from C. Jeanenne Bell, The
Collector’s Encyclopedia of Hairwork Jewelry (Paducah, KY:
Schroeder, 1998), plate 293, 108.
5.2 Hair jewelry catalogue page. Reproduced from A. Bernhard
and Company Catalogue of 1870, rpt in C. Jeanenne Bell,
Collector’s Encyclopedia of Hairwork Jewelry (Paducah,
KY: Schroeder, 1998), 239.
P.1 Pringles Ribbon Bracelet. Courtesy of Craftster.org.
P.2 CareBear Afghan. Courtesy of 1–2-3 Stitch!®,
Bluffdale Utah.
P.3 Snow White Pendant. Courtesy of 1–2-3 Stitch!®.
x L i s t o f I l l u s t ra t i o n s
P.4 Captain Kirk Cameo. Courtesy of Etsy, Inc.
P.5 Felt Cassette iPod Case. Courtesy of Etsy, Inc.
P.6 Pacman Coasters. Courtesy of Etsy, Inc.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has taken an unusually long time, and many people have had to listen to de-
scriptions of fish-scale embroidery along the way. I want to thank all the people who pa-
tiently marveled, queried, and laughed in all the right places.
At Queens College, my colleagues have generated pleasures amid the grind of daily
life. For shared tips over the Xerox machine, covert communions in offices, and excellent
jokes during meetings, I applaud Nancy Comley, Duncan Faherty, Carrie Hintz, Roger
Sedarat, Veronica Schanoes, Jason Tougaw, Andrea Walkden, and John Weir. But a special
debt of gratitude goes to Nicole Cooley, the best of colleagues, fellow commuters, friends,
and neighbors.
I am lucky enough to be a Victorianist at the Graduate Center, where it is a special
pleasure working with Richard Kaye, Anne Humpherys, and Gerhard Joseph. I have been
honored to co-organize conferences with the ever-resourceful Richard Kaye, and to coedit
WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly) with my friend Victoria Pitts-Taylor, the embodiment of
alert, efficient, intelligent energy. These projects are possible because of the support of
the English Department, especially Steve Kruger and Mario DiGangi, and the Feminist
Press, especially Gloria Jacobs. I’m grateful to my ultra-resourceful research assistants
Megan Paslawski and Julie Fuller. Special thanks to my wonderful graduate students, too
many to name here, who have kindly humored my insistence on teaching Charlotte Yonge
every semester and have stimulated my thinking more than they can know.
My virtual community is equally sustaining. From grad school onward, I have loved
talking to Eleanor Courtemanche, Elizabeth Ezra, Shuchi Kapila, Anna Neill, and Pam
Thurschwell. They are the wittiest, warmest, and smartest of friends, and I am touched by
how our friendships are deepening as we go through different stages of our lives. Many
years ago, Jonathan Grossman asked me why I wanted realism to be in this book, a com-
ment he has probably forgotten but I never have. I must say a special word for Diana
Maltz, who colludes with me in all my preferences, from embroidery movies to aestheti-
cist trivia, and whose thorough, thoughtful work always continues to be an inspiration to
me. I am so grateful to have had Elaine Freedgood as a close friend and colleague; her think-
ing, both in person and on paper, has been fundamental to this project. This book would
not have happened without her—and I would have been much the poorer. Sally Mitchell
xi
xii Acknowledgments
has been a model of grace; her friendship, help, and support stabilized this project, as
they did so much else of my work.
For personal encouragement and professional advice, for coffees and e-mail and help
and friendship, I want to thank many other people: Ann Ardis, Susan Bernstein, Joe
Bristow, Regenia Gagnier, Pam Gilbert, Kelly Hager, Linda Hughes, Mark Samuels Lasner,
Deborah Lutz, Sharon Marcus, Linda Peterson, John Plotz, Matt Potolsky, Leah Price,
Kathy Psomiades, Margaret Stetz, Rachel Teukolsky, Leslee Thorne-Murphy, and Tamara
Silvia Wagner. I wish I had space to explain what each of them has done for me. They
believed in the validity of a project about amateur crafts; they travelled to attend my
events, or invited me to talk about craft; they confirmed hunches for me; they gave me
permission to use images; they made me write papers to work out my own ideas; they
matched my enthusiasm with their own. I am thankful to each and every one of them and
to all the other Victorianist friends I may inadvertently have left out. If I have, it’s only
because I am overwhelmed by how many people have done so much.
Since the moment this project arrived at Oxford University Press, it has been treated
with extraordinary consideration. Above all, I have to thank Brendan O’Neill, who has
been an absolutely model editor. Special thanks to the superb readers, whose insights
made this a far better book than it would have otherwise been: Kate Flint, Ruth Livesey,
and the anonymous reader. I was electrified by the insightfulness (and humbled by the
generosity) of their reports and only wish I could prevail on them to read everything I
write from now on. I also want to thank Rick Stinson and Preetha Baskaran for their
meticulous attention to the manuscript.
Many institutions kindly let me develop this material. Among the ones I remember
most fondly are the University of Delaware, at the very beginning of this project, and the
University of Wisconsin at the very end. Between these two, I want to thank the audi-
ences at Yale University, the University of Exeter, Temple University, Pennsylvania State
University, and the Victorian Conference at the City University of New York. The pro-
vocative, stimulating questions I received from these talks helped me rethink major
aspects of the book.
Material from chapter 1 was printed in Victorian Review, chapter 2 originally appeared
in VPR, and an earlier version of chapter 3 was published in Victorian Studies. I am grate-
ful to these journals for permission to reprint this work. Support for this project was
provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and
The City University of New York.
This book has taken eight years to produce (with time off in the middle for other
projects), and that I was able to return to it with energy and enthusiasm is due to the
wonderful support of my family, Ann and Ben Schaffer, Jonathan Schaffer and Susanna
Schellenberg, Ezra Schaffer Schellenberg, George Musser Sr., Judy Musser, Eva Szekely,
Bret and Eileen Musser, and Aidan, Katherine, and Kieran Musser. They joked with me,
cooked great meals, invited me for long lazy days, played with my daughter, and always
expressed pride in my work, even if they weren’t always quite sure what it was. That sup-
portive haven gave me the space to relax.
Above all, George Musser continues to sustain me with his passion for social justice,
his extraordinarily astute editing, and his energetic brilliance. He is the best kind of part-
ner: a true interlocutor. And Eliana Musser teaches me, every day, how to imagine, how
to dream, how to laugh, and how to try new things. This book is for her.
Novel Craft
Figure I.1 Wax Coral.
INTRODUCTION
How to Read Wax Coral, and Why
Take a long-necked wine bottle, with a rounded bowl, and with a coil of
flexible wire twine it all over to resemble coral. . . . Cover it all over with
white Berlin wool. Melt enough paraffin in a can set in hot water to dip
the vase in, or pour the wax over it, melting it afresh as it congeals, till
you have a good imitation of branch coral.1
When I read this description of imitation coral, it haunted me. I thought I knew
the Victorians, but I could not imagine what cultural values could have made
such an artifact desirable. If wax coral counted as art (or craft), the Victorians
had a different understanding of that term. Wax coral violates the categories we
expect of craft. It is not true to its materials; it is not well constructed; it does
not showcase the imagination or skill of the maker. We could say the same of
other Victorian domestic handicrafts: magazine pictures pasted to glass bottles,
a needlework portrait of Prince Albert, a penwiper made of yellow satin, a lily
crocheted out of green and white wool. Victorian domestic handicraft was a
ubiquitous cultural practice, engaged in by virtually every middle-class woman
(and some men, and upper-class and working-class subjects, too) for the first
seventy years of the nineteenth century.2 Yet we have no grammar for decoding
this practice, and therefore we may well feel baffled when we try to figure out
why it was so popular. In looking at those wax coral instructions, I realized that
either the mid-Victorians had no clue about artistic criteria—or they were using
criteria that we had not yet deciphered.
In this book, I try to work out the principles of this handicraft language. I aim
to figure out how mid-Victorians assessed an artifact’s worth when its materials,
labor, and price were negligible and how they determined an artifact’s beauty
when its maker’s skill, imagination, and technique were irrelevant. Tracing Vic-
torian domestic handicraft across a century, I explore what kinds of associations
3
4 Novel Craft
these objects carried and how those meanings changed. In this book, I read
domestic handicrafts as survivals of an earlier cultural era, parsing them like
fossils from some kind of Pre-cambric Era. Their very strangeness, their pro-
nounced difference from modern craft formations, allows us to deduce what
kinds of evolutionary change occurred over the past two centuries’ worth of aes-
thetic theory. As Thad Logan has remarked, “There are indeed times when study-
ing Victorian handcrafts brings us face-to-face with the otherness of Victorian
life.”3 But too often it is easy to dismiss this otherness as merely bad taste. I have
tried, here, to take it as evidence of a way of thought.
In fact, in this book I have analyzed it as a complex of ideas that I call
“the craft paradigm.” The craft paradigm is a set of beliefs about representation,
production, consumption, value, and beauty that underlies a great deal of mid-
Victorian creative work. While these beliefs can be found throughout nineteenth-
century culture, handicraft makes them especially, usefully, visible to modern
scholars. Studying more familiar creative genres, like art, fiction, or music, we
can easily assume that we already understand their principles. But domestic
handicraft is alien enough to force us to spell out its basic principles, an exercise
that spotlights what would otherwise go unnoticed.
Of course, when I started to explore domestic handicrafts, I did not yet know
there was a craft paradigm. I merely felt that it would be interesting to investi-
gate Victorian ugliness: the gaudy, the tawdry, the ill-made, the lumpy, the
blowsy. My earlier work was about the beautiful objets d’art that the aesthetes
loved: Spanish leather, Jacobean cabinets, blue-and-white china, antique silver
tea sets, cream-colored matting, sage and peach silks. As I read aesthetic home
and fashion manuals, I relished the descriptions. I visited museums and gazed
longingly at the beautiful hues of aesthetic textiles and furnishings. But as I
explored female aesthetes’ somewhat tortured relationship to mid-Victorian
furnishings, I grew intrigued by their difference from their predecessors and by
the oddly intense reaction the female aesthetes had to their mothers’ furnish-
ings, a powerfully ambivalent mixture of nostalgic yearning and revolted renun-
ciation. Why, I wondered, did Rosamund Marriott Watson need to assert that
her childhood ideal, cut-paper flowers, fell “below the uttermost low-water mark
of the worst imaginable taste”?4 Why did mid-Victorians love such objects, I
wondered, and why did they become unfashionable so quickly?
Novel Craft started by trying to answer these questions, but as the project
grew, its goals did, too. First and most basically, this book is a cultural history of
an underread movement and, as such, aims to be useful to others studying rele-
vant artifacts. One reason I have focused solely on Britain is that I have aimed to
make this book a culturally specific and archivally grounded study, rather than a
theoretical investigation of “craft” itself.5 Domestic handicraft practices in other
cultures, even in the relatively similar culture of the United States, differed
enough to require separate treatment.6 The Victorian novel is rife with domestic
handicrafts, and I hope that anyone trying to contextualize an example of

Victorian handicraft will find this book helpful. From Lady Bertram’s endless
carpet-work to Lucy Snowe’s netting to Maggie Tulliver’s plain-sewing, there is
scarcely a nineteenth-century novel that does not feature a craft. It can only help
to know what values each type of handicraft expressed at different periods.
But Novel Craft also aims to change our understanding of the history of craft
ideas. Most studies of Victorian interiors focus on handicraft’s successor, the
Arts and Crafts movement. However, studying the domestic handicraft para-
digm alters the way we view Arts and Crafts. When one gets a sense of just how
widespread domestic handicraft practices were, one realizes that the Arts and
Crafts reformers were a small, embattled, isolated group, fighting an apparently
almost hopeless battle against an overwhelming opposition. To read the culture
of Victorian domestic handicrafts as normative (the way it was lived at mid-
century) is to restore the context of these reformers’ work. In the 1840s and
1850s, John Ruskin, William Morris, and the other reformers seemed a few
voices piping up against the entire culture. John Ruskin, William Morris, Sir
Henry Cole, C. R. Ashbee, Richard Redgrave, Lewis F. Day, and Charles Eastlake
write in a way that is profoundly charged with awareness of Victorian domestic
handicraft, visible in everything from their specific gibes against craftswomen
to the structure of their theories, as I show in chapter 1. If the wax coral violates
Ruskin’s theories, perhaps that is because Ruskin generated those theories by
critiquing objects just like the wax coral. Ruskin’s vitriol, like Rosamund Marriott
Watson’s antagonism, testifies to the continuing threat that the domestic hand-
icraft posed to what still felt like a fragile artistic insurgency.
Domestic handicraft also threatened the kind of professional success and
autonomy Rosamund Marriott Watson enjoyed, for handicraft was deeply tied
to older models of femininity. During the first decades of the nineteenth century,
several factors coincided to create a market for handicraft, factors I will review
very briefly here. The idea that women ought to demonstrate moral and domes-
tic qualities (rather than wit or beauty) gained popularity, British families moved
away from agricultural work toward urban retail and industrial production, and
the filth, crowds, and noise generated by industry (or, slightly differently, urban
trade) encouraged those families to locate their homes at a geographical distance
from their workplaces. As a result, middle-class men increasingly lived in a home
coded as a haven away from work, and middle-class women were increasingly
sequestered in and expected to focus on that home.7 Deprived of the occupa-
tions that had made them important managers of their farms, forbidden to
engage in virtually any kind of remunerative employment, middle-class women
were searching for activities to help pass the time in their new domiciles. Domes-
tic handicraft was an ideal solution. It made women’s separate-sphere virtues
visible; the domestic handicraft testified to the woman’s skills in management,
thrift, industry, and ornamental talent. It occupied women’s time and energies.
6 Novel Craft
And it was a creative outlet that allowed middle-class women to articulate their
relation to the industrial economy in a satisfyingly complex way. These ration-
ales colluded, so that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, what had
previously been the humdrum mode of generating everyday objects now became
recoded as a middle-class women’s leisure skill of creating luxury ornamenta-
tion. Domestic handicraft consequently became closely associated with middle-
class women’s homebound status, a connection that accounts for both the
passionate advocacy and the bitter renunciation with which women described it
during the nineteenth century.
When I began this project, I surmised that the ideas associated with Victorian
domestic handicraft must have influenced the novel. Just as men like Charles
Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray received early training in journalism
that profoundly shaped their adult fiction, I argued, so, too, women like Eliza-
beth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge learned handicraft when
young, and that experience must have taught them ideas about representational
codes, creative production, and aesthetic evaluation that undergirded their
mature writing. Indeed, I had originally named this book The Imitative Arts and
planned to explore specifically how literary realism developed via the domestic
handicraft’s emphasis on trompe l’oeil imitation and literal verisimilitude.
However, as I began to explore these connections, I found that I could not
with certainty establish domestic handicraft as the origin of particular ideas.
Although the handicraft paradigm expressed fundamental mid-Victorian ideas,
those ideas can be found elsewhere, and there was no reason to say that the craft
paradigm was the first or most influential of those expressions. For instance,
women were taught that it was shameful to sell their work directly, so crafts
circulated through gift exchange and charity bazaars, rather than shops. Yet the
attitude that women shouldn’t sell their labor was a widespread belief that gen-
erated multiple prohibitions (and multiple techniques for evading those prohibi-
tions) in fields as diverse as acting, painting, and music. It would be problematic
to assume that the bazaar system was somehow the primary expression of this
feeling that then influenced all the others. Similarly, it is true that domestic
handicraft insisted on absolute, documentary realism, as I show in chapter 1.
The craftsperson had to prove that her work was based on actual models and was
encouraged to imitate them as closely as possible. Yet verisimilitude ran through-
out mid-Victorian arts, with highly naturalistic flowers on carpets, sensation
novels where transportation runs according to real train schedules, and Pre-
Raphaelite paintings full of minutely accurate details. All these pursuits seem to
be expressions of a common preference for literal realism, and there is no par-
ticular reason to cast handicraft as its source. If Gaskell, Oliphant, and Yonge
could be proven to be unusually steeped in these notions—which was not alto-
gether certain—I knew that they could have derived them from multiple sources in
their culture, and I did not want to fall into a kind of naïve biographical causation
by saying that my subject’s adherence to forms of realism must have derived

from having worked an ottoman for the local bazaar as a teenager.
Instead of suggesting that domestic handicraft originated major cultural ideas,
I have come to believe that its significance lies in its particularly powerful mode of
circulating and publicizing such beliefs. For the Victorians, domestic handicraft
was utterly ubiquitous. Handicraft wrote its tenets on the very cushions on which
they reclined, the slippers they donned, the mantelpiece at which they gazed.
Comfortingly pervasive, domestic handicraft’s ideas could be taken for granted,
too obvious to be controversial. But ironically, for modern critics, domestic hand-
icraft is important for the opposite reason: its oddness. We notice its tenets
because they are encoded in materials we never normally see—fish-scale embroi-
dery, molten wax, homemade varnish—materials that cry out for explanation.
The domestic handicraft’s alterity makes it memorable, when we might overlook
those same ideas expressed by more familiar arts like music or poetry.
Handicraft and Histor y

One of the central ideas expressed by handicraft is an idea about history. Hand-
icraft stages a tension between historicity and modernity. It thus simultaneously
embodies tradition and allows users to complicate their relation to the idea of
the past.
A woman making a domestic handicraft was involving herself in early-
Victorian gender roles. The domestic handicraft demonstrated her leisure time,
domestic management skills, thrift, and housewifely skill. A woman who was
making a wax coral centerpiece was demonstrating her ability to beautify her
home without spending money. Using crafts in the 1840s was synchronized
with the prevailing feelings about economic, aesthetic, and social conventions,
but by the 1860s, to use craft was to deliberately align oneself with a now-
receding set of values. After the 1860s, domestic handicraft became a reaction-
ary pursuit, promulgating ideas that were at least one generation old, if not two.
This belatedness explains to some extent why progressive thinkers like Marriott
Watson felt so hostile toward it.
Yet it is precisely because the genre of domestic handicrafts was so steeped in
tradition that specific craft projects could encode a dream of contemporaneity.
This kind of contradiction is typical of popular pursuits like domestic handicraft;
the thing has to satisfy disparate audiences simultaneously. Popular fiction, for
instance, often encases an attractively escapist fantasy in a reassuringly traditional
framework; the good girl is forced to engage in hair-raising adventures, only to be
awarded conventional married bliss at the end. If we look at the general discourse
justifying domestic handicraft, we frequently find nostalgia. “Time was,” Sarah
Stickney Ellis reminisces fondly, “when the women of England were accustomed,
8 Novel Craft
almost from their childhood, to the constant employment of their hands.”8 Stick-
ney Ellis writes as if craft were an age-old pursuit, shared by all English women
throughout all their lives. Yet if we read specific craft instructions, we see that the
craftsperson frequently used new materials and generated items designed to last
only a few days. Thus the domestic handicraft allowed women to enact a thrillingly
relevant modernity in the context of an impeccably traditional genre.
Indeed, domestic handicraft flamboyantly embraced the latest technologies. It
certainly was not a timeless inherited folk tradition, and this is hardly surprising,
since that is a later fantasy about craft invented by the Arts and Crafts movement
(partly in order to discredit domestic handicraft). Domestic handicrafts cele-
brated contemporaneity. They existed in an urban mercantile nexus; they relied
on up-to-date print, media, and transportation technologies; they incorporated
and emulated mass-produced objects. For instance, the wax coral instructions,
published in 1875, required egregiously modern materials. Berlin wool became
available in the 1840s (as we shall see in chapter 1), and paraffin wax was devel-
oped only in 1854.9
Domestic handicrafts enshrined speed. They were ephemeral and disposable;
they showcased shortcuts meant for unskilled amateurs; they could be made
repeatedly and quickly. The wax coral project exemplifies the ease and swiftness
with which the object could be assembled. Domestic handicrafts also demon-
strated a triumph over nature. They showed natural objects reprocessed into vir-
tually unrecognizable ornament; they treated one substance to look like a
different substance; they petrified passing natural objects into permanence or
improved on real coral by using wool-wrapped, wax-dipped wire. Moreover,
domestic handicraft allied itself to a shifting fashion sensibility, being marketed
in women’s magazines in sections that paralleled the fashion pages, with identi-
cal instructions, patterns, and sketches of the finished product, even using over-
lapping materials.
Domestic handicrafts embraced the mass-produced commodity, challenging the
very handmade qualities we associate with craft. Frequently, the craftswoman
bought objects to wrap, glue, spangle, or paint. Factory-generated decorative arts
were part of the domestic handicraft tradition, including transferware (designs on
paper transferred to earthenware), painted Staffordshire figurines (depicting local
celebrities, athletes, actors, politicians, and royal figures), “Stevengraphs” (silk
tapestries woven by machine), and Parian ware (porcelain statuettes).10 Stafford-
shire figures in particular show how far domestic handicraft amalgamated indus-
try, since they were hand-painted by local people in a kind of urban folk art
tradition, but produced for sale by a factory.11 The young bride, about to furnish
her first home, could purchase those ornamented wares she neither inherited nor
had time or inclination to make herself. By the 1880s, the enormous emporia of
London were selling handicraft items like papier-mâché tea trays and card baskets,
scrapbooks, screens, and hand-painted glass vases.12 Even hairwork souvenirs of
the dead (figure I.2), presumably the most sacred relics of private family life, were
professionally produced by specialized jewelers who did a flourishing trade.13
In short, the Victorian domestic handicraft item was a modern, disposable
part of the consumer economy in the industrial era—and it could do that safely
because Victorian domestic handicraft rhetoric offered a conservative reasser-
tion of older social norms. While women dunked wire into paraffin according to
the latest magazine instructions, they could imagine themselves akin to medie-
val ladies embroidering tapestries.
The craft paradigm stood for a set of values, many of which were contradic-
tory. It meant literal realism, but it also meant altering materials to resemble
other substances, the imitative arts. It meant salvaging worthless debris, but it
also meant establishing incalculable sentimental value. As we shall see, it cri-
tiqued the mainstream economy by generating a more personal nexus of trade,
but it emulated that economy by making semi-mass-produced artifacts. It meant
celebrating urban modernity and changing fashion, but it also meant alliance
with a deeply historical mode of producing artifacts. It imagined industrious
middle-class female domestic management skills, but it allied the maker with an
aristocratic tradition of wealthy leisured ladies. It celebrated the handmade, but
Figure I.2 Hair Jewelry.

10 Novel Craft
it happily incorporated mass-produced items. These contradictions name the

fields in which domestic handicraft is most interested: representation, value, the
economy, history, class, production. When we see one of these snarled knots of
conflicted handicraft ideologies, we know that it could only have been caused by
a rather significant snag beneath.
What we recognize as contradictions, mid-Victorians received as compro-
mises. For instance, should the ideal woman should be a housewife or a lady?
Through handicraft, women could imagine themselves into both groups simulta-
neously, a thrifty manager of household scraps who is nevertheless following
Queen Elizabeth’s sixteenth-century example of dainty embroidering. Was the
mass-produced product an enviably perfect, accessible artifact or a generic prod-
uct devoid of personal meaning? Through domestic handicraft, women could
argue both. They could generate an object that had all the inexpensiveness, swift-
ness, and completeness of factory production yet imbue it with personal signifi-
cance. What propelled the domestic handicraft craze was that handicraft offered
plausible solutions to vexing problems. By reconciling culturally competing ideas,
they suggested that there was no inherent conflict, that one could have it all.
When writers invoked the craft paradigm in fiction, however, they did so in a
somewhat different way. Handicraft was still the somewhat magical solution to
vexed cultural issues, but two such issues stood out above all: the economy and
representation. In Victorian fiction, economic and representational concerns
are, overwhelmingly often, the anxieties that craft is used to answer, and it will
pay to explore the reasons.
This book shows that from Cranford (1851–1853) to Phoebe Junior (1876),
authors often mobilize the craft paradigm against an emergent financial system.
As modern economic institutions rushed upon the Victorians—as joint-stock
companies, limited-liability banking, and consumerist theories of value all threat-
ened to swamp them in a new tide of unprecedented behaviors—the handicraft
expresses mistrust of the new system. “Within the development of culture under
an exchange economy,” Susan Stewart writes, “the search for authentic experi-
ence and, correlatively, the search for the authentic object became crucial.”14 For
several decades, that “authentic object” was the domestic handicraft, which car-
ried a fiercely nostalgic affiliation with older ideas of industry, trade, and artifact.
Victorian writers found that the craft paradigm offered a satisfyingly familiar,
culturally enshrined alternative to commodity culture and industrial capitalism.
Selling Domestic Handicraft: T he Bazaar

Handicraft also gave writers a way to endorse a nostalgic economy of small
personal transactions. As Judith Flanders reminds us, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, shops coexisted with markets, fairs, hawkers, and peddlers,
and in fact markets, not shops, were the most common places to buy goods.15
Buyers were accustomed to items made by a vendor and haggled over at a weekly
local market, not manufactured commodities displayed at fixed prices in stores.
But after 1850, this sort of bargaining was increasingly displaced by modern
retail trade, with its clearly fixed prices, advertisements, and multiple shops.16
The products of the handicraft craze were not supposed to be sold. Since they
represented a woman’s selfhood, putting a price on handicrafts felt rather like
selling the woman herself. They were, instead, traded in charity bazaars. The
bazaar, then, functioned as a kind of reservoir in which earlier modes of eco-
nomic behavior were preserved, and it attracted those nostalgic for something
like the method of selling before modern standardization and efficiency.17 It sat-
isfied historical yearning for earlier forms of consumption.
In 1815, a bazaar opened in Soho Square in London to assist the widows and
orphans left behind by the Napoleonic Wars. The first “sale of fancy work” to aid a
charity occurred in 1813. Both commercial and charitable bazaars had become
widespread by the 1830s.18 By the middle of the nineteenth century, bazaars could
bring in huge amounts of money. The most profitable bazaar on record, a seven-
teen-day Anti-Corn Law League benefit, raised £25,000 in 1845.19 The bazaar was
capable of assimilating and transforming heterogeneous material into salable
items. A typical stall, run by Mrs. Joseph Ansell and Mrs. William Ansell at a Grand
Bazaar in Birmingham in October 1879, included a piano, a “gipsy table,” a baby
doll, “a large and very beautiful assortment of wool and crewel work, including
brackets, suite, consisting of fender stool, banner screen, and cushion,” baby cloth-
ing, purses, jewelry caskets, cutlery, papier-mâché tables painted with views of
Aston church, carved wood, brackets, portrait frames, silver jewelry, needlework
chairs, antimacassars, electric brushes, children’s toys, oil paintings and water-
colors, cigars and cigarettes, and “numerous miscellaneous articles.”20 Bazaars
were very big business (figure I.3). The women who ran them had to import goods,
organize entertainment, hire performers, arrange stalls, cajole prospective par-
ticipants, canvass for contributions, accommodate visitors with food and drink,
arrange tickets, place advertising, and decorate the hall. Since bazaars could host
thousands of customers over several days, this was a major undertaking that cer-
tainly showcased women’s organizational abilities and business acumen.
The bazaar worked according to its own economic rules. Women were
expected to charge outrageous prices; a half-admiring, half-outraged article in
the Cornhill cited rosebuds at a pound apiece.21 They could refuse to give
change. They could steal objects from nearby stalls and sell the goods them-
selves. They could appropriate customers’ personal possessions and sell them.
They could alter the prices constantly. The Cornhill advised male readers to
repress ordinary consumer behavior at the bazaar: “And so do you go and pur-
chase recklessly, and don’t let the circumstance of your not wanting anything
stand for a moment in the way of your buying any quantity. . . . And if you do
12 Novel Craft
Figure I.3 The Bazaar.
come, make up your mind beforehand how much you intend to spend, and
spend it like a man.”22 Without any way to find anything that looked like a
natural or intrinsic value, prices for crafts could veer wildly from one extreme
to the next.23 By the end of the day, “fabulous bargains may now be had: arti-
cles, which were offered in the morning for ten times their value, are now
‘given away.’”24 As Frank Prochaska comments, “Such practices would have
ruined the reputation of a tradesman, but to a lady turned shopkeeper, it was
all in a day’s work.”25
These violations of ordinary business practice confirmed that the women
were merely “playing,” in a separate realm not bound by the laws of trade. At the
same time, however, it was unsettling to witness such an anarchic form of eco-
nomic exchange. “A Stall Holder” wrote a verse pamphlet praising bazaars for
paying indigent gentlewomen but condemning them for “a make-believe buying
and selling, that’s made / To interfere with legitimate trade,” and selling trash
not worth the money, like “woolen ornaments, that must / In the cleanest
houses accumulate dust; / And card erections, of slender make / That you scarcely
can lift before they break.”26
Another way to transform handicrafts into commodities was presented by

the Exchange and Mart magazine or the “Englishwoman’s Exchange” column of
the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, which fostered the exchange of objects
that might usually be regarded as inalienable. For instance, the February 1869
issue featured an ad placed by “A LADY” who wanted to sell infants’ robes and
two long plaits of hair.27 In the previous month, a particularly intriguing ad read:
“M.R. wishes to exchange a very handsome piece of double Berlin wool work . . .
for a handsome birdcage capable of holding twenty canaries.”28 The barter
system and the pseudonyms may have alleviated women’s shame in seeking to
sell the items they were supposed to treasure. Barter and bazaar functioned,
above all, to mystify women’s relation to the marketplace, to transfigure their
labor, production, trade, and consumption with the effulgent halo of domestic
leisure—thereby keeping it separate from male economic transactions.
Victorian writers liked to depict what seemed like ordinary purchases as
being secretly charged with emotional electricity, because that indicated that the
domestic craft had a powerful enough sentimental effect to transfigure the act of
mercantile exchange. As Igor Kopytoff argues, culture is always pushing to resin-
gularize objects tainted by commodification.29 No wonder there was a powerful
impetus to construct a fiction of a loving relationship between vendor and cus-
tomer. Virtually all bazaar accounts are threaded with fantasies of men buying
items from women to whom they are romantically attracted, in which purchase
becomes refigured as courtship or flirtation. (The Mill on the Floss is perhaps the
best-known example.)30 Very few bazaar descriptions feature, for instance,
middle-aged wives and mothers buying from other middle-aged wives and moth-
ers, although surely this group, which ran the bazaars and whose friendship
structures made it possible, would have been most visibly in evidence.
T he C ra f t a n d t h e T h i n g
Domestic handicraft flourished precisely because of the threatening incursion of
modern economic behavior. Handicraft, both as a lived practice and a literary
trope, was driven by Victorians’ need to retain an alternative to mainstream
capitalism. As John Plotz explains,
The portaging of sentiment in beloved objects is a predictable, even

a necessary, development in a world of increasingly successful com-
modity flow. The more global such trade becomes, the faster the
exchange of items between different regions becomes, the more need to
develop auratic–or even somatic–forms of storing personal or familial
mementos.31
14 Novel Craft
Indeed, “thingness,” Plotz asserts, “is as much a product of the modern world of
global exchange as any software network or Coca-Cola franchise.”32 Plotz is
arguing that an increasingly global economy generates a specific need to assert
one’s affiliations and to invest certain objects with the imagined capacity to
carry that identity as it circulates in the globe. Thus a sprig of heather, for
instance, could represent Scottish or Yorkshire identity, especially prized when
carried to India and other distant areas of empire.
In Novel Craft, I extend Plotz’s insight. I argue that the Victorians’ need for
“personal or familial mementos” drove not only these artifacts’ global trade but
also their modes of production. Heather itself might be prized as a repository of
Englishness—but a sprig of heather was never just thrown into the Indian mail
or left lying carelessly atop a bookshelf. In the nineteenth century, the curating
of the precious object—wrapping it with ribbon, constructing a small shelf,
making a special box, pasting it into a collage—was as important as the object
itself. It articulated the owner’s familial, domestic, and artistic (as well as
national) claims.
What would one call that decorated sprig of heather? Plotz calls it “portable
property,” but I prefer Elaine Freedgood’s term, “thing culture.” Freedgood
explains that “commodity culture happened slowly: it was preceded by, I will
argue, and was for a long time survived by what I call Victorian ‘thing culture’: a
more extravagant form of object relations than ours, one in which systems of
value were not quarantined from one another and ideas of interest and meaning
were perhaps far less restricted than they are for us.”33 Handicraft is an impor-
tant category of “thing culture.” “Things” are objects we tend to overlook, but
they are meaningful in ways that can be breathtakingly different from our
current understanding of objecthood. Victorian things collapse historical,
sentimental, material, and economic values, registers that modern modes of
thought do not normally conflate. Moreover, Victorian things need to be exam-
ined for their sheer materiality, their fabric, paper, paste, not subsumed into
metaphors for other textual processes. Freedgood points out that thing
culture has a separate history from commodification. As she explains, “The
processes of commodification—abstraction, alienation, and spectacularization—
were achieved slowly rather than suddenly, unevenly rather than consistently or
finally. I want to suggest that thing culture preceded commodity culture and still
persists within it, however vestigially or invisibly.”34 It is indeed partly because
of the uneven, often worrisome migration of artifact into commodity status
that the Victorians valorized the craft paradigm. The Staffordshire figure, hand-
crafted and factory-produced, is an example of this kind of uneven compromise
between the older handicrafted artifact and the newer mass-produced commod-
ity. Another example is glass, so memorably described by Isobel Armstrong as an
industrial material shaped by the congealed breath of the worker.35 If the Victo-
rians had been happy with commodification, they would not have needed craft.
Novel Craft enters the burgeoning field of “thing theory,” along with Plotz’s
Portable Property, Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things, Armstrong’s Glassworlds, Bill
Brown’s Things, and Lorraine Daston’s Things That Talk.36 But this study offers
something different. Instead of suggesting a larger theory of how “things” worked
in the nineteenth-century imagination, it focuses on one category of thing, read-
ing back out from this specific category to see how pervasive, important, and
unresolved are the anxieties it encodes. In other words, while Freedgood, Plotz,
and the other thing theorists offer global theories of the Victorian object’s rela-
tion to imperialism, trade, and the natural world, with multiple examples, my
study resembles Armstrong’s in that it works in the opposite direction, centering
on a particular case study, from which larger ideas may be traced. In this respect,
Novel Craft seems a necessary counterpoint; we need both types of analyses to
read Victorian things.
Yet I also want to stress that domestic handicrafts constitute an especially
crucial category of thing. Indeed, the domestic handicraft almost names the
“thingness” of things. Though the domestic handicraft was a particular hobby, it
also was perceived as the last representative of a once-powerful, now-dwindling
world of goods. It was understood as a last vestige of the preindustrial object
world, a marvelous survival of a cherished past, even if in fact it was a wholly new
procedure driven by the changes in mass production, transportation, advertis-
ing, and sales that made it possible to procure craft instructions and materials.
Decorative artifacts were only the most visible component of the world of
Victorian domestic handicraft. A working definition of domestic handicraft is
anything made by hand, at home. Thus domestic handicraft really includes eve-
rything homemade, whether for decorative or sentimental or pragmatic use:
sewing, watercolors, collages, shellwork. It includes the manufacture of clothing,
fashionable accessories like bags and collars and slippers and purses, and church
or home decorations like swags, curtains, centerpieces, mantelpiece draperies,
pictures, and painted china. It includes homemade botanical, entomological, and
zoological collections. It may even (as we shall see) include book manuscripts.
Thus although handicraft was increasingly confined to the status of a leisure
activity for middle-class women, that newer identity sat atop a much older one
and evoked a much wider one as well. The specific craft activity might be, say, the
trivial action of wrapping wire in wool, but this practice evoked long-standing
associations of historical production and connected to various contemporary
practices of storing, preserving, and decorating. As Thad Logan explains, it “is
not that crocheted antimacassars and decorated ginger jars actually were pos-
sessed of the authenticity Walter Benjamin discusses in Illuminations; it is only
that they could signify such authenticity at a time when people were beginning
to intuit the consequences of its loss.”37 This signification held especially strongly
for needlework, which still carried aristocratic connotations and had ancient,
even biblical, resonances.38 Domestic handicrafts were felt to be among the last
16 Novel Craft
survivals of traditional manufacturing and distribution practices. This gave

them the status of a profound alternative to modernity and made them speak
for historically outmoded economic practices.
Pa p e r C raf t
Handicraft’s association with fragile, older materials made it a poignant way to
express anxieties about a particular form of paper craft: making a book. The
physical book was sometimes indistinguishable from the handicraft in the nine-
teenth-century imagination. The keepsakes and annuals of the early nineteenth
century were sometimes sold with blank leaves or frontispieces for women to
personalize with their own illustrations. Throughout the century, one could buy
volumes that demanded a decorative interaction: scrapbooks, autograph albums,
and photograph albums.39 Artistic skills were often employed to produce manu-
scripts. Famous examples include the microscopic volumes of the Brontës’
juvenilia, Blake’s illustrated poems, and Emily Dickinson’s fascicles, in which
microscopic writing, watercolors, and/or sewing formed an intrinsic part of the
manuscript.40 Less well-known examples include the homemade books Victo-
rian women frequently compiled to sell at bazaars, containing collections of
neighborhood wit or describing the delights of the bazaar itself. These small
pamphlets could have elaborately drawn cover pages, emulating the quality of
published volumes. Geoffrey Batchen’s and Patrizia di Bello’s studies of the
homemade album show examples of books personalized with frames, flowers,
hair, and drawings, along with photography.
Writing a manuscript had obvious parallels to constructing a handicraft. In
both cases, the maker demonstrated manual dexterity, labored privately in the
home, and aimed to make a version good enough to impress strangers. Hand-
written or handmade, the finished product was marked by the unique style of its
author’s manual skill. But readers as well as writers worked to make their vol-
umes decorative. Books sold with inexpensive paper covers had to be rebound.
Anthea Callen comments, “Bookbinding appears to have been one of the most
popular crafts, apart from embroidery and illustration, to attract women artists
towards the end of the nineteenth century.”41 This is not surprising, since book-
binding involved some of the most popular handicraft skills: gilding, incising,
molding, and scorching decorative patterns into scraps of leather or cloth.
Women sometimes felt free to recover existing covers; in “Keynotes: A New
Woman, Her Publisher, and Her Material,” Margaret Stetz describes the silk
cover George Egerton embroidered for her book, overlaying the official Beards-
ley-illustrated boards with a design of her own.42 Professional bookbinders
sometimes constructed their covers of materials usually associated with the ama-
teur arts: velvet, vellum, silk, porcelain, tortoiseshell, wood, and papier-mâché.43
The mid-Victorian ornately gilded, densely ornamental book covers expressed

the same decorative preferences as the intensively detailed, beaded, embroi-
dered, fringed handicraft,. Their resemblance would be underlined by their prox-
imity since they would often be displayed together on the parlor table.
Both books and crafts could bring in money but through roundabout and
troubling processes that foregrounded personal relationships. In both the bazaar
and the publishing industry, pricing one’s personal product was a deeply worri-
some act. After all, the book and the handicraft were both private expressions of
their maker’s unique personality. To trade it for money was like selling oneself.44
The problematically commercial transaction between publisher and writer could
get mystified into a paternalistic mode in which the male publisher/gentleman
protected and cared for his female author.45
At the basis of the identification between book and craft, however, is the fact
that books are made of paper. The changing signification of paper is crucial to
understanding Victorian feelings about authorship. Each chapter of this book
addresses a different moment in the history of paper, but I offer a brief overview
here to allow readers to conceptualize the history of this product.
Until the 1860s, paper was a precious substance. Leah Price explains that
“until not much more than a century ago, most reading matter was made from
old rags, and much of it went on to be recycled in turn. Newspapers were handed
down a chain of households as their contents staled: letters were torn to light a
pipe, broadsheets pieced out dress patterns or lined pie-plates or wiped shit.”46
In the early- to mid-Victorian imagination, paper was a robust, long-lasting, use-
ful, and expensive material. The fact that it had words printed on it at some
point in its lifetime was not particularly important in defining the nature of that
paper. According to Price, “In an age of taxed paper, reading constituted only one
point in a cycle: beginning its life as rags no longer worth wearing, the page
dwindled back into paper once its content was no longer worth reading.”47 Paper
was a material for wrapping food, for wiping waste, for cutting and twisting and
rolling and pasting, for reselling, for lining trunks, for protecting carpets.
Because paper came from cloth, it was sturdy—but there was a limited sup-
ply. Paper had been made from rags, recycled from old clothes, which meant
constant crises as the supply of rags failed to suffice for paper-making needs.48
Nineteenth-century paper historian J. Munsell marveled that the paper indus-
try’s “immense steam and water power, and ponderous machinery . . . consume
the cast-off habiliments of the population of the whole world.”49 Because paper
came from cloth, too, it was intimately related to the material that women spent
many of their waking hours manipulating. Early paper crafts often treat paper as
if it were cloth, folding and pleating it, even sewing and embroidering it.
However, at mid-century, two important events changed paper’s value. In
1861, the paper tax was lifted, and starting in the 1860s, wood pulp began
replacing rags as the stuff of paper.50 Moreover, mid-century technological
18 Novel Craft
innovations allowed paper manufacturers to create continuous sheets of paper

and to print faster than ever before by using rotary presses and linotype.51 No
wonder that, as Judith Flanders explains, “from 1800 to 1860 there was a seven-
fold increase in paper production in Britain.”52 Suddenly, printed matter became
ubiquitous and cheap. “Books of the period,” Henri-Jean Martin writes, “were
no longer treasures to be carefully saved but simple consumer items.”53
Some Victorians were disoriented by the swift change in the value of paper.
In Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), Dickens marvels at the quantity of flying
paper trash:
That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the

wind blows gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it
come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree,
is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at
every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass,
seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails.54
Suddenly, paper was a debased substance, worthless waste. For a man whose
life work was on paper, this was not a minor concern. Dickens is rather like a
professional embroiderer uneasily noticing that disregarded, stained, crumpled
slips of silk blow promiscuously about the streets of London. This image of de-
valuation is more than a complaint about littering; it is an anxiety about the
stability of paper’s value and, by extension, the value of anything written on
paper. Paper’s movement from crafted, reused, salvaged material to a disposable
modern commodity emblematizes the changes wrought by industrialization
generally, of course. But to view paper as a friable, flammable, windblown, waste
material is to express a particularly personal fear about the survivability of what
is written on paper.
Novel after novel agonizes about paper. In Cranford (1851–1853), Elizabeth
Gaskell interrogates the status of her book as a series of papers, published in a
newspaper, through her repeated, fascinated fixation on the dramatic destruc-
tion of paper. Cranford’s paper is immolated, ripped, stained, and lost. Not until
the end of the novel is Gaskell able to imagine a form of writing that is stable.
Similarly, Charlotte Yonge dreams of imperishable artifacts throughout The Daisy
Chain (1856). If a novel is a set of paper leaves within leather covers, the Daisy
Chain’s signature craft is the making of leather leaves, which transforms imper-
fect living leaves into idealized leather specimens that are fixed forever in var-
nished, incised, solid arrangements. That “paper currency” in Our Mutual Friend
represents the novel’s overriding anxiety about waste. The novel is famously
filled with piles of paper waste, salvaged fragments, and dust heaps. Yet Dickens,
too, “fixes” the paper, offering paradigmatic scenes in which generic papers are
replaced by specifically meaningful and individual letters and a “Postscript” in
which he prefers to envision his own manuscript as a woven textile rather

than a pile of papers. In the 1870s, Margaret Oliphant reimagines the value
of paper completely in Phoebe Junior. The other authors I discuss have aimed
to replace the soiled, aimless, eddying, fragile paper with a handicraft, a
superior specimen of solidity or sentimental worth. But Oliphant satirizes
those alternatives, instead showcasing the intellectual and emotional thrill
of mastering the interpretation of paper. In the modern world, one wants to
deduce the secret history of paper through its minute identifying marks and
use that precious information to solve a crisis. Phoebe Junior makes paper
epistemological, not material.
Handicraft allows writers to work through a vision of themselves as makers:
crafters of an item that might not survive, whose value is unfixed, whose circu-
lation is uncontrollable, whose existence depends on worrisomely cheap and
fragile materials, and whose reception is determined by the audience’s senti-
ment. Handicraft helps writers imagine scenes of craft production in which
they work out the values governing their own text. Gaskell, Dickens, Yonge, and
Oliphant eschew the idea that they are generating abstract commodities for glo-
bal circulation. Rather, they cling to the idea of themselves as makers of small
handicrafts, laboriously transforming the everyday detritus of Victorian life
into treasures that convey emotional rewards. Imagining themselves stitching,
twisting, knitting, varnishing, these authors envision their novels as handi-
crafts, and if we want to understand what they are aiming for, we need to learn
what handicraft meant.
Marg inal Economies

These two fields with which handicraft is constantly associated, the economic
and the representational, are, of course, profoundly linked, and that connection
makes the craft paradigm more complicated. They are linked by the emergence
of another meaning of Dickens’s “paper currency,” the new finance, in which
bills, checks, and other paper instruments of economic exchange had as much
value as traditional specie.
In this reading, I am indebted to Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy,
which traces the way financial and literary texts were intimately enmeshed in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.55 Until the last quarter of the eight-
eenth century, Poovey argues, literature was not really differentiated from
financial writing (or even paper money and documents of credit); they all
worked to familiarize the reader with value. In a fascinating reading of bank
notes, Poovey outlines the representational crisis presented by money. The
problem with paper notes, Poovey explains, is that they are worth less than
the number stamped on them. Thus paper notes represent value, rather than
20 Novel Craft
embodying it.56 Users therefore had to be taught how to believe in a value they
could not see. It is Poovey’s contention that literary and financial writing func-
tioned to train readers to “practice trust, tolerate deferral, evaluate character,
and, in a general sense, believe in things that were immaterial”: perfect training
for the credit economy.57
These ideas explain why the fiction I discuss here so often stages a competi-
tion between a solid, verifiable, present value (represented by handicraft) and a
fluid, abstract, representational value (represented by the new credit markets).
Handicraft becomes a way to name the nostalgic “real” of money, just when
nineteenth-century finance was training readers to rethink their allegiance and
give credit to new forms of money management that relied on worth that was
deferred, elsewhere, unascertainable. Perhaps handicraft fiction tries to explore
whether fiction could develop in the opposite way from the way Poovey traces—
whether fiction could reinforce readers’ desire to grasp a fully tactile and imme-
diate worth, instead of training them to believe in immaterial value. As a
fundamentally historically oriented genre, handicraft redirected readers back-
ward, to an imagined plenitude of solid worth.
The novels I examine here almost always cast an anxiously abstract paper
finance against an old-fashioned solidity of precious metals. In that framework,
the status of the novel itself becomes unclear. Generally, the author would like it
to be a kind of imperishably glowing, perpetually valuable cache, a treasured
memento, a precious hoard. But the author may be uncomfortably aware that
the real material of the novel necessarily casts it as part of the unpredictable
world of paper information circulation. To resolve the problem of the value of
paper becomes, therefore, an urgent matter for the novel. It means establishing
the novel’s value, too.
Domestic handicraft was an ideal metaphor for working through these issues.
While Victorian writers used plenty of other genres to represent their creative
work—painting, music, later even photography—they embraced domestic
handicraft with a special emphasis. They found handicraft one of the most
immediate and naturalized metaphors for writing. They did so for two very
cogent reasons.
First, the Victorian domestic handicraft was not just one hobby among
others. For middle-class Victorian subjects, the handicraft was virtually un-
avoidable. Handicrafts would tend to precede and thus shape experiences of
literature in the lived experience of Victorian readers and reviewers. Middle-
class and upper-class nineteenth-century children wore embroidered or cro-
cheted clothing, sat on Berlin wool work upholstery, gazed at scrap screens,
noticed craft instructions in their favorite magazines, watched their mothers
do fancy work in the evenings, participated in or watched their sisters perform
craft activities, saw their fathers wearing home-decorated items, visited
bazaars, and examined handicrafts in their friends’ houses. In other words,
Victorian children of the educated classes spent their formative years among
handicrafts, so the craft’s aesthetics would have already been internalized as
the paradigmatic form of women’s work by the time the individual came to
read and judge novels.
Second, domestic handicraft was the standard against which women’s writing
was constantly compared. When nineteenth-century writers talked about
“women’s work,” what they meant was the work of the hands, the needle. “Work”
meant sewing; “stuff ” meant fabric. As Patricia Zakreski explains, “As both a
domestic and an industrial employment, sewing formed one of the most central
experiences of work throughout the nineteenth century for all women regard-
less of class or economic status, and the needle came to embody a powerful
metaphor for female existence.”58 Sewing (the largest category of domestic
handicraft) was among the most fundamental categories of activity.
Intellectually ambitious women, therefore, often regarded handicraft with
strong hostility. “Needlework and intellectual improvement are naturally in a
state of warfare,” observed Mary Lamb dryly in 1815.59 Frances Power Cobbe,
writing more than sixty years later, marveled that “if the problem had been set
to devise something, the doing of which would engage the very fewest and small-
est powers of the mind or body, I know not whether we should give the prize for
solving it to the inventor of knitting, netting, crochet, or worsted work.” She
concluded that “a drawing-room crammed with these useless fads—chairs,
cushions, screens, and antimacassars—is simply a mausoleum of the wasted
hours of the female part of the family.”60 These women’s resentment was real,
but, interestingly, other women justified their writing by reconceptualizing it as
a form of handicraft, embracing craft as an appropriate model for their literary
labors. Feminist critics have frequently commented on the continuity between
writing and sewing.61 Kathryn King argues: “Literary creation—a woman’s tex-
tual work—is troped as a handiwork, a craft, a form of fabrication analogous to
the textile work long considered proper for her: authorship becomes the work of
women, women’s work.”62
Some writers manifested a complicated combination of hostility and identifi-
cation. George Eliot’s heroines “must struggle with their distaste for what they
view as a secondary and decidedly compensatory art,” comment Sandra Gilbert
and Susan Gubar. “Sewing signals woman’s domestic confinement and diminish-
ment.”63 The only Eliot heroine who enjoys sewing is Rosamond Vincy, whose
trivial nets ensnare Lydgate. Indeed, in The Mill on the Floss, one prominent sign
of Maggie’s intellectual superiority to her conventional female relatives is her
dislike of fancywork and bazaar culture. Yet, as Gilbert and Gubar rightly point
out, the famous web metaphor by which Eliot described her own fiction is a
textile image. Eliot’s web is composed of threads that must variously be
unraveled, disentangled, stretched into connections, knotted into families, spun
into alliances, or knit into plots to weave what Gilbert and Gubar call “Eliot’s
22 Novel Craft
fictional fabric.”64 Thus Eliot guarantees her character’s intellectual stature by

emphasizing her rejection of female handicrafts yet simultaneously uses craft as
a self-referential way of understanding her own production.
Meanwhile, critics often assessed women’s writing in ornamentalist terms,
most famously in Jane Austen’s oft-quoted comparison of her writing to ivory
miniatures. In Victorian reviews, the positive adjectives used for women’s crafts
(elegant, tasteful, industrious, pretty) and the negative rhetoric (amateurish,
meretricious, flimsy, gilded, fake) often became the vocabulary for women’s lit-
erature generally. For instance, in 1852, a reviewer wrote that “in the symmetry
of a complicated plot, the elaboration of varied character, and the filling-in of
artistic touches and imaginative details, [women] can design and accomplish
works which go down to posterity not very far behind those of certain Titanic
lords of creation.”65 Handicraft-inflected language permeates this review,
encouraging the reviewer to perceive women’s writing as elegant finishing of an
object appropriate to the “home,” rather than creating new material like the
primal “Titanic lords of creation.” Rohan Amanda Maitzen has found a similar
pattern in reviews of women’s historical writing, where she points out that “nee-
dlework is quite explicitly invoked to further the aims or criticisms of a
reviewer.”66 As Naomi Schor has shown, women’s art is condemned as mimetic,
detailed, decorative, and immediate, while men’s is seen as general and abstract.67
Handicrafts and books were therefore so intimately connected in the Victorian
mind that it felt obvious to make one stand in for the other. The book was imme-
diately recognizable as a form of craft, especially when written by a woman.68
That book was a product of a leisured middle-class subject’s personal labor, often
devoted to writing instead of normal “work,” as the woman would pick up the pen
instead of the needle or, as Margaret Oliphant describes in her Autobiography,
employ both simultaneously at the same table. The book was handmade, encased
in decorative covers, circulated through unusually personal markets, and evalu-
ated according to its ornamental qualities. Above all, the book was printed on
paper, the material of much handicraft and a material whose value was declining
with breathtaking precipitancy. It is no wonder that craft scenes in fiction tend to
work through those moments of uncertainty or defensiveness about the act of
producing text itself. Indeed, craft scenes are often produced in the works of
women writers for precisely this purpose—they become a way of making wom-
en’s creative labor visible and of articulating the meaning of that labor.
Nove l C ra f t
In Novel Craft, I begin with a chapter that traces the uses of the craft paradigm
from the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century and outlines
the history of domestic handicraft. Chapter 1 lists some of the major trends in
domestic handicraft construction and describes handicraft’s growing popularity

from the eighteenth century through the 1840s, then the decades from the 1840s
through the 1860s when it flourished as the most ubiquitous and influential of
decorative practices, and finally the decline of handicraft after 1860, as it became
increasingly affiliated with superseded ideologies and displaced by new aesthetic
and financial trends.
Once we have explored the nineteenth-century history of the handicraft, we
can investigate the way fiction writers utilize its changing meanings. Thus chap-
ters 2 and 3 address novels written at the height of the domestic handicraft
craze, and chapters 4 and 5 discuss those novels that were written as domestic
handicraft was dying out. In each chapter, I begin by foregrounding one repre-
sentative handicraft that figures largely in the novel under discussion. Through-
out the chapter, I analyze the most prominent aspect of the craft paradigm that
the novel interrogates; for instance, I read Gaskell’s Cranford as a meditation on
ephemerality, while Yonge’s The Daisy Chain is all about preservation. In each
chapter, I notice how the novel stages a climactic confrontation between the new
paper finance and the older craft paradigm, a thrilling emotional test to see
which realm of value can convert the other. In each chapter, I notice the text’s
nostalgic adherence to an older form of value that seems to offer more solidity,
but I also stress the increasing cracks noticeable in this construct, the way a
vision of an archaic materially based economy becomes impossible to sustain,
even imaginatively, in an increasingly modern era.
Specifically, in chapter 2, which analyzes Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–
1853), craft becomes a way to ask about the status of Gaskell’s collection of
sketches and to investigate historical and generational change. I read Cranford’s
signature craft, the making of paper candlelighters, as an emblem of Gaskell’s
anxieties about the novel itself. Cranford constantly rehearses moments when
paper gets either destroyed or transfigured. Making candlelighters—twisting
wastepaper into decorative matches—becomes the primary emblem of this
dynamic. By exploring paper as both carrier of text and as material entity,
Gaskell can foreground the fundamental issue of what survives.
Like Gaskell, Charlotte Yonge uses craft scenes to invoke larger concerns
about survival, as I argue in chapter 3 regarding The Daisy Chain (1856). Yet The
Daisy Chain does not imagine conflagration: it dreams of preservation. And in
lieu of paper, The Daisy Chain, as its name implies, foregrounds preserved hor-
ticulture: dried flora, leaves cut out of leather. Interestingly, just as the charac-
ters transform living leaves into pasted artifacts, so, too, do they work to
transform “wild” Irish or Melanesian subjects into decorous drawing room
specimens. These missionary characters exert skills learned from middle-class
domestic labor over a population imagined as unruly invaders of domestic
order. In other words, by using the vocabulary and logic of domestic ornamen-
tation, Yonge elaborates a particular model of colonial mastery—and a model
24 Novel Craft
that offers an unusual idea of racial essentialism and philanthropic labor.

Transforming wild growths into deathless ornament names the fundamental
action of this novel.
Cranford and The Daisy Chain demonstrate that, through the 1840s and the
1850s, domestic handicraft could be used as a model for major issues because
handicraft itself was omnipresent. Handicraft also still carried that powerful
nostalgic charge of maintaining fundamental values of production in spite of
new economic conditions. “Work” and “stuff ” worked to metaphorize big issues:
survival, race, growth.
But starting in the 1860s, the meaning of domestic handicraft shrank. In the
early nineteenth century, it must have seemed as if mass production was a small
island poking up through an ocean of homemade handicraft. Over the decades,
however, that island accreted more and more land. Virtually everything that had
once been made at home could now be bought. The mass production realm
spread out, surrounded that water; it became a lake, then just a pool. Eventually,
one just heard its melancholy long withdrawing roar. In this case, it was not the
sound of faith, but the noise of melting, bubbling paraffin wax—the sound of
increasingly unlikely and desperate craft, striving to flow back to its previous
fullness. By the 1870s, domestic handicraft came to mean valueless artifacts
that one could get much more easily and cheaply for a few pence in large empo-
ria. Its rationale disappeared. Although the domestic handicraft continued to
signify an other to industrial modernity, that identity increasingly came to seem
irrelevant. Industrial modernity itself was giving way to the consumer culture of
contemporary capitalism, and to consumer culture, the domestic handicraft
offered no coherent response. (We have perhaps yet to find what does; every
critique of consumer culture, from William Morris onward, has been co-opted by
consumer culture.) While domestic handicrafts were still being made, they
increasingly signified a defensive, reactionary posture, a grim grip on an alterna-
tive paradigm that was no longer viable. After the 1870s, in short, the real action
was in consumption, but handicraft was still grappling with production, the
early-Victorian worry. Instead, connoisseurship developed as a new method of
dealing with the consumerist market. Craft was left behind.
Thus in literary texts after the 1860s, the craft paradigm could be evoked, but
quite often it was used defensively, anxiously, antagonistically. For instance, as I
argue in chapter 4, in Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), Dickens insists on the
superiority of the craft realm but is unable to imagine any viable way to use it in
the modern world. In the kindly makers of small handicrafts—the doll’s dress-
maker, the taxidermist, the peddler with her knitting—Dickens constructs a
benevolent parallel world behind the facade of the abstract realm of debt, inter-
est, and loans. Yet the depiction is profoundly incoherent, for the domestic
handicraft paradigm inculcates a middle-class sensibility that is dangerous, and
sometimes literally fatal, for these indigent characters. The crucial character
here is Riah, the Jew, who works with both these realms. In Riah, Dickens tried
to imagine finance coexisting with craft, but it was a vision that could not be
sustained in any realist way. The main craft item of Our Mutual Friend is cloth,
but the craft-paradigm value it imagines is salvage, the recycling of trash, an
activity that speaks to the somber point of view with which it regards craft itself.
It is a novel of 1876, Margaret Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior, that articulates the
end of the craft paradigm and celebrates its replacement, the Arts and Crafts
movement, as I argue in chapter 5. Phoebe is a young sophisticate, well educated
in design reform tenets, sent to a provincial town to live with grandparents
mired in the mid-Victorian craft world. But when a crisis occurs, Phoebe’s Arts
and Crafts connoisseurship enables her to save her friends, for she alone can
solve the mystery by identifying and curating the crucial artifact, the scrap of
paper, when the avatars of old-fashioned domestic handicrafts are helpless.
(This novel’s signature craft item is a piece of hair jewelry, depicted as vulgar and
meretricious; connoisseurship is a far better skill.) Moreover, Phoebe Junior
demonstrates the pervasiveness of the new finance, as every character becomes
embroiled in its world of floating debt and abstract bills. In a new kind of infor-
mation economy, the person who can thrive is the connoisseur, who has the
expertise to parse texts skillfully.
Novel Craft shows that the despised domestic handicraft, the wax coral, can
be cracked open and unrolled to see fundamental ideas undergirding mid-
Victorian thought. This book could not have been written about any more
localized or concrete artifact. Craft spoke of separate spheres and traditional
economics, of domestic and natural relations, of time and history. It was not so
much a type of object as a mode of doing things. It expresses the dominant ways
that women intersected with the material world. It named the fear of economic
change and the self-interrogation of the uncertain author. And when we lose the
sense of what craft meant, we have lost some fundamental understanding of
what the Victorians thought. When we read Victorian domestic handicraft only
as the silly products of bored housewives, we impose on it a criterion from a later
generation that was explicitly designed to contest and eradicate that handicraft,
instead of viewing it in its own terms. Nor do we respect the urgent emotional
needs that the craft paradigm answered, the way it provided a rich alternative to
the disorienting economic changes of the nineteenth century, the way it gave
writers a venue for working out their anxieties about their own texts. In this
book, I do not aim to recover Victorian domestic handicraft as neglected art
deserving new appreciation. What I care about are the ideas that the domestic
handicraft expressed for the Victorians, in craft instructions and in fiction. If
Victorians perceived the pace of historical change as a war, what we examine
here are the things they carried.
Figure . Berlin-Wool Work.
CHAPTER 1
Women’s Work
THE HISTORY OF THE VICTORIAN
DOMESTIC HANDICR AFT
By the way,
The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning1
This chapter sets out to answer Aurora Leigh’s famous question: what exactly
were the “works of women,” the wax flowers, doilies, and embroidered slippers
of the mid-Victorian era? In the introduction, we saw how the domestic handi-
craft spoke to specific Victorian issues, especially the way the handicraft offered
an alternative to emergent industrial and consumer capitalism and the way
writers used handicraft models to work through self-referential textual anxi-
eties. In this history of the domestic handicraft, we will find that, ironically, the
very qualities that accounted for the vast popularity of this pursuit at mid-
century are responsible for its decline thereafter. Domestic handicraft encapsu-
lated so many urgent cultural needs of the 1840s and 1850s that it was never
able to update itself for a new era and could not compete with the aesthetic and
financial codes that increasingly governed modern life. This does not mean that
domestic handicraft died out at the end of the nineteenth century, but that it
increasingly assumed a reactionary function, aligning its practitioners with par-
adigms of a previous generation.
This chapter starts by looking at the rise of the domestic handicraft move-
ment. In the late eighteenth century, people started constructing domestic
handicrafts because new consumer goods (especially cheap textiles) became
available, and the hobby allowed them to relate themselves to aristocratic
27
28 Novel Craft
embroiderers while simultaneously fulfilling the emergent ideology of middle-

class women’s domestic duties. This early craft tends to be concerned with
rationalizing and taming nature. By the mid-nineteenth century, however,
handicraft gets infected by Victorian enthusiasm for industrial production,
eagerly emulating the new values of inexpensive, easy reproducibility. Mid-
Victorian handicrafts often transform bits of household trash into a simulacrum
of an expensive commodity. The bulk of this chapter explores the productions of
this period, paying especially close attention to the Great Exhibition, the craze
of “imitative arts,” Berlin-wool work (figure 1.1), and craft manual rhetoric. The
hobby was a thriving urban experience, participating in fashion, embracing
modernity, intended to be ephemeral, aiming to imitate other substances, and
predicated upon disposable consumer items.
However, by the 1860s, the Design Reform movement and then the much
more influential Arts and Crafts movement began to supersede the domestic
handicraft. Nothing could be further from the cheerful, cheap, modern, ama-
teurist copying of the domestic handicraft than the new dogma of traditional,
handmade, skilled, unique craft. I argue that the Arts and Crafts movement did
not so much reveal the truth of crafts as it constructed an oppositional move-
ment for a particular place and time. The Arts and Crafts movement, in other
words, developed against its domestic handicraft competitor, and this chapter
will conclude by exploring the consequences of that shift.
E a r l y -V i c to r i a n Ha n d i c ra f t H i s to r y
In Europe, the idea of a craft, as distinct from art, emerged in the fifteenth cen-
tury. In the Middle Ages, jewelry was generally considered the highest craft, and
painters emulated it by inserting gold leaf and jewels into their pictures. The
artistic ideal was to produce well-executed versions of long-accepted models,
whether those models were horseshoes or Holy Families. “In the Middle Ages—
that is, in a culture largely based on manual work—outstanding dexterity and
superb manual skill themselves became central values,” explains Moshe Bar-
asch.2 Manual skill was prized over creativity. But in the fifteenth century,
painters began insisting that their pursuit was qualitatively different, most
influentially in the treatises of Leon Battista Alberti, who claimed that painting
was an intellectual ability showcasing creativity, originality, and higher knowl-
edge.3 Art split off from crafts and was soon considered a higher pursuit, because
the artist showed a godlike ability to create out of nothing, while the craftsman
was simply a mechanic, reproducing traditional forms.4
From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the most important
craft women pursued was embroidery, which was associated primarily with aris-
tocratic families.5 But during this time, several innovations encouraged the
Women’s Work 29
development of a middle-class craft pastime. The late seventeenth and early

eighteenth centuries saw a dramatic increase in the use of paper patterns, made
possible by increasing literacy and decreasing costs for paper and printing.6
Moreover, an explosion of consumer items in the eighteenth century brought
luxury goods within reach of many middle-class consumers for the first time. By
the late seventeenth century, the parlor was used primarily as public space
rather than a bedroom, creating a new venue for ornamentation.7 Domestic
decoration thus became more feasible.
Domestic handicrafts, defined as a leisure hobby producing luxury items, really
emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century. In its eighteenth-century
incarnation, it seems to have functioned as a way to assert one’s mastery of an
aristocratic code in which “wasting” time and valuable materials was a status
marker. Just as ornamental gardens proved that one could afford to divert arable
land from farming purposes, decorative household goods and clothing proved that
one could afford to divert time and manual skill from plain sewing. (In the eight-
eenth century, plain sewing was not yet considered a leisure pastime, although by
the 1840s, fancy sewing and plain sewing began to merge, as crochet made it
possible to produce decorative versions of heretofore utilitarian garments.)
The most popular French craze of the late eighteenth century was variously
called “drizzling,” “untwisting,” or “parfilage” and was brought to England by
émigrés. Drizzling consisted of carefully unraveling brocades in order to extract
their gold and silver threads, rewinding them on little bobbins, and selling them.
Prince Leopold, the widower of Princess Charlotte, drizzled constantly.8 It is a
marvelously legible practice; what could be more in line with Enlightenment ide-
als than to reduce a complicated fabric to its component parts, to rationalize it
into its basic elements? Drizzling expressed the post–French Revolution prefer-
ence for simplicity and rejection of ornate and courtly aesthetics. Here we see
the royal circles of two nations busily engaged in undoing their own past, taking
apart the dresses and military uniforms that had signaled status heretofore. It is
a visible and tactical critique of the ancien régime.
While drizzling soon disappeared, another popular late-eighteenth-century
handicraft flourished well into the next century: flowers made from shells,
paper, wax, and feathers. Perhaps the most famous practitioner of these crafts
was Mary Delany, a friend of the Duchess of Portland and the royal family, who
invented paper collages, making intricately detailed and naturalistic flower pic-
tures from thousands of minuscule fragments of colored papers (figure 1.2). Like
many other late-eighteenth-century craftswomen, Delany produced wax flow-
ers, shell nosegays, and landscapes made of seaweed and different-colored sand
layers and took great care to preserve them under glass and in gilded frames.9
Craft making, then, was a high-status activity, connected with the wealthiest
and most leisured individuals, and perceived as the production of remarkable
objects superior to their too-evanescent natural models.
30 Novel Craft
Figure . Mary Delany, “Physalis, Winter Cherry, a paper collage,”

–.
By the early nineteenth century, the shell, vegetation, and sand handicrafts
had become more popular than the earlier aristocratic fancy-sewing traditions.
These new forms may have been inspired by the Romantic adoration of nature
and a desire to introduce into the home what one manual called the “ornaments
which nature presents in the vegetable kingdom.”10 If the home was to be trans-
figured by the wonders of the vegetable kingdom, however, it is equally clear
that the space of interior culture would exert a disciplining and ordering effect
on these wild imports. Mary W. Helms has argued that in craft-making societies,
“the safe, civilized, ordered, moral, domesticated life of the home society where
people live in the here-and-now is contrasted either with a dangerous, chaotic,
immoral or amoral, pre-civilized natural world outside or with the outside as a
mystically powerful place of sacred superiority.”11 The function of crafts is to
transform objects from this exciting but dangerous “outside” into an acceptable
component of the “inside.” Crafting, then, is “the creation of form, shape, order,
and refinement from that which is formless, shapeless, chaotic, and unrefined.”12
Helms’s argument explains why, in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century
Women’s Work 31
crafts, the natural object is never presented in anything remotely like its natural
setting. Natural objects would be gilded, shellacked, wrapped in foil, dipped in
wax, pierced, glued together, wrapped in fabric, or incorporated into larger geo-
metrical patterns. Crafts do not display the Romantic adoration of nature.
Rather, they show the need to dominate nature, processing it into mere decora-
tion. The domestic handicraft is the opposite of the sublime. Instead of the thrill
of feeling overpowered by vast, infinite, dangerous nature, it offers the smug
satisfaction of putting a miniature, prettified bit of nature into its proper place
(usually under glass).
For an example of the most popular early-nineteenth-century crafts, we can-
not do better than look to Aurora Leigh. Although Aurora obediently does cro-
chet, the new craze invented in 1838, most of her work fulfills her aunt’s
preference for preservationist crafts.13 Aurora’s aunt practices the arts of her
youth when she produces seaweed collages, pricking the dried fronds into
patterns with a pin.14 Aurora herself “spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled
flowers in wax, / Because she liked accomplishments in girls.”15 Taxidermy and
wax flowers worked to produce a sense of permanence, to turn the decaying
bird’s corpse or the already-blown flowers into something that would last
forever, radiant, orderly, scentless, protected under glass. Interestingly, Aurora
describes herself doing the most high-status, difficult, and even dangerous of
the crafts available to Victorian women. Taxidermy was risky because it involved
arsenic, and glasswork required the operator to control molten glass at very high
temperatures. While wax flowers did not require any toxic substances, they were
extremely difficult and time-consuming to make well. In this respect, although
Aurora disdains craft, her early handicraft training prepares her for her poetic
career by developing—and revealing to the reader—her competitiveness, ambi-
tion, control, and self-discipline.
As Aurora’s training shows, early-nineteenth-century crafts tended to present
nature arranged in an orderly fashion, forced to serve a civilized end. In this
respect, the handicrafts occupy the same kind of cultural role as Nash’s orderly
architectural squares or Capability Brown’s gardens that edited nature into
carefully picturesque landscapes. Shell and seaweed pictures are diminutive dec-
orative parallels to the important work of topographic reorganization under-
taken in the public sphere.
M i d -V i c to r i a n Han d i c ra f t
Handicrafts that incorporate natural objects also, crucially, participate in the
industrial era’s pleasure in producing a man-made world whose power and pre-
cision subdue nature itself. In her important study of Victorian interiors, Thad
Logan argues that the nineteenth-century craze for aquariums and Wardian
32 Novel Craft
Figure . Shell Nosegay, Mid-Eighteenth Century.
cases (glass cases filled with ferns) derives in part from a fascination with
small enclosed spaces in which great natural forces could be domesticated.16
“When the ‘natural’ appeared in the parlour, it always did so as cleaner, more
wrought, more contained, or more organized than it would have been in its
original condition. The middle-class parlour functioned, in fact, as a symbolic
and practical switchpoint, transforming the natural into the cultural.”17 The
craftswoman improved on nature by preserving, cleansing, arranging, and
fixing the materials that nature had left in chaos.
Coincidentally, this period also saw an explosion of consumer goods,
which provided a plenitude of raw materials for textile crafts in particular.
Cotton went from being a luxury textile to a popular and affordable material
at the end of the eighteenth century. New kinds of cotton included toweling
and sheeting, plaids, corduroys, mixed worsted, and cotton blends. But there
were also new fibers like alpaca and new technology for textile printing,
which inspired craftswomen to develop new ways of salvaging and combin-
ing them.18
Women’s Work 33
The gender and class associations of handicraft altered by the middle of the
nineteenth century. The high-status embroidery, drizzling, and collage crafts
of the eighteenth century had been prized for their aristocratic associations
and practiced by men as well as women. But in the early nineteenth century,
handicraft became coded as a woman’s hobby specifically, and it was increas-
ingly identified with a middle-class sensibility, as a thrifty, skillful mode of
domestic management. This does not mean handicraft was limited to the
middle class; on the contrary, needlework continued to be popular with upper-
class women, while domestic ornamentation was prized even by the very
poor.19 But it means that handicraft now signified the moral, managerial vir-
tues of the bourgeoisie, not just aristocratic leisure, and that members of other
classes were emulating these middle-class ideals when they did craftwork. In
the nineteenth century, when high-art venues were largely closed off to women,
they channeled their creative urges into the world around them, using the ele-
ments most readily available.20 This kind of domestic decoration was also sanc-
tioned because it added to the comforts of the home, whereas more ambitious
high art was condemned as a selfish use of time taken away from the family.
Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, the handicraft’s most visible and
urgent function was to signify womanhood. Craft items were made by the home’s
female inhabitant and thus appeared to be an extension of her body, as well as
carrying the signs of her taste and skill. The woman’s hands had held it, her mind
had planned it, her eyes had gauged it, and she had communicated something of
her intangible subjectivity to the completed object.21 For the Victorians, then,
women were ensconced in a cocoon of items of their own manufacture, repre-
senting otherwise invisible aspects of their identity. This is the image behind
Ruskin’s famous claim that “wherever a true wife comes, this home is always
around her.”22 The craft was frequently described as “pretty” or “elegant,” quali-
ties that elided the object with its maker’s own body. The craft was the woman’s
home skills made concrete, a tangible trace of her household labor that was all
the more valuable for having been produced in leisure hours, for it showed that
labor was leisure, that she never stopped working to improve the domestic
abode. Its finished appearance also testified to the neatness and delicacy of the
domestic woman’s body.
Women made crafts in order to perpetuate the values of the women’s sphere.
This means that crafts had to remain personal emanations of their producer,
given as sentimental tokens, irreducibly and inalienably part of the private
world of the home. Susan Stewart explains:
Thus, while the personal memento is of little material worth, often

arising, for example, amid the salvage crafts such as quilt-making
and embroidery, it is of great worth to its possessor. Because of its
34 Novel Craft
connection to biography and its place in constituting the notion of the

individual life, the memento becomes emblematic of the worth of that
life and of the self’s capacity to generate worthiness.23
This was especially the case for women, whose “self” and “worthiness” were
made visible, confirmed, and publicized through the handicraft.
Because of this intimate connection with women’s lives, crafts stay firmly in
the category of what Annette Weiner has called “inalienable possessions.”24 In
other words, they were sacred enough to be accumulated rather than traded.
Their value lies in their emotional message, not their monetary worth. Nobody
put it better than Elizabeth Stone, who in 1840 described crafts as:
those numberless pretty and not unuseful tokens of remembrance,

which, passing from friend to friend, soften our hearts by the intima-
tion they convey, that we have been cared for in our absence, and that
while the world looked dark and desolate about us, unforgetting hearts
far, far away were holding us in remembrance, busy fingers were occu-
pied in our behoof. Oh! a reticule, a purse, a slipper, how valueless
soever in itself, is, when fraught with these home memories, worth that
which the mines of Golconda could not produce.25
In Stone’s description, domestic handicrafts are both too valuable for trade
(something “the mines of Golconda could not produce”) and too worthless
(“valueless in itself”), thus flying both over and under the radar of commodity
culture. They escape commodification in the two ways Igor Kopytoff has
described; they are “sacralized”—ascribed a value beyond price and reserved for
royals or priests—and they are cheap and ubiquitous enough to be virtually
worthless, like a single match or a tissue.26 Made of scraps that women salvaged
and recycled, unsalable in ordinary stores because of their amateurish construc-
tion and inadequate execution, the handicraft remained within the sentimental
realm of the home.
It may seem as if this homemade, sentimental artifact was the opposite of the
mass-produced commodity, but its actual relationship to the industrial economy
was far more complex. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, factory pro-
duction had begun to compete with manual fabrication, but as Daryl M. Hafter
has pointed out, handmade work persisted alongside industrialization, influ-
enced it, and competed with it.27 During this period, manual work was not nec-
essarily seen as artistic; indeed, if anything, it was associated with exhausting
rural toil that was rapidly becoming obsolete. The condition of the workers in
mills and textile factories was, of course, notoriously bad, but hand-sewers were
no better off, since they were forced to work extremely hard in unhealthy
conditions to produce enough clothing to outsell cheaper machine-made wares.
Women’s Work 35
The plight of impoverished lacemakers was especially pitiable as they desperately

tried to compete with machine-made lace.28 Thus, middle-class women might
well associate hand-sewn products with squalid, impoverished conditions. They
might well view industrialism as the wave of the future and try to incorporate
factory-made objects or use machine-influenced techniques in their own hob-
bies. Indeed, as Lara Kriegel records, “Several English commentators argued that
machinery facilitated mastery and even liberation.”29 As a triumph over nature
and a relief from toil, industrialism was idealized. Indeed, women’s own bodies
began to be in intimate contact with machinery. James Laver describes the
crinoline as “the first great triumph of the machine age”—“the application to
feminine costume of all those principles of steel construction employed in the
Menai Bridge and the Crystal Palace.”30 With advances in corset design, new dyes,
machine-made lace, cosmetics, and false hair, the mid-Victorian beautiful body
was itself a product of manufacturing.
The machine age, in fact, made the domestic handicraft necessary. In the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for the first time, many middle-
class women were spatially separated from the site of work. And as middle-
class women lost economic power in the Industrial Revolution, their domestic
life was correspondingly glorified in the doctrine of separate spheres. This
story is, of course, vastly simplified; as Amanda Vickery points out, economic
shifts are slower and messier and women’s work more multifaceted than
any such neat story can accommodate.31 However complex the reality of this
shift, the point is that the dominant ideology of this period imagined middle-
class women’s work as household management in a domestic space coded as a
haven, while assuming middle-class men’s work to be economic production in
the public marketplace.
Up to the middle of the eighteenth century, England had been a primarily
agrarian community; most women in farming families had worked on the
estate, generally overseeing the dairy, the fowl, the beer making and bread
making, and the production of cloth. But industry was designed to exclude
middle-class women, unlike agriculture. Located in unpleasant buildings in
remote or unsavory locales, dependent on advanced machinery, and tied to
technological and financial innovations, the factory was a place that strictly
precluded middle-class females. For the first time, the economic life of the
nation occurred in places middle-class women were not supposed to visit
or understand.32
Domestic handicraft gave these women an outlet for expressing their feel-
ings about the new economy. Thad Logan explains, “As the lives of men and
women in the nineteenth century became more and more thoroughly consti-
tuted by industrial capitalism, there seems to have been a compensatory
emphasis on the amateur practices of ornamental sewing and handcrafts. . . .”33
Homemade objects were an antidote to the mass-produced commodities of the
36 Novel Craft
industrial era, but in a complicated way, they also emulated those commodities.
This was a woman’s mode of production, set up as a rival to the regular indus-
trial machinery. Domestic handicrafts proved that women, too, were capable of
swift, precise, reliable production (the hallmark of industrial mass production),
but that they were able to produce objects that were far more meaningful than
the generic products of the factory. In his history of hobbies, Steven Gelber
astutely notes, “Hobbies developed as a category of socially valued leisure activ-
ity in the nineteenth century because they bridged the worlds of work and
home. They allowed women to practice, and therefore to understand, worklike
activities. . . . As a particular form of productive leisure they expressed the
deeper meaning of the work ethic and the free market.”34 Gelber captures the
way women could express their loyalty to work via what seems like its opposite,
leisure. Craft allowed women to practice the same skills that the British econ-
omy was built on. Thus the crafts that emerged in the 1840s and 1850s gave
middle-class women a way to assert their own economic productivity and
to comment on industrialization as they were being reassigned to a private
domestic sphere.
In the 1840s, handicraft became more fashionable than ever, after the 1837
coronation of a young queen who loved decorative arts, particularly embroi-
dery.35 New publications stressed the activity’s status; several needlework books
in the 1840s were either dedicated to or edited by princesses, viscountesses, and
countesses.36 This royal imprimatur became visible at the Great Exhibition of
1851, largely organized by Prince Albert and opened by Queen Victoria, in which
handicraft played a large and visible role.
T he Great E x hibition
and Imitative Arts
1851 can be read as the climax of the domestic handicraft movement, when
handicrafts were publically showcased as prime examples of Great Britain’s
manufacturing prowess. The Great Exhibition was intended to showcase indus-
trial achievements, and it accepted only art associated with mechanical
processes or appliances.37 Indeed, the Great Exhibition aimed to prove that
industrialism was compatible with art, part of a debate that lasted from the
1830s through the fin de siècle, according to Patrick Brantlinger.38 Thus the Of-
ficial Catalogue to the Great Exhibition called handicraft “ornamental industry”
and designated their makers either “inventor and producer” or “designer and
manufacturer,” titles that flatteringly affiliated them with industrial magnates.39
Indeed, Lara Kriegel points out that the ornamental arts at the Great Exhibition
actually helped domesticate industrialism. They provided examples of pursuits
Women’s Work 37
that combined both artisanal and mechanical work, like papier-mâché, iron-
work, and ornamental glass.40 Because of the double meaning of industry, which
meant both hard work and machinery by the 1850s, “the handicraftsman was
just as much a man of industry as the operator of a machine in a textile factory,
which explains why objects that were the product of exceptional craftsmanship
stood side by side with objects that were the product of machines.”41 Precisely at
mid-century, then, “industry” aligned handicraft with mechanical manufacture.
It is worth pausing to note this fact, because within twenty years, William Morris
and his fellow reformers would redefine craft and machine work as inherently
oppositional, making it hard even to remember how allied they seemed at the
Great Exhibition.
The Great Exhibition’s view of “ornamental industry” can be parsed through
its physical categories. It displayed needlework and other decorative handi-
crafts alongside its turbines, ores, and knives, glossing all these objects as
equally significant components of the newly flourishing industrial economy.
The organizing principles of the Great Exhibition made all objects equally
specular, monumental, and desirable, mystifying modes of production and
local differences among them. As Thomas Richards explains, “Under a single
ceiling, surrounded by trees and flooded with light, commodities appeared to
have come out of nowhere, radiant and ordered into departments that fixed
the place of each article and gave it a caption and a numbered place in the
catalogue.”42 The craft exhibitions at the Great Exhibition fell into several dif-
ferent groups. Some were objects remarkable for the skill of their producers.
These included most of the embroidery and tapestry work, stamped-leather
book covers, and patriotic scenes in needlework depicting Napoleon or Mary
Queen of Scots.43 Others were outstandingly large, like “a hearth-rug, with the
border and ends formed of upwards of 20,000 shreds of cloth, and the centre
of lamb’s wool,” or W. Bridges’s “tapestry wool-work, ‘The Last Supper,’ after
Leonardo da Vinci, containing five hundred thousand stitches.”44 A third
group consisted of objects produced, for the first time, wholly by machine,
including an ivory pagoda and machine-made lace, to which the editors of the
Great Exhibition catalogue could not refrain from adding the enthusiastic
comment, “The application of machinery to the production of lace is very
remarkable and interesting.”45
A fourth set of artifacts, however, were admired for their artists’ ability to
transcend the limits of their materials, and this is a significant cultural prefer-
ence. The mid-Victorians were fascinated by objects made to simulate other
objects, which they called the “imitative arts.”46 James Howard Earle displayed a
folding screen with encaustic painting “in imitation of antique gems,” beside a
“table-top imitation of buhl.” Alongside the marble statues in the sculpture gal-
leries, the inquisitive visitor could find objects made of perforated paper, mod-
eled in wax, cut out of cardboard, or cast in composition to resemble marble.
38 Novel Craft
Visitors might also spot Alexander Vischi’s stall, with woolen flowers arranged
on artificial pads of green turf in a porcelain basket.47 Brantlinger comments on
the prevalence of imitative arts at the Great Exhibition, listing: “furniture made
from new types of fake wood (gutta percha and papier maché), electroplated
vases and statues, [and] painted ‘stained glass’ windows.”48
The imitative arts had been popular before the Great Exhibition, of course.
“Between 1827 and 1846 thirty-five patents were taken out at the British Pat-
ent Office for processes which involved coating one substance or material so
that it looked like another and (usually) more expensive one.”49 Many mid-
Victorian domestic handicrafts were designed to fool the viewer by composing
inexpensive matter, including household waste, into a simulacrum of a costlier
consumer good. Two very popular crafts involved transferring a colorful paper
print to glass and varnishing it to imitate either porcelain (“potichomanie”) or
stained glass (“diaphanie”).50 Craftswomen were often exhorted to twist a rough
shape out of wire or twigs, wrap it in cotton wool, and slather it with molten
wax to make it resemble coral.51 Even imitative arts could themselves spawn
imitations. Marble might be too expensive, but “scagliola work” was an Italian
substitute made of plaster. Scagliola itself being a costly high-status object, the
Lady’s Album of Fancy Work in 1850 suggested that its readers copy the effect
by using a piece of sycamore wood painted with India ink and then varnished.
The Album went on to point out that the sycamore itself could be imitated by
a piece of cheap deal “covered with good cream-coloured drawing-paper.”52 In
this rather remarkable series, paper imitates sycamore, which imitates plaster,
which imitates marble.
Successful imitative art testified to the thriftiness, imaginativeness, and
manual dexterity of the craftswoman. It also confirmed the visual sophistication
of the viewer. In fact, any imitative art good enough to fool a naïve viewer would
actually have failed. The viewer had to be momentarily tricked into believing the
illusion, while knowing at a deeper level that it was fictional and puzzling out the
method that produced it. It was precisely the successful navigation of that dou-
ble perspective that made imitative art pleasurable.
The Great Exhibition provoked some anxiety about the absence of originality
in imitative arts, although this was part of a larger worry about the lack of imag-
ination in British art generally.53 But on the whole, imitative arts continued to
signal successful manufacturing. In 1862, “Alsagar and Neville produced papier
mâché that looked like malachite. Earl Granville, speaking in a debate on paper
in the House of Lords in 1860, found it a positive merit that paper could be made
to look like Moroccan leather and pigskin.”54 When read as manufacture, imita-
tive arts were distinctly laudable. The imitative arts were the plastics of their
day, promising to make heretofore forbiddingly expensive items affordable. Now
working-class or middle-class consumers, too, could enjoy the visual pleasure
and status of Moroccan leather, marble, and malachite.
Women’s Work 39
The crafts exhibited in 1851 fit into the machine ethos. They celebrated inex-
pensive materials utilized ingeniously and objects too vast for a single producer
to create. The ideal craft of 1851 was made of an inexpensive, readily available
material (wax, cardboard, wool), formed into the likeness of something rarer.
The Great Exhibition promised magical transformations. Those vast, rough
bales of raw materials—coal, cotton, or iron—could go into a machine that
would shape them into finished consumer items. Similarly, the detritus of
Victorian life—feathers, ink, paper, wax, fabric scraps, or seaweed—could
be supplied to an ingenious craftsperson who would fashion them into a
decorative delight.
Imitative art also satisfied the mid-Victorian fascination with ingenious
ways to incorporate waste products back into an efficient economy, a fascina-
tion with recycling and salvage described perhaps most famously in Henry May-
hew’s examination of how each class lived off the drippings and debris of the
one above it, and in the vast dust heaps of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend.55 The
imitative arts, therefore, testified that a skillful domestic manager could deliver
the visual pleasure of valuable artifacts by finding novel uses for the bits of cot-
ton, fragments of wire, scrap remnants, and old candle ends otherwise relegated
to the rubbish heap. One particularly labor-intensive craft employed fish scales
in lieu of sequins; the woman would scrape the scales off the fish, clean them,
soak them, punch tiny holes in them, snip them into the shape of leaves, and
sew them to objects.56 Cucumber or melon seeds could be sewn in intricate pat-
terns to decorate mats, bags, or table ornaments.57 This craft emblematized the
world in which rags became paper, textile fibers were processed into “flock,”
bones turned into matches, animal and human waste could be sold for fertilizer,
dead horses became glue, and coal by-products produced new dyes.58 Handi-
crafts encapsulated a kind of progress upward through the ranks of material
objects, a material evolution, as it were, when rubbish could be reshaped into
treasure or inexpensive common things made to bear uncanny resemblances to
precious materials. When the visitor to the Great Exhibition looked at imitation
marble or shreds of wool, what he saw was human skill elevating waste matter
to unforeseen heights.
What the visitor to the Great Exhibition also felt was the intense satisfaction
of common materials representing something recognizable. The preference for
careful copying dominates the history of the handicraft. While precise replica-
tion was a desideratum for all crafts, it is perhaps most often articulated in
embroidery manuals, because of embroidery’s explicitly representational pat-
terns. The most admired craftswoman in England from the 1790s to the 1820s
was Mary Linwood, who became famous for her “pictorial embroidery”: precise
replicas of famous oil paintings (by artists like Raphael and Gainsborough) done
in needlework (figure 1.4). Miss Linwood’s Gallery, in Leicester Square, was one
of the sights of London.59 Linwood’s needlework replicas of sportive dogs,
40 Novel Craft
Figure . Mary Linwood, Needlepoint Portrait of Napoleon.
Mount Vesuvius, lobsters, pathetic nuns, and King Lear were perceived as the
height of skill. No wonder that in 1842 Miss Lambert wrote:
Needlework may be regarded (if we may be allowed the expression) as

the sister art of painting; the aim of the accomplished needlewoman of
the present day, being to produce as true a picture of nature as possible;
soaring far beyond the commonplace ideas of the ancient embroideries,
which, perhaps, are more to be admired for the richness of their
materials, and the labour bestowed upon them, than for any merit they
possess as works of art.60
Indeed, she cautions, “Let us remember that the true intention of the art is to
copy nature, not to distort her.”61 Notice that here Lambert exults in modern
superiority to “ancient embroideries.” She is dubious about medieval embroidery,
Women’s Work 41
so admired by Pugin and Morris, because it fails to “produce as true a picture of

nature as possible.” Similarly, Cornelia Mee, displaying her embroidery at the
Great Exhibition, made a point of boasting in the catalogue that “the needlework
of most of the articles is done from flowers, minutely copied from Paxton’s Mag-
azine of Botany.”62 Mee, Lambert, and Linwood are, in effect, reworking embroi-
dery to resemble photography in terms of recording nature, and some of the
enthusiasm for this precise replication surely comes from the enthusiasm for
early photographic reproductions.
In other words, handicrafts were a local expression of the overriding mid-
Victorian drive for realism. The craftswoman had to embroider what was actu-
ally there, just as authors were supposed to adhere strictly to the conventions
and probabilities of real life, just as photographs were supposed to be a precise
record of nature, and just as applicants for the Royal Academy had to prove their
drawing skill by painstakingly stippling endless copies of classical models. In
Charlotte Yonge’s early novel Abbeychurch (1844), Helen embroiders an orange
rose among the more orthodox red and pink ones. Consternation ensues until it
can be definitively established, by recourse to a diary entry, that she had indeed
witnessed an orange rose. This ocular proof makes the orange rose acceptable.63
No aesthetic concerns about the visual qualities of Helen’s embroidery occurs to
the characters of Abbeychurch; documentary corroboration is paramount. The
imitative arts, similarly, satisfied the shared belief that faithful mimesis of
another object was the highest goal of handicraft.
Handicrafts, in fact, could even move beyond mimesis. They were a privileged
locus of realism because they could be the thing, not merely represent it. In this
respect, they were preferable even to photography. Craft instructions often
incorporated the desirable original directly into the craft object. Art Recreations,
a craft manual from 1861, demonstrates how to decorate already-drawn pictures
or showcase existing physical objects, pasting hair, seaweed, and shells onto
pages and casting wax fruit from real fruit. “Anglo-Japanese Work” consists of
gluing pressed leaves directly onto the article to be ornamented and then paint-
ing and varnishing the whole product.64 High art involved endless copying of
classical models, but it was only in the realm of domestic handicrafts that one
could be presented with the model itself, the actual acorn or moss, the craftsper-
son’s only role being to fix that object in such a way as to arrest its decay. Taxi-
dermy is perhaps the craft that most clearly expresses this naturalistic urge,
since the craftsperson’s entire role is simply to preserve an animal in a fit state
for public display. The fiction produced by a culture in love with taxidermy might
well aspire, equally, to fix the real forever in an enhanced, permanent, decorative
mode. Anglo-Japanese Work and taxidermy suggest why this culture loved real-
ism. They also present a model for writers of realism to emulate—a verifiable
artifact, petrified into ornament. As we shall see in chapter 3, this model of real-
ism defined the fiction of Charlotte Yonge.
42 Novel Craft
B e r l i n - Wo o l Wor k : Wo m e n
as S team-Power L o oms
Nothing summed up the mid-Victorian enthusiasm for realistic copying more
visibly than a new needlework technique called Berlin-wool work, which was,
arguably, the signature craft of the mid-Victorian era. Berlin-wool work became
phenomenally popular by the 1840s, although it had appeared as early as 1796,
according to Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall.65 Traditional embroidery
involves working a design on top of an opaque length of silk or cotton. Berlin-
wool work, however, offered a completely different model. A picture (often
adapted from a popular painting) was divided into a grid and keyed to a piece of
coarse canvas, sometimes with every tenth thread in the canvas colored yellow
to help the worker transfer each square in the grid properly. Workers used thick
wools, which made it easy to fill in the picture fast. The yarn was also cheaper
and easier to work than embroidery silks. Indeed, it became possible to purchase
canvas with the picture printed directly upon it, obviating the need even to
transfer the design. And machines that perforated paper were also used to pro-
duce cheap paper patterns with holes already punched for the needle. Such pat-
terns could be laid over cloth and simply sewn right into the fabric.66 In fact, it
was a kind of stitch-by-numbers kit, rather like its descendant, modern needle-
work kits. Without needing to exercise any individual drawing skill, a worker
could simply purchase and work the Last Supper, a Madonna and Child, a view
of the Prince of Wales as a baby, a group of Royal spaniels, a basket of fruit, or a
scene from Sir Walter Scott.67 Even a child could produce replicas as good as Miss
Linwood’s. This sort of work was adaptable to virtually anything—chair backs,
cushion covers, even slippers and bookmarks. Aurora Leigh memorializes the
range and productivity of this form of handicraft: “Producing what? A pair of
slippers, sir, / To put on when you’re weary—or a stool / To stumble over and vex
you. “curse that stool!” / Or else at best, a cushion. . . .”68 The slippers, stool, and
cushion emerge too swiftly, faster than their male recipient can learn their place.
Berlin-wool workers churned out identical copies of mass-produced replicas
of art.69 Mid-Victorians found this sort of mass production a major aesthetic
advantage. Elizabeth Stone commented in 1840: “The French ladies persevere in
the practice of working on drawings previously traced on the canvas: the conse-
quence is that, notwithstanding their general skill and assiduity, good work is
often wasted on that which cannot produce an artist-like effect. . . . By the help
of the Berlin patterns more good things are produced here as articles of furni-
ture than in France.”70 The French ladies’ traditional embroidery practice wastes
labor and time. Berlin-wool work can be relied on to produce recognizable
images and is therefore a better bet. In other words, creativity and originality
are not artistic desiderata. What is desirable in a worker is the same thing that’s
Women’s Work 43
desirable in a factory: reliable and economical production methods, without

wasted labor. In 1880, a critic marveled:
Look at all the time wasted in depicting and grounding those impos-
sible bunches of patchwork roses, those ladies with square red blocks of
woolen mosaic to represent their cheeks, those lap-dogs with lustreless
eyes and rectangularly waving tails. Yet, incredible as it seems, human
beings used to buy pieces of this work with the pattern already finished,
and spend days in mechanically filling-in the black background. They
paid work-girls for doing the only interesting part of the design, such as
it was, to save themselves even the faint intellectual effort of counting
the holes, and then contentedly reduced their individuality to the level
of a steam power-loom, to cover the remainder of the canvas with uni-
form lines of black stitches.71
This chance to prove one could work like a steam power loom was precisely the
appeal of Berlin-wool work. By churning out these identical products, middle-
class women demonstrated that they, too, could boast the skills that made Brit-
ish manufactures flourish.
Another factor that contributed to the popularity of Berlin-wool work was
the brightly colored type of wool used, which fit into a mid-nineteenth-century
aesthetic. The crafts of this period enacted the prevailing view that strong con-
trasting colors were pleasurable. These theories derived from the influential
French color theorist Michel Chevreul and the Scottish painter David Ramsay
Hay, both of whom claimed that if one combined two primaries like red and yel-
low to make orange, one had to juxtapose it with the unused primary, blue.
Chevreul and Hay both noted that staring at a purple spot produces a faint yel-
low afterimage and interpreted this as Nature’s law for putting colors together.
Purple, therefore, went with yellow, and red went with green. Even the reformist
Owen Jones, in his Grammar of Ornament (1856), argued strenuously that inte-
riors should use only primary colors and famously painted the ironwork of the
Crystal Palace yellow, red, and blue.72 Not surprisingly, strong colors dominated
Berlin-wool work patterns. For instance, a set of instructions for embroidery
told women they would require: “Black satin; six shades of crimson, five shades
of yellow, three shades of puce, two shades of scarlet, three shades of yellow-
greens, three shades of blue-greens, and two shades of brown embroidery silk.”73
In the 1860s, typical patterns include the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine’s
instructions for a sofa cushion in Berlin-wool work in black, yellow, scarlet,
maroon, and green and a crocheted carriage rug in alternative red and green
woolen squares, embroidered in green, red, purple, yellow, and white.74 Keeping
up with the latest scientific color theories, the Berlin-wool worker strenuously
asserted her modernity.
44 Novel Craft
At mid-century, then, the handicraft articulated its producers’ contempora-

neity; it celebrated industrial productivity, the new “scientific” theories of colors,
and skillful female domestic management as reinforced by the queen herself.
At the same time, producers of domestic handicraft demonstrated their old-
fashioned virtues, since the craft was associated with preindustrial crafting, sen-
timental value, and aristocratic leisure. This sense of timeless worth excused,
even sanctified, handicraft’s practical modernity. Yet it was precisely because
handicraft’s main values were so recognizably mid-Victorian that they swiftly
came to seem old-fashioned. By the 1880s, it seemed incomprehensible that
people had ever tried to emulate a steam power loom. Once its specifically 1840s
and 1850s values fell out of fashion, handicraft’s association with preindustrial
pursuits combined with its ideological belatedness. It no longer became possible
to use handicraft to place oneself in modernity. After the 1850s, making domes-
tic handicraft became an aggressively historicizing act.
T he M ea n i ng s o f “ I ndu s t r y ”: T he
R he to r i c o f C ra f t M a n u a l s
At mid-century, the domestic handicraft, then, expressed both modernity and
tradition. Interestingly, it did each in slightly different venues. Craft items were
produced according to mass-circulation magazines, utilizing premade kits, often
incorporating mass-produced commodities, and made to look as much like a
finished, accurate, machine-made object as possible. As we saw in the introduc-
tion, handicrafts were sold in bazaars that mimicked, parodied, and competed
with the regular marketplace. Thus craft practice seems harmonious with mid-
Victorian economic norms. Yet the craft ideal was quite different. The craft was
supposed to be a uniquely personal expression of a strong domestic attachment;
to bear the individual marks of the producer’s particular taste, inventiveness, and
skill; and to be given as an inalienable testimonial to their relationship. As we saw
in the introduction, this split between handicraft practice and handicraft rhe-
toric was ideologically useful; the item could secretly satisfy women’s desire to
emulate industrial production, an aim safely hidden behind a virtuous façade of
sentimental rhetoric. It was the handicraft’s ability to satisfy competing impera-
tives simultaneously that helped make it popular.
The rhetoric praising domestic crafts stresses both the craft’s kinship with,
and distance from, the world of the marketplace. Indeed, the very function of
the handicraft was to mediate the private realm’s complicated rivalry with the
public sphere. The craft, as a domestic object put into economic circulation, had
to offer an alternative to the commodity. The craft’s production methods had to
be as swift, reliable, and precise as factory work, yet the object itself needed to
Women’s Work 45
be charged with emotional meaning that guaranteed its superiority to the mass-
produced commodity.
In describing women’s production of craft items, writers tend to rely on terms
like industry, exertion, and usefulness. These terms adapt the vocabulary of the
mainstream industrial economy, but they also inscribe a profound difference.
The difference is that the women who produce handicrafts do so, not to make
commodities, but to make themselves. Sarah Stickney Ellis explained:
Time was when the women of England were accustomed, almost from
their childhood, to the constant employment of their hands. It might
be sometimes in elaborate works of fancy, now ridiculed for their want
of taste, and still more frequently in household avocations, now fallen
into disuse from their incompatibility with modern refinement. I
cannot speak with unqualified praise of all the objects on which they
bestowed their attention, but, if it were possible, I would write in char-
acters of gold the indisputable fact, that the habits of industry and per-
sonal exertion thus acquired, gave them a strength and dignity of
character, a power of usefulness, and a capability of doing good, which
the higher theories of modern education fail to impart.75
Ellis used her nostalgia for early-Victorian home life to generate a welcome alter-
native to the new economy.76 She uses the language of industry but relocates it
to the production of a virtuous domestic manager, rather than a commodity. She
locates the value of craft in the production process itself, which transforms
childish girls into virtuous domestic managers. As George Dodd wrote in 1865,
“The chief pleasure derivable by the lady artist is due to the fact that she ‘did
them herself;’ there has been some skill, taste, or industry displayed, of which
she feels a little proud.”77 Whereas ordinary objects are produced as the trium-
phant culmination of an industrial process, the craft can almost be seen as the
accidental by-product of a process of industriousness. This meaning of industry
dates back to the fifteenth century. As far back as the seventeenth century,
“female virtue [wa]s constructed through work without an outcome,” Ann
Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass explain.78 “There is never any mention of
the end product of all this handiwork. Its mere busyness appears to be suffi-
cient.”79 Aurora’s aunt makes her do cross-stitch because she does not like to see
Aurora “wear the night with empty hands / A-doing nothing”; craft production
is about inculcating industry in the woman, not about making a useful or beauti-
ful object.80
Alongside the producer-oriented industry, the other key term in craft rhetoric
is the consumer-oriented pleasing. One writer opines that the process of craft
making helps preserve “those domestic attributes which give so pleasing a charm
to home, and secure the comfort of all around.”81 Another suggests that many
46 Novel Craft
good unselfish women “have a little time at their disposal which may be taste-
fully employed in ornamental work at once pleasing and to some extent perma-
nently useful.”82 As distinct from a commodity transaction, centered on a single
moment of exchange, the “pleasing”craft never ceases to “please.” Performing
labor because it is in itself “pleasing” also constitutes a notable departure from
the world of industrial capitalism, usually depicted as the site of ruthless compe-
tition, managerial cruelty, and workers’ physical exhaustion and pain.
At mid-century, handicraft language thus constituted a flexible, constant,
delicate representation of the shifting relationship between the women’s world
and the world of industrial production. The manuals sew together the different
spheres. The terms industry, pleasing—establish metonymic relations to the
male realm of commodity production and consumption but subtly establish that
middle-class women operate differently. Their “industry” is internalized, and
their “pleasing” is continuous. Both sustain a private emotional balance instead
of being directed toward the teleological goal of a sale. Thus handicrafts consti-
tuted a complex reading of the emergent consumer economy. Those who partici-
pated in the craft system admitted that mass-produced objects were excitingly
inventive, swiftly made, prodigious in quantity, and precise in quality. But they
implicitly condemned the facts that the moment of exchange was devoid of any
deeper emotional significance and that mass-produced commodities were generic
objects unmarked by individual taste.
These stresses are visible in the crafts themselves. The “Elizabethan watch-
hook” is a typical example: a large embroidered flower made of loops of decora-
tive cord, with a mother-of-pearl watch hook sewn in the center.83 Victorians
could easily buy inexpensive imitation mother-of-pearl watch hooks.84 So why
did the women of the mid-nineteenth century feel a need to swathe this cheap
disposable product in layers of decoration? The answer is that the craftswoman
was literally surrounding and wrapping the bought object in the fabric that
testified to her labor, skill, taste, and affection. Mary Helms has argued that
craft turns dangerous “outside” objects safely “inside,” a theory that nicely
explains the motivation for this reworking. Similarly, Daniel Miller explains
that purchased goods get refashioned, an act that “may be defined as that
which translates the object from an alienable to an inalienable condition: that
is, from being a symbol of estrangement and price value to being an artefact
invested with particular inseparable connotations.”85 It is precisely because the
artifact is purchased that it requires to be literally enwrapped in signifiers of
the home.
The watch was an emblem of professional status, often a sign of patriarchal
succession, as it was inherited from a father or grandfather. It was also a per-
sonal machine that made it possible to systematize labor into mill and factory
shifts, to organize railroad timetables, and to develop precise mechanisms work-
ing in concert. The man’s watch signified his participation in a shared public
Women’s Work 47
time. But the decorative watch hook forced him to hang up his watch, relinquish-
ing it to his wife’s or daughter’s own space, making him trust this heavy valuable
object to their frail container.
It is no accident that among the most popular handicrafts were men’s slip-
pers, embroidered caps, and smoking accessories like tobacco pouches, cigar
cases, and Orientalist smoking garb. These objects facilitated the transforma-
tion of a business-oriented man into a leisured, domestic inhabitant. When he
removed his hat, shoes, watch, and other appurtenances of public work, his own
body would be overwritten with the work of the women of the house, from head
to toe bearing the embroidered signs that he was now in a space defined by their
labor and his own leisure. Thus the watch hook, slippers, and other male-
intended gifts are profoundly anti-commodity; they insist on their own status as
private and domestic objects.
If crafts for men emphasized male leisure in the home, then crafts for women
mystified female labor in the home. One very common object was the workbas-
ket, usually made of frail woven straw or cardboard and decorated with layers of
frilled and quilted satin, studded with bows (figure 1.5). Its fragility enforced
only the most gossamer and diminutive of projects; it projected a life in which
activities like the darning of men’s wool socks quite literally had no place. The
fragile receptacles were typical of nineteenth-century crafts, which almost
always used cardboard in place of wood, as woodworking tools were perceived to
be too heavy for women to wield.86 Other women’s crafts construct an equally
flattering account of women’s work. The most popular artifacts—vases, center-
pieces, card racks, picture frames, and decorative stands—were meant to be
shown off in the public rooms of the house. Public display confirmed that the
articles were just as good as any of the professionally made, purchased com-
modities around them. Such ornamental arts also confirmed that the female
inhabitant had household tasks so well organized as to enjoy leisure time for
delicate work.
The crafts had one disadvantage relative to mass-produced objects: they were
extremely brittle. Often fastened with nothing more than weak homemade
paste or bits of thread, the crafts must have fallen apart constantly. The fragility
of these objects is a fault, however, only if we assume the objects were meant to
last. In the case of the domestic handicraft, however, the market preferred
planned obsolescence. The craft’s wobbliness was actually an advantage, because
it kept women constantly employed and therefore constantly “industrious,”
replacing items that were either disintegrating or outmoded. Its brittleness also
guaranteed its value, paradoxically enough, for it forced its owners to treasure it,
to keep it in the safest spaces of the home. And since the craft was seen as an
extension of the woman herself, its bodily delicacy reinforced and guaranteed
her own. A white waxen piece of imitation coral was as pure and frail as a wom-
an’s virtue, and to some extent the woman’s success in keeping it pristine,
48 Novel Craft
Figure . Standing Workbasket, .
against all the odds, signified that she would expend comparable care on her own
body. The delicate raffia of the workbasket confirmed that she had no real work
to do. Finally, there was no incentive to make permanent objects, for the craft
was part of the fashion system and was seen as disposable and changeable. The
handicraft was closely associated with fashion: both appeared in lavish illustra-
tions in women’s magazines, both used elaborate textiles, both involved pat-
terns, and both were offered in new sets every month.
T he D e c l i n e o f t h e Ha n d i c ra f t
By the 1870s, instructions for domestic handicrafts were ubiquitous, but their
quality had markedly declined. An “imitation marble statuette” recommended
by Cassell’s Household Guide in 1869 reveals the deterioration of handicraft tech-
nique. This form of craft involved encasing an object in solidified wax, like the
wax coral example discussed in the introduction. But whereas the wires in
Women’s Work 49
the wax coral project could simply be dunked into the bucket of molten wax, the
imitation marble statuette presents a more problematic case. Cassell’s recom-
mended purchasing a cheap plaster cast and pouring half a pound of melted
white candle wax over it until it was entirely coated.87 Just like the maker of
watch hooks, the maker of the “Wax Statuette” took a cheap commodity and
expended transformative labor to render it into a sign of domestic care and an
intimate denizen of a unique home. The difference is, however, that the transfor-
mative labor has been reduced to the merest sign. As Cassell’s itself pointed out,
“No skill is needed; any one can do it well.”88 Probably, however, no one could
have done it well. Even by handicraft standards, the fragility of this object is
worrying. The hot wax would have probably melted the cheap plaster; even if the
plaster had held its shape, the wax would have caught bits of fluff or grit, thumb-
prints, and smudges; it probably would have cracked as the wax cooled; and of
course, if displayed anywhere near the fire or candles, the whole contraption
would have melted.
Part of the decay of craft quality is due, ironically, to the explosion of print
venues for handicraft instructions. Technological innovations had made it pos-
sible to print patterns, color plates, and detailed illustrations better than ever
before.89 New Berlin-wool work designs appeared constantly; by the late 1870s,
a typical issue of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine contained 55 pages, 25
pages of which were needlework and fashion engravings and patterns.90 With
the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine producing dozens of craft ideas per
month; craft columns in The Queen, The Girl’s Own Paper, and most other wom-
en’s magazines; and pamphlets and manuals constantly appearing, the com-
petitive drive to invent new handicrafts simply outpaced any kind of quality
control.91 Moreover, the enormous profusion of craft articles after 1870 may
not indicate that crafts had become more popular. Rather, it might actually
mean that craft production had become wholly specular, that as Victorian
advertising and visual culture flourished, women would rather look at engrav-
ings of crafts than actually make them.92 If the pictures were the point, there
was no reason to take any particular care with the instructions, which now
functioned merely to make the reader feel virtuously pragmatic, to occlude her
real specular hunger.
The craft had, in fact, become a residual element in Victorian culture. Just as
craft technique aimed to preserve fragile natural specimens, so, too, did the
craft genre itself sustain outmoded economic and aesthetic preferences. Craft
itself became a kind of taxidermy, a stuffed relic of what had once been alive.
By the 1870s, the domestic handicraft lingered on as a despised vestigial prac-
tice, becoming a sort of underground rallying point for reactionary women who
were disaffected from the new gender models, dissatisfied with the new aes-
thetic fashions, and distressed by the new techniques of retail trade. Identified
with the early-Victorian notion of domestic managerial femininity, expressing
50 Novel Craft
mid-Victorian color contrast theory, and cheerfully participating in mid-Victo-

rian forms of mass production, the handicraft was such a precise expression of
1840s and 1850s thought that it could not update itself. As the years marched
on, anyone who made domestic handicraft was stubbornly allying herself with a
mind-set that was increasingly outmoded. Part of the problem was that crafts
came to symbolize a traditional model of womanhood. We have seen that
throughout the nineteenth century, the domestic handicraft was associated
with the sentimental and industrious domestic manager, but starting in the
1860s, that role competed with a range of newer identities becoming available
to women. Women who wanted to affirm their fidelity to the traditional house-
wifely model might make handicrafts to symbolize this identification. But for
women affiliating themselves with more contemporary gender models, like the
emergent aesthetic or New Woman roles, the domestic handicraft symbolized a
retrograde past.
Another issue was that the domestic handicraft retained its fidelity to mid-
Victorian visual culture. Right through the turn of the century, women were still
being exhorted to produce imitative arts, to use inexpensive and flimsy materi-
als like cardboard, to cover objects with elaborate lace and ribbon decoration,
and to combine drastically contrasting colors like crimson, green, and black. Yet
these rules now constituted violations of the dominant taste. In mainstream
artistic thought after 1860, the desirable qualities in craft were personal skilled
crafting, truth to one’s materials, sturdy construction, and muted tertiary hues
like bronze, salmon, terracotta, olive, sage, and peacock blue. What we are seeing
here, in short, is that the domestic handicraft functioned as a covert node of
resistance against the artistic rules ushered in by the Design Reform movement,
the Arts and Crafts movement, and later, the aesthetes.93 The explosion of craft
instructions after 1860 functioned as a defiant show of strength in the face of
this powerful reformist movement. Domestic handicraft represented the allure
of the past; it was a historical and historicizing pursuit that rhetorically
connected women with preindustrial eras while it pragmatically enacted mid-
Victorian ideas.
A r t s ve r s u s C ra f t s
If the handicraft blustered against the increasingly popular Arts and Crafts
taste, however, it is equally true that the Arts and Crafts movement itself devel-
oped and defined itself against the domestic handicraft industry. At its height
(from the 1860s to the 1880s), the Arts and Crafts movement violently repudi-
ated ornamental arts and passionately adhered to preindustrial principles,
making itself a compelling story of a sudden artistic renaissance in which a few
committed men of genius rediscover the long-lost, glorious craft history of
Women’s Work 51
England. As William Morris wrote, there once was “a peasant art . . . and it clung
fast to the life of the people, and . . . still lived also in many a quaint pattern of
loom and printing-block and embroiderer’s needle. . . . Such was the English art,
whose history is in a sense at your doors, grown scarce indeed, and growing
scarcer year by year.”94 This narrative constructs craft as antiquarian, rural, and
threatened by modernization—the polar opposite of the contemporary, urban,
thriving practice of domestic craft. Arts and Crafts followers devoted themselves
to reviving medieval techniques to produce handmade lace, illuminated manu-
scripts, jewelry, and embroidered cloaks patterned after Tudor portraits.
Instead of copying magazine instructions or buying premade kits for their
domestic handicrafts, now would-be artists had to learn skills from intensive
study of surviving treasures at the South Kensington Museum and painstak-
ingly emulate these long-vanished craft masters; would-be collectors had to be
taught the principles of connoisseurship to detect the signs of age and hand-
made provenance in the few, frail, surviving treasures. While domestic handi-
crafts could be sold in large emporia or charity bazaars, Arts and Crafts produced
a new set of markets: antique stores, import stores like Liberty’s, Morris’s own
furniture company, and the popular “Eastlake style” furnishings. Domestic
handicraft enthusiastically celebrated industrial modernity. But the Arts and
Crafts artifact evoked the romance of an archaic, pastoral, endangered history.
Yet this dramatic story of implacable opposition between the Victorian era’s
two craft movements ignores the somewhat muddier, but perhaps more inter-
esting, ways in which they borrowed from one another. In fact, there was a
considerable transitional period, from the 1830s through the 1850s, during
which elements of the domestic handicraft industry were actually incorporated
into the Design Reform movement and nascent Arts and Crafts thinking. Even
more fundamentally, handicraft’s popularity meant that design reformers had
an audience already committed to the assumption that ordinary people could
(and should) participate in craft production and display. As Todd S. Gernes
points out, “Handicraft constructionism . . . preceded and nourished the Arts
and Crafts tradition of collective labor . . . its roots lay in the shaping and
reshaping of the material culture of ephemera by common people in response
to technological development in mechanical reproduction, particularly the
ephemeralization of communications technology and the proliferation of
cheap print media.”95 Interestingly, it is precisely the elements that seem
most antagonistic to Arts and Crafts—cheap mass-produced stuff, ephemera,
mechanization, amateurism—that taught people to enjoy manipulating the
material world.
The Design Reform leaders were powerful national figures. Sir Henry Cole
worked with Prince Albert to set up the Great Exhibition and ran the Journal of
Design and Manufactures. Richard Redgrave was the Exhibition’s chief juror, and
Owen Jones decorated the Crystal Palace. In fact, Cole organized a display of the
52 Novel Craft
most tasteless items from the Great Exhibition—featuring Berlin-wool work

and fabrics with realistic flowers and animals—to educate Britons. This collec-
tion, “The Gallery of False Principles,” became the nucleus of the South Kensing-
ton Museum (today the Victoria and Albert).96 Thus in a very real sense, the
central institution of the art reform movement developed as a deliberate reac-
tion against Victorian women’s domestic handicrafts.
On the other hand, the new materials were often disconcertingly similar to
those despised handicrafts. One example of the early instability in Design
Reform thinking concerns the question of what type of ornamentation to
choose. Would these reformers endorse naturalistic ornamentation, the sort
of highly realistic images associated with domestic handicrafts’ emphasis on
documentable validity? In naturalistic ornamentation, the artist copies nature
as closely as possible, reproducing every tendril and feather, artfully employing
shading to produce a three-dimensional effect. In Jules Lubbock’s account, the
Design Reform movement evinced considerable uncertainty about the status of
naturalistic design.97 Richard Redgrave argued that verisimilitude was a celebra-
tion of the English countryside and a form of worship of the God who made
nature for human delight. However, in the 1840s and 1850s, naturalistic style
was increasingly associated with France and seen as a rococo, sham, corrupt
style. Sir Henry Cole initially defended naturalistic ornamentation, but his
tastes were unsettled; although he railed against “shams” in his art journal and
his art-manufacturing company, he sometimes praised pictorial decoration and
shaded, illusionistic prints. In the early years of the Design Reform movement,
then, naturalistic verisimilitude seemed like a plausible, perhaps even prefera-
ble, form of decoration.
Eventually Cole and his reformist party (including Redgrave) became strong
proponents for conventionalized design, an idea first developed by A. W. N.
Pugin, which meant that natural objects should be reduced to their basic geo-
metric forms, in flat, unshaded, abstractized shapes, and arranged in repeating
patterns. They insisted that naturalistic design tricked people into fearing that
they trod on real bouquets, an assertion Dickens made famous when he paro-
died Cole in Hard Times as the gentleman who condemns Sissy’s taste in car-
pets. Instead, as Lubbock explains, they transferred their loyalties to the “East,”
adopting Indian and Japanese design as their guide. Throughout the 1850s, Red-
grave and Cole, along with Owen Jones, Ralph Wornum, and the jury at the
Great Exhibition, condemned what they saw as the incorrect use of imitative
ornamentation. They wanted objects to show solid construction and its orna-
ments to be based on conventionalized forms and to serve the object’s pur-
pose.98 Moreover, they argued that ornament should arise organically from the
object, not be simply stuck on; a water pitcher, for instance, might be decorated
with fish and reeds but not tigers or cherubs. In other words, they did not imagine
getting rid of ornament, but rather making ornamental choice more logical.99
Women’s Work 53
Design reformers did eventually choose to champion the conventionalized

decoration that is now associated with the movement, but this occurred only
after initial allegiance to a more familiar naturalistic mode and accommodated
ornamentation we would now see as extraneous.
It was John Ruskin, however, who really popularized the new principles in
1849 with Seven Lamps of Architecture, which divided the new aesthetic princi-
ples into seven categories and associated them with moral and spiritual uplift.
Ruskin disliked the conventionalizing cause, feeling that naturalistic design
offered more scope for artistic skill, but in all other respects, his stress on truth
to materials corresponded with the other reformers.100 Ruskin’s soaring bibli-
cally inflected prose and passionate moral codes gave the movement an almost
spiritual mission. Now selecting wallpaper meant exercising a principled choice
between truth and falsehood, of the gravest importance for the soul of the con-
sumer and, indeed, the nation. The Arts and Crafts movement that Ruskin
helped initiate became far more famous than the Design Reform movement that
had preceded it, and the two had a somewhat uneasy relationship. Arts and
Crafts obviously derived a great many of its ideas from Design Reform: the need
to reform British art manufactures, the emphasis on truth to materials, the
fondness for Indian design, the centrality of the South Kensington Museum. But
Ruskin and Morris, socialists who dreamed of a utopian future, diverged from
Sir Henry Cole, the didactic government functionary, as Lara Kriegel argues. The
men’s personalities clashed.101 As the reputation of Arts and Crafts increased
throughout the 1860s, that of Design Reform faded away.
By the 1870s, a new kind of handicraft emerged to accommodate the Arts
and Crafts high-minded artistic code. The wildly popular “art needlework” was
not a new form of domestic handiwork, but a new idea of craft based on aes-
thetic reform tenets that opposed the older domestic handicraft ideas. Art
needlework used the fashionable aesthetic tertiary hues in conventionalized
decorative borders. The Lady’s Crewel Embroidery Book, for instance, tells its
readers to acquire wools in olive, ivory, bronze, old gold, sage, and “dead leaf
colour”—a far cry from the red, purple, black, and green combinations of mid-
century.102 The art needleworkers had to study medieval and Renaissance art,
learn from Indian and Japanese patterns, redevelop traditional embroidery
skills, and acquire the laws of art in order to develop their own designs. Virtually
all art needlework manuals begin with a historical section tracing needlework
back through classical and biblical times, which dignifies the pursuit with the
imprimatur of serious history. Similarly, art needlework proponents stressed
the craft’s associations with high art. In Lady Marion Alford’s appropriately
named Needlework as Art, she insisted that “decorative embroidery . . . contains
in itself all the necessary elements of art; it may exercise the imagination and
the fancy; it needs education in form, colour, and composition, as well as the
craft of a practised hand, to express its language and perfect its beauty.”103 In all
54 Novel Craft
these ways, art needlework was constructed as an appropriate expression of the

reformist sensibility, a perfectly Ruskinian pursuit, and a welcome replacement
for the now-despised, garish, mechanical Berlin-wool work. The author of Art-
Needlework stressed that art needlework was superior to Berlin-wool work
because it required original thought.104
The truth is somewhat more complicated: not only did Berlin-wool work con-
tinue to be popular through the end of the nineteenth century but also art nee-
dlework shows a distinct debt to its predecessor, adopting its coarse cottons and
thick crewel yarns. Similarly, William Morris’s commercial embroidery patterns
“hardly deviated from established nineteenth-century traditions,” Rozsika Parker
points out.105 (See figures 1.6 and 1.7.) Morris offered patterns for the same
household objects as the major Victorian emporia, using rhetoric reminiscent of
their advertisements.106 In these respects, the Arts and Crafts movement can be
seen as updating an existing crafts industry, in spite of the movement’s own
oppositional rhetoric. As Edward Lucie-Smith puts it, “Arts and Crafts enjoyed no
special monopoly of handicraft. Ruskin and Morris did not put an end to the con-
fusion of styles they denounced. They only made people momentarily uneasy.”107
We can see this uneasiness in an anecdote Lara Kriegel tells about the found-
ing of the East End’s outpost of the South Kensington Museum in 1872. Because
laborers had trouble getting to South Kensington, Cole agreed to open a branch
in Bethnal Green. But once the building was established, Cole sent only “meager
collections of unwanted animal products and wax models,” the refuse from the
main museum. Trying to help fill the empty shelves, a local resident “kindly
Figure . Textile Pattern Identified by Henry Cole as Poor Design,

from the “Gallery of False Principles.”
Women’s Work 55
Figure . “Strawberry Thief,” Textile Pattern by William Morris.
offered his daughter’s wax flowers for show at the museum.” The museum
officials refused indignantly, but, as Kriegel points out, the wax flower offerings
“bore a disconcertingly close approximation to the surplus collections that Cole
had sent from South Kensington.”108 One might well wonder why wax models
were accepted and wax flowers rejected. At this moment, 1872, the craft world
was still fluid, although the museum officials’ huffy response—such goods
“scarcely c[a]me within the scope of the collections”—shows how the museum’s
disciplinary mechanisms were beginning to enforce distinctions between pro-
fessional craft and amateur handiwork.
Another craft of the period that testifies to the brief overlap of amateur and
professional craft was china painting, in which women bought blank china
pieces and painted decorative patterns on them.109 China painting certainly
looked more professional than the old imitation china hobby of potichomanie, it
provided an opportunity for applying the laws of decorative art, and it therefore
satisfied the new Arts and Crafts standards. However, its ease, its adaptability to
naturalistic patterns of flowers and birds, and its reliance on mass-produced
cheap components felt comfortingly familiar to women who had grown up in the
domestic handicraft tradition. Thus in the 1870s, the residual cultural prefer-
ence for gratifyingly easy productivity was incorporated into the newly domi-
nant paradigm of painstakingly skilled artistry, with understandably
contradictory results.
Perhaps the most important tenet of the new aesthetic dogma was that the
handmade was desirable, while the machine-made “is always repulsive to the
artistic eye.”110 Arts and Crafts reformers therefore aimed to replace cheap
56 Novel Craft
mass-produced goods with objects produced by people who were not alienated
from their labor. In practice, this meant fetishizing those artifacts that could not
possibly be machine-made: artifacts made by the aesthetes themselves, antiques
that predated industrialism, or exotica imported from nonindustrialized nations.
Arts and Crafts reformers praised handmade lace as a charming archaic skill,
gradually altering its meaning from a sweated industry associated with rural
poverty into a skilled pursuit.111 As one writer summed it all up, “Machine-made
ornament is destitute of the incommunicable charm which belongs to hand-
work, and unfortunately this is the one charm which makes ornament worth
having. Ornament is only beautiful in so far as it expresses the mind of the work-
man.”112 A unique object that spoke of the culture, history, and personality that
produced it was the ultimately desirable acquisition. But whereas the domestic
handicraft spoke of recent history—early-Victorian ideas—the Arts and Crafts
artifact carried a romantically archaic, preindustrial past.
It took a trained male eye, apparently, to spot the authentically preindustrial
object. Home decoration now became the province of men, a place to showcase
the “finds” that demonstrated their taste and knowledge. Thus the meaning of
the home recalibrated, with the decor exuding manly honesty instead of femi-
nine charm. J. Beavington Atkinson promised that “if a man in the adorning of
his house would only be guided by the principles which go to make moral recti-
tude; if he would apply to inanimate form and colour the maxims which regulate
action; if he could see in the furniture of a room something typical of gentle-
manly conduct in life,” then he would banish all vulgarity.113 The formation of
gentlemanliness occurs in the decoration of a house, just as womanly virtue sup-
posedly formed in the act of constructing handicrafts. In both cases, work
expended on domestic space turns out to be work on one’s internal character,
thereby justifying the hobby.
However, redefining the home as male fostered a different aesthetic code. If
the home represented its female resident, it ought to be pretty, even if inno-
cent little shams were employed to heighten its charms; wrapping household
objects in lace or ribbon was similar to adding a lace frill to hide a stain on a
dress. But “prettiness” was deeply suspect for a home seen as an emanation of a
male persona. Moreover, since honesty was supposed to be the core of gentle-
manly honor, the imitative arts were absolutely forbidden. The author of “Artis-
tic Homes” forbade “imitations and shams of all sorts” and condemned the term
pretty: “what word but meretricious describes our ‘pretty’ things—most of them
unmitigated shams, and the rest no worse (or better) than ‘namby-pamby’?”
Instead, the author praised “the valuable moral teaching of the honest, artistic
objects which will meet our eyes at every turn. Can small and ugly faults of
character flourish when surrounded by material beauty, or deceit, in the face
of a style of design of which the chief characteristic is a straightforward
simplicity?”114 As we have seen, imitative arts challenged the viewer to develop
Women’s Work 57
a pleasurably complex dual or triple perspective. But the “Artistic Homes” writer
reconstructs this perspective, making the viewer a simple, unitary, blank space
on which art will impress a character.
Once the home was recoded as the proper space for displaying masculine,
professional, connoisseurship credentials, then the Victorian domestic handi-
craft became unspeakable. Arts and Crafts opposition to the handicraft grew so
intense precisely because the handicraft manifested the admirable quality of
being handmade yet also simultaneously displayed the unspeakable qualities
associated with factory work: sham imitative arts, salvage and scrap materials,
machine aesthetic, frail construction, and amateur design. The Victorian domes-
tic handicraft tainted the Arts and Crafts categories, mixing the taboo with the
sacred. The difficult interplay of imitation, homage, contradiction, envy, resent-
ment, and critique that the domestic handicraft had offered vis-à-vis the indus-
trial economy now looked very different. The craft’s composite nature was now
viewed as a vitiated, adulterated mixture that endangered its consumers. The
craft was considered polluting matter, dubbed a “dust-catcher,” and a new moral
language was applied to it; no longer associated with “th’ industrious fair,” now
it connoted shoddy falsehoods, “fuss, flimsiness, and fashion” in Lewis F. Day’s
phrase.115 Male aesthetic reformers targeted women. In Aurora Leigh’s terms,
“this hurts most, this—that, after all, we are paid / The worth of our work, per-
haps.”116 Once crafts were evaluated according to financial value rather than
sentimental associations, women’s works became, literally, worthless. By the
1870s, the aesthetes tossed them out to fill their homes with Japanese fans,
blue-and-white china, Jacobean cabinets, peacock feathers, and William Morris
friezes, and by the turn of the century, even the aesthetic litter of collectibles
would be rejected for an emergent modernist aesthetic of stark cleanliness.
Domestic handicraft did not disappear, but it became even more unfashion-
able, reactionary, and oppositional. In the twentieth century, those who partici-
pated in the continuing domestic handicraft industry were the most disaffected
from the contemporary art scene. As we shall see in the postscript, domestic
handicraft tenets have retained a strong public following but the practice is not
recognized as a separate paradigm with its own history. Domestic handicraft has
thus continued to provide an alternative for those disaffected from contempo-
rary aesthetic and economic norms, making it, perhaps, inevitable that it would
acquire a countercultural following in the twenty-first century.
C o n c lu sio n : T he S he p h e rde s s
The short history of handicraft can be written this way. Domestic handicraft
emerged at the end of the eighteenth century to express contemporary attitudes
toward nature; paper flowers, seaweed montages, and taxidermy fixed fleeting
58 Novel Craft
objects into permanent decorative arrangements. By mid-century, “ornamental

manufactures” expressed women’s emulation of the mainstream industrial
economy, confirmed by their prominent place in the Great Exhibition. Salvage
arts showed that women could act like factories in turning raw waste products
into desirable goods, while Berlin-wool work demonstrated that women could
produce swiftly replicated, perfectly identical objects. Such production rendered
the women themselves “industrious.” The handicraft also functioned as a critique
of generic commodities, as demonstrated by the structure of the crafts them-
selves, in which mass-produced objects and male inhabitants are covered with
signs of female labor, overwriting the visual signs of their participation in the
manufacturing realm. In the 1870s, however, the handicraft craze began to
decline. As art critics began to prefer conventionalizing decoration, as middle-class
women increasingly rebelled against domestic labor, as the Arts and Crafts move-
ment began stressing the need for professional training in connoisseurship and
craft production, and as aesthetic fashions brought new tertiary hues into promi-
nence, the handicraft began to look clumsy, amateurish, and old-fashioned. By the
1870s, what need was there for a craft that cheerfully emulated industrialism
and supported separate spheres? In this respect, the handicraft was as histori-
cized as its own taxidermy, preserving a moment that had otherwise decayed.
In its heyday, however, domestic handicraft stood for a complexly allusive
and enabling kind of writing. I want to end by returning to Aurora Leigh’s
craft. Aurora describes how “I sate and teased / The patient needle till it split
the thread / Which oozed off from it in meandering lace / From hour to
hour.”117 This passage acts as a kind of mise en abîme for how to read Aurora
Leigh. Aurora Leigh is “teas[ing]” the reader. We expect straightforward narra-
tive threads; we expect her to knot those threads into a strong central plot.
Instead, we will get “meandering lace,” the meaning of the poem unraveling as
we try to follow it, the individual episodes splitting into multiple curlicues of
separate meanings to be admired, clouds of complex structures that offer
intricate loveliness.
One moment where the fabric of the poem unravels is Aurora’s shepherdess
embroidery:
So, my shepherdess
Was something after all (the pastoral saints
Be praised for’t) leaning lovelorn with pink eyes
To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks;
Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat
So strangely similar to the tortoise-shell
Which slew the tragic poet.118
When Aurora Leigh sews pink eyes on her shepherdess, she is rebelling
against realism, rather like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus imagining a green rose.
Women’s Work 59
Her rebellion against her aunt’s handicraft code indicates her desire to escape
literary conventions in order to produce emotional truths.
Of course, Aurora’s “mistake” is no mistake. She would have seen the silk’s
color before she threaded the needle, and she could have unpicked the stitches at
any time. In fact, it is a deliberate, if covert, rewriting of the codes of pastoral
femininity that the shepherdess represents. In Aurora Leigh, the needlework is
only something for people to trip over and curse, interference in the real work
they have to do. Indeed, Aurora resews the pastoral shepherdess to bring her
closer to the “tragic poet” figure, embroidering a hat like the tortoiseshell and
making her eyes pink, as if with weeping, to commemorate that tragedy. Embroi-
dery here is configured as both crushing and invigorating.
The pink-eyed shepherdess and the meandering lace work to educate the
reader about what to expect in the rest of the poem. This will be a text that
undercuts and complicates its own “reality.” Barrett Browning is simultane-
ously dismissing women’s arts and using them seriously as poetic training.
Aurora Leigh’s “mistakes” about her own feelings regarding Romney correlate
to the mistakes made on the pink-eyed shepherdess; it is a poem that frustrates
realistic or omniscient readings in favor of complex “mistakes” revealing emo-
tional truths. The way handicraft functions in this poem, to express Aurora’s
poetic training and yet compete with that training at the same time, is sympto-
matic of the uses of domestic handicraft in nineteenth-century texts. As we
shall see in the rest of this book, this complex activity—marginalizing yet
ubiquitous, modern yet historical, critiquing yet emulating the mainstream
economy—provided an ideal way to work out what texts meant. From Aurora’s
pink-eyed shepherdess to Miss Matty’s decorative spills, “the works of women”
became symbolical indeed.
Figure 2.1 Paper Spills.
CHAPTER 2
Ephemerality
T H E C R A N F OR D PA P E R S
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–1853) is notably patched together out of

women’s domestic handicrafts. Its elderly spinsters live in rooms full of faded,
fragile remnants, “the female miscellany” of disparate bric-a-brac, “the snippet
and the pressed flower.”1 Not only does the novel foreground women’s collec-
tions, but, as critics have often noted, the novel itself is structured like a craft,
its plot compiled from carefully preserved fragments.2 This chapter asks, first,
how Cranford enshrines or mimics craft practice, and second, what the novel’s
affiliation with craft allows it to accomplish. Gaskell’s use of female handicrafts
is more than merely decorative. Rather, Gaskell situates her novel within the
ideological assumptions, economic rationales, and aesthetic codes of this pur-
suit. Handicraft becomes useful technique on the narrative level, as Gaskell uses
it to reveal subtle aspects of her characters’ psychological development and
social situations. But handicraft simultaneously offers a way to write on the
metanarrative level, for Gaskell uses it self-referentially to express anxieties
about constructing the novel itself. We might say that Cranford depends on the
handicraft rather in the same way that a Victorian illustration depends on the
paper on which it is printed; in both cases, local peculiarities may be explained if
we transfer our attention to the texture of the fundamental material beneath.
On the narrative level, reading Cranford’s decorative arts can sensitize us to
generational markers in the novel. Certain craft practices carry with them par-
ticular temporal markers a modern reader is liable to miss. By clarifying the dif-
ferent histories of female domesticity within Cranford, this chapter aims to open
up space between the novel’s younger narrator and its older subject. Tradition-
ally, Cranford critics have accepted Mary Smith’s affection for the Cranfordians
as a guarantee of her narrative reliability.3 But I would suggest that feeling fond
of one’s subject does not automatically make one a reliable narrator; indeed, it
can have the opposite effect. Mary is so anxious to show the Cranfordians as
61
62 Novel Craft
lovable that she projects onto them the virtues she expects them to have. Most
importantly, she insists that her subject has a transparently simple emotional
life, making Matty into an adorable yet dignified companion, a sort of pet cat.
Much depends on this assumption; Mary would lose her expertise as narrator
and her credentials as friend if she allowed herself to recognize certain signs that
her subject has a more complicated inner life, incorporating historical experi-
ences with which she is unfamiliar and feelings of which she would disapprove.
One of the contentions of this chapter is that this narrator inadvertently pastes
a mid-Victorian understanding of propriety, gender, and textuality over charac-
ters who are actually built along late-eighteenth-century lines. In this respect,
we see handicraft performing one of its major functions: historicizing. As mod-
ern Mary fails to comprehend Matty’s late-eighteenth-century craft sensibility
(so much so, in fact, that she has no idea she is missing anything), we see handi-
craft used to measure the present’s distance from the past.
In Cranford, the experience of domestic handicraft and the practice of textual
composition fold into a single material: paper. By exploring paper both as carrier
of text and as material entity, Gaskell can foreground the fundamental issue of
what survives. Ephemerality and preservation are issues at the heart of the craft
paradigm, as we saw in chapter 1. Cranford has three sets of sentimentally valu-
able but worrisomely brittle artifacts: the handicrafts the Cranfordians make,
the elderly Amazons, and the pages of the text itself. What is the future of Mat-
ty’s decorative candlelighters? Can Miss Matty herself—and the culture around
her—survive? Finally, will this collection of sketches extend into a novel?
Through paper images, Gaskell manages to articulate all these worries and,
indeed, find their solution. She does so through the paper craft scenes, which
obsessively re-present a single iconic image, a kind of mise en abîme for the
novel. Paper allows Gaskell to imagine disintegration, loss, death—but its flip
side suggests a kind of perpetuation, reuse, resurrection. Thus paper craft (figure
2.1) provides a uniquely apt metaphor through which Gaskell finesses the con-
tinuation of both Cranford and Cranford. Throughout this chapter, then, I explore
Cranford’s significant paper craft scenes—the newspaper pathways, the candle-
lighters, the letters, and the note—to show how they express Matty’s unspoken
needs, Mary’s unconscious assumptions, and Gaskell’s own half-articulated anx-
ieties about composition, editorship, history, preservation, and literary value.
C ra n fo rd and the Domestic

Ha nd ic ra f t Pa radi g m
Elizabeth Gaskell had a long history of involvement in domestic management
and craftwork. Her letters show a lively interest in sewing and in teaching her
daughters needlework skills. As a young woman, the novelist boasted that she
Ephemerality: The Cranford Papers 63
did worsted work “beautifully,” and she made stools and cushions with her
daughters.4 The connection between sewing and reading was deeply ingrained.
Gaskell taught her daughter Marianne to sew and read together, one word and
six stitches per day.5 The pragmatic difficulties of combining these skills, how-
ever, occupied Gaskell. As Elizabeth Langland argues, “Gaskell . . . conceived her-
self as a household manager whose managerial reach extended to the construction
of novels. She famously advised would-be female writers on the domestic arts as
a key to successful pursuit of the creative arts.”6 Langland is referring to a letter
in which Gaskell earnestly urged an aspiring writer to stop complaining about
time spent on household chores. Instead, the writer needed to become versed in
the “poetry and association about . . . the various household arts” and to have
“always some kind of sewing ready arranged to your hand, so that you can take it
up at any odd minute and do a few stitches.”7 Similarly, in a letter of 1850, Gas-
kell insisted that artistic and domestic labor ought to coexist: “Assuredly a
blending of the two is desirable (Home duties and the development of the Indi-
vidual I mean) . . . I have no doubt that the cultivation of each tends to keep the
other in a healthy state.”8
Gaskell’s interest in handicraft can be read throughout her fiction. Ruth,
written at the same time as Cranford, focuses on a seamstress. The epony-
mous main character of Mary Barton is apprenticed to a dressmaker. Wives and
Daughters opens with Molly Gibson’s sense of childish pride in quilling the lin-
ing of her new bonnet, and it charts Molly’s maturation by her increasing skill
in selecting and ornamenting the textiles she will wear. Whether the charac-
ters are poor women struggling with the harsh conditions of the textile indus-
try or middle-class ladies designing adornments, sewing is the basic work of
their lives.
These novels also showcase Gaskell’s Unitarian ideals, which included an
inclusive tolerance, an eager embrace of scientific thought, and a humane eager-
ness to relieve pain.9 Ruth, Mary Barton, Wives and Daughters, Sylvia’s Lovers, and
North and South all show a passionate sympathy with suffering. In Cranford, this
feeling emerges in the Cranfordians’ touching outpourings of generosity toward
the poor. But I’d like to suggest that her Unitarianism also undergirds the com-
plexity of the novel. Jill L. Matus explains that, “guided by Unitarian and
humanitarian principles, Gaskell valued open-mindedness and the ability to
explore a problem from different points of view.”10Cranford respectfully presents
multiple different points of view simultaneously, without ever trying to sub-
merge them into one acceptable ideology. (As we shall see, this makes her fiction
very different from the religiously motivated work of her contemporary Char-
lotte Yonge). The complexity, the undecidability, of Cranford derive from this
writer’s deepest principles.
Of all Gaskell’s novels, it is Cranford that is most profoundly (and famously)
structured by domestic handicraft. As Mary comments:
64 Novel Craft
I had often occasion to notice the use that was made of fragments and
small opportunities in Cranford; the rose-leaves that were gathered ere
they fell, to make into a pot-pourri for some one who had no garden;
the little bundles of lavender-flowers sent to strew the drawers of some
town-dweller, or to burn in the chamber of some invalid. Things that
many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarcely worth while
to perform, were all attended to in Cranford.11
Attention to despised “things” and “actions” constitutes one of the most pro-
found values of this town. Fragmentariness, indeed, is one of the aspects of
Cranford on which virtually all scholars concur. “The fragments and small oppor-
tunities of Cranford are reassembled constantly to produce the larger, fragmen-
tary form of the episodic novel,” writes Andrew Hoxton Miller.12 Margaret Case
Croskery contends that Cranford’s discrete elements constitute a radical experi-
ment in narrative structure, as the novel rejects teleological progression in favor
of repetition and continuity.13
Because Cranford is dependent on small fragments, it works to retain and
reuse them. The novel showcases the Cranfordians’ fidelity to the craft aesthetic
of salvage. Elizabeth Langland explains:
Instead of the conspicuous consumption and waste of a “vulgar”

economy, the “elegant” economy bases itself on recycling resources: old
dresses, fragments of flowers, pieces of string, ends of candles, old
notes and receipts. It privileges exchange over consumption: the news-
paper circulating among the ladies early presages the way more sub-
stantial resources will circulate among them to protect their world,
their ways, and their privilege.14
The practitioners of this genteel recycling construct themselves against those

who labor to earn money. The Cranfordians generously assist helpless objects of
charity but express hostility toward the self-supporting working poor. For
instance, they help the Browns when the Browns fall ill, but when the Browns
are succeeding as theatrical performers, they cause the Amazons’ “panic.” Matty’s
first servant, Fanny, exploits her mistress and engages in darkly-hinted-at sexual
adventures. Other servants are richer than their employers. Matty’s second ser-
vant, Martha, sturdily follows her own behavioral rules and uses her own sav-
ings to feed Matty and buy Matty’s house. Mrs. Jamieson’s butler, Mr. Mulliner,
gets luxuries, like the newspaper, before the Amazons do. This sort of working-
class success is threatening because it demystifies the static “elegant economy.”
It reveals that labor can earn more money, whereas the Amazons assume one
can only engage in passive living off tiny fragments. Participation in the “elegant
economy” therefore becomes a way of expressing fidelity to powerful ideologies
of femininity: domestic management and communitarian mutual support, while

refusing the dominant mid-century ideas of class mobility and self-made men.
The Cranfordians relegate those ideas of economic self-improvement to the
large, male-dominated manufacturing center of Drumble (based on Manches-
ter). Although Cranford and Drumble seem opposed, a series of transactions
denotes a close traffic between the two. Mary Smith and her father travel
between the towns; the Cranfordians acquire commodities and information
from Drumble; the news of the failure of the significantly named Town and
County Bank reverberates between the towns.
The Amazons prefer to consider Drumble as a source of raw materials and
Cranford as the locale where women can exercise their transformative skills to
“finish” the items. Mr. Smith is in “that ‘horrid cotton trade’” in the city (106).
Miss Pole obtains raw wool from the city but works to make it into a crocheted
decorative object in the town. When Mary purchases a cap in Drumble, Matty
declares it unacceptable and subsequently refuses to purchase any patterns
there (129, 170). The Cranfordians’ contempt for Drumble is a way of guarantee-
ing their own superior taste and skill, making themselves necessary to the proc-
ess by which the “horrid cotton trade,” the raw materials, can be transformed
into “genteel” caps, the civilized product.
Since the Cranfordians generate decorative handicrafts, it is no surprise that
they model their mercantile establishment on the charity bazaar.15 When Matty
opens a tea shop, she assembles her wares from community donations and con-
ducts trade based on personal loyalties. Interestingly, we never see her make a
sale. Instead, we witness personal offerings that tend to interfere with ordinary
transactions, when Matty either gives her commodities away or warns custom-
ers not to purchase them. She even trots down to the corner grocer to make sure
her plans will not imperil his livelihood. The tea-selling period ends with the
transaction imagined in virtually all bazaar accounts, the emotional thrill of the
long-awaited male customer’s intimate conversation with the female seller,
when Peter comes into the shop. In all these ways, Matty behaves and is per-
ceived like a bazaar stallholder. No wonder Mary’s father comments that “it
would not have done in Drumble, but in Cranford it answered very well” (200).
It would fail in the mainstream industrial economy, but in the women’s world,
the bazaar model is ideally suited to the circulation of sentimental, homemade
artifacts that reinforce social ties.
The bazaar model provides a luxurious sense of plenitude, counteracting the
dominant economy of reusing scraps. Matty’s chief worry is actually about peo-
ple buying too much. She sells more tea than she wants, she gives away comfits
and lozenges, she earns plenty of money, her very competitor sends her buyers,
and her customers, who come from every class, not only pay her but also add
gifts (205). Although she sells so much, we never see her replenish her supplies.
When Peter’s miraculous return frees her from the shop, he signals his arrival by
66 Novel Craft
munificently ordering a vast quantity of sweets and subsequently hurls a “shower

of comfits and lozenges” upon the town’s delighted children (209–210). If Cran-
ford is about salvage and fragmentation, Gaskell embedded within it its own
antidote: a delightfully perpetual supply of pleasures, pure plenitude. The wom-
en’s mode of trade climaxes in a festival of gift giving, the last word against
ordinary trade.
We might note, however, that it is a shower of sweets, not tea leaves. After all,
Matty never wished to trade in tea. It is Mary who chooses this commodity,
in spite of her elderly friend’s worries about her account keeping, her dislike of
giving change, her mistrust of the physical effects of green tea, her fear of male
customers, and her timidly expressed preference to sell comfits to children
instead. The choice of tea does not seem particularly apt for Matty, but it makes
sense for our narrator. Tea continues Cranford’s work in a different register, its
Orientalism. As many critics have noted, Cranford is always looking to an exotic
Other, especially India, and the town is periodically invigorated by the imports
and representatives of the East. This choice fits Mary’s own interest in the exotic,
seen when she attempts to imagine the “strange wild countries beyond the Gan-
ges” (182–183).16 Tea also reflects her status as someone who “had vibrated all my
life between Drumble and Cranford,” for tea is similarly anomalous, being both a
raw material needing further finishing treatment (like a Drumble product) and a
genteel luxury item associated with tasteful, leisured, feminine social events
(appropriate for Cranford) (211). And the shop itself is another compromise,
retaining all the equipment of the dining parlor it had once been with the single
exception of a window lengthened into a door (197). As Hilary Schor explains,
Mary stands for mediation: mediation between the outside world and the inner
one, the authorial voice and the story itself. Indeed, “that position of intentional
mediation, between literary figures and literary voices, is what Mary Smith’s nar-
ration re-creates.”17 Matty gets moved into a space that speaks to Mary’s values
rather than hers: the values of compromise and traffic between two supposedly
oppositional spaces (India and England, raw and cooked, shop and home).
Matty herself would actually prefer to sell her handicraft skills, but Mary
rejects this option. Our narrator regretfully concludes that her friend’s failing
eyesight will preclude her from counting threads, necessary in the newly fash-
ionable Berlin-wool work. The upwardly mobile tradesmen’s daughters of Cran-
ford would be the audience for Berlin-wool work, but they are (as Mary admits)
already learning it at their Ladies’ Seminary (185).18 However, Matty could have
taught the fancywork skills of her own generation (like the decorative garters
she surreptitiously knits behind the counter) or basic plain-sewing, a skill taught
intensively to girls at all class levels throughout the nineteenth century.19 Matty
proudly recalls her family’s tradition of sewing lessons: “Deborah and her mother
had started the benefit society for the poor, and taught girls cooking and plain
sewing” (80–81).20 Such lessons were particularly characteristic of a Unitarian
ministry, for “Unitarians had always been prominent in establishing bible, liter-
ary and philosophical (scientific) societies, charity schools for girls as well as
boys, mechanics’ institutes and the like.”21 Such lessons would have allowed
Matty to teach little girls, whom “she was sure she could please,” for “it was of
men particularly she was afraid” (198).
Mary’s exclusive focus on her own generation’s fashionable craft blinds her
to the fact that her older friend does have skills that are salable to a wider audi-
ence. In this respect, she shares the Cranfordians’ willful ignorance of work-
ing-class interests and needs. At a performance, when Mary “would fain have
looked round at the merry chattering people behind me, Miss Pole clutched my
arm, and begged me not to turn, for ‘it was not the thing’” (134). Although our
narrator pokes fun at this prescription for gentility, it has clearly left a mark:
what is Mary’s disregarding the educational and vocational needs of working-
class girls but another case of refusing to look back at the “people behind me”?
Furthermore, to preserve Matty’s image as a sweet old lady, Mary must asc-
ribe to her a squeamishness about selling her handicraft skills that her elder is far
from feeling. Our narrator inquires indignantly, “But would any one pay to have
their children taught these arts; or, indeed, would Miss Matty sell, for filthy lucre,
the knack and the skill with which she made trifles of value to those who loved
her?” (186). Apparently, the answer is yes, gladly. Miss Matty declares: “I’m will-
ing to do anything that’s right and honest. . . . Only let me see what I can do, and
pay the poor people as far as I’m able” (196). Impoverished women of this gen-
eration lost no status by selling fancywork in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century; such a skill was even regarded as admirable in idealized
female characters like Caroline Beaufort in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
and Laura Montreville in Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811). It is only Mary’s
mid-Victorian generation that insisted on preserving middle-class women from
any taint of trade practices.
Will Matty’s perspective survive, when even her affectionate narrator cannot
comprehend it? Cranford’s longevity has become a critical crux. Gaskell, some-
what remarkably, manages to stage the town as simultaneously dying and being
reborn. Although it is full of elderly ladies whose way of life is disappearing (“the
Amazons are on the edge of extinction,” Tim Dolin writes), Cranford is also
immortal because it boasts a series of sets of old ladies reproducing themselves
by parthenogenesis (in Langland’s unforgettable term).22 Cranford’s particular
current preferences are doomed, yet the structure of a town of elderly women
with archaic behaviors persists. Matty and her ideas are fading away—but when
Mary’s generation takes over, their ideas will seem just as old-fashioned. This
coexistence of local extinction and generic survival (or, to use the terms Mary’s
successors will think in, the death of the individual and survival of the species)
is not just a nice compromise to which we readers can resort when thinking
about the problem. Rather, the paradox is in some sense the heart of Cranford.
68 Novel Craft
Gaskell wants to keep both options open and balanced, enjoying the complexity
that Matus has identified as a hallmark of Unitarianism. This coexistence of life
and death is a source of perpetual fascination for Gaskell, recurring in a particu-
lar set of images to which she repeatedly returns.
Gaskell works through this issue, quite literally, on paper. Not only does she
write out the Cranfordians’ fate on paper but also she uses paper as a metaphor
for the Cranfordians themselves. In Cranford, Gaskell focuses on the way paper
can switch from being a carrier of meaning to a waste object, the moment at
which text becomes, or ceases to become, thing. Paper perfectly parallels the
Cranfordians, who are both doomed and thriving, both extinct and continuing.
In fact, “Gaskell is writing with a nineteenth-century conception of her novel as
a material work in her reader’s hands, not as a bodiless text,” Jonathan Gross-
man explains. “And her concern is that her almost-immaterial words be con-
nected to the material reality in which they exist and persist.”23 Writing consists
of immortal thoughts tied to a brittle physical body. Paper is the medium of
permanence and ephemerality at once, in a paradox that Gaskell repeats through-
out the novel, the paradox that names the Cranfordians.
Paper is a material used—but used interestingly differently—in Matty’s and
in Mary’s eras. Mary Smith, who seems to be in her twenties or early thirties
during Cranford, is more or less contemporary with Elizabeth Gaskell, born in
1810. That means that our narrator and our author share a mid-Victorian atti-
tude toward paper goods, which, as we shall see, differs significantly from Mat-
ty’s view, formed in the late eighteenth century. The slippage between these
views of paper is symptomatic; here are two women in sympathy with one
another but unconsciously wedded to different views of the world. Paper
becomes, then, a visible locus for Mary’s narrative untrustworthiness, a kind of
blank page that can take the faint imprint of her difference from her subjects. As
a representative of both ephemerality and permanence and as a marker of gen-
erational change, it is the perfect metaphor for Cranford’s central paradox.
Finally, paper represents not only the Cranfordians but also the novel it com-
poses The paradox of survivability and doom also characterizes this novel. Will
it come together, will it make a book, or will it dissolve into its component
sketches, without enough plot or characters to make it go on? Paper is the mate-
rial that unites the text and the craft, and through this craft discourse, Gaskell
can work out uncertainties about this difficult type of literature. In exploring the
ways paper can be burned, decoratively enhanced, copied, stitched, mailed,
stained, salvaged, sold, mailed, exchanged, Gaskell is really asking about both
the longevity of the Cranfordians and the viability of the document that is
Cranford. In the rest of this chapter, I examine several incidents where paper—its
uses, its disposition, its destruction—becomes the explicit object of the
characters’ concerns: newspaper pathways, spills, letters, the Town and County
Bank’s note, and advertising placards.
Pa p e r H i s to r y
In the late eighteenth century, fashionable paper crafts involved twisting, snip-
ping, or rolling tiny scraps of paper. In rolled paper work, tightly curled tiny
scraps of paper were pasted to a dark background to form a lacy pattern of tiny
circlets.24 Mrs. Delany’s famous paper collages used thousands of infinitesimal
scraps of colored paper to form botanically accurate and arrestingly attractive
images of flowers.25 Jane Toller describes the “paper-filigree” arts of the 1760s
and 1770s, in which the craftsperson carefully cut out portraits or silhouettes in
paper to glue to a paper background. Talented cut-paper workers could create
fine webs that resembled lace, or assemble cut-out paper petals into flowers, or
puncture the paper in decorative pinprick patterns, or even stitch very fine em-
broidery on paper (figure 2.2). Papier-mâché, also developed during this period,
required shredding, soaking, and mashing paper into a paste, which could then
be molded into different forms.26 As Clive Edwards notes, paper crafts were the
signature pursuit of the late eighteenth century:
Scrollwork or quilling, which employed paper and small decorative beads,

seeds, etc. was a popular craft. It was clean and could be completed by
beginners or experienced workers alike. As with many other crafts, it
had its own patterns and specialist suppliers. In 1786 The New Lady’s
Magazine, supplied “a profusion of neat elegant patterns and models
of ingeneuity and delicacy, suitable for tea-caddies [figure 2.3], toilets,
chimney-pieces, screens, cabinets, frames, picture ornaments etc.”27
This preference for skilled manipulations of minute quantities of paper

reveals a sense of paper as a precious material, partly because it was expensive
due to the paper tax, and partly because it was only available in small sizes, tech-
niques for printing large sheets not yet having been invented. Moreover, since
paper was made of rags, there was always a risk of running out of textiles. Paper
scarcity was a real threat.
While the eighteenth-century craftswoman used paper for its own sake, as a
pliable, divisible, valuable material, the mid-Victorian craftswoman regarded
paper very differently. In the nineteenth century, machines developed to print
large sheets of paper, while the technology for reproducing illustrations rapidly
improved. Gladstone’s repeal of the paper tax in 1860 facilitated these new uses
of print. One example of the new attitude toward paper can be found in a pre-
paratory note to the 1860 volume of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine,
exultantly announcing “many new, useful, and elegant features, never practicable
before the Treaty with France, and the Remission of the Paper Duty.” Th ese new
features included steel-plate engravings, Berlin-wool work patterns, and sepa-
rate oversized sheets with life-sized patterns—all features that took advantage
70 Novel Craft
Figure 2.2 Fine Embroidery on Paper, Eighteenth Century.
of new illustrative and printing technologies. But perhaps the most important
technological innovation in paper production was the development of paper
based on wood pulp. Replacing valuable textiles with inexpensive vegetable mat-
ter drastically lowered the cost of paper.28
By the mid-Victorian era, printed pictures had become cheap and plentiful
enough that paper was perceived primarily as a carrier for illustrations. It was the
illustrations—not the inconveniently frail medium on which they were printed—
that craftswomen wanted to use. The mid-Victorian craftswoman worked to pre-
serve, enhance, and display printed images. In potichomanie and diaphanie,
handsome prints were glued to glass panes or vases to make the viewer believe it
was porcelain or stained glass. Scrap screens involved collages of cut-out magazine
pictures glued to a large screen for the nursery. Craftswomen were also advised on
how to transfer engravings to other surfaces or to color black-and-white etchings.
Since Matty grew up in the last decades of the eighteenth century, it is no
surprise that her favorite craft utilizes these late-eighteenth-century skills of
rolling and cutting tiny scraps of paper.29 “What she piqued herself upon, as arts,
in which she excelled, was making candle-lighters, or ‘spills’ (as she preferred
calling them), of coloured paper, cut so as to resemble feathers . . .” (185). Cassell’s
Figure 2.3 Rolled-Paper Tea Caddy, c.1800.
Household Guide explains: a spill is a small slip of paper rolled into a cone shape,
sewn at top and bottom, and decorated with a spray of paper (curled around
knitting needles or snipped into feathery ribbons) glued to the top.30 This thrifty
way of reusing waste paper derives from a period when paper was costly. Thus
Matty’s continued practice of paper manipulation crafts helps preserve a way of
conceptualizing paper that was disappearing. Cutting the feathers associates
her, again, with eighteenth-century paper manipulation craft, and the old-fash-
ioned association would have been reinforced by the fact that the slim, pointed,
feather-topped implements would have resembled quill pens (rapidly being
replaced by steel pens in the mid-nineteenth century).31 It is fitting that Matty
makes unusable pseudopens out of the papers she has rolled back into blank-
ness, concealing their original writing. The making of spills is the other side of
the making of words. Matty unwrites.
On the other hand, Matty’s term spills suggests a secret meaning: they are
prodigal expenditures, wastes, spills, a moment of release from the too-precise
accounts of every day. Every Tuesday night, Miss Matty “made candle-lighters of
all the notes and letters of the week; for on Mondays her accounts were always
72 Novel Craft
made straight—not a penny owing from the week before; so, by a natural
arrangement, making candle-lighters fell upon a Tuesday evening . . .” (118). In
a normally economical text, the phrase “making candle-lighters” recurs three
times within a few paragraphs, with the same elaborate explanation each time.
The fact that Miss Matty burns her notes and bills is obviously getting narrative
attention, an indication that it carries some deeper significance. Matty rips the
bills, twists them tightly, and seals them down, making a tightly screwed cone to
be dipped into a flame and carried to an unlit candle. Previously, the notes’ value
came from the messages they bore. But Matty redefines them as useful bits of
paper. In this new incarnation, the paper is no longer celebrated for its informa-
tion-carrying potential but for its inherent properties: pliability, portability,
flammability. Indeed, these two paper functions can work against one another.
The most expensive stationary—an elegantly thin page or an impressively stiff
invitation card—would be worthless for candlelighter-making purposes, while
ordinary inexpensive notepaper would be most desirable. By turning her notes
into candlelighters, Matty changes the economy of value.
What Matty transforms is also significant. It seems perfectly plausible to
burn one’s bills after paying them—typical of the meticulous household man-
agement Elizabeth Langland praises in Matty—but it is an odd thing for a care-
ful housekeeper to do.32 Since Matty does keep account books, we must presume
that before burning the bills, she records them in her ledger, keeping a running
tally of various vendors’ charges. But Matty does not say so (118).33 Moreover,
Matty does not just burn bills (for which an elaborate if specious explanation is
given); she also burns notes and letters (for which no rationale at all is given).
Correspondence is precisely what one might expect to be preserved for senti-
mental reasons, as well as pragmatic reasons like needing to recheck details of
invitations. In Cranford, where social relations constitute the full-time work of
its genteel female members, where the tenor of a note can be parsed for the fin-
est shade of meaning, the destruction of those social records is indeed surpris-
ing. In an act of strange equivalence, Matty regards both records kept by
working-class shopmen and social interactions penned by her friends as equally
waste paper. In a novel famous for its nostalgia, the main character sets the
past afire.
Matty’s making of candlelighters is in fact a deeply odd act. It means that
every week she sweeps her history clean, erasing both its sentimental and eco-
nomic ties. For an elderly woman who spends much of the rest of the novel rem-
iniscing, this bold erasure is anomalous. It is as if Matty’s carefully thrifty
consumer behavior finds its one vent in this reckless expenditure in which every
time she lights a candle, Matty watches her labor, her skill, her Tuesday nights’
task, going up in a few seconds of flame.
Perhaps this is the secret of why Matty economizes on candles. Perhaps Mary
has misread her; perhaps it is not that she is “chary of candles” (84) but that she
is prodigal of candlelighters. Every time Miss Matty blows out a candle, relights
a candle, or darts back and forth to keep both candles burnt down to the same
level, she is using another of those candlelighters. In each act of “elegant econ-
omy” is encoded a moment of sheer willful waste when she sends the bills and
notes, the records of her life, up in smoke. In each candlelighting, she is violently
effacing those Tuesdays. Her act of burning her own handiwork is a minor
domestic convenience, so minor that Mary does not even notice it, and yet in its
way it is as rebellious as Bertha burning down Thornfield Hall.
Ne w s p a p e r Pat hw ay s: S t i tc h i n g
C ra n fo rd To g e t h e r
Before Matty can achieve the cathartic burning of papers, she is first trained in
the peculiarly Cranfordian uses of paper. Toward the beginning of the novel,
Matty, Deborah, and Mary sew newspapers:
We were very busy, too, one whole morning, before Miss Jenkyns gave
her party, in following her directions, and in cutting out and stitching
together pieces of newspaper, so as to form little paths to every chair,
set for the expected visitors, lest their shoes might dirty or defile the
purity of the carpet. Do you make paper paths for every guest to walk
upon in London? (53)
The cutting and stitching of paper connects this scene with the older paper crafts
practiced in the Jenkynses’’ youth. To its mid-nineteenth-century readers, the
scene would carry a slightly archaic quality, along with its comedy. Its foreign-
ness to Mary’s—and presumably, the reader’s—modern, urban sensibilities is
shown in the uncomfortable gibe about London. In London, at mid-century,
women were indeed doing newspaper work—but it was as (usually anonymous)
journalists. Mary, uncertain about just what she is doing, unconsciously affili-
ates her activity to a more familiar craft practice by saying they are “cutting out,”
a phrase used for making paper patterns. At the same time, Mary’s use of “path”
incorporates a gardening model. We see our narrator’s tangential relationship to
the world of Cranford here, her willing participation mediated by her slightly
hostile questions and attempts to affiliate Cranfordian culture to her genera-
tion’s normative leisure practices. Her subtly alienated position is significant. At
the beginning of her role as narrator, she is establishing herself as a sympathetic
outsider, but her description also constitutes a useful warning that she will tend
to rewrite Cranfordian experience in more familiar terms.34
In the Household Words edition of December 13, 1851, when it first appeared,
Mary’s question would have had an obviously self-referential meaning, for this
74 Novel Craft
description of newspaper pathways was printed on newspaper. Asking whether

newspapers can be sewn together expresses a concern about the continuity of
the sketches that compose Cranford itself. This anxiety may already have been
haunting Gaskell as she wrote this sketch; although she claimed she “never
meant to write more, so killed Captain Brown very much against my will,” in
fact, the next installment, “A Love Affair at Cranford,” followed almost imme-
diately (January 3, 1852), and Dorothy W. Collin cogently argues that Gaskell
had probably written the first two numbers at the same time.35 The newspaper
episode thus appears just when Gaskell was thinking about expanding her
story and articulates her concerns: should she connect the Captain Brown
material to the Holbrook episodes? Can these occasional sketches get stitched
together into coherent “paper paths”? Is there some sort of domestic labor
capable of uniting them? Would such a narrative seem too provincial or archaic
to London readers?
Interestingly, Gaskell’s newspaper pathway image not only alludes to the
physical experience of publishing on newsprint but also evokes the memory of an
editorial encounter. In trying to convince Gaskell to write for Household Words in
1850, Dickens begged, “When you send me anything which I can shew you, in our
own pages as they will actually be, we shall have some resting-place for our feet.”36
The metaphor constructs an odd vision: Gaskell’s work, on newspaper pages, will
be laid out to be trodden upon. This slightly disturbing promise is symptomatic
of the double-edged language Elsie Michie locates in Dickens’s correspondence
with Gaskell, in which outrageous flattery masks critical undertones.37 It is in
fact quite appropriate that the episode, with a kind of dream logic, literally enacts
Dickens’s metaphorical phrase, for Gaskell uses this episode, at least in part, to
work through her feelings about her extremely strong-willed editor.
Gaskell’s and Dickens’s already fraught relationship deteriorated badly dur-
ing the publication of Cranford. She had argued with him recently about both
literary and political issues: in 1850, she disagreed with him about the best solu-
tion for prostitution, and in 1851, she attacked him for publishing a ghost story
she had told.38 In late 1851, Gaskell built the plot of the first episode around
Captain Brown’s admiration of The Pickwick Papers, but Dickens replaced his own
name with Thomas Hood’s, thereby changing the meaning of the sketch. Gaskell
was so enraged that she may have tried to withdraw Cranford from Household
Words.39 Indeed, Collin even speculates that her comment that she “killed Capt
Brown very much against my will” may have been a trace of another battle with
his editorial edicts.40 The moment of Cranford’s inception, then, is marked by a
battle over who controlled the text—a battle that was analogized in the novel’s
opening scenes, the fight between Deborah Jenkyns and Captain Brown over the
merits of Dickens.41 Captain Brown, Dickens’s defender, gets run over by a train.
Eileen Gillooly sums it up: “Gaskell’s digs at Dickens—impugning his authority
as a literary model, parodying his plot device for getting rid of Carker, murdering
him by association”—all indicate her growing resentment of Dickens in this first

episode of Cranford.42
Although Deborah Jenkyns condemns Dickens in the rest of the chapter, in
the newspaper pathways episode, Deborah actually seems to stand in for Dick-
ens. Gaskell constructs the newspaper scene to stress that Deborah is doing no
work. Instead, she hands down dictatorial “directions,” meant to preserve
“purity.” Deborah, in other words, is acting very much like Dickens, whose
famously high-handed instructions annoyed Gaskell so much in her experience
with Household Words.43 Specifically, Dickens’s domineering editing style was
intended to prevent virtuous women from sliding into deviant behavior, as Elsie
Michie explains: “his function as editor is to be a disciplinarian; he must keep
Gaskell’s professional behavior within the limits of what is proper.”44
Gaskell might well have been annoyed at such restraints as she wrote the
comically decorous pages of Cranford (a wary editor might have done better to
keep an eye on Ruth, composed simultaneously). In Cranford, Gaskell succeeded
brilliantly in composing a woman’s style perfectly keyed to the laughable, affec-
tionate minutiae of domestic life. Indeed, it might be said that she “wrote nice,
kind, rambling letters”; in spite of the humility of her style, her “account gave me
the best idea”; in other words, it is Miss Matty who most resembles Gaskell in
writing in a fluid, congenial, and expressive voice (51, 52). But that voice is under
constant correction. We find Miss Matty
now and then venturing into an opinion of her own; but suddenly pull-
ing herself up, and either begging me not to name what she had said, as
Deborah thought differently, and she knew; or else putting in a post-
script to the effect that, since writing the above, she had been talking
over the subject with Deborah, and was quite convinced that &c.—
(here, probably followed a recantation of every opinion she had given in
the letter). (51)
In other words, Miss Matty is being edited—and edited by a person with strong
literary and political opinions, who wears masculine clothing, and who even has
an initial D.
Finally, we might note that because contributors’ work was published anony-
mously, Gaskell’s name does not appear. Instead, each page of Cranford was
headed by the words “Conducted by Charles Dickens.” Dickens, like Deborah,
signs her story, substitutes his choice of characters for hers, controls her voice,
dictates her proper language, and “conducts” the work on the newspaper page
before us.
The question about the newspapers—whether they can indeed be stitched
together to form a coherent pathway—expresses a pervasive anxiety about the
fragmentary nature of the narrative. Most readers of Cranford concur that the
76 Novel Craft
novel itself can be read as a collection of unconnected trifles, a fragmentariness

that might, in Margaret Case Croskery’s reading, constitute an alternative form
of narrative. But I want to suggest that attention to the situation of periodical
publication makes a different kind of sense of Cranford’s fragmentariness. Prob-
lematically incoherent for a novel, it is nonetheless entirely appropriate if we
read Cranford as a kind of newspaper. For instance, notice the number of inter-
woven stories in the Cranfordians’ theories about Peter. Miss Pole opines that he
might have been
elected Great Lama of Thibet; and this was a signal for each lady to go
off on her separate idea. Mrs. Forrester’s start was made in the veiled
prophet in Lalla Rookh . . . in a moment, the delusive lady was off upon
Rowland’s Kalydor, and the merits of cosmetics and hair oils in general,
and holding forth so fluently that I turned to listen to Miss Pole, who
(through the llamas, the beasts of burden) had got to Peruvian bonds,
and the share market, and her poor opinion of joint-stock banks in gen-
eral, and of that one in particular in which Miss Matty’s money was
invested. In vain I put in “When was it—in what year was it that you
heard that Mr. Peter was the Great Lama?” They only joined issue to
dispute whether llamas were carnivorous animals or not. (163–164)
Like a journal, this offers multiple stories, each following its own logic, simulta-
neously presented. One can choose to read the columns on Lalla Rookh, stocks,
or llamas. The Cranfordians’ miscellaneous diction is a patchwork of local mem-
ories, mixed with half-informed guesswork, obscurely significant hints about
the bank, and distantly recollected allusions from the larger economic, political,
and cultural worlds. If Cranford is a woman’s “household words,” however, it
redefines the nature of that journal into the local, poetic, and associative.
Because there are no conventional climaxes from which to date these women’s
life events, no marriages or births, the Cranfordians live in an even flow of small
daily news, domestic or local happenings, each of which is equally important and
has its own life cycle that must be traced.
The newspaper pathway scene has interesting ramifications within the nar-
rative of Cranford as well. The paper paths imply a social scene in which mobil-
ity is so predictable that one knows exactly where each guest will step, leaving
behind (or ahead) paper traces of their putative footsteps. Two-dimensional
flat characters, they step on paper pathways in preordained patterns. But real-
ity, violence, and death break in; the drawing room is violated by a working-
class man who has a tragedy to tell. At that moment, the novel (which is not yet
a novel) comes to life. Plot is, as Peter Brooks says, what happens when a story
strays. The party is not held, the carpet is not protected, and dirt from the
world of men and voices from the working class replace the flatness of the
predicted plot. “The affrighted carter” is hauled into the Jenkynses’ parlour,
“where he stood with his wet boots on the new carpet, and no one regarded it”
(55). At that moment, the preservationist ethos of the paper pathways fails;
the carpet is brought into a world of decay. Those wet boots make the newspa-
per pathways into pulp. This is one of the first of those key moments in Cran-
ford where preservation and destruction, creation of story and disintegration
of paper, occur simultaneously. As representatives of those very different
worldviews confront one another, the paper disintegrates under the strain, but
the novel is born.
“ No te s ” o n C ra n fo rd
In Cranford, Gaskell almost always describes the physical state (crossed, sealed,
creased, misspelled, yellowed, unreadable) of her characters’ correspondence.
Cranford’s letters are material objects, status markers, guarantors of affection,
insignia of loyalty, records of history, tenuous connections to places, eras, and
interests not directly accessible to the ladies of Cranford. A brief accounting of
the letters in Cranford includes Deborah Jenkyns’s Johnsonian epistles, Miss
Matty’s timid gossip, Mr. Smith’s father’s “just a man’s letter” (172), Miss Pole’s
newsy letters, Mary’s letter to the Aga Jenkyns “spelt by sound” (182), the
worrisome circular from the Town and County Bank that Matty misreads as a
personal invitation, the comically inscrutable letters from the ladies of Cranford
recording their determination to contribute to Matty, Martha’s occasional
“hieroglyphics” (203), and the touching series of letters from the Jenkyns par-
ents (and Peter) that form the subject and indeed the content of two chapters.
Along with these letters, Cranford features manuscript sermons, encyclopedia
entries, notes of invitation, advertising placards, fashion books, conversation
cards, receipts, Preference cards, calling cards, gift books, newspapers, financial
plans, “Locksley Hall,” Pickwick Papers, and Rasselas.45
Perhaps the most famous account of letters in this novel is the scene when
Matty burns the family papers. This scene operates very much like Matty’s
paradigmatic “spills”; she ignites old notes, taking a kind of cathartic pleasure in
their eruption into flame. A closer reading of the letter burning will show exactly
what Matty is destroying and why she wants to burn it.
First, we need to be aware that although Matty and Mary look over the letters
together, they do not see exactly the same things. The early letters are “written
in a straight hand with the lines very close together. Sometimes the whole letter
was contained on a mere scrap of paper. The paper was very yellow, and the ink
very brown; some of the sheets were (as Miss Matty made me observe) the old
original post” (90). These eighteenth-century letters are sealed with red wafers,
or wax stamped with “an immense coat of arms,” and sent via franks (90). What
78 Novel Craft
Matty notices is, characteristically, eighteenth-century use of paper as an expen-

sive commodity: a scrap whose small surface is carefully maximized, with coat of
arms indicating the importance of the correspondence, and the original stamp
and valuable franks testifying to the expense of letter writing. However, when
we get to the next generation, we shift into Mary’s point of view. In the early
nineteenth century, young Deborah “wrote on the square sheet, which we have
learned to call old-fashioned” (90). The word we positions Mary and the reader
together, part of a modern generation that is distinct from Matty and Deborah.
Mary’s comic account of the difficulties of reading these much-crossed, “sesqui-
pedalian” epistles further separates her from Matty, who feels nothing but pride
in her sister’s letters (90). Although both women find a melancholy pleasure in
reading these historical documents before destroying them, each finds confirma-
tion of her own assumptions about the meaning and value of paper in the cache.
Second, Matty burns these letters at the crux of a private battle with her fam-
ily history. At the beginning of the novel, when her sister is alive, she allows
herself a few covert acts of self-assertion, “now and then venturing into an opin-
ion of her own” before retracting it based on Deborah’s corrections (51). But
Deborah’s death transforms her. “Miss Jenkyns’s rules were made more strin-
gent than ever, because the framer of them was gone where there could be no
appeal” (66–67). Yet just as Matty seemed to be fixed by the limits of her dead
sister’s ideas, a new plot development intervenes: she meets the man with whom
she had once been in love, Mr. Holbrook, and whom she had not been permitted
to marry. Recovering her own private emotional past, Matty begins to trust her
own independent values. Publicly endorsing love over gentility, she permits her
servant, Martha, to have a follower, breaking Deborah’s cardinal rules. When
Mr. Holbrook dies, however, she also has to relive the trauma of their earlier
separation. She begins battling with her repressed resentment against her sister,
as Mary shrewdly guesses, “as if to make up for some reproachful feeling against
her late sister” (80). In short, Matty’s long-suppressed anger conflicts with
residual loyalty. Significantly, it is in this state of terrible emotional confusion
about her family that she decides to burn their letters.
Although Gaskell carefully sets up this concealed resentment on Matty’s part,
she also shows that Mary does not see all of it. The narrator does recognize that
Holbrook’s death has sent her friend into a depression. Matty weeps privately,
wears a symbolic pseudo-widows’ cap, and exhibits somatic symptoms of dis-
tress: “this effort of concealment was the beginning of the tremulous motion of
head and hands which I have seen ever since in Miss Matty” (81). But whereas the
narrator assumes the epistolary fire expresses her friend’s sorrow about Holbrook,
it actually seems more likely to be Matty’s attempt to express her feelings about
her family. The trembling of the elder lady’s head and hands may indicate fear
about what those hands could do, the violent anger and misery that must be
suppressed because its enactment would be so terrible. But through burning
letters, Matty finds an outlet: a safely sublimated rebellion. The act is both a
cathartic moment in its spectacular destructiveness and an expression of hostil-
ity against the family—a hostility that is all the more acceptable because it can
be papered over, as it were, as duty: “the desireableness of looking over all the
old family letters, and destroying such as ought not to be allowed to fall into the
hands of strangers” (85).
The letter burning does indeed prove to be therapeutic for Matty. “One by one
she dropped them into the middle of the fire; watching each blaze up, die out,
and rise away, in faint, white, ghostly semblance, up the chimney, before she
gave another to the same fate. The room was light enough now; but I, like her,
was fascinated into watching the destruction of those letters . . .” (86). The burn-
ing is hypnotic, calming. She performs it as if it were a ritual: one by one, in the
center of the flames. It is making the history go up in smoke that empowers
Matty—the history whose words can still, half a century later, make her blind
with weeping, make her shake with emotion. She must prove that she has the
power to make those inconveniently vital speeches “ghostly semblance” again,
turn the dead back into ghosts. Haunted by history, she finds relief in the light
and heat and violence of fire. In this description, Mary manages for a moment to
intuit something of her subject’s complex emotions; together, these women
sense the fascination of reducing feelings to paper and burning that paper.
Mary’s sudden sympathetic insight, however, is a rare occurrence, for the
letter-burning episode tends rather to show how far apart the women really are.
The scene begins with a tacit query that Mary misses: “‘We must burn them, I
think,’ said Miss Matty, looking doubtfully at me. ‘No one will care for them
when I am gone’” (86). Matty is obviously offering to bequeath the letters to her
young friend. But the narrator remains silent, refusing the hint. If Mary is delib-
erately rejecting the letters, then the appreciative nostalgia of “Old Letters” is
undercut by a secretly dismissive attitude; perhaps she does not “care for them”
after all. If, on the other hand, Mary misunderstands her cue and simply ascribes
that “doubtful look” to the elder lady’s habitual uncertainty (“in general she was
so undecided anybody might turn her round”) (178), then she is judging Matty
too hastily. Either way, the scene problematizes Mary’s narratorial reliability by
signaling feelings about which she is either ignorant or covertly derisive.
Playing with fire is something Matty does emotionally as well as literally.
The epistolary holocaust liberates her from slavish loyalty. For the first time,
Matty manages to criticize her family by telling Peter’s history. She cannot
yet bring herself to blame her father for forbidding her marriage, but Peter’s
story allows her the relief of a parallel accusation, blaming her father for flog-
ging Peter. Dorothy W. Collin agrees that the Peter episode stands in for the
Matty-Holbrook romance, arguing that “the explicitly narrated flogging of
Peter functions also as a vicarious representation of the more significant
encounter between the father and the suitor.”46 In each case, Collin points
80 Novel Craft
out, a strong young man loses in a confrontation with the rector, the loser has
to relocate, and the women of the family are victimized by the conflict.
Afterward, Matty’s life is one of gradually growing self-assertion, as though
by burning the documents of the past, she has acquired the right to write her
own life. She refuses to socialize with Mrs. Jamieson once she has been snubbed,
demands a fashionable sea-green turban in spite of its inappropriateness, gets
ready to attack a supposed burglar, discusses her broken engagement, pays the
farmer when his note fails, sets up shop herself, asserts what her customers
should and should not buy, and finally grows to enjoy her tea-selling job.
The letter burning follows the peculiar logic of the candlelighter. Matty can
easily be identified as a candlelighter herself: the last fragment of an old family,
gradually burning itself down so that when she goes, the race of Jenkyns will be
extinct. Yet, read another way, Matty’s favorite hobby augurs well for her own
survival. A superseded note is recycled into another sort of valued household
tool. An old tragedy is transformed into recent information. So, too, might Miss
Matty be transformed. Once she relinquishes the old note, the text of “the rec-
tor’s daughter, who visited at Arly Hall,” she can be remade (194). When she loses
her money, Matty finally gives up the family rank (“I’m willing to do anything
that’s right and honest; and I don’t think, if Deborah knows where she is, she’ll
care so very much if I’m not genteel”) (196), the parlor which had been used for
ceremonial social occasions is transformed into a shop, and the erstwhile Miss
Matty enters a new existence as “Matilda Jenkyns, licensed to sell tea” (200).
Like the defunct note of invitation transformed into a practical candlelighter,
like the father’s old reproach changed into new information about Peter, Matty’s
leisured past self goes up in smoke, transforming into a different usefulness.
Moreover, the candlelighter-letter-burning logic offers a somewhat more
hopeful model for Cranford’s longevity than the newspaper pathways did.
Although both episodes show text to be frighteningly ephemeral, they also show
its durability. The letters are burned but not before being read, mourned, loved,
and commemorated by Mary’s careful descriptions. If the letters are burned in
Matty’s parlor, their meaning is extended by Matty’s tales and preserved in
Mary’s summaries. In Richard Menke’s view, “Cranford has hardly annihilated
those letters but only signaled a change in their mode of being. As they burn, the
text achieves a deft sublation, canceling their physical existence at the moment
that it reveals their contents and incorporates those contents into Cranford’s
narrative itself.”47
Thus the paradoxical moment of Cranford recurs. As the letters are burnt, they
are both destroyed and preserved, which is to say destroyed for the characters
but preserved for us. Similarly, the notes are ripped and rolled but given a new
identity as candlelighters. Like the papers, the ladies of Cranford will die—but,
like the papers, their essential spirit, their fundamental structure, will be
perpetuated.
Matty’s acts express quite neatly what Gaskell is doing. Matty twists records
of her immediate past and twists them into art, into candlelighters. So, too,
Gaskell reshapes her memories of Knutsford into art, into fictional anecdotes.48
Like Matty obediently sitting down to make her candlelighters every Tuesday,
Gaskell, too, was forced into patterns of regular production by the demands of
periodical publication. In other words, Matty continues to act as a semicomic
stand-in for the writer herself, as both women manipulate their old stories into
new uses, working dutifully at preset periods, thinking about the materiality of
the paper in which they work. In these chapters, Gaskell is no longer worrying
whether she can stitch newspaper sketches together to form a coherent whole.
Now she is more concerned whether art can perpetuate memory in spite of the
frailty, fallibility, and vulnerability of that art. Matty’s covert glee at burning her
past, mingled with Mary’s careful preservation of its basic story, is also the story
of Gaskell slowly realizing she could transmit the truths of Knutsford while leav-
ing its specifics behind.
M a k in g No te s
Two other paper episodes are significant because they mark the application of
a craft sensibility to a transaction that rightfully belongs to the male eco-
nomic sphere. When public text—banknotes, business correspondence, and
advertising—emerge as the primary forms of paper in Cranford, we have reached
a new stage in the novel’s understanding of itself. And as we shall see in this
book, the encounter between craft and financial records is the centerpiece of
craft narratives, charged with an emotional intensity that may surprise, even
confound, modern readers.
When Matty exchanges the farmer’s worthless Town and Country banknote
for five sovereigns, the witnesses worry about her foolishness—but the narrative
attention focuses on something else. Gaskell stresses the banknote’s materiality.
Every character insists on holding the piece of paper. The shopman carries it to his
superior, and then Matty “gently tak[es] it out of his hand, as he brought it back
to return it to the farmer” (176). The farmer gloomily “turn[s] the note absently
over in his fingers,” fumbles with it, and finally puts it down (176, 177–178). The
emphasis on the physical stuff of the note places it into a craft register. The ban-
knote is not just money, which is to say that it is not an abstract way of signifying
value that can be exchanged for any other equivalent set of counters. It is, above
all, a piece of paper that can be folded, carried, held, turned over, pulled out, laid
down. When monetary value leaches out of the note, what is left behind is, as the
shopman remarks, “waste paper” (176).
In other words, what we have here is the candlelighters scene in reverse. Here
is a small strip of waste paper whose printed information has become irrelevant.
82 Novel Craft
Like the scraps Miss Matty makes into candlelighters every Tuesday, it is a
“note” that has lost its value. Yet by exchanging the note for five sovereigns,
Matty restores its meaning. She reverses time; she makes a candlelighter back
into a note. The craft economy has taught Matty that waste paper is precisely the
material most fit for making new objects of value. Its paradigm of recycling and
salvage, learned through a long life, helps her see worth in a slip of “waste paper.”
This final apotheosis of paper signifies several achievements in the novel.
Above all, having worked through her anger at her family, having indulged in the
pleasure of burning up the past, Matty can now literally turn waste paper into
gold. Her action emblematizes Cranford’s continuity. Cranford can regenerate
itself by conferring identity and value upon new objects. Indeed, one of those
new objects is our narrator herself. Revaluing the banknote corresponds to
retraining Mary. In both cases, the elder woman takes something from Drumble
and imbues it with her own value(s) so it can circulate within Cranford and sus-
tain it once she has gone. The sovereigns, like Mary, can be accepted anywhere.
Mary herself is the next “sovereign,” waiting to succeed Matty on the throne of
Cranford. Finally, the banknote scene is also a way of thinking about the mean-
ing of writing. The episode forces the characters to decide what the words “Town
and Country Bank” signify. Money, like all print, derives its value from the good
faith of its readers. The question of whether a piece of print is waste paper or
worth gold is, of course, at the heart of Gaskell’s worries about whether the
newsprint of Cranford deserves credit.
The banknote is not just writing; it is a very particular type of text, a “note,”
and notes have a special significance in Cranford. “Notes” are humble, intimate,
and problematic communications, as distinct from “letters,” which are impor-
tant missives sent through the post.49 Cranford features an “oracular” note from
Miss Pole and an insulting invitation from Mrs. Jamieson, and these notes bear
certain intriguing resemblances to the farmer’s banknote. They are carried by
working-class people on behalf of absent women. They carry unsatisfactory
markings. Their female recipients have to work to glean their meanings and
decide whether to honor their intentions. In other words, notes are another kind
of raw material that has to be processed into an acceptable finished form by the
Cranfordians. Like the fabric from Drumble and the tea in Matty’s shop, this is
another basic material requiring genteel female processing to render it usable. In
spite of immediate reluctance, in the long term, the Cranfordians’ innate gener-
osity impels them to do this “civilizing” work, bestowing value upon the notes.
We might also note that a note is locally delivered, whereas a letter is medi-
ated by a paid civil service bureaucracy. In Cranford, letters come from Drumble
and speak of the larger world of business (the famous circular from the Town
and Country Bank, Mary Smith’s father’s “man’s letter”) (172). We assume the
post functions, but we do not see it in operation. Mary describes the postman,
but we see him only on a social occasion, a ritual round he performs once or
twice a year, when everyone on his route gives him a celebratory feast. Mean-
while, his wife’s daily drudgery of delivering the letters is taken for granted. She
apparently does these rounds while pregnant (thus becoming a laboring body in
both senses), although the Cranfordians do not notice, blithely inquiring of the
postman “if another [child] was likely to make its appearance” (171). The Cran-
fordians strive to make the working-class laboring body invisible through a
series of displacements. They replace the wife’s hardworking body by the hus-
band’s lame body, her daily rounds by his special visit, her physical discomfort
with his feasts, her due wages with his gifts. Thus the worker can be recuperated
as a helpless, needy, and grateful recipient of Amazonian patronage.
The banknote scene similarly rewrites working-class labor; it demonstrates
economic work recalibrated to look like a social occasion. The shopmen “had on
their best looks, and their best cravats” and are eager to serve their customers
(174); they apologize deferentially when forced to give bad news; and “with
much good feeling and real kindness, but with a little want of tact,” they try to
help the Cranfordians understand the economic situation (178). No wonder
Mary calls the shopman “the civil Mr Johnson” (178). In the shop, the workers’
labor is invisible; they practice the insignia of middle-class etiquette and are in
turn treated with some respect. It is perhaps not irrelevant that the scene occurs
during the great sale of the new spring fabrics, which the Cranfordians will make
up into the year’s new gowns. The civil Mr. Johnson therefore presides over
the process by which the great bales of textiles from Drumble get processed into
the peculiar personal garments of the Cranfordians. The shopmen facilitate the
great “civilizing” work of Cranford. Indeed, they themselves represent finished
products. The raw working male is processed by Cranfordian gentility into a
“civil” social being.
The Amazonians would like to retrain their servants similarly, but the serv-
ants resist in ways that range from the resentfully aggressive to the cheerfully
oblivious. Mrs. Jamieson’s butler, Mr. Mulliner, demonstratively enacts his
resentment at running errands. He raps furiously at the front door, not at the
back door where servants were supposed to go, and he carries the notes in a
ridiculously oversized basket “in order to impress his mistress with an idea of
their great weight” (118). This performance wholly undermines the sense of the
invitation as a hospitable communication. Matty’s servant, Martha, on the
other hand, performs an open friendliness that equally undercuts the intentions
of the sender. She simply announces that the note came “with Miss Pole’s kind
regards,” thus negating the elaborate apparatus of secrecy Miss Pole has con-
structed in the note itself (190). The episodes are uncomfortable reminders of
the way working-class labor intervenes and mediates relations among members
of the genteel class.
Similarly, Mr. Mulliner reads the St James’s Chronicle instead of passing
it along to the Cranfordians, acquiring the court news that his class should
84 Novel Craft
supposedly separate him from, and giving the Cranfordians a document already
touched by bodily signs of its passage through the service economy: Mr. Mulliner’s
hair powder, Mr. Mulliner’s finger-marks and creasings. Mary especially notices
his “imposing back” (an adjective that also expresses unease that he is imposing
on the Cranfordians) and his spreading hair powder, a sign of her discomfort at
how much space he takes up (121). Mr. Mulliner’s presence also changes the
rhythm of social gatherings: “he would wait in the hall when we begged him
not to wait, and then looked deeply offended because we had kept him there,
while, with trembling, hasty hands, we prepared ourselves for appearing in
company” (121).
The bodies, personalities, emotions, and preferences of the working class
shape the social situation of the Cranfordians, and this fact proves impervious
to Cranfordian refashioning. The Amazons covertly resent or tactfully overlook
their servants’ associations with raw materiality, even while they benefit from
that work. As Elizabeth Langland argues, Cranford’s happy ending “depends
entirely upon the mystification of labor: both household work and childbirth.”50
Matty’s refined existence depends on Martha’s robust sexuality, childbirth,
pleasure in food and drink, and willingness to undertake rough household work.
Notes are problematic because they invite reminders of how Cranford depends
on working-class bodies and appetites, and how those workers can intervene in
the communications of the Cranfordians.
Finally, the banknote scene shows Cranford encountering a financial system
that threatens its most basic precepts. Bank failures and joint stock companies
are concepts wholly alien to Matty. Andrew H. Miller argues that the Cranfordi-
ans’ economy is founded on an archaic understanding of corporations as ethical
subjects, with partnership as a personal relationship based in trust. The more
savvy modern characters have to carefully buffer Matty from economic reality.51
As Matty confesses, “I don’t pretend to understand business. . . . I can’t explain
myself” (177). Matty’s encounter with an alien economy, in a place of retail
trade, mediated by working farmers and lower-middle-class shopmen, ought to
be registered by the perturbations of paper. Throughout the book, frail docu-
ments that carry meaning within Cranford look like mere debris from the point
of view of the larger world. Yet in the banknote scene, the process is reversed. It
is the non-Cranfordian document that is waste paper, and it is the encounter
with Cranford that reanimates it. The banknote scene, for the first time, shows
Cranfordian values triumphing over the economic conventions of Drumble.
Cranford triumphs because, as represented by Matty, it has changed to meet
the demands of the modern world. Previously, Matty did not feel as if “my mind
was what people call very strong,” feared working men, and was indecisive about
retail purchases (179). But in this scene, she “saw my duty,” arranges matters
with the shopman and farmer, and decisively rejects the silks (179). In other
words, her development since Deborah’s death climaxes here. She becomes
strong enough to assert Cranford’s values over the outside world’s. As Boris
Knezevic explains, “Even as Cranford society is forced to make concessions to
extra-Cranfordian economies, it keeps trying to gentrify the economic practices
that engulf it.”52 Although it is ludicrous to imagine that Cranford could gentrify
the entire modern industrial economy, in this small symbolic instance, Matty
(and Cranford) score a symbolic triumph when genteel craft values are shown to
overpower financial rules.
It is a scene that the craft narrative aches to stage, the showdown between
the consumer economy and the craft world. The banknote scene sets a pat-
tern we shall see elsewhere: the elderly person brings the craft sensibility to
bear on a man’s financial document, while the encounter is mediated by a
sympathetic younger person. As Matty transfigures the farmer’s banknote,
with Mary watching, we have reached the kind of apotheosis of which the craft
paradigm dreams.
A final set of paper scenes occurs toward the end of the novel, and it is
significant because it follows a different pattern. Here, there is no traumatic
encounter with an Other to produce the switch between waste and meaning.
In these last scenes, instead of the Cranfordians’ destruction-preservation
problematic represented by notes, we enter Mary’s mediating consciousness
represented by letters.
Peter Jenkyns has been impossible to reach by letter. The “Poor Peter” chap-
ter is dominated by correspondence with Peter that went horribly awry. Matty’s
mother sent a letter to him at a schoolfellow’s, which was returned unopened; a
message sent to Holbrook missed him; the captain wrote to summon the par-
ents, but “by some of the wild chances of life, the captain’s letter had been
detained somewhere, somehow” (100); the mother sends message after message
to a son who has been ordered to a region beyond the reach of letters; the son’s
parcel reaches the mother the day after her death; Peter’s subsequent letters to
England were returned marked “Dead” (209). The mother was “but a frail
woman” and dies as a result of the grief and shock (101). Mrs. Jenkyns’s inability
to reach beyond Cranford to a younger generation is symbolized by the appalling
miscarriage of every kind of communication with her son, and this catastrophe
betokens Cranford’s vulnerability, Cranford’s ruinous inability to communicate
with the outside world.
Decades later, however, confident young Mary has no doubt at all that the
post office will do its proper job when she sends her letter to India:
It would get tossed about on the sea, and stained with sea-waves per-
haps; and be carried among palm-trees, and scented with all tropical
fragrance;—the little piece of paper, but an hour ago so familiar and
commonplace, had set out on its race to the strange wild countries
beyond the Ganges! But I . . . hastened home. (182–183)
86 Novel Craft
And of course, Mary is quite right. The letter does get delivered, “Aga Jenkyns” is
indeed Peter, and he immediately comes home. No transaction could be simpler.
There are two main reasons that Mary’s letter works. First, a generational
difference: Mary, a mid-Victorian woman, takes the infrastructure of empire and
a functioning civil service for granted. (By contrast, as we have seen, the postal
system in Cranford is a complicated system, where we are shown the lame man
enjoying charitable feasts in lieu of the real worker and her daily round of deliv-
eries.) Mary, accustomed to Drumble, regards India as a place with postal carri-
ers, a road network, transportation, and distribution systems that will work
more or less like English ones. Mary has heard Mrs. Brown’s story of an India
that is roughly parallel to England, with a river flowing like the Avon, a series of
villages she can walk to, a major port city from which she can embark, even sen-
timental gifts from women who recognize their shared motherhood (160–161).
As Richard Menke notes, “The moment it [Mary’s letter to Peter] passes through
the gap into the collection box, it enters an imperial information network whose
brisk automatism lets it ‘race’ towards its destination” (254).
Mary’s India, then, is quite different from the Amazons’ vision of India, which
is geographically unstable (“Peter had last been heard of in India, ‘or that neigh-
bourhood’” (164), they say), and which the Amazons vaguely envision mainly
through glimpses of elephants and boa constrictors in Wombwell’s menagerie
(164). When Peter returns and tells wildly exaggerated tales of India, the Cran-
fordians’ credulity is a measure of their real ignorance, one that Mary pointedly
does not share.
Second, Mary’s letter gets through because, symbolically, it must. No ques-
tions of frailty or survival hang about her character; she does not represent a
dying culture. Mary embodies the principle of mediation, as we have seen.
Our narrator vibrates between Cranford and Drumble, reaches from England
to India, translates between reader and characters. The function of this char-
acter is to bridge opposing worlds. Thus it is typical that Mary imagines the
letter’s passage to India rather than its reception by Peter. It is also typical
that she composes the letter in an ambiguous style, “a letter which should
affect him if he were Peter, and yet seem a mere statement of dry facts if he
were a stranger” (180). Writing for an indifferent public reader and a senti-
mental private reader at once, her epistolary achievement is a symbol of her
narratological success as mediator.53
Mary’s letter derives its meaning in part from its connection with another
text with which Gaskell explicitly juxtaposes it. When Mary asks the Browns for
Peter’s address, “Signor Brunoni” and his wife are
looking over a great black and red placard, in which the Signor Bruno-
ni’s accomplishments were set forth, and to which only the name of
the town where he would next display them was wanting. He and his
wife were so much absorbed in deciding where the red letters would
come in with most effect . . . that it was some time before I could get my
question asked privately, and not before I had given several decisions,
the wisdom of which I questioned afterwards with equal sincerity as
soon as the signor threw in his doubts and reasons on the important
subject. At last I got the address, spelt by sound; and very queer it
looked! (182)
The Browns and Mary are engaged in parallel writing projects. Both are creating
advertisements designed to lure the audience to a particular place. Both have
left the address to the end, unsure where it is going. Both consult the other
about how to make that address look right, and both are somewhat dubious
about the other’s advice. Indeed, Mary and the Browns are both acutely aware of
their messages as visual objects that ought to look a certain way. Both promise
magic of a certain sort, making people appear unexpectedly. And these messages
share another similarity: they are traveling. The Browns’ placard will go with
them when they start moving to the next town, while Mary’s letter, as she
muses, would be tossed about on the sea. Like Mary, the Browns are only going
to another provincial English town, but their rhetoric also conjures up India, for
we discover later that it includes the boast, “Magician to the King of Delhi, the
Rajah of Oude” (216).
The Browns’ and Mary’s two messages, parallel in so many ways, represent a
kind of narrowing of the work of Cranford. They can be read as the male and
female sphere versions of the same text: the Browns are producing public adver-
tising for a paid occupation, while Mary is producing a private letter for familial
sentiment. But the differences between them are outweighed by the multiple
similarities. Thus private domestic writing begins to converge with public pro-
fessional discourse as the novel draws to an end.
As Cranford concludes, Gaskell no longer represents its writing as a problem-
atically frail, illegible, worthless material, but as writing that is merging into
public text with widespread distribution, awareness of multiple audiences, a
carefully designed appearance, and reliance on a well-developed infrastructure.
Indeed, the final piece of writing in Cranford is another edition of the Browns’
placard, this one with a line “Under the Patronage of the Honourable Mrs. Jamie-
son” (216). Mary, mistakenly, reads this as a sign of Peter’s private romantic
preference, but in fact it is another piece of public writing, advertising designed
to facilitate the social work of the town. By the end of the novel, there is no more
need for private, oppositional, female writing—frail newspapers stitched
together and trampled into pulp, notes to be twisted into candlelighters, defunct
banknotes “little better than waste paper” (176). These private, ambivalent
“notes,” with their eighteenth-century sense of paper as a manipulable material,
have ended. What has replaced them is the mid-Victorian sense of paper as a
88 Novel Craft
carrier of information for public display. Cranford is now Mary’s story, and it is
ready for publication.
Conc l u s ion: T h e C ra n fo rd Pa p e r s
In exploring the way paper works in Cranford, we have seen how, in each episode,
a piece of text hovers in a strange state in which, like Schroedinger’s cat, it is si-
multaneously dead and alive, waste and valued. Paper allows Gaskell to empha-
size this paradox, rather than resolve it. This half-life perfectly represents the
Cranfordians, who are dying out yet self-perpetuating. Paper is also the meta-
phor for the Cranfordians’ encounters with economic modernity; the stress of
that encounter can wipe away meaning. But paper also enfolds Matty’s—and
Cranford’s—cautiously progressive development. We see Matty grow, from her
timidity in the newspaper pathways scene, to her tentative self-confidence
expressed through the letter burning, to full self-assertion via the farmer’s
banknote. These scenes also chart Gaskell’s growing confidence about the status
of her book. We watch her move from her early frustration with Dickens and
anxiety about the Cranford sketches as frail disintegrating newspaper bits, to a
sense of her own work of historical transformation of personal memories in the
letter-burning scene. Finally, she begins to regard Cranford as public, publish-
able, valuable text, analogous to a banknote or advertising placard. Paper craft in
Cranford is no static artifact. It makes the pace of change visible.
Domestic handicraft in Cranford is the measure of history. Its products
emerge from a specific cultural moment, and later generations’ misapprehen-
sions of those products shows how fundamental understandings of materials
and skills have altered. When we recognize that handicraft was a pursuit subject
to historical change and multiple fashions (as opposed to the Arts and Crafts
sense of craft as a timeless traditional skill), we become part of Cranford’s inter-
rogation of the nature of changing times. But domestic handicraft in Cranford is
also the measure of value. A note, a bill, a banknote, a letter, an advertisement—
what are they really worth, and under what conditions can their value be
changed, restored, or deepened? In this novel, characters twist, burn, stitch,
trample, deliver, mail, claim, and transcribe these paper goods, anxious about
the paradox of valuable words depending on fragile material selves. For both of
these concerns, history and value, we might ask: what does paper mean?
Paper is the stuff of Cranford. Paper sheets constitute the novel, of course, but
form its primary metaphor as well. Paper shows the frailty and fragmentation of
the text, the generational gap between the characters, the anxiety about the value
of stories, and the fear of their destruction. It is, then, not surprising to learn that
the novel was originally called The Cranford Papers. Each section of the novel was
originally conceptualized as a separate “paper” (as Mary remarks at one point,
“soon after the events of which I gave an account in my last paper”) (128). Gaskell’s
“papers” title obviously continues her rivalry with Dickens and her focus on The
Pickwick Papers; this will be a women’s set of papers, named by a community
rather than a man, but a similarly loose and comic collection of sketches. Cranford
itself is a paper craft. Cranford is newspapers stitched together, it is paper twisted
into candlelighters, and it is a banknote made good.
At the most basic level, The Cranford Papers evokes itself, sheaves and bundles
of paper that might or might not be stitched together into narrative. From an
eighteenth-century perspective, The Cranford Papers is a kind of boast of pleni-
tude, promising a plethora of valuable sheets ready to be manipulated into deco-
rative patterns; the emphasis would lie on “papers.” From a nineteenth-century
mind-set, The Cranford Papers offers a stack of reading material, paper valued
mainly for what is printed on it as designated by its title; here the reader would
underline “Cranford.” In other words, the title commemorates the divergent per-
spectives of its character and narrator, and in itself pastes them together. The
Cranford Papers not only names paper as the central metaphor of the book but
also justifies that metaphor by showing what latitude of readings it permits.
I would, however, suggest that the final decision to drop the title The Cranford
Papers in favor of Cranford is significant. Matty’s role in the novel is to confer
value on notes (social notes, monetary notes). Above all, she confers value on
the series of “papers” that compose Cranford. “We all love Miss Matty,” concludes
Mary, “and I somehow think we are all of us better when she is near us” (218).
Indeed we are; Matty’s job is to transform the potentially waste paper of Cran-
ford into The Cranford Papers.
But it is Mary’s assumption of the narrative that makes it into the Cranford
papers. That the word Papers drops out of the novel’s title shows the triumph of
the mid-Victorian view of paper as disposable information carrier. Matty’s world
used notes, the often illegible, offensive, outdated, locally transmitted slips of
paper. But the modern world consists of letters and papers in the sense of public
text: science reports, anthropological data, the imperial international post. Our
narrator may not do her generation’s paper crafts, potichomanie, diaphanie, or
transfer printing, but she follows their basic model in transcribing the old letters
carefully, transferring the tenuous record to a new, more permanent medium.
Just as the old letters consigned to the flames are transcribed and perpetuated
in Mary Smith’s narration, so, too, the old ladies’ habits, peculiarities, dresses,
and utterances live on in the novel. Information can be transcribed onto any
pages; we are no longer wedded to the faded, crossed, yellowing papers of the
“Old Letters.” The novel becomes Cranford because “paper” can be taken for
granted at last.
Figure 3.1 Ivy Frame.
CHAPTER 3
Preservation
THE DAISY AND THE CHAIN
Like Elizabeth Gaskell, the popular mid-Victorian novelist Charlotte Mary Yonge
wrote domestic fiction in which handicraft holds a central place. For Gaskell, as
we have seen, paper craft highlights the fragility and vulnerability of text. But
for Yonge, another craft—preserved horticulture (figure 3.1)—evokes a very dif-
ferent answer to the same fear. If Gaskell’s novel interrogates the ephemerality
of craft, Yonge’s novel expresses craft’s preservationist drive. If Gaskell’s novel
reworks scenes of paper being destroyed, Yonge’s novel insists on a countervail-
ing image: growths freezing into petrified simulacra of themselves. In this chap-
ter, I argue that Yonge’s craft metaphor, like Gaskell’s, expresses a paradigm that
is so fundamental to its novel that it speaks not only to the internal narrative
but also to the external issues of authorial anxiety and political relationships. In
Gaskell’s case, those relationships concerned the dynamics of a male editor, a
female author, and periodical publication. In Yonge’s case, the issue is youthful
wildness, both in its relation to intellectual growth and in its expression as racial
alterity. To domesticate another is, in Yonge’s novel, to reduce and preserve that
subject forever. We might note that whereas Gaskell’s faith sustained a tolerant
and respectful depiction of multiple points of view, Yonge’s religious drive pro-
duces a crushing drive toward conformity. The Daisy Chain (1856) is the only
novel in this study that does not foreground the economic alterity of handicraft
and does not stage a confrontation between a sustaining craft object and a
worrisomely valueless piece of paper currency. In fact, Yonge was as anxious as
Gaskell, Dickens, and Oliphant about mid-Victorians’ movement away from
what was imperishably, solidly, reliably valuable. But for Charlotte Yonge, those
adjectives describe a spiritual state, not an economic system.
The movement toward an implacably permanent icon is, I think, appropriate
for the way Yonge constructs narratives. In virtually all of her novels, characters
start as delightfully rebellious youths who must be painfully, painstakingly
91
92 Novel Craft
trained to adhere to the law. Absorbed back into family, state, and religious
norms, the successful Yonge character usually ends the novel expressing grati-
tude for finally achieving a socially acceptable lifestyle, even at the cost of a bro-
ken physical and emotional state. At the end of Yonge’s late novel The Magnum
Bonum (1879), for instance, pale, weak, disabled characters dutifully claim that
they are glad to have lost their siblings and lovers in order to achieve a moral
victory. In The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), a barrage of medical, emo-
tional, and legal calamities pummel the heroine into speechless, exhausted self-
hatred. Q. D. Leavis, in her infamously sweeping denunciation of Yonge published
in 1944, nonetheless was quite accurate when she wrote:
Consider the typical pattern of her novels. There is a permanent invalid

who is a hero or heroine; tubercular invalids are peculiarly saintly and
frequently an idiot is idealized; the most blessed marriages are those in
which one party is diseased or physically incapable; the most blessed
betrothals are those where the death of one party prevents marriage at
all; the most blessed life for a man is to give up the natural field for his
abilities in order to become a South Seas missionary, and for a woman
to renounce a possible husband in order to devote herself to her rela-
tives, even if they are only imbecile grandparents, or on the mere wish
of a parent—self-sacrifice is an end in itself.1
Victorian readers noticed the same pattern. As a reviewer noted in 1865, “having
brought before us one or more fine creatures, she beats them; she binds them; she
lets her other inferior creatures make butts of them; she sticks pins into them;
she impales them; she makes them declare it is ‘so comfortable’ to be impaled.”2
This dynamic is especially easy to see in The Magnum Bonum, which showcases
two elements that remain covert or merely metaphorical in other fiction and
therefore provides a useful case study. First, The Magnum Bonum has a central
sacred trust that does the work of disciplining the youthful characters. The
“Magnum Bonum,” the notebook containing the dead father’s great medical dis-
covery, can be bequeathed only to the child most worthy of it. Thus the children
shape their lives to deserve this inheritance. Because it represents the dead, its
rules are holy, the father’s wishes (enforced by the mother) absolute and without
appeal. Second, The Magnum Bonum reveals the children’s socialization toward
the dead father’s ideal—and their backsliding from it—by means of a powerful,
repeated image. When the children pursue money instead of moral and medical
truths, they get caught in the Midas myth. They slowly petrify into gold, literally
sickened and immobilized by wealth, their skin yellowed and their minds dis-
eased. These two techniques produce Yonge’s powerful narrative drive: first, ide-
alizing the agent of social conformism into a suffering or departed saint (the
dead father) and, second, deploying a single powerful image (the Midas disease)
to track how the characters progress toward that ideal.
Preservation: The Daisy and the Chain 93
In this chapter, I want to focus on one of Yonge’s most popular novels, The
Daisy Chain, which uses these two disciplinary techniques as it describes the
unruly maturation of the eleven May children and their widower father over a
decade.3 Like The Magnum Bonum, The Daisy Chain centers on a sacred trust asso-
ciated with an idealized dead parent that the children must work to deserve. But
in The Daisy Chain, this trust is a church, not a medical discovery. The decision to
build a church is a holy vow formulated at the moment of the mother’s death, a
status confirmed when both the saintly elder sister and her admirable fiancé
endow and sanctify it with their dying words. To build the church, Ethel May
subjects herself to decades of severe personal and financial self-discipline, pain-
fully retraining her brilliant, unruly youthful self in order to become a competent
household manager. As her brother remarks smugly, the drive to build Cocks-
moor church “will make a woman of her after all.”4 The May family also pursues
a parallel church-building project, headed by the brother who is almost Ethel’s
twin. Norman May is the man who, in Leavis’s words, “give[s] up the natural field
for his abilities in order to become a South Seas missionary.” Norman leads the
drive to build a church in Melanesia, although, as I will argue, part of the point is
that the Melanesian mission conspicuously fails to “make” Norman.
What ties these two sacred trusts together and provides the structure of the
family’s philanthropic work is The Daisy Chain’s dominant metaphor. If The Mag-
num Bonum imagined its characters tainted by gold, The Daisy Chain imagines its
characters as links in a “daisy chain,” wildflowers organized into ornament. In
Magnum Bonum, when the golden poison gets eradicated, the pale, trembling
residue is the purified spirit, the true moral core of the character revealed at last.
In The Daisy Chain, characters are represented as weeds that must be pruned,
dried, arranged, glued. The living sap must be frozen; the character must be
drastically altered, perhaps even killed, to be preserved forever in a superior
form. We might note here Susan Stewart’s insight that “Victorian souvenirs of
nature . . . eternalize an environment by closing it off from the possibility of
lived experience. They deny the moment of death by imposing the stasis of an
eternal death.”5 Achieving a kind of eternal death-in-life was a widespread cul-
tural ideal, visible in handicraft, not just a product of Yonge’s religious belief.
And this carefully preserved subject is not just Ethel or Norman—it includes the
people for whom the church is being built, the impoverished natives. The colo-
nial subject is perceived as a wildly growing weed that the British must clip.
Thus craft—the craft of horticultural preservation, the art of rearranging and
preserving nature—is the chain binding this novel together. The Daisy Chain
gives us a chance to trace the totalizing effects of a craft paradigm when it forms
the very structure of a novel: its uses as a model of racial identity, its function in
describing readers, its power in disciplining characters, and its method of inter-
pellating us, its readers.
This totalizing model sets up a special understanding of character. In realist
novels like Cranford, utterances about craft flesh out characters’ personalities,
94 Novel Craft
preferences, and histories, just like discussions of other items like food or
clothes. Matty and Mary talk about paper crafts, but those utterances give them
depth; they are not presented as flat paper crafts themselves. In The Daisy Chain,
however, the characters are supposed to be like dried flowers. This craft is sup-
posed to represent the fundamental truth of human character.
In this sense, craft seems to conflict with the text’s psychological realism. After
all, as Kim Wheatley observes, Yonge constructs characters as flat, allegorical fig-
ures facing a morally preordained fate—yet she also treats those characters as
realist beings with psychological choices and free will. The didactic plot drive forces
us to endorse the characters’ ends while our realist assumptions make us regret
them.6 Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström puts this combination in perspective:
Charlotte Yonge’s position appears as a synthesis of two contemporary

theories of the novel. To start with, she thinks that the study of the
particular in the novel should illustrate a general metaphysical truth,
and that the author, as the “Providence of the book,” is justified in ma-
nipulating his/her material for didactic purposes. At the same time . . .
she is open to the idea that to be convincing, novels must be plausible
and show inner coherence.7
In other words, this is not an idiosyncratic style of Yonge’s, but a mature writing
practice that combined two dominant ideas of the period. Craft supports the
“Providence” view. Yonge’s craft paradigm encourages us to see the characters as
raw, inert materials awaiting the guiding intelligence of the craftsperson, an idea
that certainly militates against our wish to regard them (and Yonge’s painstaking
attempt to present them) as if they were real.
“Typological realism” is the theory that Sandbach-Dahlström summed up as
“the study of the particular [to] illustrate a general metaphysical truth.” Gavin
Budge provides a useful reminder that this was a familiar philosophy to the nine-
teenth-century reader. He points out that for nineteenth-century followers of
the religious and philosophical traditions informing Yonge’s work, the realist par-
ticularities would have reinforced the larger moral meaning, not conflicted with
it. Typological realism asserted that nature typified divine lessons. For instance,
in Yonge’s Heartsease (1854), a devout woman opines that a frostbitten currant
bush symbolizes the maturation of the soul.8 In The Daisy Chain, when a boy
acquires a fine engraving of Alexander, “nothing was to be thought of but a frame
for this—olive, bay, laurel—everything appropriate to the conquerer” (144). He
selects these leaves not because of their aesthetic harmony, but because they
symbolize a deeper truth, Alexander’s identity as “the conquerer.” Such a reading
was properly Christian, for it showcased the deeper meaning of the specific ele-
ment. As both Sandbach-Dahlström and Budge show, typology was a widespread
mode of reading natural phenomena in the mid-nineteenth century, and what’s
more, John Keble, with whom Yonge was so intimately associated, developed one
of the most influential strands of typological realism of the period.9
I would add that typological realism overlaps with the craft paradigm in ways
that must have powerfully reinforced its message for Yonge’s target audience. The
idea that stuff should be manipulated into a better version of itself is not just a
religious notion of character but also a handicraft idea of material. A craftswoman
would view the Heartsease frostbitten currants in terms of their abstract qualities
(shape, color, size) that may or may not be suitable for gluing into a pattern. In
neither case does the observer care to view the berry as in itself it really is. Rather,
she prefers to ignore its particularities in order to generalize or conventionalize it.
Handicraft, therefore, provided Victorians with a specific way of reading
character development, especially when reinforced with a religious typological
perspective. Not only did it train readers to view characters as manipulable
materials but also it insisted that doing so was being true to the essential and
best aspect of those materials, revealing ideal forms that had been obscured and
tangled in unfortunate growths. Just as the pious worked to purify their souls,
so, too, the writer (and reader) of a novel worked to untrammel the characters
from their baser natures, pruning away whatever sprouted over the best self.
Such an achievement was more profound than professional mastery, romantic
happiness, or worldly success. These were temptations or “snares” (to use one of
Yonge’s favorite terms). The reader was supposed to be able to set aside desires
for such things because what was really crucial was the streamlining of the soul.
Mak ing L e ather L e aves

The May family’s favorite craft activity exemplifies this typological under-
standing. Norman, Margaret, and Meta enjoy pasting leather leaves onto frames.
Yet leather-leaf frames are not exactly a celebration of botany. In the nineteenth
century, leather leaves were rock-hard, painted, shiny objects. The purpose was
not to replicate leaves, but to approximate wood. Thus leather-leaf making is not
one of the naturalistic crafts of the nineteenth century, like taxidermy. Rather,
it belongs with the imitative arts, that category of craft in which inexpensive
stuff was refashioned into simulacra of valuable materials.
The leather-leaf craftsperson did copy or trace real leaves, but the main work
of this craft was to move the leather leaf away from that original model. The
craftsperson might, in fact, simply choose to use a cardboard pattern instead of
a leaf, tracing around the cardboard stencil onto the leather.10 L. B. Urbino and
Henry Day’s craft manual, Art Recreations (1868), directs the reader through the
next steps:
When you have a sufficient number cut from the leather, wet them in
cold water, and squeeze them dry, and pull them into shape, and form
96 Novel Craft
the leaves and flowers to suit your taste; while wet, put them into the
oven to dry. Make a solution of vinegar and Venetian red, and dip them
into it. When perfectly dry, dip them in thin black varnish; if the varnish
be too thick, dilute it with spirits of turpentine. When dry, they will have
the color of rosewood. Take gum shellac, and the night before you wish
to use it, pour on sufficient alcohol to dissolve it. Dip the flowers and
leaves into this solution, taking care not to have it too thick. If not stiff
enough, dip them a second time. Put them on a board to dry in the sun.11
After desiccating that leaf through squeeze-drying, oven-drying, vinegar-drying,

varnishing, shellacking, reshellacking, and sun-drying, the authors suggest
additional layers of finish: “Nail on the leaves and flowers with small tacks, and
paint with a solution of shellac dissolved in alcohol; finally, varnish with the best
copal varnish.”12 No wonder the leather “closely resembles rich carving in wood”
in its stiffness and hardness.13 Another craft book actually suggested varnishing
the leaves with asphaltum, which would have hardened it to a consistency like a
modern road surface.14 Immutability guaranteed its virtue. The tender texture
and varied colors of the leaf were erased in favor of an object that shared the
general shape of a leaf but otherwise provided all the impermeability and inflex-
ibility and hardness that real leaves so conspicuously lacked. By hammering
them onto a wooden picture frame, the craftsperson consolidated their affilia-
tion with internal decoration instead of nature.
The leather-leaf frame could join the other processed elements of nature in the
parlor: the dried flowers arranged in a fan shape and glued to black velvet, the
ferns under the glass Wardian case, the varnished nutshells pasted onto boxes. In
a period profoundly fascinated by realism and amateur science, it is not surprising
that the preservation of natural objects seemed so desirable. From the beginning
of the domestic handicraft movement in the late eighteenth century, craftspeople
worked to improve on nature, selecting specimens of shells, seaweed, or dried
flowers; arranging them nicely; and gluing down the result for perpetuity. By the
mid-nineteenth century, popular preservationist handicrafts also included taxi-
dermy and the craft of “skeletonizing,” in which the flesh of a small mammal or a
leaf is removed and the remaining skeletal structure is preserved and displayed
under glass (figure 3.2).15 Particularities of form and color disappear, replaced by
a permanent, elemental structure. In a culture that loved taxonomies and classifi-
cations, there must have been a profound sense of pleasure in reducing botanical
or zoological specimens to purified representatives of their respective categories.
Indeed, Lorraine Daston points out that botanical illustrators usually drew com-
posite plants, “drawn from several exemplars of the same species, so as to capture
the characteristic aspects of the plant by filtering out the idiosyncratic details.”16
When seeking the truth of the type, individuality simply got in the way.
Indeed, The Daisy Chain’s titular image works this way: although we normally
think of a daisy chain as a frail ornament made of knotted wildflower stems, this
novel transforms it into a “chain” indeed, a thing whose permanence, heaviness,

and unbreakability are axiomatic. All the daisies in The Daisy Chain are hardened
representations, not growing flowers. In this novel, the daisy image is enameled
on a metal locket, incised on a stone seal, cut out of paper, and dried and pressed
and glued into a cross. But the novel also works to make the daisy into a symbol.
Its title refers to a family linked by mother, elder sister, sister-in-law, and young-
est sister, all named Margaret (daisy). The Daisy Chain is supposed to be a set of
sacred links connecting the family with heaven, for the two eldest Margarets die.
In a prophetic dream, the father thinks his dead wife is drawing him up to heaven
with a daisy chain. The novel’s epigraph explains: “To the highest room / Earth’s
lowliest flowers our Lord receives; / Close to His heart a place He gives / Where
they shall ever bloom.” Heaven, here, is a field of daisies. Members of the May
family are consistently associated with floral preservation imagery. Their
surname, May, means the mayflower or hawthorn blossom; two of the Mays,
an aunt and a daughter, are named Flora; and another daughter, Blanche, is
nicknamed “the white may-flower” (44). The missionary Norman May is “the
flower . . . of us all” (557). When his brother Harry is thought dead, his father
Figure 3.2 Skeletonized Leaves.

98 Novel Craft
exclaims, “He was the flower of them all!” (445). Meanwhile, neighbor Meta
becomes “a daisy of [Dr. May’s] own” (554), Margaret sees herself as “an old
faded daisy” (307), and Gertrude is “the real Daisy” because of her golden hair,
red-and-white complexion, and serene temper, which “had so much likeness to
the flower” (307). The daisy is turned into both a hard artifact and a spiritual
ideal—everything, in fact, except a living plant. As the epigraph to the chapter
describing the aftereffects of the mother’s death puts it, “They may not mar the
deep repose / Of that immortal flower” (28).
If the daisy is the central botanical symbol of its eponymous novel, the leaf
is not far behind. Yonge assigns specific leaves to particular individuals to rep-
resent an essential truth about their characters. Norman May learns about
leather leaves from his lovely neighbor, Margaret Rivers (nicknamed Meta),
whom he will eventually marry. “Norman looked on eagerly, asking questions
and watching while Miss Rivers cut out her ivy leaf and marked its veins, and
showed how she copied it from nature” (131). The scene, shown from Norman’s
perspective, stresses that the leaves are “copied . . . from nature”—in other
words, Meta is not showing off personal artistic skill but demonstrating her
fidelity to a standard whose truth and appropriateness she and Norman equally
assume to be inarguable, according to the craft paradigm’s dogma of absolute
fidelity to real phenomena.
As a loving daughter and, later, wife, it is appropriate that Meta chooses to
copy ivy leaves, for the symbolic ivy emblematizes her tendency to cling to the
men she adores. Her clinging is part of her perfect enactment of the decorative
feminine ideal. When Norman first meets Meta, Yonge emphasizes how she has
brought nature under control. Her home is “full of beautiful vases, stuffed birds,
busts &c” (129). Meta cuts sprays of hothouse flowers from her conservatory,
and she herself is frequently described as a miniature ornament, “a bit of the
choicest porcelain,” a “China shepherdess” (548, 535).
Meta’s ornamental appearance is fundamental to her character. Ethel remarks,
“‘You look as if you were meant to be put under a glass case!’ . . . surveying the
little elegant figure, whose great characteristic was a look of exquisite finish, not
only in the features and colouring, the turn of the head, and the shape of the
small rosy-tipped fingers, but in everything she wore, from the braids of black
silk hair, to the little shoe on her foot . . .” (553). It is fitting that this highly var-
nished and shellacked craft attracts someone who is herself so perfectly “fin-
ished.” Like the leaf, the living body has been brought into line with artificially
decorative functions; even her hair is “silk” and something “she wore,” as if it
were millinery. The leather leaves are part of the closed realm of this lady’s arti-
ficial decorativeness. And the Mays question how this kind of artifice will work
when Meta moves to the Pacific islands. Ethel remarks that “you’ll never get rid
of it [her ‘exquisite finish’] . . . unless you get yourself tattoed!” (553). Tattooing
is the antipodean equivalent of Meta’s artifice. The two women half-jocularly,
half-fearfully imagine that the luxury materials of her body (silk, porcelain)
might get imprinted, overwritten, with Pacific patterns.
If a girl’s leather leaves are varnished miniature ornaments expressing obedi-
ence and luxury, in Norman’s hands (literally), the leather-leaf craft takes on a
different significance. Yonge stresses the wildness of Norman’s choices, as he
hunts for “a curious fern in the hedge-rows” and seeks “the rare yellow bog-bean”
(147, 200). Tramping through fields and bogs, Norman struggles through a nature
that has nothing to do with Meta’s decorative miniaturism, a nature that is decid-
edly outdoors instead of the neat little hothouse of home. It is worth repeating
Thad Logan’s insight that “when the ‘natural’ appeared in the parlour, it always did
so as cleaner, more wrought, more contained, or more organized than it would
have been in its original condition. The middle-class parlour functioned, in fact, as
a symbolic and practical switchpoint, transforming the natural into the cultural.”17
Transforming ditch weeds into leather garlands is a typical example of the parlor
ornament’s improvement of the natural. Norman is getting experience in the skill
of seeking wild subjects to transform into acceptable domestic specimens.
Ethel clearly prefers Norman’s model of domesticating the wild to Meta’s
conventionally feminized decoration. In The Daisy Chain, the ornamental work
performed by the May sisters—netting, pincushions, and decorative boxes—is
consistently dismissed as “trumpery” and “trifle[s]” (314). Ethel is annoyed at her
sisters’ “rickety” bazaar artifacts and “mere feeble gimcracks” that have to be rein-
forced by a visiting boy (300, 315). When Ethel returns home, “there she found a
great display of ivy leaves, which Norman, who had been turning half the shops in
the town upside down in search of materials, was instructing [Margaret] to imitate
in leather work—a regular mania with him, and apparently the same with Marga-
ret” (138). Ethel is frustrated that her space has been invaded by a pursuit she codes
as excessive, turning everything “upside down,” bringing the shop into the home,
the private room into the “display,” the male into the craftsperson, with even the
“mania” itself becoming oxymoronically “regular.” Leather work is an agent of
domestic disorder that threatens Ethel’s reluctant and laborious housekeeping. But
her objection to leather-leaf frames is more profound. “To Ethel, who had no tol-
eration for fancy-work, who expected everything to be either useful or intellectual,
this seemed very frivolous”; while she can tolerate her invalid sister’s fancywork,
she thinks it “very odd” that Norman should find such a pursuit amusing (144).
Ethel’s preference for the “useful or intellectual” reveals the real reason she
despises female craft. As it turns out, the inferiority of the women’s crafts does
not lie in the types of objects they make. The sisters’ despised “pasteboard
boxes, beplastered with rice and sealing-wax” are not particularly different from
their brother’s highly praised frames with leather leaves gummed onto them
(314). Both glue inexpensive materials onto small souvenirs to create speci-
mens of the imitative arts. Both pursue crafts instead of their schoolwork.
Crafts’ value derives not from themselves but from the kind of studies they
100 Novel Craft
replace. Interestingly, it is apparently beneficial to interrupt boys’ schooling, but

suspending girls’ lessons is unforgiveable.
For Ethel, who is desperate to keep up her academic study, craft is a real threat.
Ethel’s whole family works to deter her from learning Greek and mathematics,
aiming to redirect her energies into needlework and dressing her hair (158–164).
They constantly tell her to pick up the needle instead of the pen. And indeed, the
bazaar preparations specifically displace studies. Margaret is too excited about
the crafts to pursue “rational employments,” and the sisters still in the school-
room are so involved in fancywork that they can no longer focus on lessons at all,
which are finally given up completely (314). Craft redirects the girls into roman-
tic courtships that seem more vocationally useful than mere lessons. Blanche, for
instance, is so obsessed with her watch chains that she guards them throughout
the bazaar, giving rise to an uncomfortably sexualized rivalry about who will win
the “chain” (318–319, 328). The May girls’ lessons are mediocre to begin with,
given first by an unimaginative and narrow-minded pedant, then by a neurotic
and oversensitive teenager, but such as they are, they are clearly dispensable at
any time in favor of domestic handicraft and its role in the marriage market.
Crafts also displace study for the boys in the family, but in this case, Ethel—
and Yonge herself—seems to approve of the substitution. School, in The Daisy
Chain, is a place of temptation. As June Sturrock points out, Yonge presents male
educational institutions (Stoneborough school, Oxford) as places of moral, spir-
itual, and physical danger.18 At Stoneborough school, a secular headmaster, a cul-
ture that fosters bullying and cheating, and a vicious rival combine to make the
May boys miserable. Tom May, in particular, is terrorized, blackmailed, and beaten
by his fellow schoolboys. Meanwhile, freethinking debates at Oxford nearly send
Norman into a nervous breakdown. Norman describes his feelings upon finding
that the secular world views religious discourse as “but an outer case, a shell of
mere words, blown up for the occasion, strung together as mere language; then,
self-convicted, we shrink within the husk” (381). Similarly, when Flora has a
breakdown at the end of the novel, it is because she recognizes “the hollowness of
all that had been apparently good in her” (578). The language of hollow husk and
shell, while carrying on the botanical metaphor, reverses its meaning; instead of
the subject’s essential self getting preserved, that vulnerable self shrinks inside an
alien casing. Fortunately, however, this is a sensation that good women cannot
understand—that, as Norman says, “I could not wish you to understand”—and
Meta charms away Norman’s fears with nice descriptions of yellow lilies and
pretty hills (381). Better to stay home making floral handicrafts with one’s sisters,
than to suffer fellow students’ assaults on one’s bodily and religious integrity.
Moreover, boys’ crafts offer superior education. Aspiring sailor Harry leads the
boys in constructing a successful model ship, showcasing his nautical information
(315). Norman’s craftwork teaches him science he cannot get at Stoneborough
school. Margaret explains, “‘Men give dignity to what women make trifling. He
will know everything about the leaves, hunts up my botany books, and has taught
me a hundred times more of the construction and wonders of them than I ever
learnt.’ ‘Aye,’ said the doctor, ‘he has been talking a good deal to me about vegeta-
ble chemistry. He would make a good scientific botanist . . .’” (147). In other
words, we are directed to admire the leather leaves not because they are beautiful
but because they are useful in the formation of a professionally well-directed sub-
ject. The product is not so much the leather leaf as the worker. The gendered con-
trast is pretty clear. In Yonge’s view, handicraft by girls is a lamentable distraction
from lessons that took hard fighting to get in the first place, but handicraft by
boys is a marker of professional interest, a sign of maturation beyond the bounds
of school concerns, and a way of redirecting males away from the dangerous
homosocial environment of school, into the safe moral harbor of the home.
Indeed, craft quite literally leads Norman away from school. Pursuing speci-
mens, he wanders out of sight of the boys he is supposed to control, and a rebel-
lion takes place for which he is blamed. Consequently, he loses his scholastic
ranking and the scholarship that came with it. This demotion makes him decide
that he had placed too much value on his achievements. He therefore selects the
career of missionary work precisely because he has no talent or vocation for it,
in the classic model of the self-punishing Yonge character. Missionary work also
offers escape from his Oxford-induced crisis of doubt. “I long to leave this world
of argument and discussion,” Norman explains. “I must be away from it all, and
go to the simplest, hardest work, beginning from the rudiments, and forgetting
subtle arguments” (461).
Pr uning Melanesi ans

The leather-leaf hobby apparently leads Norman away from his regularly marked-
out academic career path. It takes him into the bog, the unknown land where he
has to gather wild specimens of quite a different sort, involving risks, mess, and
the necessity for retraining. It involves plucking and refashioning people. Nor-
man goes to Melanesia to convert “black figures, with woolly mop-heads” (474).
This mop-head image, frequently reiterated, demonstrates that the natives need
the kind of pruning Norman’s hobby has taught him (480, 541). The Daisy Chain
has trained both its characters and its readers to view natural growths as raw
materials for ornamental improvement. When Yonge turns to missionary work,
she uses hair the same way she used horticultural matters: to represent the wild
nature that must (or May) get disciplined.19
The control of hair was a major concern for Pacific missionaries in the nine-
teenth century. As Anna Johnston reveals, missionaries strongly emphasized
the importance of bonnet wearing for Polynesian women. A bonnet signified
that the woman had accepted the Western values of self-control and female
102 Novel Craft
modesty, abjuring the islands’ supposedly easy sensuality. Moreover, because

the bonnet kept the sun off the face, it indicated that the wearer wished to
whiten or lighten her skin. But if the missionaries read the bonnet as signifying
native acceptance of Christian and civilized values, the Pacific islanders who
adopted this headgear (and Western dress in general) used it for quite different
reasons, using its cultural capital to negotiate their own internal political divi-
sions.20 The bonnet, symbolizing a whole complex of Western ideas about the
female body, sexuality, and self-presentation, was a powerful emblem of conver-
sion, the counterpart of the tattoo. Where the tattoo added dark color for bodily
self-display, the bonnet whitened and concealed that body.
Interestingly, The Daisy Chain shows this very anxiety about bonnets—but in
the domestic, not the colonial context.21 The May family members are unusually
concerned to guarantee the modesty of their headgear. Ethel’s specialty is making
sunbonnets (310). When Flora marries, the bridesmaids wear large bonnets, for
Dr. May will not endure “the sight of a daughter without shade to her face” (357).
The presence of proper bonnets is a guarantor of her ethical propriety. When Ethel
and her distant cousin Norman Ogilvie feel a mutual attraction, Ogilvie exclaims
that “it was a comfort to [walk about] with ladies who wore their bonnets upon
their heads,” instead of fashionable small hats. His companion confesses that she
does not have the strength of mind “to go about with her whole visage exposed to
the universal gaze; and, woman-like, [Flora and Ethel] had a thorough gossip over
the evils of the ‘back-sliding’ head-gear” (377). The only two women who uphold
the value of female modesty in a shameless world, the May sisters express precisely
the missionary values Johnston describes. Moreover, it is significant that the two
scenes where Yonge emphasizes Ethel’s large bonnets are the situations where she
is uncomfortably aware that her body is on sexualized display, first as a bridesmaid
and then as a single woman attracted to an eligible man. That Ogilvie is capable of
reading the bonnet correctly, in spite of the competing influence of fashion, con-
firms that he is worthy of uniting with a May daughter. His eligibility is also guar-
anteed by his participation in the main metaphorical structure of the novel, for he
plucks a fern leaf to show his family badge; if daisies are the May emblem, ferns are
the Ogilvie sign, and, similarly, the living plant only functions as an imperfect
example of an everlasting and conventionalized representation (379).
When Norman chooses the Antipodes for his missionary labors, he picks a
site that was extremely significant for Yonge. The Yonge family deeply admired
Bishop of New Zealand George Augustus Selwyn, whose pioneering efforts to
train local converts as teachers of Christianity constituted the earliest and most
enduring missionary work in the Loyalty Islands. Yonge donated much of the
proceeds of her enormously successful novel The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) to build-
ing a mission ship for Selwyn. Called The Southern Cross, the ship was outfitted
just in time for Selwyn’s newest recruit, Yonge’s relation John Coleridge Patte-
son, to use it as he and Selwyn traveled throughout the Loyalty Islands starting
in the summer of 1855. Patteson maintained a long, intimate correspondence
with Yonge, and when Patteson died in 1871, his sisters asked Yonge to write his
biography, Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian
Islands, published in 1875.
Yonge biographers Mare and Percival write that “‘Coley’ Patteson seems to
have served to some extent as a model for Norman, and Charlotte [Yonge] tells us
that his earlier voyages in his mission ship had been so suggestive of incidents
fabricated in The Daisy Chain that the proceeds were felt to be the due of the mis-
sion.”22 Like Patteson, Norman is a brilliant, sensitive boy whose character is
shaped by the death of his saintly mother when he is a teenager. Each boy is very
close to his younger brother and his elder sister, who stands in as a mother figure
for him. Each attends a local school with long-standing ties to the family and then
goes on to Oxford. Each suffers medical problems with his eyes. Norman, like Pat-
teson, ultimately rejects success at home to become a missionary in Melanesia,
inspired by tales from a traveler who has just returned from the South Seas.
Unlike Patteson, however, Norman fails as a missionary. Whereas Patteson
spoke twenty-two native languages, Norman never gets near enough to the Loy-
alty Islands to deal with cultural difference; his work in New Zealand appears to
involve a parish of British working-class emigrants. As a sister remarks, “Nor-
man need not have gone so far, and sacrificed so much, to obtain an under-bred
English congregation.”23 He finds himself annoyed by “a widespread district
of very colonial colonists, and the charge of a college for their uncultivated
sons” (The Trial, 5). “Cultivation,” with its echoes of both agriculture and culture,
neatly sums up Norman’s job. This was a widespread association. As Sujit
Sivasundaram remarks, “Missionaries viewed unconverted Pacific Islanders to
be like live natural historical specimens. Selection, naming and classification saw
the starting point of this linguistic practice; cultivation and improvement fol-
lowed, and display marked the desired end.”24
Although headed for “cultivation” in the Loyalty Islands, Norman gets shunted
off into the professional realm of church and education administration, replicat-
ing precisely the frustrating experiences of school teaching, controlling unruly
boys, and dealing with political infighting in a small community of male intellec-
tuals that had dogged his entire life and that he thought he had escaped by leav-
ing Oxford. Eventually, he becomes archdeacon (The Trial, 242). Norman simply
follows out his original ambitious path, though in the church instead of the acad-
emy. And having tried to leave school, he ends up running one instead. He may be
in the Antipodes, but he ends up with “an under-bred English congregation.”
Tr i m m i n g C o c k s m o o r
If the Pacific gets rewritten as another version of England, however, England
gets recast in alienating, frighteningly racialized ways. As Norman begins to
work in New Zealand, his sister Ethel starts to develop a church in the nearby
104 Novel Craft
hamlet of Cocksmoor. Interestingly, however, although Ethel actually has the

“under-bred English congregation,” her parishioners are marked as savage. Just
as the anxiety about bonnets occurs in the British Isles, not the Loyalty Islands,
so, too, does Yonge transfer the fears of racial alterity to home. The settlement of
Cocksmoor is “a bad wild place” full of “wild people” (22, 2). Its dirty children and
dishonest women, with long matted hair and filthy rags, demand favors from
visitors. A neighbor describes the children as “little savages” (111). These “little
savages” are finally expelled from church because of their shaggy hair (118).
Although the village is not particularly described as Irish, its Victorian
readers would have identified it as Irish because its inhabitants are dulled with
starvation, living in mud or turf huts suffused with peat smoke (21), and because
it is represented by the child Una M’Carthy, who is repeatedly, even obsessively,
described as Irish. “That merry Irish-looking child” has “a real charming Irish
name” (113), speaks “in her Irish accent” (184), and lives in “a wild Irish cabin”
(267), so it is not surprising that soon Una’s “Irish wit and love of learning had
outstripped all the rest” (184). Another observer notes Una’s “unmistakably
Irish” body and her speech, characterized by “Irish pronunciation” and “Irish
expression” (333, 334). Una evidently represents Irish poverty. Like the other
Cocksmoorians, her hair is out of control, but in her case it is charming; she
sports “sandy elf-locks streaming over a pair of eyes, so dancing and gracieuses,
that it was impossible to scold her” (184). The fact that Cocksmoor can be saved,
and is worth saving, is represented by Una’s eagerness to be evangelized, her
delight at the chance to attend church, and her heroically Christian death in
which she recites hymns and gives the clergyman comforting and slightly conde-
scending messages about her Redeemer (333–334). Una becomes Ethel’s token
civilizable figure, containing and replacing a much more unruly population.
Because her Irishness is so emphasized, Una’s good qualities come to resignify
Irishness. In that sense, Una seems to partake of an emergent notion of the
“Celt” as imaginative, eloquent, charismatic, and spiritually sensitive.25
However, it is also possible that Una’s intelligence and humor are meant to
be read as unrelated to her Irishness—or emerging in spite of her Irishness.
The novel still includes the dominant idea of what Catherine Hall calls “the
widely accepted stereotype of ‘Paddy’ [as] brutalised, intemperate, improvi-
dent, unclean, mendacious and menacingly savage.”26 Yonge vests it particularly
vividly in a minor character, Una’s mother, “a wild, rude specimen of an Irish-
woman” who never attends church (333), keeps Una dirty and ragged, and moves
the family without notice to “some heathenish place again,” much to Ethel’s
indignant despair (184, 230). Thus Yonge mobilizes two mutually exclusive nar-
ratives, and by representing them as parent and child, Yonge commemorates the
dominance of the older model and the novelty of the other.
The other Cocksmoor children, however, resemble Una’s mother more than
they resemble Una. Without any idea of appropriate public behavior, the children
push their way into school, “rough heads, torn garments, staring vacant eyes, and
mouths gaping in shy rudeness” (145). Unable to answer the simplest questions,
the children are not only illiterate but also apparently incapable of hearing or
retaining textual information. Like the prototypical barbarian, they gabble
nonsense (they “said something that nobody could make out, but which
Mr. Wilmot thought had once been an ‘Ave Maria’”) (145). After months of
labor-intensive instruction, the best anyone can say is that a few children have
“glimmerings” and Una has actually learned some information (183–184).
Yonge also rethinks Irishness by altering religious affiliations. In spite of that
“Ave Maria,” oddly, Cocksmoor does not seem to be Catholic. The May family’s
great quest is to establish a church in Cocksmoor, which lacks accessible facilities
for worship. There is never the slightest suspicion that the residents of Cocks-
moor might be following a different religious trajectory or might have their own
forms of worship perhaps set up in some of those turf huts. The only religion in
The Daisy Chain is Protestant, and because Anglican services are inaccessible, the
children have no religion; they know nothing or, at best, only badly garbled ver-
sions of common prayers. Una M’Carthy’s piety is not presented as a conversion
but as an uneducated girl finding salvation.
Una’s “wild, rude specimen” mother seems odd, for as we have seen, Yonge
usually tends to construct idealized and powerful parental figures to whom
errant children must learn to subject themselves. However, these two maternal
ideas are two links of the same chain. It is precisely because of the deification of
parents that this novel needs an equivalently demonized counterpart. Ethel,
unable to achieve a healthy view of her sacred, dead mother, compensates by
projecting her repressed resentment onto other mothers. She feels frantic irrita-
tion at the mothers of Stoneborough, whom she depicts as squabbling, inept,
and interfering when they try to assert themselves by running the Ladies Com-
mittee and the bazaar (329). But for Ethel, Cocksmoor provides an even darker
reflection of Stoneborough. Its mothers also meddle in educational activities,
but she identifies them as instigators of a “mass of falsehood, spite, violence,
and dishonesty [that was] perfectly appalling” (263).
Since Mrs. May dies halfway through Chapter 3, the reader has little chance
to get to know her, but the few scenes featuring this character reveal why Ethel
might harbor resentment. The enforcer of social norms, Mrs. May reduces her
talkative brood to silence simply by entering the room (5, 12). Her stringent
rules governing mixed-sex company make even the conventional Margaret
exclaims indignantly about being “plagued with troublesome propriety” (5). But
worst of all for Ethel, Mrs. May is actively hostile to her children’s intellectual
ambitions. She snubs Ethel’s ideas, commenting dryly, “I think that might be
better expressed” when her daughter tries to work out a moral and, when she
finally expresses it, offering a very qualified satisfaction: “I had rather you [found
practical lessons in the Gospel] than that you read it in Greek. . . . Now go and
106 Novel Craft
mend that deplorable frock” (6). Similarly, Mrs. May worries that Norman’s “tal-
ent and success” will be “snares” (16). Her final half-finished letter repeats these
fears, in a written form that makes them all the more immutable.
The mother, in other words, demands self-suppressing behavior from her
children in ways that surely would have invited rebellion had she lived longer.
Her early death allows Yonge to replace her with mother-substitutes whom Ethel
feels safer complaining about. First, there is the governess Miss Winter, whom,
as Margaret points out, mother “had such perfect trust in” and whom “dear
mamma thought an excellent governess for the little ones” (60–61). Second, we
have oldest sister Margaret, who shares her mother’s name, household status,
and conventional precepts. When Ethel enthuses about a moral lesson, Marga-
ret warns, “I think dear mamma would call that silly” (57). In the family’s con-
tinuing battle to rein in Ethel’s ambition, the mother’s influence is most potent.
Margaret discusses studying Greek with Ethel:
“I like Greek so much.”

“And for that would you give up being a useful, steady daughter and
sister at home? The sort of woman that dear mamma wished to make
you, and a comfort to papa.”
Ethel was silent, and large tears were gathering.
“You own that that is the first thing?”
“Yes,” said Ethel, faintly.
“And that it is what you fail in most?”
“Yes.”
Ethel begs to be let off her childish lessons instead, but Margaret refuses: “I
think it would vex Miss Winter; and I don’t think dear mamma would have liked
Greek and Cocksmoor to swallow up all the little common lady-like things”
(163). Ethel’s mute, sad resistance allows us to feel the pain of having her
learning balked so as to do “little common lady-like things,” but because it is the
sacred mother’s wishes, no appeal, no revision, no correction is possible. It is
another maternal stand-in, eldest brother Richie, who is “more like his mother
than any of them” (127), who finally punctures Ethel’s last intellectual dream.
Richie is a timid, kindly man with distinct talents for domestic management. He
teaches Ethel to pin up her skirts, carves toys for the children, nurses his bed-
ridden sister, and pours tea. He destroys her dream of becoming an author by his
dogged inability to understand a word of her poetry, an excruciatingly embar-
rassing exercise that forever deters Ethel from the writing that she is so pro-
foundly driven to create (343).
However, Miss Winter, Margaret, and Richie are members of the May family
circle, so Ethel cannot criticize them too profoundly. Ethel’s rebellion is thus
outsourced to Stoneborough society and then ultimately to Cocksmoor, where
Una’s intelligence (and untidiness) is clearly meant to echo Ethel’s. When Una’s
family cruelly rips her away from her studies, the reader can express the horror
we may feel, but are not allowed to articulate, regarding the Mays’ comparable
treatment of Ethel. Ethel never criticizes Margaret’s rule (164). But her irrita-
tion at her elder sister can finally surface when she deals with Margaret’s Cocks-
moor counterpart, the invalid Cherry Elwood, who teaches at Stoneborough
school. Cherry, like Margaret, is a meek, lame young woman who takes care of
younger children, experiences romantic trouble as a result of her injury, and
enjoys domestic skills (especially sewing). But it is safe to fume at “her outra-
geous dulness” (278). It is perhaps this need to keep Cocksmoor full of obviously
faulty substitutes that accounts for the fact that, in almost every description,
the inhabitants of the village are female. Although male inhabitants are occa-
sionally mentioned, the Mays mostly negotiate with the mothers and teach the
daughters. This community works to write Ethel’s personal problem on a civic
level: how do you facilitate girls’ learning, in spite of retrograde mothers? For
Ethel to resolve this—to set up a viable school/church at Stoneborough—is to
symbolically resolve a problem she was unable to surmount in her own life, and
this perhaps accounts for the urgency with which she pursues the goal of reform-
ing Cocksmoor. Her vow to save the wild region occurs at the moment of her
mother’s death. Cocksmoor will compensate for what her mother denies her; it
will offer a socially acceptable way to struggle for girls’ education.
Editing the Wild

While Cocksmoor enacts Ethel’s resentment against her family, the Loyalty
Islands express her brothers’ rejection of their friends. We have seen how
Norman fears school influence, reneges on his leadership role, and yet ends up
unhappily re-creating school life in the Antipodes. Norman’s younger brothers,
Harry, a popular schoolboy, and Tom, a victim of traumatic school bullying, like-
wise understand the Loyalty Islands as an extension of school culture.
Like Cocksmoor, the Loyalty Islands get constructed in an anomalous way,
its differences suppressed and rewritten to make it more contiguous with the
British community it represents. This results in a similarly unsettled colonial
narrative. Just as Cocksmoor’s Irish residents boast one charmingly intelligent
child in a horde of barbarically wild urchins, so, too, the Melanesians have one
deftly polite representative against a background of cannibal savages. Just as
with Cocksmoor, Yonge mobilizes an emergent, idealistic depiction without
quite letting go of the dominant negative discourse. And just as with Cocks-
moor, Yonge edited the region to make it more attractive to her English readers.
Starting in the eighteenth century, Nicholas Thomas explains, the British
contrasted the supposedly fair, sensual Polynesians to the dark and savage
108 Novel Craft
Melanesians, whom they often associated with cannibalism.27 Indeed, in her

Life of Patteson, Yonge writes that “the population [is] called Melanesian or Black
Islands, from their having much of the Negro in their composition and complex-
ion,” and comments that “the reputation of cannibalism hung about many of the
islands.”28 Patteson described diseased residents dying in smoke-filled, filthy huts,
with brackish water and no food. The notion of the black or dark Melanesians
survives in the margins of Yonge’s text, in minor characters’ muttered imputa-
tions of cannibalism and “black savages,” just as the “wild” Irish image is retained
for the older Cocksmoor women (470, 473, 474, 532). However, on the whole,
Yonge continues the pattern of transferring this kind of description away from
Melanesia and onto Cocksmoor. Cocksmoor school becomes the “black-hole,” “the
stifling den,” whose mud and turf huts are too smoky to enter (184, 21).
When Harry May is shipwrecked in Melanesia, however, what he finds is a world
of light, not darkness. He is delighted to catch sight of the shining, paradisiacal
Loyalty Isles. They are verdant, full of clear water and abundant fruit: “Such a place
as it was! You little know what it was to see anything green! and there was this isle
fringed down close to the sea with cocoa-nut trees! and the bay as clear!—you could
see every shell, and wonderful fishes swimming in it!” (473). In a botanical para-
dise, marked by its greenery, visitors admire the flora and fauna, not the people.
By the time Yonge wrote The Trial, the sequel to The Daisy Chain, ten years
later, she must have read more of Patteson’s and Selwyn’s dispatches, yet her
version of the Pacific islands is even more rapturous. A converted native
dwelt upon the delights of the yearly voyage among the lovely islands,
beautiful beyond imagination, fenced in by coral breakwaters, within
which the limpid water displayed exquisite sea-flowers, shells, and
fishes of magical gorgeousness of hue; of the brilliant white beach,
fringing the glorious vegetation, cocoa-nut, bread-fruit, banana, and
banyan, growing on the sloping sides of volcanic rocks; of mysterious
red-glowing volcano lights seen far out at sea at night; of glades opening
to show high-roofed huts covered with mats; of canoes decorated with
the shining white shells resembling a poached egg; of natives clustering
round, eager and excited, seldom otherwise than friendly. . . .29
Although an indigenous inhabitant is speaking, he assumes, and forces us to

share, the viewpoint of a foreign missionary approaching from the sea. The
speaker first sees the islands, then the coral breakwater, and comes up onto the
beach before venturing into the glades in the interior. The natives come last, an
anticlimactic, slightly worrisome addendum to the glorious landscape. Yonge is
also careful to focus on images of whiteness, light, and brightness, reassuring to
Western eyes and contradicting the “dark Melanesians.” We might also note that
all the beautiful objects here are natural: sea-flowers, shells, fish. Yonge does not
imagine any kind of indigenous craft tradition.30 In these descriptions, Yonge

was surely drawing on Patteson’s similarly rapturous descriptions of the beau-
tiful islands.31 But the question is why she chose to replicate Patteson’s occa-
sional testimony about the beautiful landscape, while ignoring his much more
frequent laments about the difficult living conditions that obtained on those
islands (material she did represent much more fully in her Life of Patteson).
Sara Suleri’s work on the picturesque in colonial writings about India
offers a useful model here. For British women in India, Suleri points out, “The
picturesque became synonymous with a desire to transfix a dynamic cultural
confrontation into a still life.”32 Indeed, the picturesque has a colonial function,
she argues, turning a living culture into memorabilia. By turning the Loyalty
Islands into a spectacle of the picturesque, then, Yonge processes it into a deco-
rative artifact. She normalizes the viewpoint of the foreigner, not the inhabit-
ant, and she reconstructs the scene as a welcoming tableau for visual delectation
instead of a place with political struggles, cultural conflicts, daily work, religious
practices, and local traditions.
Yonge does describe one admirable inhabitant in her picturesque paradise.
When Harry and his companions land, they find the chief, David, a symbolically
already-colonized Melanesian. Yonge used Selwyn’s experiences to construct
David, basing him on one of the boys Selwyn trained in the summer of 1849:
“Siapo, a young Negone chief eighteen or nineteen years old, of very pleasing
aspect, and with those dignified princely manners which rank is almost sure to
give” (Life, chapter 6). Compare Harry’s comment that “you must not think of him
[David] like a savage, for he is my friend, and a far more perfect gentleman than I
ever saw anyone but you, papa” (476). Siapo returned to his island to build a round
chapel, “smoothly floored, and plastered with coral lime,” where he was baptized in
1852 and given the name of George. He did not, however, survive the year.33
Siapo’s manners and his lime flooring clearly helped inspire the fictional David, as
did another boyish convert named Umao, who had nursed a very sick English sailor
who had been left behind by a whaler in 1851 (Life, chapter 6). Both Siapo and
Umao died in the early 1850s, and in The Trial, we find that David has died, too.
Yet just as Yonge improved the Loyalty Islands, Yonge also edited and ideal-
ized David. Although Patteson’s letters home describe the challenging cross-
examinations through which the islanders put him, David comes to Harry with
“little easy first questions about the Belief, and such things, like what we used to
ask mamma” (476). David and his fellow islanders have in fact already been con-
verted by Samoans from the Navigator Islands, who had in turn been converted
by emissaries from the Church Missionary Society, and their lessons are rein-
forced by periodic visits from the Newcastle and New Zealand mission stations.
When Harry met David, David had already spent two summers receiving reli-
gious instruction in New Zealand and had been baptized (473). Thus David’s
remaining questions are such that a barely confirmed teenage sailor can answer
110 Novel Craft
easily, the kind that “mamma” handled, with no serious challenge to the
Christian belief system. Just as Yonge erased the Cocksmoorians’ Catholicism,
so, too, does she wipe away the Melanesians’ religion. With no prior beliefs to
intervene, enjoying a good grounding in Christianity, eager to learn, and thor-
oughly approving of his lessons, David is the ideal pupil. As Harry describes
David, “The notion of his heart—like Cocksmoor to Ethel—is to get a real Eng-
lish mission, and have all his people Christians” (476).
Although we are clearly supposed to concur with Harry’s admiration of David,
the narrative voice complicates this by dubbing David “Harry’s Black Prince”
(476). While this is clearly a sneer, it also interestingly connects the man to one
of the most romanticized royal figures in English history, about whom Yonge
was writing a romance at the same time she was composing The Daisy Chain.34
“Black Prince” is a switchpoint, a distancing slur that is also a startling Angliciza-
tion, a rejection of Harry’s enthusiasm that is also an endorsement exceeding
anything Harry says.
Una and David are racially other (Irish, Melanesian) but culturally English
(Anglican, Europhile). David, “in a white European garb, met his guests, with dig-
nified manners that would have suited a prince of any land, and conducted them
through the grove of palms, interspersed with white huts, to a beautiful house
consisting of a central room, with many others opening from it, floored with
white coral lime, and lined with soft shining mats of Samoan manufacture” (474).
The emphasis on whiteness—the clothing, the huts, the floor of the house—
clearly is meant to counteract the popular idea of the black Melanesians.35 As
Sivasundaram explains, shining whitewashed churches were important to South
Sea missionaries during the period, signifying European superiority to the dark
native houses of worship.36 In the weird cultural geography of The Daisy Chain,
however, the hot, smoky, dim native spaces of worship are in Cocksmoor, while
the clean, shining building is in the Pacific islands. Conversion here is not figured
temporally but spatially, and the spatial configuration is the opposite of what we
would expect; the unconverted are in Cocksmoor, and the converted are in the
Loyalty Islands.
How, then, do the South Seas come to represent the disastrous effect of edu-
cation for boys? If they are shining, white, and led by an enlightened Christian,
they seem quite unrelated to the problems of, say, school bullying or secular
arguments that had so demoralized Norman. The answer lies in the population
of the island. Although David himself wears “white European garb,” the other
islanders are merely undifferentiated “black figures, with woolly mop-heads, and
sometimes decorated with whitewash of lime” (474). All seem to be boys; appar-
ently, that is no country for old men. By erasing females, children, and the
elderly, Yonge brings the islanders closer to the schoolboy population of Stonebor-
ough. Intelligent, courteous, meticulous David is clearly a stand-in for Norman.
He is chief of his island, just as Norman was Dux (head) of Stoneborough school.
But the other islanders are like the boys of Stoneborough school, an undifferen-
tiated crew of subsidiary males with violent and sensual inclinations.
Yonge depicts the Stoneborough schoolboys as vicious, deceitful, cruel, and
greedy. They surreptitiously buy gin, just as the islanders supposedly long for the
“long pig” (human flesh) (168–170, 473). When the Stoneborough boys rebel
and burn down a barricade, they look like “black specks dancing in the forbidden
field” and “black figures were flitting round it [the cloud of smoke]” (200). Sig-
nificantly, this is the outbreak that Norman was unable to control, prefiguring
his later failure to reach the “black figures” of the Loyalty Islands.
If the crew of wild black figures represents schoolboys, it is appropriate that
it is the popular schoolboy Harry May who finds himself at home among the
Melanesians. A crossover figure, Harry’s excessive hair—remarked upon from
boyhood—signifies this capacity for wildness. As a child his hair curled in such
tight matted curls that he was “unfit to be seen” most of the week (11), and his
mother associates him with a wild animal, given his “curly mane of lion-colored
wig” (44). His behavior is as uncontrollable as his hair. Harry bullies Tom and
plays tricks at school (44). One of his practical jokes goes awry, which nearly
prevents his confirmation. Without being confirmed, Harry feels he is hardly
better than a heathen, as he cannot get to heaven or have any reminders of
how to behave virtuously (244). This crisis aligns Harry with the unconverted,
the natives among whom he will later find a temporary home. Indeed, in the
Pacific, Harry grows “a huge superfluous mass of sun-dried curls,” resembling
his “woolly-haired” companions (486).
Harry’s brother Tom is exceptionally anxious to see Harry differentiate
himself from the Melanesians, insisting that Harry get a haircut and a British-
tailored coat. It is also Tom who predicts Meta will be tattooed or cannibalized
(486, 553). His fearful hostility toward the Melanesians is palpable. Tom calls
the Loyalty Islanders “those black villains,” “these savages” (488), and “vehe-
mently” expressed “all sorts of outrageous abuse of the niggers and cannibals”
(549). His vicious name-calling seems a displacement of the anger he rarely
allows himself to articulate toward his schoolmates.37 The Stoneborough boys
victimize Tom, but he vents his rage onto the Loyalty Islanders instead, confirming
the connection between these two groups.38
Tom lashes out against the South Sea islanders because they represent his
attackers but also to separate himself from them. At Stoneborough school, he
learned to cheat at lessons, to gorge on ill-gotten treats, to lie, and to break the
Sabbath. This is “the average Stoneborough code,” which obviously violates the
Mays’ Christian precepts (167). Thus he becomes “a miserable victim, not merely
beaten and bruised, but forced to transgress every rule of right and wrong that
had been enforced on his conscience” (291). He has, in other words, become a
heathen. His main crime, significantly, is to blacken. Eager to see a teacher’s book
containing pictures of classical heroes, Tom hurls himself across a table, spilling
112 Novel Craft
ink all over the page. Tom’s disaster is the opposite of Norman’s leather-leaf
frame. Norman enhances Mr. Rivers’s gift of the engraving of Alexander. Tom is
also viewing an image of admirable classical heroes that belongs to a respected
male authority, but it is a purloined and irregular view (the teacher has left the
book behind accidentally), and instead of pointing up the typological reading of
the image, the boy’s greedy haste means he blots it out, ruins the image, betrays
his teacher, and subsequently lies to conceal his crime. The scene is full of images
of darkness. The sun is setting; the room contains inky, hacked-up chests; and
when Tom spills the ink, the book itself turns into “the black witness” (166).
Inky blackness becomes Tom’s signature, connecting him with the “black”
Melanesians. For instance, when Norman catches him with a surreptitious bot-
tle of gin, Tom protests that it is really a bottle of ink (169). Ink is the perfect
symbol for the problematic “crew of fellows” at Stoneborough school (294). Part
of the schoolboys’ normal equipment, it nonetheless has the power to soak into
everything and blacken it, a kind of spreading, infectious agent, the power of
literacy gone dark. Ink-stained trembling Tom, having ruined his teacher’s pic-
ture, is darkened as much as if he had been tattooed. No wonder that Norman
can ask, “What can make you so savage?” (291) and that Norman and Harry can
joke that “Tom oiled himself like a Loyalty islander—his hair was so shiny, that
Harry recommended a top-knot, like theirs” (541).
Absorbed into “native” culture, a black Melanesian, Tom has to be converted.
Gradually and laboriously, Norman begins to instill different values in Tom
(214). Winning Tom back to Christian practices is difficult work, but it gives
Norman his first practice as a missionary. Although Norman does reclaim Tom,
it is significant that even years later, Tom is reluctant to join his father’s medical
practice, showing a residual alienation from the May clan. Perhaps, Norman sur-
mises, this is because “that black spot in his life had never passed out of the lad’s
memory” (488).39
Yonge clearly designed the Pacific island region to parallel Cocksmoor. They
have the same structure: a homosocial group that enacts the worst qualities of
the corresponding group at home, an idealized convert who dies, and a May
family effort to establish a church there. In each case, these groups are appropri-
ately gendered. In Cocksmoor, almost everyone is female: mothers resemble
Mrs. May, the leading light is Una, and the Mays who go there are Ethel, Margaret,
and the feminized Richie. Similarly, in Melanesia, everyone is male: natives act
like Stoneborough schoolboys, the shining example is David, and the Mays who
go there are Harry and Norman. Yet if the two regions are structurally similar,
they are tonally very different. The language about the Cocksmoorians is suf-
fused with vivid anger, with both moral and physical revulsion. But the Loyalty
Islands get discussed with equanimity, even admiration. Its bad qualities get
bracketed and its faults contested, jokingly excused, or relegated to the past. The
sense that anything is wrong with the islands merely forms an uncomfortable
undercurrent in a smoothly admiring narrative. But Cocksmoor appears to

express a much more potent anger, vested in a largely autobiographical central
character, Ethel. The Loyalty Islands, on the other hand, articulates a situation
that is already at some remove from the narrator’s attention. The physical dis-
comfort and exhausting work of missionary labor is displaced onto “savage”
Cocksmoor, while the Loyalty Islands are already Christianized, idealized, and
predigested into the picturesque.
Rewriting colonial subjects as stand-ins for the Mays’ circle creates an odd
effect. Yonge edits Cocksmoor by erasing its Catholicism and emphasizing its
squalor; she revises the Loyalty Islands by scoring out its religion and stressing
its beauty. Yonge thereby makes both communities more familiar for her Victo-
rian readers. At the same time, however, Yonge needs to retain the alterity of
these spaces if they are going to be viable places for the Mays to project their
repressed resentments. The result is that Una and David are surrounded by peo-
ple who enact “savagery” in the most recognizable nineteenth-century terms. In
the most generous reading, Una and David represent something like a liberal
idea of the subject in which any individual is capable of achieving admirable
qualities regardless of race or class. By trimming off the inconveniently specific
protrusions, the local religion and indigenous living conditions, Yonge turns her
natives into generic stems, to be trained as the gardener wishes. More precisely,
one might say that plants may look different, but all behave the same way when
cut and dried. As Dr. May remarks, Una is an example of how “where we thought
it most wasted, some fresh green shoot will spring up, to show it is not we that
give the increase” (336). Reduced to “some fresh green shoot,” Una is one of an
interchangeable, identical set of plants. Similarly, Norman gives a speech in
which he poetically invokes “the lovely isles, and the inhabitants of noble prom-
ise, but withering for lack of knowledge” (529). The natives are like plants, who
will “wither” unless they are carefully tended. Tending those plants will create a
bumper crop. “Harry’s friend, the young chief David, was dead; but his people
were some of them already teachers and examples, and the whole region was full
to overflowing of the harvest, calling out for labourers to gather it in” (317).
David himself may have died, but he is replaced by others, and so many green
shoots have sprung up that an entire harvest is ready.
David and Una are clearly the equivalent of any English subject and the supe-
riors of many. And having trained up one fine specimen of each type, Yonge can
afford to let the other plants grow as they will. In each case, a sympathetic May
main character defends the colonized subject while a host of minor characters
remind us that we ought to despise racialized bodies, language, and culture.
Harry insists on David’s nobility while Tom makes hostile jokes about dark skin,
wide lips, and oiled hair. Similarly, Ethel champions Una’s spirituality while her
siblings and neighbors vilify illiterate Irish beggars. Indeed, the background of
wild savagery functions to highlight the converted subject’s virtues.
114 Novel Craft
Thus Yonge’s horticultural paradigm has mixed results. In Yonge’s Christian-

ity, anyone can be saved, regardless of race, and Yonge seems to include all her
characters in this missionary embrace. Their dark skin or matted hair does not
consign them to inferiority. Their souls are just as valuable as the English char-
acters.’ On the other hand, to consider the Irish or Melanesians wild is to regard
them as growing anyhow because nobody has bothered to take care with them;
it is to trim away any sense of an indigenous culture that might account for their
behavior. In this sense, Yonge’s attitude differs from Gaskell’s cosmopolitan and
inclusive Unitarianism. Whereas Gaskell sympathizes with members of differ-
ent generations, Yonge assumes the natives’ personhood depends on being
retrained. Yonge’s paradigm normalizes Westernization, ignoring the pain of
alienating oneself from one’s community to affiliate with a foreign cultural sys-
tem. A telling example occurs in The Trial, where a missionary describes the
natives as “wild lads, innocent of all clothing, except marvellous adornments of
their woolly locks, wigged out sometimes into huge cauliflowers, whitened with
coral lime, or arranged quarterly red and white.” Fortunately, he adds, “a few
days taught dressing and eating in civilized fashion” (316–317). While the mis-
sionary acknowledges the complexity and aesthetic achievement of the lads’
hairstyle, he has no sense that it might have a cultural or religious significance
that would make them wish to retain it. Instead, it is an unnatural growth that
has occurred simply because nobody had yet taught them dressing. There is
either missionary cultivation, which is inherently caring and improving, or there
is a wasteful absence. This model corresponds to what Georgina Battiscombe
describes as Yonge’s own position.40
Thus The Daisy Chain hopes that the May family can do to the Irish and the
Melanesians what they do to daisies and leaves. It sets the ornamental decorative
pieties of preserved horticulture against the wildness of unreclaimed land and
peoples. And it rewrites those converts into analogues to the Mays themselves,
figures as intelligent, ardent, and pious as Norman or Ethel, generic icons who
have no connection to a residually racialized community. In short, the notion of
replacing wild leaves with snipped leather leaves suitable for the drawing room is
an apt corollary for the work of taming the wild Irish and Melanesians into grateful
Christian pupils, as represented by Una and David. Pruning Kanak “mop-heads”
and combing the Cocksmoor “elf-locks” continues the craftwork set up by the
leather leaves, in which one copies and improves on nature at the same time. And
it indicates how one might continue to modify oneself and tame one’s own wild
wishes. All flesh is grass; one aims for eternal life instead. In all the novel’s exam-
ples of foliage—the leather leaves, the daisy chain, the paper rose, the daisy cross,
the carved daisy seal, the leather leaves—the Mays make permanent what would
otherwise be ephemeral botanical specimens (figure 3.3). To do so is to be a good
Christian, to lift up to heaven. “To the highest room / Earth’s lowliest flowers our
Lord receives; / Close to His heart a place He gives / Where they shall ever bloom.”
Preser vationist Fiction

Let us turn back to this novel’s signature craft, leather leaves. We have seen how
leather-leaf craft expresses Meta’s ornamental “finish,” Norman’s affinity for
wild specimens, and the characters’ enthusiasm for typological realism. But
leather-leaf craft functions on the metalevel as well. Just as paper named a fun-
damental aspect of “The Cranford Papers,” so, too, does leather-leaf craft refer to
the very stuff of its novel. After all, at its most basic level, The Daisy Chain is
printed on leaves within a leather binding. We are encouraged to notice this, for
in The Daisy Chain, characters remark on bindings. Ethel is excited when Norman
brings her a copy of John Keble’s Lyra Innocentium with embossed edges that
make a pattern as the leaves open (150). The decorated leaves of Lyra Innocen-
tium share the leather-leaf genealogy: Norman saw it at Meta’s house, sought his
own example in distant places, and imported it into the May family. In The Trial,
we have another notable example of Yonge’s focus on the materiality of text.
We learn that a bullet perforated Harry’s book, driving its words deep into Har-
ry’s chest (83). The leaves of the book therefore save Harry’s life, slowing and
deflecting the bullet, but also having the remarkably literal effect of making
Harry take its words to heart. Paper and leather leaves are significant in their
patterns, weight, and dimensions and not just in what is printed on them. As in
Cranford, the materiality of paper gets emphasized.
The leather-leaf frames aptly represent the typologically realist strategy
Budge and Sandbach-Dahlström have identified in Yonge’s fiction, which I am
suggesting could also be read as a craft paradigm. Norman’s decoration of the
engraving of Alexander corresponds to Yonge’s own authorial labors. Norman
works to create “a frame for this—olive, bay, laurel—everything appropriate to
the conquerer” (144). Similarly, Yonge selects and arranges narrative informa-
tion to provoke a central emotional response, eradicating the specificity of the
individual, Alexander, in order to essentialize him as “the conquerer.” It is sig-
nificant that the goal of Norman’s decoration is to enhance our reverence for a
male hero, and the gift itself came from Meta’s much-admired father, Mr. Rivers.
Yonge similarly revered patriarchal authority, admiring her father and Keble,
and the drive to conform to an idealized parent is the fundamental goal of much
of her fiction. Thus The Daisy Chain seems like a leather-leaf frame itself, present-
ing specific portraits but surrounding its figures with emblems of their essential,
higher selves.
If the leather-leaf frame is meant to typify the giver of the picture as well as
the subject, we have a problem, since Meta’s valetudinarian father is nothing
like Alexander. However, by giving Alexander this Apollonian wreath, Norman
resignifies the image as an artistic rather than a military conqueror, creating a
metonymic connection between the two men that enhances Mr. Rivers’s mas-
culinity. In choosing to give this engraving to Norman, moreover, Mr. Rivers
116 Novel Craft
Figure 3.3 Pressed Flowers.
implies that Alexander would be a good model for Norman to follow. Norman’s
eventual move to Australia becomes flatteringly connected with Alexander’s
world-conquering travels. Learning to revere Alexander prepares Norman for
an exalted view of his own future mission and confirms his future wife’s admira-
tion for it. In short, both the dilettante Mr. Rivers and the sensitive intellectual
Norman are encouraged to affiliate themselves with Alexander, to foreground
certain elements of their personalities and slough off the rest.
Not only the characters of The Daisy Chain but also its author and readers get
implicated in this craft paradigm. On June 9, 1854, when Yonge was in the midst
of writing The Daisy Chain, she received a locket commemorating her funding of
the Melanesian mission ship. It was engraved with a Cocksmoor cross and an
enameled daisy in its center.41 Presumably, it would be worn on a chain: a daisy
chain. That locket clasps the mission cause in Victorian political and economic
reality firmly together with the imagined symbols of a fictional universe. In that
image, a long, complicated, half-finished novel gets condensed into a single, per-
manent, incised, miniature emblem. The narrative turns into a neat allegorical
and didactic moment. The transformation of a messy, fluctuating process into
one simple, unchanging object perfectly emblematizes Yonge’s goals. In this

complex chain, an image that represents a missionary, colonizing technique and
a self-disciplining, self-improving method within the narrative also enters real
life to represent the novel itself as an object.
Finally, Yonge’s novels work to manage the reader’s own behavior and beliefs,
so this form of mastery occurs on the metalevel as well; the reader is colonized
almost like the Melanesians and Irish and by what we might argue are analogous
methods and a parallel missionary-colonizer. In the wild spaces of her reader-
ship, a strong female emissary strives to flatten and press us, to reduce us to
decorous ornamental specimens who will duly admire the May family.
Yonge devoted the profits of The Daisy Chain to building a missionary college
in New Zealand. Her funds, together with a large contribution by Patteson,
founded this college, which was named St. Andrew’s after the Cocksmoor
church.42 This expenditure drafts the reader into the missionary agenda. All the
multifarious transactions between an author and her readers—all the people who
bought or borrowed the novel for their own reasons, who fought with Yonge in the
margins, who admired, derided, rewrote, and satirized it—that whole rich variety
of reading experience gets smoothly flattened into a single act of homage and obe-
dience. Just as Cocksmoor and the Loyalty Islands are each reduced to one repre-
sentative character, and that character in turn is transmogrified into an exemplar,
just as this long novel is condensed into an enameled daisy on a cross, so, too, the
multitudes of Yongian readers are symbolically condensed into one body with one
intention, one destination for its money, one belief, and one church.
The leather leaves of The Daisy Chain tell us something beyond their allegori-
cal framing. The process of becoming a Daisy, or a leather leaf, is no fun. Like
Aurora Leigh, Yonge’s characters have to lie “Like sea-weed on the rocks, and
suffering her / To prick me to a pattern with her pin / Fibre from fibre, delicate
leaf from leaf, / And dry out from my drowned anatomy / The last sea-salt left in
me.”43 To become preserved horticulture means a kind of death, the destruction
of one’s original self, to be replaced by the permanent new version, the heavenly
Daisy, the leather leaf. This, for Yonge, is what it means to be Christian. In this
fatal Daisy Chain, the mother dies, sister Margaret dies, Una dies, David dies,
and Ethel and Norman kill their intellectual selves, replacing them with perso-
nas prized all the more for their hard-fought unnaturalness. With this rarified
and preserved version of the self, the ideal Yongian subject achieves apotheosis
at the cost of the messier, more realistic, and more bodily emotions we modern
readers tend to regret. As modern readers, we want to see these characters grow.
Instead, we watch them get flattened, dried, and immobilized. Living leaves
harden into calcified wood. To take pleasure in this is to succeed in entering a
now-foreign Victorian notion of what it means to mature—not to flourish, but
to prune; not to bloom into wildflowers, but to twist oneself into a chain.
Figure 4.1 Knitting.
CHAPTER 4
Salvage
BET T Y A S THE MUTUAL FRIEND
Critics have long noted that Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865) critiques money,
most obviously through equating mounds of trash with value: money is filth,
dirt, waste.1 Dickens appears to have derived much of the specific information
for his studies of the working poor and their scavenging of London trash from
Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor.2 While Mayhew’s influence
was important, we might note that handicraft—a pursuit that Dickens passion-
ately espoused—also charged debris with meaning. In this chapter, I offer a dif-
ferent way of reading trash in this novel by reading its association with half a
century’s worth of domestic handicraft ideas, beyond the immediate spur of
Mayhew’s reportage. Mayhew gives Dickens his vision of impoverished people
scraping together a living from reselling rubbish, but, I suggest, it is handicraft
that gives the rubbish itself significance. For instance, Dickens discovered a
stubborn elderly woman in Mayhew, “a poor old woman resembling a bundle of
rags and filth stretched on some dirty straw,” who collects dog waste.3 However,
when Dickens revised this subject into Betty Higden, he stressed purity. As a
laundress and a knitter, Betty’s job is to cleanse soiled linen, to generate wear-
able items out of skeins of rough wool (figure 4.1). That Betty turns into some-
one who salvages textile handicrafts is profoundly meaningful. The type of work
Betty does—restoring, recycling, purifying, transforming—is fundamental to
Dickens’s vision of a viable England and, more specifically, a humane economy.
And this chapter explores what happens if we follow Betty, using her as an autho-
rial representative and a model of what Our Mutual Friend cares to establish.
Betty’s decision to renounce payments from the Boffins because she prefers
to sell her knitted goods represents a larger value judgment in Our Mutual Friend.
Dickens uses handicrafts as a way of critiquing mid-Victorian finance while
imagining an alternative form of making a living. Like Cranford, Our Mutual
Friend diagnoses the ills of contemporary finance and endorses the residual
119
120 Novel Craft
economic elements that are associated with craft. Yet in the 1860s, domestic
handicraft was already beginning its decline. Thus Our Mutual Friend records a
fascinating moment, when the work of domestic handicraft represented an eth-
ical, behavioral, and aesthetic ideal that it was no longer possible to inhabit. Ten
years earlier, Matty and Mary thrive, but in Our Mutual Friend, Betty Higden is
poor, and she dies. Her restorative work can patch nothing together, not even
the fabric of her own life.
In previous chapters, we have looked at the craft paradigm’s emphasis on
ephemerality (Cranford) and preservation (The Daisy Chain), but in this chapter,
we will follow Betty’s example and focus on handicraft’s salvage ethos. Reusing
debris was, as we have seen, a central value of domestic handicraft. By finding
decorative uses for household waste, the mid-Victorian woman demonstrated
her thriftiness, her ingenuity, her taste, and her industry. Moreover, the salvage
craft allies domestic handicraft with factory production, as debased raw materi-
als get processed into valued artifacts. This transaction helped the middle-class
craftswoman feel that she, too, was participating in the exciting work of indus-
trial modernity, paralleling the economic work going on in a realm from which
she was, otherwise, mostly excluded.
Salvaging Things
The preference for reprocessing waste reveals how profoundly early to mid-
Victorian thought prioritized production over consumption, for salvage craft
emphasizes making rather than buying things. Women were expected, for
instance, to make their own paste, varnish, and paints, rather than purchasing
them, and a craft like fish-scale embroidery expects the maker to go to great
trouble to essentially re-create spangles (sequins) in spite of the fact that span-
gles were inexpensive, ubiquitous accessories. Handicraft after handicraft uses
leftover scraps—shells, candle ends, bits of cotton or straw, pieces of newspa-
per, old glass bottles, feathers. Most common, of course, were textile scraps;
domestic handicrafts reuse leftover lengths of ribbon, offcuts of dress material,
stray buttons. To expend enormous labor transforming garbage into a facsimile
of a commodity item was the ideal for domestic handicraft.
The craft that perhaps most visibly expresses the idea of salvage is taxidermy,
in which a corpse is turned into parlor art (figure 4.2). “Methods of taxidermy
improved greatly in the nineteenth century,” comments Thad Logan, “and it was
assumed to be a perfectly acceptable hobby for young ladies.”4 Indeed, in 1877,
Cassell’s Household Guide gave instructions for making feather screens, begin-
ning with the rather endearing comment “Assuming, then, that we have got our
pigeon dead, and that he lies on his back on the table before us. . . .” Assuming
this, one was to take the dead bird, scoop out its brains, pull the skin over the
Salvage: Betty as the Mutual Friend 121
Figure 4.2 Taxidermy.
head, cut out ears and eyeballs, sever the neck and scrape away the flesh on skull
and wings, skewer the eyelid backward with a darning needle, while stuffing all
the cavities with cotton wool soaked in an arsenic solution. “The work is not
beyond ordinary skill,” this writer reassured his readers.5 It was a common pur-
suit to “skeletonize” leaves and to “obtain exquisite skeletons of small animals”
by burying a corpse in an anthill and digging up and displaying the skeleton once
the ants had finished their work.6
Salvage crafts often featured leftover food detritus. In Household Elegancies
(1877), readers could find instructions for making a decorative frame featuring
cherry stones (figure 4.3). After making an octagonal frame of cheap wood or
cardboard, the craftswoman was instructed to glue “a border of cherry-stones on
the outer and inner edge. In each of the eight corners put an apricot-stone or a
hazel-nut, and then place plum-stones as shown in the picture; lastly, fill the
spaces that are left with red popcorn.”7 By using fruit pits, this craft-instruction
writer transforms an unsightly by-product of food processing into a centrally
decorative element. Instead of seeing fruit as a delicious comestible with an indi-
gestible stone in the middle, the Victorian handicrafter would now see the fruit’s
122 Novel Craft
flesh as a soft, corruptible mass to be scraped away to reach the ideally hard,
imperishable heart.8
To a modern reader, however, perhaps the oddest salvage craft is fish-scale
embroidery. In this pursuit, women scraped the scales off fish, cleaned them
thoroughly, and pierced holes in them with a darning needle. They then traced a
pattern on blue or pink silk or satin and sewed the fish scales onto the fabric in
overlapping rows to create the effect of a flower or a bird. To obtain different
colors, the craftswoman used the scales of different fish or else tinted the scales
with homemade varnish. Cassell’s Household Guide evidently anticipated some
skepticism about this craft idea, defensively insisting that fish-scale embroidery
was “a species of exquisitely graceful embroidery,” one of those “small articles of
taste, which always conduce to throw an air of refinement over a home,” “very
fine indeed,” and producing “a most beautiful effect.”9 It was obviously hard to
believe that decaying fish refuse could become a “refined” ornament. Anxiety
Figure 4.3 Pit Frame.

about the hygiene of salvage crafts evidently increased at the end of the century.
In 1895, one magazine described frames bedecked with gilded oyster shells but
began by reminding readers that “the shells must be thoroughly washed before
being used.”10
Of course, the most common use of salvage was in industrial production,
where smelly trash was turned into desirable commodities. Dickens was intrigued
by salvage crafts. He published several articles on the subject in his journal,
Household Words, in the 1850s.11 George Dodd, who wrote articles about domes-
tic handicrafts, was also a major contributor to Household Words with several
articles about the reuse and circulation of rubbish. His “Penny Wisdom” describes
“the use of old horse-shoe nails to make gun-barrels, of old bones and bits of
skin salvaged from abbatoirs to make gelatine, of plumbago dust to substitute
for lead in pencils, of small coal—left over at pit mouths—to make coke, of
ammoniacal liquor left over from the manufacture of gas-light to make the vola-
tile salts kept in my lady’s smelling-bottle, and so on.”12 The accumulation of
such examples in a magazine explicitly intended for the household indicates that
domestically oriented readers were fascinated by tales of magical industrial
transformation.
Dickens’s passion for cozy domestic spaces extended through his fiction into
his life, where he insisted on overseeing every aspect of the arrangement and
decoration of his homes.13 Starting with the Pickwickian Christmas, the Cheeryble
Brothers’ dance in Nicholas Nickleby, and the inn in Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’s
interiors became the iconic depictions of domestic warmth and family senti-
ment, characterized by crackling fires, generous goodies, rosy plump relatives,
and affectionate play.14 In Bleak House and Little Dorrit, women prove them-
selves when they can transform a literally bleak house (or prison) into a beloved
home. Throughout his life, Dickens remained a stalwart defender of traditional
domestic design. When Henry Cole selected certain items of home decor for dis-
play as examples of poor British design in his “Gallery of False Principles,” Dickens
published an influential critique of the exhibit in Household Words.15 He also
satirized Cole’s campaign against naturalistic design in the government official
who condemns flowered carpets in Hard Times. Dickens felt that the qualities for
which domestic handicraft stood—imagination, affection, decorative pleasure—
were under attack in a modern world that had quite different values. Home was
the idealized site of a sentimental plenitude, represented by the feminine hand-
icrafts of his youth in all their ornamental efflorescence.
Salva g ing O ur Mutual Fr iend

Our Mutual Friend’s landscape is the urban world of refuse, recycling, and sal-
vage that provided the raw materials for craft. As Juliet McMaster puts it:
124 Novel Craft
Dickens presents a vision of a world and a society that are disintegrating:

the world is made up of landscapes and cities and things that are bewil-
deringly discontinuous, conglomerations of fragments that are in process
of shaking down into mounds of dust; and the society is composed of
people who are figuratively and literally falling to pieces, decaying like
corpses, and who seem to be headed for the same mounds of rubbish.
Moreover, Dickens “chooses to present his fragmented world in fragments” as

his language becomes spasmodic, disconnected, interjectional.16
Our Mutual Friend’s characters eke out a precarious living from recycling rub-
bish, but, even more significantly, the characters themselves are people rejected
as rubbish who need to be salvaged. Jenny’s father is mistaken for a heap of old
clothes by the visiting Eugene Wrayburn. The “Golden Dustman,” Noddy Boffin,
was salvaged from the working-class ranks of manual laborers and transformed
into a uniquely valuable specimen. Similarly, lower-middle-class Bella Wilfer is
adopted by the wealthy Boffin family, retrained and translated into a higher class
and more appropriate model of middle-class femininity. Perhaps most obvi-
ously, Bella’s suitor John Harmon is literally thrown away as trash, his body
dumped in the river when he is robbed and nearly killed, and he gets reborn, or
perhaps we should say recycled, with a new identity. These specimens are crafted
by the stress of circumstance—specifically, the unexpected transmission or
denial of wealth—into sterling characters, so to speak.
The heroes of Our Mutual Friend are those who expend labor to transform all
these fragments into art. As Brian Cheadle points out, “The novel ubiquitously
registers the driven ability of those in the marginal economy to rearticulate
waste. Sloppy makes toys out of bits and pieces, Gaffer fashions Lizzie’s cradle
from driftwood. Jenny Wren turns even her own offcuts into pin-cushions and
pen-wipers.”17 One might also mention Mr. Venus, who assembles stray bones
into skeletons and, of course, Betty Higden, who knits bits of wool into salable
trinkets. I want to turn now to three of these craftspeople to examine Dickens’s
version of salvage in more detail.
The sympathetic taxidermist, Mr. Venus, articulates skeletons. Although crit-
ics like Metz tend to read Venus as an artist or a scientist, he can also be seen as
a male professional practitioner of what female amateurs did at home. Venus’s
name, of course, feminizes him, and so does his shop. Dark, cluttered, full of tiny
objects, Venus’s store emits “a warm and comfortable smell” from tea and muf-
fins. As his customer’s transaction turns unexpectedly to social call, the cus-
tomer tries to keep to the rules of ordinary purchase, saying, “I think you know
me, Mr. Venus, and I think you know I never bargain,” but Venus immediately
implicates him in the kind of personal relationships that constituted the bazaar
exchange (he offers to hold onto the commodity, saying feelingly, “I’m a man of
my word . . . that’s a promise”).18 Venus’s creations are admirable in the context
of the craft paradigm’s literal realism. His articulated skeletons are ingeniously
but grotesquely accurate replications of living beings. Finally, as Metz points
out, the taxidermist’s craft skills work to guarantee his probity. His adeptness
at piecing little things together, following imperceptible clues, and practicing
“disciplined labor” (or “industry”) replicate the reader’s work (and even the
novelist’s), while keeping him true to his “art” and preserving him from the
blackmail plot.19
Like Mr. Venus, the dolls’ dressmaker Jenny Wren is an artist who crafts
treasures out of unwanted bits of textile, a pursuit that generates sentimental
bargaining. Jenny cobbles together tiny scraps of beads, ribbon, and fabric.
What she buys is “damage and waste,” salvaging the detritus of Pubsey and Co.’s
supposed business, and when she makes her tiny dolls’ clothes out of the waste
scraps, she even reuses the extra bits of those scraps as pincushions and penwip-
ers (314). Literally on the margins of the upper-class economy of consumption,
spectacle, and status expenditures, Jenny dodges about in the dark gutters to
glimpse the ladies whose outfits she will reproduce in miniature. Like her taxi-
dermist counterpart, she is a good craftswoman because of her realism; her doll
clothing is “dazzling” and in “most elegant taste” (482) because it is copied so
precisely, not because it is beautifully designed.
Another thrifty textile worker is Betty Higden, who knits small items for sale.
Knitting was a working-class craft, very differently coded from the fashionable
fancywork of crocheting or tatting lace. It was primarily a way to make unro-
mantic items like stockings or socks, and it used inexpensive, rough wools in
drab colors. Alison Adburgham explains that until the end of the 1870s, the only
knitted garments ladies wore were shawls, bed jackets, and petticoats.20 Not
until the 1870s and 1880s did fashionable women begin to wear fisherman’s
jerseys and dress items cut from knitted fabric.21 During Betty’s lifetime,
then, knitting was a decidedly humble way of generating sturdy undergarments.
Betty’s products are not admired for their aesthetic qualities, like Venus’s or
Jenny’s, but the homely material seems to correlate with Betty’s own honesty
and strength.
The salvage ethos has its dark side, of course. Our Mutual Friend has scaven-
gers, Gaffer Hexam and Rogue Riderhood, who rifle drowned corpses; the vicious
Mr. Harmon, who owned the salvage yard originally; and Silas Wegg, who sifts
mounds of garbage and is hurled into a scavenger’s cart at the end (864). The
problem with Hexam, Riderhood, Harmon, and Wegg is that they attempt scav-
enging without recycling, and they attempt to consume without buying. In other
words, they grab debris without expending the “industry” to transform it into
something fresh—and because they steal these scraps from the dead or betray
the living, they transact one-sided exchanges with those who cannot answer
back.22 The demonization of these characters reveals how profoundly Dickens
endorses craft “industry” and sentimental bargaining, how much these elements
126 Novel Craft
are at the heart of Our Mutual Friend’s ethical project. Lothar Cerny’s conclusion
about Dickens’s art is almost poignantly accurate as a description of craft:
Dickens constructs and opposes two worlds in Our Mutual Friend:

the first one knows no harmony in difference but only mechanically
organized emptiness. . . . The other one is that of an art which uses the
bits and pieces regarded by others as useless, and even what is called
‘dust.’ It forms them by virtue of the artist’s imaginative strength into
images which are similar and different from the reality they represent,
in fact they are superior to reality and provide a perfect image of
it. Such art is also playful . . . momentous . . . and it creates a semblance
of life.23
Our Mutual Friend, like the handicrafts made by the virtuous characters, reas-
sembles fragments into beauty.
Cerny’s “mechanically organized emptiness” may refer to a metaphysical
state, but it also conjures up one of the most famous passages in Our Mutual
Friend. What about the garbage that gets away? The narrator notes:
That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the

wind blows gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it
come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree,
is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at
every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass,
seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails. (168–169).
The mysterious paper currency is the opposite of salvageable waste. It is promis-

cuous, unwanted, useless. Although oddly disembodied and without agency, in
Dickens’s description it comes to have an uncannily human aspect, cowering and
caught and shuddering and restless. The paper currency fits into the category of
“thing”—uncannily alive yet dead, sentient yet artifact—that Bill Brown ana-
lyzes in his “thing theory.”24 In a novel—indeed, an entire oeuvre—full of home-
less wanderers, what is arresting about paper currency is that it behaves like a
Dickensian subject, it is everywhere and nowhere, and, like Jo in Bleak House (or,
as we shall see, like Betty), it is constantly moving without anywhere to go.
In a vision of an England choking and drowning in foul waste, smothered by
flyaway paper, the great imperative is to reuse waste and make it into something
beautiful, while generating rich emotional connections. Thus, one would expect
the characters who adhere to the craft paradigm to succeed. The odd thing is
that, in Our Mutual Friend, they fail.
In fact, they barely survive economically. Mr. Venus occupies a greasy, filthy
store “among the poorer shops” “in a narrow and a dirty street” (97) and
socializes among the working poor (his fiancée is a waterman’s daughter who
runs a pawnshop). His body is marked by his labor (he has “weak eyes” and a
“stoop”) (97). Yet Venus tells Wegg that business “never was so good,” that
“I’m not only first in the trade, but I’m the trade. You may go and buy a skele-
ton at the West End, if you like, and pay the West End price, but it’ll be my
putting together” (103). This claim hints at what is really happening; West
End shops are paying Venus a pittance while reselling his work at inflated
prices. While we often see Venus’s work in progress, Dickens assigns a senti-
mental rather than an economic motive for Venus’s constant labor: he works
to forget his love life (104). Interestingly, Dickens never shows Venus selling
his artifacts. The closest we come is Venus’s assertion that “I have just sent
home a Beauty—a perfect Beauty—to a school of art” (99). The transaction
has already occurred offstage, its economic nature not only invisible to the
reader but also mystified by the misleading language “sent home a Beauty,”
which sounds more like a fashionable young lady’s vacation from school than
the sale of an anatomical model.25 The language’s redirection toward romantic
discourse is significant. At the end of the novel, Venus’s stock seems to have
been reduced, but not because he sells anything; no, the place has been
“cleaned up . . . by the hand of adorable woman” as a prelude to marriage (854).
Similarly, the taxidermist’s thinness, pallor, and dustiness are ascribed to
romantic misery rather than poverty, for they all disappear as soon as his
beloved agrees to marry him. Domestic and sentimental affiliations are
responsible for the change, not economic advances. Indeed, if anything, Venus
has received an economic blow, having had to promise never to articulate
females again (855).
Dickens reads Venus, in other words, in terms of romance instead of the real
conditions of small artisans in mid-Victorian London. The difficulty is that these
two conditions collide, creating a moment of incoherence in the narrative. If
Venus is sighing and dying for “lovely woman,” one would expect his object of
desire to be lovely woman, whereas in fact Pleasant Riderhood is a prematurely
aged woman with a “swivel eye” and a “muddy complexion,” a hardheaded inter-
est in profit, and an obsession with cheating sailors (390–391). I am not saying
that it is impossible for Venus to fall in love with someone who does not meet
middle-class standards of taste; as I noted earlier, his romantic choice reveals his
class standing, and from an economic point of view, who better to partner with
than someone who understands how to run a shop? But because Dickens has
him express his desire in terms of middle-class romance, it is contradictory for
its object to baffle the conventions of that genre.
Jenny makes a bare living, and only by dint of constant work. She cannot
afford to stop thinking of models even at her father’s funeral, and her con-
stant sedentary bending over her work has probably caused her disability.26
She lives in a poor district and cannot afford medical care. Yet although we
128 Novel Craft
constantly see Jenny working to produce her dolls’ clothing, we hardly ever see
her dispose of it.
There are only two cases where we see what Jenny does with her products.
First, Jenny delivers a doll for her rich friends’ daughter. Significantly, “she’s
folded up in silver paper, you see, as if she was wrapped from head to foot in new
bank-notes” (885). In the craft paradigm, which assumed leisured women with-
out economic need, decorative silver wrapping replaces specie, and gifts replace
sales. Jenny’s delivery fits perfectly into the craft realm, if one can bring oneself
to overlook the terrible irony of the penniless worker expending her labor on a
gift to the local millionaires.27 Second, the dolls’ dressmaker points out her crea-
tions in the window of an expensive West End toy shop. The narrator lists all the
costumes “for presentation at court, for going to balls, for going out driving, for
going out on horseback, for going out walking, for going to get married, for
going to help other dolls to get married, for all the gay events of life” (482).
Clearly, the West End toy shop is using Jenny as sweated labor, and this fact is
obscured by narrative attention to the (misleading) signs of her knowledge of
the dress conventions of prosperous females.
One would expect Jenny, with all her sharpness, to drive good bargains—
but, oddly, she does the opposite. She boasts that she has spent “two precious
silver shillings” for her basketful of millinery scraps, far more than it would
have been worth, as we realize from Fledgeby’s pleased surprise (314). In fact,
for less than one shilling, one could purchase enough brand-new ribbon to
decorate a fashionable woman’s dress.28 Poor Londoners at this class level (as
chronicled by Henry Mayhew) were lucky if they earned a shilling a day. For
Jenny to spend two shillings on a single basket of damaged goods is not cred-
ible. This payment would be typical of the largesse of a middle-class visitor
generously patronizing the deserving poor, a transaction that is, to say the
least, inappropriate for Jenny. Her economic behavior is anomalous in other
respects as well, like the fact that she is apparently also able to travel to
the country for months at a time to attend upon sick friends, without any
particular concern about staying in touch with her suppliers or getting prod-
ucts to her distributors.
As a devoted nurse to her friends in the country, as a generous patron of the
deserving poor, Jenny adheres to middle-class notions of femininity that her
real situation ought to preclude. In other words, when Dickens works to make
the dolls’ dressmaker into the craft paradigm’s iconic leisured middle-class
subject, he produces a worrying contradiction with his dismaying realist descrip-
tions of the conditions of the working poor. Jenny as gift-giving, skilled maker
of charming miniatures is at odds with the debilitated and suffering child who
has to work around the clock to support herself and an alcoholic father.
Betty Higden, similarly, does not do well. Instead of a leisurely and well-
provided-for retirement after a lifetime of labor, Betty has so internalized the
work ethic that she voluntarily selects a life of homeless drudgery. She asks for a
loan of twenty shillings to set her up with a basket of knitted goods. This price is
as startling as Jenny’s; her actual costs would have been more on the order of
five shillings, for she only needs to buy a small basket, which would have cost
one or two shillings, perhaps knitting needles, and some skeins of wool, which
would have cost two or three shillings at most.29 Betty then becomes responsible
for repaying that enormous loan (426). Tramping through bad weather and
rough roads, she finds few buyers and frequently collapses. “It had gone worse
with her than she had foreseen,” the narrator explains, chiefly because there is
no venue for her wares. She seeks marketplaces, but quite often there were no
“such things”; the High Streets of the country towns where she stations herself
are “seldom very busy,” and she “would not often get” leave to enter the great
houses to show her wares (557).
Betty is the clearest example of the craft paradigm’s retail nostalgia as she
turns herself into a figure fast disappearing from the increasingly urbanized
British landscape: the itinerant peddler who shows wares at clean country mar-
kets. As Judith Flanders explains, shops were becoming the primary way to pur-
chase items, and by the mid-nineteenth century, fixed pricing, department
stores, and multiple (chain) stores were defining the retail landscape of Brit-
ain.30 When Betty decides to become a peddler, she resembles Miss Matty in
Cranford in reverting to an economic behavior from her eighteenth-century
youth, a role that has become outmoded in Victorian Britain. In this privatized
culture, in which trade has retreated into indoor establishments, there is liter-
ally no space for her. The market squares that once would have supported her are
vanishing, the country roads do not attract traffic, and the denizens of the great
houses no longer expect to be visited by peddlers. Starving, dazed, dying, Betty
finally collapses. She dies behind a paper mill, her last conscious thought being
to arrange the letter in her dress so that those who find her body can contact the
Boffins to manage her funeral.
B e t t y ’s L e t te r
Betty’s death scene is significant, for she literally dies in the shadow of the source
of the “paper currency” of the novel. In her death, she has no concern for the
knitted goods she has carried about the country; what she cares about is the
object in her breast. “Paper. Letter” (567) she gasps. As Betty’s fabric dress opens
to reveal, not her heart, but her letter, and as her small basket of textiles falls
before the mighty paper mill, her body enacts a larger cultural shift occurring
just at mid-century as rags ceased to be used in papermaking. Thus Betty’s life-
time of textile labor, mangling and laundering and knitting, painstakingly man-
aging rags and cloth, ends at the factory. This is where rags go to die or, more
130 Novel Craft
precisely, to be sifted, boiled, washed, broken, bleached, and flattened into the
waste paper that haunts Our Mutual Friend. Betty, herself wrung out, can only
die here, too.
Ironically, for someone who dies in a paper mill, thinking of a letter, Betty
is illiterate.31 When the Boffins consider whether to allow Betty to become a
peddler, they stipulate that she must stay in touch. “Yes, my deary, but not
through letter-writing,” explains Betty, “because letter-writing—indeed, writ-
ing of most sorts—hadn’t much come up for such as me when I was young”
(427). Betty cannot produce or decode letters. Rokesmith offers to write a note
that could be handed to someone if Betty ever needed help, identifying her as
a friend of the wealthy Boffins. In Rokesmith’s modern imagination, the let-
ter’s function then changes, from a form of communication to something
more like a check or bill—a way of drawing on friends’ financial plenitude at
need. It becomes a piece of paper currency. But if the letter is a kind of bill, it
is also a material object. Betty and Noddy Boffin (both illiterate) treat it as a
physical thing whose appearance and storability are the issues. Boffin urges,
“Give her the letter, make her take the letter, put it in her pocket by violence”
(434). And Betty takes the letter willingly, agreeing that “it’s a beautiful letter”
(434). The two working-class, elderly characters, who had little education in
their youth, concur in seeing the letter as material, paper. We see here the
characteristic split between the modern view of paper as a fluctuating instru-
ment of value and the older sense of paper as physical stuff. We have seen how
profoundly this contrast characterizes Cranford, but it also becomes key to Our
Mutual Friend.
In this respect, it may seem appropriate that Betty brings her prize piece of
paper home to a paper mill. But that mill is strangely nonindustrial. It is a “great
building full of lighted windows,” with a chimney issuing smoke and a water-
wheel churning at its side, with a lake and a “plantation of trees” nearby (565).
This idyllic paper mill appears to have no products, except, oddly, Betty’s corpse,
reverently placed “in that sweet, fresh, empty store-room of the mill” (570). In a
kind of Derridian logic of the supplement, Betty represents yet replaces the
absent paper. More specifically, the generic “paper currency” that would nor-
mally be produced by a paper mill gets replaced by a special, sentimentally
charged, sacred piece of paper, the irreplaceable letter that is the object of
Betty’s last dying hopes. Industrial product thereby gets replaced by a craft
object, a handmade, beloved item that functions to cement social networks.
For that letter performs a significant social mission. Lizzie Hexam finds the
dying Betty and recognizes the names on the letter. This scene of a sympathetic
younger woman facilitating the delivery of the elder’s words may well remind us
of the episodes in Cranford where Mary oversees the transactions with Matty’s
banknote and sends the letter to Peter. Like Mary, Lizzie constitutes herself the
successor to the feeble elder, circulating the material about which she cares so
much but can no longer carry herself. And like Mary, she knows how to use mod-
ern postal networks. Whereas Betty’s dying fear is that the letter won’t be found,
Lizzie is perfectly confident in mailing it back and requesting further directions,
and of course, the letter reaches its destination flawlessly. The Boffins therefore
travel to the funeral and meet Lizzie at last.
In this sense, I want to suggest that Betty can qualify as the real “mutual
friend” of the novel’s title. Although John Harmon is nominally the mutual
friend who unites Bella with the Boffins, Lizzie’s meeting with the Boffins
may be more significant. Dickens introduces the title phrase when the Boffins
mention the Wilfers’ lodger. “‘I may call him Our Mutual Friend,’ said Mr. Bof-
fin. ‘What sort of a fellow is Our Mutual Friend, now? Do you like him?’” and
apologizes for the query, remarking, “I am not particularly well acquainted
with Our Mutual Friend, for I have only seen him once” (133). This ingenu-
ous explanation undercuts the “friendship,” as does Mrs. Wilfer’s pointed
refusal to adopt Mr. Boffin’s term, and, just for good measure, Rokesmith
(Harmon) himself immediately asserts that he does not know the Boffins
(135). Mr. Boffin’s ascription of mutual friendship generates a frightened
mutual scurrying away from social bonds, with every member of the group
insisting that they are not, in fact, friends. One way to read Our Mutual Friend
is to see this fictitious friendship as central to what the novel critiques. Like
Twemlow’s persistent worry whether he is the newest or oldest friend of the
Veneerings, this mutual friendship is an abstract name to justify a transac-
tion where the real ties are economic. (Harmon is not a “friend,” because he
is the Wilfers’ lodger and Boffin’s prospective employee.) Dickens had this
title in mind for years, but by writing it into the novel in only this minor
scene, this instantly mutually renounced social overture, he suggests serious
skepticism about the possibilities of real social connection in a world of finan-
cially driven ties.32
Suppose, however, that the real mutual friend is Higden, not Harmon. Betty’s
letter brings the Boffin group together with Lizzie, “and thus it fell out that she
became the unconscious means of bringing them [Bella and Harmon] together”
(571). Bella and Harmon’s mutual interest breaks through their constraint, they
clasp hands, and Bella sheds tears. At the same time, Bella and Lizzie immedi-
ately fall into a cordial friendship. “I wish you could make a friend of me, Lizzie,”
says Bella, and Lizzie, captivated by her charm, “showed beyond all question that
she thought she could” (579). Bella has made two powerful connections due to
Betty’s death: a romantic one, to Harmon, and a social one, to Lizzie. Higden as
the mutual friend suggests an alternative social world, one of intensely mean-
ingful and rewarding relationships in which an attraction breaks through eti-
quette to declare itself and find a genuinely mutual response. If Higden, not
Harmon, is the mutual friend, then it is this emotive model of social relations
that the novel’s title endorses.
132 Novel Craft
This fantasy of mutual cherishing occurs in an appropriately pastoral, ideal-

ized landscape. The paper mill has a nice, clean little village and a pretty river
with a wooded riverbank, a “great serene mirror of the river [that] seemed as
if it might have reproduced all it had ever reflected between those placid
banks, and brought nothing to the light save what was peaceful, pastoral, and
blooming” (571, 576–577). Michelle Allen points out how odd this depiction
is. “Paper mills were implicated in the problem of environmental pollution.
Their effect on the health of rivers in particular was disastrous,” since they
spewed carbonate of soda and lime, bleaching powders, and the wash from old
rags.33 But for at least fifteen years, Dickens had derived pleasure from imag-
ining paper mills as engines of purification. In “A Paper-Mill,” published in
Household Words in 1850, Dickens exults over the sight of a paper mill. In
Allen’s account:
“Paper!” he rhapsodizes, “White pure, spick and span new paper . . . can
it ever come from rags like these?” As the repetition throughout the
article of the words “pure,” “clean,” and “white” suggests, Dickens rep-
resents the process of paper making explicitly as a process of purifica-
tion, of cleansing. . . . Originally associated with clothing, the rag sheds
its grosser origins to become the sanctified tool of artistic creation—
writing paper.34
Ignoring the actual chemical pollution of paper mills, Dickens remakes paper-
making into a fantasy of cleansing. And Betty’s death can be read, not as a stum-
bling deterioration toward a miserable oblivion in the shadow of the factory, but
as rebirth. According to Allen, “By traveling against the current toward the river’s
unpolluted source, Betty finds the purity imaginatively associated with both a
pristine river and the moral innocence of childhood.”35
Moreover, this mill is a community. It is run by a kindly Jewish couple who
appear to treat the employees like their own children: they “most willingly and
cheerfully do their duty to all of us who are employed here, and we try to do
ours to them. Indeed they do much more than their duty to us, for they are
wonderfully mindful of us in many ways” (570). Indeed, in the 1860s, some
paper mill owners did engage in town development. J. Munsell remarked in
1864, the year of Our Mutual Friend, “in a little more than a quarter of a century
the machines have entirely superseded the diminutive hand-mills which
sparsely dotted the country, and gigantic establishments have risen up in their
places. Paper-mill villages, and banking institutions even, have grown out of
this flourishing branch of industrial art.”36 His description of factory towns
does not necessarily imply the kind of town established by the Jewish couple;
Dickens imagines such an idyllic realm because he is attempting to cleanse the
industrial institution.
What the Jewish paper mill managers have produced here, in other words, is
not paper. It is, rather, an ideal community, and what it generates is the proper
treatment of human beings. Its product really is Betty, not paper. Or more pre-
cisely, it exists to support the value of Betty’s “Letter. Paper” instead of generic
reams of blank pages. Thus to give Betty a good death, Dickens has to empty the
factory, to stress its humane qualities and mystify its production, to emphasize
its purification and erase its pollution. In short, Dickens refashions it into part
of the craft realm instead of an industrial establishment.
C ra f t a n d C a p i t a l i s m
It is not so easy for Dickens to write a literal craft realm. When he tries to give
Mrs. Boffin a craft-marked interior, the space is riven with ambivalence. The Boffins’
room contains two hard wooden settles with tables, shelves with cold meat,
bottles of liquor, flaring gaslight, and sawdust and sand on the floor. It reminds
Wegg of a “tap-room” and is clearly a utilitarian masculine space for eating,
drinking, and working. But in the middle of the room is “a centre-piece devoted
to Mrs. Boffin” (74). As the term centerpiece implies, Mrs. Boffin’s bower is all
about ornamentation. With expensive and garishly colored sofa, footstool, and
little table on a flowery carpet, its furniture is suitable only for relaxation; the
“little table” can hardly hold more than trifles and is already occupied by domes-
tic handicrafts, “stuffed birds and waxen fruits under glass shades” (74).37 This
taxidermy and wax fruit display was presumably purchased, for it seems unlikely
that Mrs. Boffin, with no training or experience in middle-class domestic handi-
craft, could have made items requiring such expertise. Her space, therefore,
advertises skills that she does not actually possess. Mr. Boffin’s space, however,
remains a working-class ideal founded on the pub. “I don’t go higher than com-
fort, and comfort of the sort that I’m equal to the enjoyment of,” Boffin explains.
“So Mrs. Boffin, she keeps up her part of the room, in her way; I keep up my part
of the room in mine. . . . If I get by degrees to be a high-flyer at Fashion, then
Mrs. Boffin will by degrees come for’arder. If Mrs. Boffin should ever be less of a
dab at Fashion than she is at the present time, then Mrs. Boffin’s carpet would
go back’arder” (74–75).
The division of this room, though comic, reveals a fundamental split in the
novel. How does one correlate a working-class subject’s history, needs, and
preferences with the middle-class aesthetic and emotional ethos to which
she is supposed to aspire? The Boffins have managed it by locating each class
aesthetic in a different member of the couple and assigning each a different
space, dramatizing just how difficult it is for Boffin to move into fashion. When
Boffin eventually finds a will that confirms his legal inheritance of the entire
fortune, he hides it and only reveals its existence on the (rather comical)
134 Novel Craft
condition that he can relinquish the fortune and take only his small mound
of rubbish instead (861). Like Betty, he is anxious to maintain his original
impoverishment, and Dickens’s insistence on representing the Boffins as
proudly working class in lifestyle, yet aspirationally middle class in decor,
generates a space that is impossibly internally conflicted.
The working poor are not allowed to sell, to love, to live, to work, or to die in
terms that correlate with the conditions Dickens so persuasively describes. This
fundamental problem indicates that something deeper is going on. Since the
craft paradigm assumes and reinforces middle-class norms, why does Dickens
assign it to the working poor? Why, in other words, does Dickens depict all these
disabled, malnourished, indigent, exploited subjects as if they are leisured, pros-
perous, middle-class ladies? There would be no such incongruity if Dickens had
shown Bella Wilfer, Sophronia Lammle, or Georgiana Podsnap making handi-
crafts. Domestic handicraft would presumably give lazy Bella the habit of cheer-
ful industry, teach impecunious Sophronia thrift, and offer bored Georgiana a
welcome hobby. Yet Dickens never allows Sophronia or Georgiana any improv-
ing hobbies, and he retrains Bella through cookery instead, avoiding the novel’s
signature handicraft activity of small recycling. It is as if Dickens goes out of his
way to keep his middle-class female subjects away from handicraft. What he
affiliates them with, instead, is the new finance. In 1865, middle-class subjects
were buying shares of stock. And it is this activity that Dickens wants to explore.
Dickens uses the salvage world as a standpoint from which to critique the
practices of mid-Victorian capitalism.38 Michael Cotsell and Mary Poovey have
both analyzed the ways Our Mutual Friend invokes and responds to the various
financial innovations and crises of the 1860s, including fallacious joint-stock
companies, bank failures, rigged stocks, and shady transactions.39 The novel’s
skepticism about stocks is famous:
As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the

one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no
established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have
Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital
letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris,
and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to?
Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares.
What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of
himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never
produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares!
(136–137)
“Shares,” in this passage, is the opposite of the values of the mid-Victorian

novel and, specifically, the Dickens novel. “Shares” threatens everything that
drives the Dickensian bildungsroman. “Shares” erases the urge to find one’s
family and establish a true identity; it creates a fictitious career instead of
teaching the subject the necessary skills for success; it erases narrative, since it
makes origin and goal illegible. Instead of the story of growth and develop-
ment, “shares” mires one in a perpetual present that has no relation to deeper
experiences, values, or qualities. The subject of “shares” might be what we would
today consider a postmodern subject, a media creation, whose identity is solely
self-generated and shaped by public wealth rather than private qualities. It is a
notion that Dickens abhors.
It is also a notion that he explores in numerous unsavory characters: Fledgeby,
Lammle, Podsnap, Veneering. “Fascination” Fledgeby emblematizes the new
finance, as he runs a complicated loan business in which he purchases bad debts
in order to browbeat the debtors into paying.40 Fledgeby’s business, Pubsey and
Co., has all the hallmarks of the new capitalism. Fledgeby has no customers or
merchandise; he consults “a sheet of foolscap covered with close writing” listing
“queer bills” that are for sale “in parcels as set forth . . . or the lump” (470). No
human beings are involved. Fledgeby ticks the bills he wants to purchase, and
the bill moves from one broker to another according to the vagaries of the mar-
ket rather than personal relations between debtor and borrower. These floating
bills, abstract and nonhuman, emblematize a new financial world in which the
previous rules are upside down: a debt is worth money, a friend can sell your
interests, and nothing is what it seems to be. What makes Dickens uneasy—as
it worried so many other mid-Victorian novelists41—is the way value fluctuates,
unfixed, depending on the circulation of scraps of paper that represent other
transactions in process. Whether shares, bills, or IOUs, this “waste-paper” has
no necessary relation to traditional fixed guarantors of value (470). We might
note here what Deborah Heller memorably describes as “Dickens’s almost medi-
eval repugnance for some of the basic institutions of capitalism.”42
At this point, it may be useful to return to “that mysterious paper currency
which circulates in London when the wind blows gyrated here and there and
everywhere” (168–169). Conflating currency and litter is a profoundly disori-
enting idea. As we have seen, in the eighteenth century, paper was a valuable
commodity, sparingly used and employed in intricate decorative procedures.
Through the mid-nineteenth century, paper became a cheap material to be cut
and pasted, valuable not for itself but for the pictures and text printed on it. By
the 1860s, paper had come so far from its previous incarnation as a precious
material that it could be nothing more than “waste paper,” urban detritus,
blown around the streets. It is “paper currency” partly because the urban scav-
engers interviewed by Mayhew and represented by characters like Krook in
Bleak House could collect this waste and resell it; even litter had value. It is
“paper currency” partly because Dickens is joking that these random wind-
blown gyrations resemble currency’s circulation through the economy. But it is
136 Novel Craft
also “paper currency” because the new finance was based on paper, checks,
IOUs, and bills and because it was terrifying that in these new conditions value
was no longer located in the object’s material itself. How could one differenti-
ate between litter (scraps of newspaper and old letters and advertisements)
and bills worth thousands of pounds? This is the problem the illiterate Noddy
Boffin faces, adrift in piles of papers whose value he cannot ascertain. When
Rokesmith (Harmon) becomes his secretary, the sign of Harmon’s skill is his
ability to ticket each paper with a figure, to translate the meaningless mark-
ings into real values. Characteristically, Boffin is so unaccustomed to the
notion of paper as something to organize that he can only imagine a “secre-
tary” as a solid piece of wooden furniture (115–120, 206). In Cranford, Our
Mutual Friend, and, as we shall see, Phoebe Junior, the denizen of the older
economy gets associated with sheer matter, against the abstract fluidity of the
new paper finance.
In this novel—as in other craft narratives—the blizzard of waste paper gen-
erates a desire for a solid, material respite. The opposite of “paper currency” is
true metal, real coinage. Dickens yearns for material whose value is undeniable
and measurable. As Michael Cotsell puts it, “In the waste-paper world of Our
Mutual Friend, Veneering, a ‘paper’ man, interchangeable with his own calling
cards (I.17.258), is contrasted with the ‘golden dustman,’ Boffin.”43 Similarly,
Bella is the “true golden gold,” and when she nurses her baby, the Boffins muse
that the Harmon money “had turned bright again, after a long, long rust in the
dark, and was at last beginning to sparkle in the sunlight” (845, 850). In a par-
ticularly off-putting passage, John Harmon identifies Bella as “a most precious
and sweet commodity that was always looking up, and that never was worth less
than all the gold in the world” (748). While Harmon eschews the miserly focus
on money that destroyed his father, he nevertheless cannot free himself from
using monetary language to evaluate intimate relationships. His ambivalence is
writ large in Our Mutual Friend. Uneasy with his own nostalgia for gold, Dickens
lampoons the feeling in the famous description of the Podsnaps’ solid plate that
invites one to melt it down and in Noddy Boffin’s fascination with misers secret-
ing gold coins. Yet the novel can offer no alternative. It is either waste paper
that blows about promiscuously or metal hoarded in the dark. It is either debt
or miserliness.
An emotional and social world based on debt is deeply problematic. Social pur-
suits, like the opera or dances, are horridly uncomfortable because they are irrel-
evant to the real fiscal grounds of connection between people. Public declarations
of fidelity are based on nothing and therefore collapse; marriages fail; elections
are fraudulent. Fledgeby’s history reveals the way debt poisons the most intimate
relations. His mother married his father to settle her debt with him; their marital
lives are defined by their attitudes toward expenditure (301). Fledgeby’s friend
Alfred Lammle is bound to him by a debt rather than emotional pleasure, and his
employee Riah works for him to pay off a debt (307, 310). The Lammles make a
similar bargain when they marry for the money each thinks the other possesses,
and they enter into a partnership of economic predation when the relation of
economic dependence is proven nonviable. Mr. Twemlow’s anxiety about whether
he is the oldest friend or the newest friend exemplifies the fundamental uneasi-
ness of the new financial realm: what is friendship? When abstract transactions
have replaced personal bargaining, how does one know who one’s friends are? In
his famous critique of the role of money in Our Mutual Friend, J. Hillis Miller
identifies this alienation as central to the novel:
The Veneering dinner parties are an elaborate theatrical ceremony

resting on nothing, and the people who come to these parties have been
so dehumanized by their submission to money that they exist not as
individuals, but as their abstract roles, “Boots,” “Brewer,” and so on. . . .
Instead of being a unique and therefore individually valuable individual,
each person becomes his monetary worth, an object interchangeable
with others. . . . Money turns people into objects which are, like the
Podsnap plate, valued only according to the money they are worth.44
As Miller’s analysis shows, the attitude is pervasive in Our Mutual Friend, and I
would add only that the new finance and the old economy pose different prob-
lems of dehumanization. While older behaviors—locating value in metal, for
instance—lead to hoarding, miserliness, and a fetishized understanding of
value itself, the new rules of paper currency make value fluid and abstract, ren-
dering all money equally suspect and offering no solid basis on which to found
social relations.
Novelty is, apparently, as bad as debt. In a novel enamored of recycling, virtue
resides in creatively reusing debris, while vice means excessive and unnecessary
consumption. As Natalka Freeland comments:
The Veneerings’ world is characterized by a kind of planned obsoles-

cence, which has no place for things that are no longer new. The
Lammles, both of whose value on the marriage market is considerably
diminished by their maturity, know all about the importance of new-
ness. Although they are practically penniless, they never consider pre-
serving or recycling anything: when Sophronia breaks her parasol, her
husband coolly recommends that she “throw it away” since it is “use-
less” and therefore “ridiculous.”45
The Veneerings are “bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter

of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick-and-span new. All their
furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their
138 Novel Craft
plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were
new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new . . .” (20). The middle
class lives in a financial world of disposable, constant consumption, violating the
salvage ethic that Dickens holds dear. John Plotz notes that “Dickens generally
goes out of his way to point out a disjunction between pricey and nostalgic
object: meltdownable teapots here, poignant treasures there.”46 The wealthy Pod-
snaps and Veneerings have the teapots. The starving Jenny has the treasures.
In short, Our Mutual Friend presents a dramatically bifurcated Victorian
world in which obscure working-class characters demonstrate worthiness by
painstakingly crafting small salable items out of rubbish, thereby demonstrating
their adherence to middle-class ideologies that are unlikely, even dangerous in
their class positions. The result is suffering, failure, and death. Meanwhile, pros-
perous upper-middle-class characters have embarked on a new mode of thinking
about familial, social, and ethical life, predicated on new ideas about the fluidity
of money and the facility with which they can acquire consumer items.47 This
new finance relies on paper currency, which is unsatisfactory, though its alterna-
tive, hoards of gold, appears to be equally problematic. To be an impoverished
maker of small handicraft is the only way to be virtuous—and it can only mean
economic failure.
These two modes of economic thought, the new finance and the domestic handi-
craft, cannot coexist. When Fledgeby sees Jenny and a friend seated on the roof of
his brokerage, their position literally outside the financial realm confounds him.
“And you,” said Fledgeby . . . “do you buy anything here, miss?”
“No, sir.”
“Nor sell anything neither, miss?”
“No, sir.” (314)
Jenny explains that they come to rest, which gives them a sense of tranquility
and gratitude that she identifies as “being dead.” Fledgeby, wholly unable to
understand, sums up, “I hope she ain’t bad enough to put any chap up to the
fastenings and get the premises broken open. You look out” (316). Fledgeby
understands that the craftswomen want something that is not for sale, but in
his world of quantified pricing, what is not for sale can only be what is stolen.
T he Je w in the Tex t
However, there is one body in this novel that unites the world of labor-intensive
small salvage and the world of bran-new money: Riah, the Jew. We have seen
how Gaskell’s Unitarian embrace of intellectual complexity and Yonge’s adher-
ence to her High Anglican missionary work determine how they depict the craft
world. In Cranford, Matty’s and Mary’s perspectives are both given sympatheti-
cally, with full acknowledgment of their different but equally valid presupposi-
tions. In The Daisy Chain, characters and readers alike are dragooned into serving
the central mission of petrifying wildness into acceptable decorum. In Our
Mutual Friend, I suggest, part of the problem is that no pervasive religious struc-
ture organizes the characters’ perceptions. Dickens’s own religious feeling—
apparently an inclusive, mild form of faith—is not in evidence.48 What replaces
it is Judaism—and it is a Judaism that is, peculiarly, an empty set.
In Riah, Dickens creates a virtuous Jew who leads a secret life. In the Victo-
rian imagination, the “Jew” was the public symbol of interest-bearing finance.
But here, the bill-broker Jew turns out to lead another career as sustainer of the
residual craft realm. By day, Riah manages debts; by night, Riah provides beads.
Pubsey and Co. is the switchpoint of the novel’s two economies. On the one
hand, it is the locus of the sense of modern finance as emotionally empty, with
real relations replaced by transactions. In this bill brokerage, the real power
resides with Fledgeby, and its real business is purchasing bad debts of people like
Alfred Lammle in a strictly self-interested fashion (or, if it has an emotional
component, it is the satisfaction of spite rather than the fulfillment of friend-
ship). Similarly, Fledgeby’s relation with his employee Riah is based on self-
interest, not on loyalty. Yet on the other hand, Pubsey and Co. supports the craft
economy. In this realm, it is a shop of craft paraphernalia where the vendor
is Riah, and its business is selling “waste and damage” to customers like Jenny
Wren in a way that exemplifies sentimental attachment between buyer and
seller. We can see why the paper mill was managed by Jews; in this novel, Jew-
ishness is a force that perpetuates craft values.49 Yet the fact that the mill man-
agers’ Jewishness is never explored points to a deeper problem, and it is a
problem that undermines Riah’s character.
For readers of this novel, Riah has always been anomalous. He appears to be
allegorical rather than realist, and he challenges credulity in everything from his
quasi-biblical rhetoric to his secret probity. Jonathan Grossman intriguingly
suggests that “Dickens does not make a mimetic attempt to construct a Jew,”
but instead, “Riah is a representation of the impossibility of depicting Jews.”50
Riah is impossible because Dickens understands subjectivity to derive from
one’s place in the community. This is particularly true for Jews. Apparently,
any Jew’s action “compromise[s] the Jews of all conditions and all countries”
(794–795). Yet Dickens never shows Riah in the context of that Jewish commu-
nity. Just as the Jewish-led community of the paper mill develops in the absence
of Jewishness, so, too, Riah’s virtues derive from a Jewish community that
remains unspoken. Jewishness is responsible for everything, but it is unimagi-
nable. A similar problem affects Daniel Deronda, where Jewishness is central yet
virtually unshown, as John Plotz has demonstrated.51 Because the content of
Judaism remains undescribed, Riah can only be seen in a secular context, which
140 Novel Craft
means oppositionally, because he must perform against the hostile assump-

tions of his Christian audience. It is because Riah remains isolated, never seen
in the context of his community, that, Murray Baumgarten argues, Riah’s
story is not “narratable in the same discourse as the one that recounts the
adventures of Lizzie and Charlie, Eugene and Mortimer, Bradley Headstone and
Rogue Riderhood, Wegg and Venus and Sloppy.”52
I’d like to extend this reading to suggest that Riah’s impossible private side and
his embattled public side correlate with the two paradigms Dickens is mobilizing
in Our Mutual Friend. Riah’s private community exists, but instead of showing the
Jewish community, Dickens shows us Riah nurturing Lizzie and Jenny in his roof
garden, where books, flowers, fruit, and trimmings are shared in peace. The com-
munity formed by craft replaces that Jewish community as a place where Riah
can apparently be an authentic self. Craft is a way of making the communitarian
values of Jewishness visible in a novel that does not allow Jews discourse. Mean-
while, the hostile, coldly judging debtors that persistently name him a money-
lender represent Dickens’s repugnance to modern capitalism. This circle is not
social, but financial; it consists of his employer and his clients; and as relation-
ships are monetarized, identity becomes solely economic, not emotional. Riah’s
day job is as an instrument of the new finance among people who mistrust each
other, but his private night world is as loving facilitator of domestic handicraft.
Imagining a character who can participate in both worlds is almost impossible.
In that respect, a Jew is the ideal choice for Dickens. He needed to imagine
someone with dual loyalties to different communities, someone who could pass in
the world of modernity while retaining private adherences to older practices.
Drawing on these nineteenth-century notions of the Jew, he imagined Riah.
Or—to put it in more modern terms—for someone who can live in both the craft
world and the realm of finance, Dickens needed what we today might see as the
subject of a global world, someone with multiple affiliations and histories, fluidly
combining communities. In the nineteenth century, the Jew was particularly
ambiguous, “neither black nor white” in Bryan Cheyette’s terms, an international
subject circulating through nations while loyal to a private group, a foreigner who
was as Londonized as any Cockney.53 The Jew was also feminized, something
particularly true in Riah’s case, since he wears skirts, tends a garden, distributes
ribbons, and is nicknamed “fairy godmother.”54 The Jew was the perfect figure for
a changing cultural norm. Whether Dickens knew it or not, the Eastern patriarch,
the most archaic figure he imagined, was something like the subject of modernity.
Yet Dickens could not fully imagine or endorse such a hybrid figure. The “Jew”
has no content: no community, no doctrine, no moral code. The imagined dual
structure ascribed to Judaism is hollow and does not satisfactorily support the
novel in the ways Gaskell’s Unitarianism and Yonge’s Anglicanism do. As Deborah
Heller points out, Riah dwindles away as a character and finally disappears from
the novel, apparently not even invited to Lizzie’s wedding. The last speech in the
novel is Twemlow’s quavery reassurance that Lizzie and Eugene have attained
gentlemanliness and ladyhood. Dickens retreats to a nostalgic Englishness.
Instead of recognizing and embracing hybridity, he can only see a uniform iden-
tity as desirable, and he can only confess its decay. Perhaps the problem is actu-
ally that Riah tries too hard to choose the world of craft, for it is when the Jew
resigns from Fledgeby’s that he leaves the novel, his role as tentative, impossi-
ble, imaginary bridge between the financial and craft registers having ended.55
When he picks the side of the angels, the craft world, Our Mutual Friend may
approve of him, but it has no more use for him.
The person who replaces Riah, structurally, is Sloppy. We last see Riah living
with Jenny as her “fairy godmother.” By the end of the novel, however, it is
Sloppy who enters Jenny’s home and brings her semi-magical gifts, with a strong
hint of a future romance between the two (884). Sloppy will make an ornamented
crutch handle especially for Jenny and will be paid with a song, not with money.
The personalized production and sentimental rewards of the craft system could
hardly be showcased any better. If Riah offered a potentially new kind of subject
whose hybridity and fluency in different worlds offered a new kind of hope, his
replacement by Sloppy marks, characteristically, a return to tradition. Sloppy is a
well-worn kind of Dickensian character, reminiscent of Smike in Nicholas Nick-
leby or Maggy in Little Dorrit: the “simple” orphan brought up in terrible poverty,
utterly devoted to kindly rescuers. The disabled orphan’s exuberant displays of
affectionate, inconvenient loyalty generate sentimental merriment in the reader,
a laugh mingling with a tear. Sloppy is all English and all Dickens, and by gently
nudging him toward a romance plot as well, Dickens places the novel’s ending
firmly in the comic tradition as far as Jenny’s story is concerned.
Ending the Craft Nar rative

At the end of Our Mutual Friend, then, Dickens has managed to resolve all of his
conflicted working-class subjects’ lives by transforming them into the kind of
bourgeois subjects they had pretended to be all along.56 Jenny is on her way to
becoming a middle-class female subject, her textile skills diverted to making
gifts for her friends’ babies, softened by the prospect of marriage. Venus is
reconfigured as a middle-class provider, happy in his marriage, with a domesti-
cally comfortable shop whose contents cannot offend the most delicate feminine
sensibility. Betty has died in a pastoral utopia. And the Boffins’ Bower has been
altered beyond recognition.
The Boffins’ house is now decorated according to Bella’s fantasy. The stairs are
wreathed with flowers and feature “a charming aviary, in which a number of
tropical birds, more gorgeous in color than the flowers, were flying about; and
among those birds were gold and silver fish, and mosses, and water-lilies, and a
142 Novel Craft
fountain, and all manner of wonders” (839). Mrs. Boffin’s taxidermic fowl have
been replaced by living tropical birds; her flowered carpet has given way to real
mosses and water lilies on the floor; her wax fruits under glass have ceded to
flowers twining up the stairs. The preserved crafts, the altered, petrified, rear-
ranged nature of Mrs. Boffin’s “fashion” have given way to the living nature pre-
ferred by the new middle-class feminine inhabitant. It is a fairy-tale fantasy,
complete with an ivory casket filled with marvelous jewels and a rainbow-hued
nursery (849). Crafts are gone. The female inhabitant need exert no labor to
transform the materials of this house. Bella simply makes wishes, and her hus-
band does the work to carry them out (“‘though we were hard put to it,’ said
John Harmon, ‘to get it done in so short a time’”) (849). This “dainty house” is
uncomfortable because transformative craft has become invisible; the work that
the novel has previously valorized has been transformed into magical gift giving.
Its essential impossibility is confirmed by the fact that it is built on the system-
atic and intimate deception of Bella. When Bella marries a man who has an
invented name and an imaginary career, we are given more than a hint that the
happy, prosperous domestic life she enters is a dream. The novel’s real alterna-
tives are struggling in the urban underclass to sell small handicrafts or else man-
aging meretricious wealth via “shares.” But neither works.
For craft is no way to live. In 1865, it was in decline, and in this novel, it is
practiced only by the economically marginal.57 As Natalka Freeland writes,
“Mr. Venus and Jenny Wren . . . operate at the uncertain boundaries of animation. . . .
Their work is specifically directed towards revitalizing their lifeless materials.”58
Venus’s craft is manipulating dead bodies, and even the rearranged corpses are
on the verge of death, fighting duels or being pierced with arrows.59 Betty fights
off “deadness” in her wanderings (425, 434). Jenny’s dolls “are every bit as life-
less as Venus’s fatal articulations,” for the wax dolls are in danger of melting
away.60 Jenny invites a friend into the craft realm on the roof of Pubsey and Co.
by crying, “Come up and be dead!” (315). To be in the craft realm, practicing
superseded arts on waste products for a pittance, is to be dead. “But you are
not dead, you know,” Jenny instructs Fledgeby. “Get down to life!” (315). Like
it or not, the financial industry is life in the mid-nineteenth century. And
Dickens admits this tacitly through the many ways he undermines his own craft
paradigm—both within the narrative, by making his craftspeople experience
physical suffering and economic distress and making his middle-class female
subjects avoid craft, and on the metafictional level, by producing incoherent fic-
tions of subjectivity in which anomalous middle-class ideals endanger the char-
acters’ own best interests.
Our Mutual Friend itself could be seen as “waste paper,” a manuscript that
generates tens of thousands of copies, a physical stack of papers about to be
blown all over London in the form of monthly serial and bound publications.61
Not surprisingly, however, Dickens eschews the vision of himself as generator of
paper and instead connects himself with a much older idea from the craft para-
digm. In the “Postscript” to Our Mutual Friend, he writes about his “design” as
“the relation of its finer threads to the whole pattern which is always before the
eyes of the story weaver at his loom” (897). Dickens thinks of himself as a maker
of tapestry, one of the oldest and most idealized of handicrafts. The postscript
describes the traumatic event of June 9, 1865. “Mr and Mrs Boffin (in their man-
uscript dress of receiving Mr and Mrs Lammle at breakfast) were on the South
Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. . . . They were much
soiled, but otherwise unhurt” (897). If for a moment Dickens was able to imag-
ine himself as a weaver at his loom, an idealized vision of the medieval crafts-
man, his attention quickly turns to “manuscript dress,” as if the manuscript
itself were a casual outfit, and then further “soiled.” This image is further under-
scored when he draws our attention to another scene that he has salvaged from
the train wreck, “Mr Riderhood inspecting Bradley Headstone’s red neckerchief
as he lay asleep” (897). In other words, a lofty craft identification dwindles into
a reference to a bit of cloth debris that Dickens can rejuvenate. It is as if the low-
liness of craft, the association with failure and salvage, names the novel itself, in
the kind of self-referential work we have seen throughout this book. Nancy Metz
has identified the author’s work as a kind of taxidermy, in which Dickens, like
Mr. Venus, pieces together small scraps over time to build a coherent whole. It is
an attractive idea. But the image Dickens himself chooses to name his work is
more like Betty Higden’s dirty clothes to launder or Jenny’s scraps of cloth, the
“damage and waste.” To leave the reader with the image of Our Mutual Friend as
a soiled piece of cloth is poignant, to say the least. In this novel, the craft para-
digm is deeply fragmented, perhaps disintegrating beyond repair. Perhaps Our
Mutual Friend is trying to cleanse itself from the taint of the new commerce by
imagining itself as a craft alternative. But like Betty’s knitting, handicraft is a
good (in every sense) that nobody wants to buy. Like Betty, handicraft has been
shelved in the empty warehouse of industrialism, while modernity goes on else-
where. Like Betty, handicraft can be our mutual friend only when it has died.
Figure 5.1 Hair Brooch.
CHAPTER 5
Connoisseurship
GIVING CREDIT TO PHOEBE JUNIOR
“Money’s money—but there’s more than money here.”

—Phoebe Junior
Like Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant wrote in the midst of the banking
scandals, stock market, and new financial practices that made money feel worri-
somely abstract in the 1860s. Like Dickens, Oliphant identified waste paper as
the sign of the new finance, contrasting it with solid, heavy, metal coinage. And
like Dickens, Oliphant critiqued both sides. But she came up with a different
answer to the period’s problem of the instability of value and representation.
While Dickens treated the craft paradigm as a nostalgic if doomed alternative
to the new marketplace, the reservoir of humane values in a repulsive culture,
Oliphant instead explored the way that the marketplace itself altered and super-
seded craft and craft values.
As befits the new credit economy, Margaret Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior (1876)
focuses on connoisseurship, or what the Victorians called “discrimination”: the
intelligent identification of which artifacts merit acquisition.1 This contrasts
strongly with the production-oriented emphasis on recycling that characterizes
Our Mutual Friend. Whereas Dickens critiques the Lammles for purchasing new
items, such consumer behavior is the basis of all the events of Oliphant’s novel.
In this story, characters express their feelings through purchasing. Parental pride
is demonstrated by the provision of a new wardrobe; masculine self-assertion
takes the form of ordering furnishings; wealth is demonstrated by collecting
expensive paintings and ordering clothes for poor relations. The delights of
145
146 Novel Craft
shopping in Phoebe Junior are far more obvious than the pleasures of small
(unremunerative) craft making were in Our Mutual Friend.
Phoebe Junior marks the end of the dynamic we have been tracing in this
book. In the novels of the 1850s, Cranford and The Daisy Chain, domestic handi-
craft is prominent. It defines the values of the town of Cranford, a women’s
world based on scraps and patches. Handicraft is the governing metaphor of
Yonge’s novel, for in the 1850s domestic handicraft was still such a culturally
central pursuit that it could provide the model for the characters’ (and author’s)
missions. However, we begin to see craft dwindling in the 1860s in Our Mutual
Friend, where it is still frequently invoked and sentimentally defended but
persistently associated with vocational failure and financial instability. By 1876,
the year Phoebe Junior was published, craft had essentially disappeared. Nobody
in this novel makes handicrafts.2 Instead, Oliphant’s novel replaces the craft
paradigm with the new consumerist ethos that ushers in modernity. Indeed,
Phoebe Junior explicitly rewrites The Daisy Chain, with a large family called the
Mays who, when reminded that they share a name with Yonge’s novelistic fam-
ily, retort indignantly that “we are not a set of prigs like those people. We are not
goody, whatever we are” (195). “May” is a noun in Yonge’s novel, representing
the mayflower (hawthorn) and thereby invoking the novel’s horticultural meta-
phor. But “May” in Oliphant’s text is the modal verb, in the words of the OED
“expressing ability or power,” “expressing objective possibility, opportunity, or
absence of prohibitive conditions,” “expressing permission or sanction: To be
allowed (to do something) by authority, law, rule, morality, reason, etc.”3 These
are the central questions of Phoebe Junior. May a clergyman forge a bill? Does he
have the ability, is anyone going to prohibit him, is it morally permissible? In the
mismatch among these three conditions lies the horrible riddle of Mr. May’s
identity, the issue of what happens to someone left suspended in “may.”
The gap between the material mayflower and the abstract, putative “may”
itself expresses the growing uncertainty associated with the new finance. But
Oliphant separates herself from her rival in other ways. Interestingly, as one
character points out, another character comes straight from “Miss Yonge. I know
you as well as if I had known you all my life.” On the other hand, she claims, the
local millionaire is a new figure in fiction. “But then, no person of genius has
taken any trouble about him” (234). The new figure, the millionaire, indicates
what has changed since The Daisy Chain. In a different economic realm, with a
different relation to money, Phoebe Junior also foregrounds a new kind of con-
sumerist expertise.
Margaret Oliphant was especially interested in these modern financial speci-
mens. As the sole supporter of a large family that depended entirely on her pro-
ductivity, Oliphant was under a kind of desperate economic pressure not felt by
her contemporaries Gaskell and Yonge. She maintained her family through sheer
creative force, managing “to keep my household and make a number of people
Connoisseurship: Giving Credit to Phoebe Junior 147
comfortable, at the cost of incessant work, and an occasional great crisis of

anxiety, [rather] than to live the self-restrained life which the greater artist
imposes upon himself.”4 As Oliphant admitted, she found the perpetual threat
of financial catastrophe stimulating.
This experience probably underlay Oliphant’s keen interest in Victorian
finance. She applauded “The Autobiography of a Joint-Stock Company (Lim-
ited),” the story of a fraudulent company, written by her cousin, the diplomat
and journalist Laurence Oliphant, in 1876. The company describes itself: “I was
conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity, and became almost immediately the
means of demoralising every one who came into contact with me, of deceiving
those who trusted in me, and of crushing those who opposed me, until my own
turn came, and I fizzed out in a gutter of fraud like a bad squib.”5 Margaret Oli-
phant read his tale of financial chicanery as typical of the entire class of modern
finance, a “daring and pungent piece of satire, which portrays the conception,
growth, prosperity, and ruin of one of the many commercial ventures of the
age.”6 Indeed, Oliphant’s fiction testifies to her fascination with the new credit
economy and its opportunities for financial disaster. In Miss Marjoribanks, Hes-
ter, and Phoebe Junior, men destroy the family fortunes—sometimes willfully—
and it is the daughter (or granddaughter or great-niece) who revels in her power
to rectify the financial mess, even if she nominally knows nothing about busi-
ness. The thrill of recalibrating the local economy is the true pleasure for these
young women, far more so than the orthodox marriage plot in which they are
supposed to be involved. Women prove to have an innate sense of accounting,
and, as Phoebe’s narrator asks, “Who can say that she was not as romantic as any
girl of twenty could be? only her romance took an unusual form. It was her head
that was full of throbbings and pulses, not her heart” (300).
If Oliphant thrilled to tales of dramatic corporate collapses, her own daily
money management partook of the drearier nature of household management.
As she wrote wearily in 1880,
[The wife] must watch over all the minutiae of household living; she
must keep a careful eye upon weekly bills, and invent daily dinners, and
keep servants in order, and guide the whole complicated machinery so
that nothing shall jar or creak, and no part of it get out of gear. House-
keeping is a fine science, and there are some women who show a real
genius in it; but genius that makes everything easy is rare; and in gen-
eral it is a hard struggle to carry on that smooth and seemingly easy
routine of existence which seen outside appears to go of itself. Try to let
it go by itself for ever so short a time and you will find the difference.7
Oliphant saw household work as an indispensable but laborious daily chore,

and, interestingly, she regarded her writing in much the same way. For Oliph-
148 Novel Craft
ant, writing and housekeeping were intertwined activities, pursued in the same
room, even at the same table. In her Autobiography, she reminisced, “I had no
table even to myself, much less a room to work in, but sat at the corner of the
family table with my writing-book, with everything going on as if I had been
making a shirt instead of writing a book.”8 Her mother did needlework at the
same table. Oliphant did not experience separate spheres, with masculine eco-
nomic productivity occurring in a public space as opposed to leisured feminine
stitching at home. Both were her responsibility, and both involved intensive
managerial oversight and continuous personal labor. Oliphant was, in fact,
acutely aware of her own anomalous identity as quasi-masculine head of house-
hold, as well as feminine manager. In “The Grievances of Women,” she bemoaned
the fact that there was no legal category for women like her.9 But in writing
Phoebe Junior, she worked out a literary category: the woman who demonstrated
male-identified expertise. A woman connoisseur—like the female banker of
Hester, the political campaign manager of Miss Marjoribanks, or, for that matter,
the head of the Oliphant household—is showing her ability to excel in a realm
of knowledge not normally acceded to her. Finding no category of Victorian
female identity suited to her vocational and managerial prowess, Oliphant
wrote her own.
T he U n d e s i ra b l e Ha ndi c ra f t
Each chapter in this book has foregrounded a paradigmatic handicraft: the spills
in Cranford, the leather leaves in The Daisy Chain, the salvage crafts of Our Mutual
Friend. In each case, the novel anxiously surveyed a modern world that seemed
to be characterized by fluctuating, impermanent, abstract paper trash and fan-
tasized about using handicraft techniques to transform them into something of
imperishable value. But in Phoebe Junior, that problem is reversed. Here the
iconic object is an enormous solid-gold hair brooch set with topazes. The brooch’s
very solidity is an affront, its value forming an obstacle to decently disposing of
the thing. Hair jewelry sums up what the novel does not want to be (figure 5.1).
And Phoebe Junior rejects what every other novel desires.
Hair jewelry had an ambiguous reputation in the latter half of the nine-
teenth century. Its main problem was that it looked too suspiciously manufac-
tured for consumers’ comfort.10 Hairwork was often farmed out to professional
jewelers and could be bought at Victorian emporia or by mail order (figure
5.2). Thus this most personal and sentimental of icons became a commodified
product, manufactured by paid strangers. As Helen Sheumaker points out,
“Hairwork was supposed to be handmade, relatively inexpensive, and senti-
mental. If the manufacture of hairwork was depersonalized or mechanized, the
meaning of hairwork was affected and it no longer served a purpose.”11 An
Figure 5.2 Hair Jewelry Catalogue Page.
object that carries both sentimental and financial value is, according to John
Plotz, the perfect type of “portable property” for the Victorians.12 But in this
case, the ornament’s financial value is precisely what negates its emotional
worth. The more it is jewelry (generated by a paid professional), the less it is
hair (marking the most intimate bodily and domestic associations).
We see this anxiety in hair jewelry instructions, which warned readers about
unscrupulous jewelers who would swap the beloved’s hair with a stranger’s hair
that was more easily worked. Hair jewelry could be forged by a jeweler, in both
senses of the word. In 1867, Mark Campbell advertised his guide to making hair
jewelry by promising that craftspeople would “enjoy the inexpressible advan-
tage and satisfaction of knowing that the material of their own handiwork is the
actual hair of the ‘loved and gone.’”13 However, Campbell’s own guide shows
why the prospect deterred handicrafters. Often using eighty skeins of hair,
divided into dozens of strands, the hair jeweler had to keep track of the compli-
cated pattern in which she moved each lock, while seated at a special braiding
table. Weaving the hair into a decorative chain was only the beginning. The hair
jeweler then had to process this chain into jewelry, coiling the hair around a
wire or wooden armature, boiling or heating the hair in an oven, shellacking
it, or wrapping it with cotton. To make flowers or leaves, she dunked the
150 Novel Craft
hair into gum tragacanth, which hardened the hair and allowed her to cut it
into patterns.14
Such complicated hair jewelry might at least win admiration for its maker’s
skill. But Mrs. Tozer’s brooch contains almost unprocessed hair. It features curls
“cut from the heads of her children [Phoebe’s mother and her uncle Tom] in early
life” (132). She offers it to Phoebe, who refuses. Mrs. Tozer tries to stir her by
adducing the competition, Phoebe’s aunt and cousin: “I should like Mrs. Tom to
see you with the brooch as she’s always wanting for Minnie. Now why should I
give my brooch to Minnie? I don’t see no reason for it, for my part,” Mrs. Tozer
opines. Her granddaughter responds, “Certainly not, grandmamma . . . you must
wear your brooches yourself, that is what I like a great deal better than giving
them either to Minnie or to me” (171–172). As the narrator points out,
It is unnecessary to say that her disinterestedness about her grand-

mother’s brooch was not perhaps so noble as it appeared on the out-
side. The article in question was a kind of small warming-pan in a very
fine solid gold mount, set with large pink topazes, and enclosing little
wavy curls of hair, one from the head of each young Tozer of the last
generation. It was a piece of jewelery very well known in Carlingford,
and the panic which rose in Phoebe’s bosom when it was offered for her
own personal adornment is more easily imagined than described. She
went upstairs feeling that she had escaped. . . . (172)
The Tozers’ brooch stagnates with one owner, unable to enter circulation. It
cannot be exchanged in the marketplace, because it is too unfashionable and
personal for anyone else to buy. But neither can it participate in the sentimental
gift exchange for which crafts were designed, because nobody wants it except
Mrs. Tozer’s greedy daughter-in-law, and Mrs. Tozer resents and refuses her
demand because it violates the sentimental rationale of craft exchange.
What causes Phoebe’s sheer panic is the particularly contaminating nature
of the hair brooch. This item combines supposedly opposite realms. Hair jew-
elry is normally a relic of the dead body, but, in this case, it commemorates the
living. It represents a family harmony that its existence itself disrupts by caus-
ing family fights over its ownership. Although it seems like a personal home-
made relic, the solid gold mount set with topaz indicates that it was made by a
jeweler. The mount is clearly made by a paid professional, but the curls of hair
could have been placed by any unskilled hand, belying the expense of the set-
ting. Thus its financial value is simultaneously high and nonexistent, for it com-
bines expensive and worthless materials. In short, this brooch appears to be a
relic of familial love, a sentimentally valued homemade craft, but in actual fact
it induces familial strife, it is manufactured, and it has financial rather than
emotional value.
If this brooch is the central craft image of the novel, then it is a satirical one.
Family values in Phoebe Junior all work like the brooch, which seems to symbol-
ize family harmony but really embody monetary interests. Phoebe visits her sick
grandparents not because of affection but because of the need to secure their
inheritance. As Phoebe’s mother cries, “I won’t leave poor mamma in the hands
of Mrs. Tom . . . not whatever it costs me” (33). This pun is typical of Oliphant’s
style, in which words chosen to express emotion covertly express financial
concerns, implying that sentimental expressions are actually economically
determined.15 The brooch is desirable to Mrs. Tom not because of the hair but
because of the gold. We might apply John Plotz’s description of a different piece
of literary jewelry to the brooch: it “is an object that necessarily circulates uneas-
ily between cash and sentimental value—an object that bears with it potentially
all the memories of an heirloom and all the convenient amnesia of a letter of
credit.”16 Yet this uneasy circulation is inherently unstable. For the Tozers, famil-
ial affection is a pious cover story, the curls of hair that barely cover the solid-
gold mount. If there is one symptomatic object in the novel, it is this: the brooch
that establishes the Tozers as enviable (if unattractive) solid gold.
When Phoebe rejects the brooch, what does she prefer to it? Nothing—the
novel does not set up a counteracting artifact. Rather, the novel showcases a dif-
ferent style of reading. The brooch invokes a naïve surface reading, a ready faith
in family harmony, but our heroine brings to that object a skeptical, knowledge-
able, trained assessor’s eye. When she can debunk the brooch’s promises, she is
using the skills of the artistic reformers of her generation.
In chapter 1, we saw that the Arts and Crafts reformers differentiated them-
selves sharply from domestic handicrafters by insisting that artifacts adhere
to a specific code of artistic value. Artifacts had to come from a nonindustrial
culture (exotic or antique), made by a trained craftsperson, follow traditional
style, and look true to their material. They could be bought in specialized bou-
tiques and curated at home as collectibles. Reformers insisted that the home
should showcase art treasures purchased by the male connoisseur, not homemade
ornaments created by the female inhabitant and her friends.17 The home became
a kind of a museum, housing collections of objects with demonstrable financial
value, rather than the messy and unpredictable world of sentimental souvenirs.18
This code militated against the domestic handicraft’s cheerful embrace of mass-
produced modernity, amateurism, and imitation, not to mention the handicraft’s
circulation in the gift and bazaar economies and its fragility and obsolescence. We
have seen how the early art reformers, Sir Henry Cole’s mid-Victorian generation,
actually experienced significant overlap with domestic handicraft. In this chapter,
however, we will see how Oliphant writes in the context of the growing animosity
between the reformers and the handicrafters. By the 1870s, Arts and Crafts writ-
ers were beginning to sharply resent the handicraft industry and to demand that
the decoration of the home be placed in safer hands.
152 Novel Craft
Many Arts and Crafts writers worked to eject the women from the private
sphere, either by excoriating women’s taste or by ignoring women’s presence.
The “house of an English gentleman should wear a gentlemanly character and
appearance,” wrote J. Beavington Atkinson, while Lewis F. Day described an ide-
ally masculine drawing room for two pages and then remarked, “It is assumed, of
course, that the wife is in sympathy with the husband, or if there be little differ-
ences of idea between them, this is the room in which his wants prevail, as hers
do elsewhere.”19 Atkinson and Day have casually reassigned to the male resident
a space that had been presumed female.20 Now that crafts were fit for male
professionals, women should get out of the way, according to Day: “What can
women do towards the decoration of the home? In the first place they might
leave undone something they are wont to do. They might begin by abstaining
from the introduction of all unnecessary drapery and flimsiness.” Let them
study ancient ornaments, he proposed, and learn that beauty involves “strength,
dignity, meaning, character.”21
Day believed that women were essentially incapable of producing tasteful
homes. In his devastating 1881 attack, “The Woman’s Part in Domestic Decora-
tion,” he argued that women do not have the time, physical strength, spirit, or
training to produce real art.22 Deborah Cohen accurately notes that “Day’s criti-
cism marked one more episode in the long battle between female amateurs and
male professionals fought over the course of the nineteenth century.”23 Day
draws a sharp line between women’s needlework and real art:
Perhaps there is no branch of industry in which there is such waste

of labour as in “ladies’ work.” How many women there are who have
perpetually in hand some piece of fancy needlework, and how few of
them succeed in accomplishing anything that can justly lay claim to
artistic excellence! The possibility of failure in art is avoided by abstain-
ing from any attempt of that kind. The search after prettiness stands
for an ideal; and often there is no higher aim than the having “some-
thing to do.”24
In this passage, Day ridicules two of the main justifications for the handicraft.
Self-perpetuating industry (“something to do”) is pointless, while “prettiness”
means a degradingly cheap and easy visual pleasure. Rather, true artifacts ought
to demonstrate the laws of art: “higher aim,” “ideals,” or “artistic excellence.” The
newly professional art discourse puts pressure on the handicraft’s function.
Given that Day is convinced that women cannot do meaningful art, he is under-
standably annoyed by the fact that women keep trying.25 Indeed, the only task
Day can imagine for women is touching up the wallpaper.26
Charles Eastlake, whose famous Hints on Household Taste derived from
articles in the Cornhill Magazine in the mid-1860s, shared Day’s revulsion at
women’s decorative codes. Eastlake sees them as spiraling out of control, an

invading army of details that take over a room. In Victorian houses, “Bad orna-
ment was multiplied into vicious elaboration.”27 Homemade ornament was
particularly reprehensible:
It is hardly necessary to add that the so called ‘ornamental’ leather work

which a few years ago was so in vogue with young ladies, who used it for
the construction of brackets, baskets, picture frames, &c., was—like
potichomanie, diaphanie, and other modern drawing-room pursuits—
utterly opposed to sound principles of taste. . . . Such work as this may
be the rage for a few seasons, but sooner or later must fall, as it deserves
to fall, into universal contempt.28
Using language like “in vogue,” “rage,” and “a few seasons,” Eastlake underlines
the connection between handicrafts and fashion, implicitly contrasting un-
changing male artistic laws against these fleeting feminine preferences. Simi-
larly, Atkinson finds ornamental work offensive: “In a house, as in a picture,
above all things shun crowded medleys of mediocre or common forms as you
would the unkempt rabble of democracy. Strive against scattered, small, trivial,
and frivolous effects. Even a mantelpiece may, by its purposeless and silly bau-
bles, bespeak a childish intellect.”29 The home now showcased contemptible
female silliness.
However, when women tried to participate in the new skilled art techniques,
they were resented. When C. R. Ashbee’s craft collective failed, he blamed price
competition from amateur women handicrafters. In 1908, Ashbee complained
about the type of woman he called “dear Emily.” “Dear Emily,” Ashbee continued,
did not pretend to any great talent, but because she was supported by her family,
she could sell her work cheaply enough to undercut legitimate workmen.30 Inter-
estingly, his complaint echoes the anti-bazaar language of almost a century
earlier, when women’s amateur trade practices were seen to threaten men’s legit-
imate business. Women were supposed to stay on the margins of the market-
place, but that very marginality was then condemned as a subversion of the
regular economy.
The antagonistic language of art reformers like Ashbee, Eastlake, Day, and
Atkinson indicates the way that Arts and Crafts was often constructed against
a domestic female enemy.31 Indeed, to be a connoisseur was, in some sense, to
be the opposite of a woman. To redefine the home as the exclusive space of
male professional activity required the demonization and eviction of the per-
son to whom home management was normally conceded. Hereafter, women
who wanted to produce handicrafts had to do so according to a code she would
have to acquire. Some women welcomed the professionalization of craft
because it gave certain types of craftwork an unprecedented cultural cachet,
154 Novel Craft
but others must have mourned at finding their life’s skills suddenly treated as
barbarous amateurism.32
Phoebe Junior was written in the midst of this crisis of female authority in the
home. During a period of cultural rancor, Phoebe Junior imagines how a female
can be a connoisseur. It speaks back to Day and Atkinson and Eastlake. In this
novel, Oliphant creates an admiring portrait of a confident, competent woman
who has internalized male artistic codes with supreme skill. Phoebe Junior insists
on constructing a relationship where art reformers demanded a rift. In so doing,
Oliphant writes a more generous idea of art reform. Where the discourse of male
connoisseurship urged readers to break away from the debased feminized hand-
icraft, Oliphant uses Phoebe Junior to construct a frail bridge between new and
old ways of seeing craft. She repositions the domestic handicrafter, not as the
connoisseur’s antagonist, but as her ancestor, and rewrites their relationship as
one of love.
T he Desirable Consumer I tem

As in Our Mutual Friend, the craft paradigm declined while new economic ideas
were emerging. We have seen that the 1860s and 1870s were marked by the
development of the credit economy and a new stress on consumption.33 Chris-
tina Crosby sums up the new situation well:
Britain moved with surprising rapidity from an economy based on

money to one based on credit; from trade based on the direct exchange
of gold sovereigns for goods to a complex system of notes, bills of
exchange, bank deposits, checks, and stocks; from unlimited liability,
which restricted access to investment, to limited liability, which opened
the stock market to anyone with a few pounds to risk. Credit enables
one to get (money or commodities) now and pay (more) later; it is a
structure of deferral in which individuals, firms, and corporations find
themselves increasingly involved, getting more and owing more, renew-
ing bills, deferring payment, over and over, credit pyramiding as the
economy expands.34
Thus by the 1870s, Britain saw multiple new forms of spending and a concomi-
tant fascination with the acquisition of consumer goods. Part of this shift was a
theoretical one, the Marginalist Revolution of 1871, in which the value of goods
was understood to be set by consumer desire, rather than the labor required to
make them or the inherent value of their materials. Indeed, explains Regenia
Gagnier, “The shift in economics actually privileged subjective psychological
factors on the part of the consumer that a science of aesthetics was best placed
to explain.”35 The taste of the consumer became all-important, so the aesthetic

connoisseur assumed a new importance. This expert could explain what made
certain artifacts desirable, an account that not only revealed the inner workings
of the otherwise mysterious consumer economy but also actually helped produce
those workings. The connoisseur could create a consumer desire for, say, peacock
feathers or sunflowers. He (and it was usually a he) therefore became a crucial
interpreter and producer of consumerism.
Phoebe applies the latest Arts and Crafts theories instead of expressing the
sentimental preferences associated with the domestic handicraft. As her mother
remarks, “You are a funny girl, with your theories of colour” (56). She develops a
style of dress based on the theory of complementary colors and, when she goes
to Carlingford, continues to wear the aesthetic half-tints of browns and grays.
Asked to dress up for an occasion,
She chose a costume of Venetian blue, one soft tint dying into another
like the lustre on a piece of old glass. . . . When it was put on with
puf fings of lace such as Mrs. Tozer had never seen, and was entirely
ignorant of the value of, at the throat and sleeves, Phoebe wrapt a shawl
round her in something of the same dim gorgeous hue, covered with
embroidery, an Indian rarity which somebody had bestowed upon Mrs.
Beecham, and which no one had used or thought of till Phoebe’s artistic
eye fell upon it. (172)
Wearing aesthetic tertiary colors with handmade antique lace, Phoebe is a

perfect representative of the new theories, and the Indian shawl is a particular
triumph of connoisseurship; in this exemplary tale, the expert spots value in an
artifact that everyone else had overlooked. Phoebe is as good at identifying
people as she is at noticing artifacts, having “a faculty quite royal of remem-
bering faces” (151). Her powers of discrimination, as we shall see, extend well
beyond shawls and faces.
In this respect, she is quite different from her grandparents, relics of a much
older style. Mr. and Mrs. Tozer are unable to comprehend or appreciate their
granddaughter’s taste. Scene after scene showcases their comic misjudgments.
As Phoebe wears a succession of stunningly costly and aesthetically admirable
outfits, her elderly hosts bemoan her “dingy things” (170). “There be them as is
more for dress,” Mr. Tozer remarks, “and plays the pianny,” unaware of Phoebe’s
remarkable gown and her exceptional musical skill (244). When she plays
Beethoven, he hospitably assures a visitor that the noise will be over soon (245).
Mrs. Tozer wears a crocheted collar along with her gold brooch and serves her
company tea on gaudy modern china, despising the priceless set of Cream Wedg-
wood she has inherited. Phoebe’s room is hung with chintz, drooping moreen
curtains, and “gigantic flowers on the carpet,” all of which make “Phoebe’s soul
156 Novel Craft
sick within her” (133). In other words, the Tozers’ aesthetic code is firmly located
in the early- to mid-Victorian era of bright colors, naturalistic representation,
and amateur dress accessories.
Oliphant presents this not as an older generation’s fidelity to the style of
its youth, however, but as an indelible sign of class and intellectual inferiority.
The Tozers’ unfashionableness is not charming, although the same quality was
endearing in Cranford, which was written in the midst of the domestic handi-
craft era. Rather, their taste is awful—enough to make one’s soul “sick.” The very
seriousness with which their taste is anatomized is itself a symptom of the
novel’s allegiance to aesthetic ideas, for it was the aesthetic belief that taste
mattered profoundly, that it was an index of a person’s moral health, and that
training a child’s eye to appreciate artistic qualities was a crucial parental respon-
sibility.36 Thus the Tozers’ failure in dress and decor correlates to more profound
mistakes. The twain are deficient in “discrimination”; they are as incapable of
judging people as they are of assessing gowns. Seeing the May children clinging
to their father, Mrs. Tozer interprets this (incorrectly) as a sign that he’s “a good
man” (113). They are sycophantic to the arrogant Mr. Copperhead and vindictive
toward the innocent Cotsdean. Judgments, in the Tozer world, are simple, uni-
vocal, and usually wrong.
The reason they cannot judge properly is because they use the wrong princi-
ples. Mrs. Tozer’s infamous brooch partakes of the same values that have defined
Mr. Tozer’s working life: a faith in solid, real bills, painstakingly accumulated,
instead of newfangled abstract notes. The older generation has made its money
in trade, in the sale of small quantities of butter and tea and soap for small coin-
age painstakingly saved up over decades. This is a way of making a living that is
foreign to the new generation. Phoebe is shocked to realize that they owned a
shop. “—Shop! Yes, to be sure, that was what being ‘in trade’ meant, but she had
never quite realized it till now” (89). Of course, she does not realize it because
being “in trade” means, to her, a managerial role organizing commodities or
retail outlets, where the person’s relation to the material object is much more
distant. She has imagined that Mr. Tozer placed orders for certain quantities of
material goods, not that he actually scooped up pickles with his own hands. We
can see the change from the older generation if we contrast her horror at the
grocery trade with Cranford, in which it is perfectly appropriate and even some-
what admirable for an elderly lady to make a living selling tea.
Mr. Tozer’s trade economy was the dominant one for Carlingford. He has
managed to purchase a house on Grange Lane, the highest class location in
town, and is widely regarded as financially rock solid. In his cautious retirement,
he rarely invests and refuses to speculate. Nor did Tozer ever borrow money,
even in his earliest struggles (293). As “the old butterman,” his very nickname
demonstrates that he has become superseded. Judith Flanders points out that
identifying a grocer as a specialist in butter or cheese was an outmoded style, for
beginning in the early nineteenth century, the grocer, butter man, oil man, flour
dealer, and cheese factor increasingly sold other goods.37 Denoting “Mr. Tozer”
“the old butterman” thus renders him doubly old-fashioned, rather like calling
someone “the old peruke wearer.” He is as much of a relic as his wife. Like their
gold brooch, they are solidly rich but represent values with which the younger
generation has no sympathy.
Textile and domestic craft work is distinctly déclassé in this novel. While
Margaret May in The Daisy Chain made white puffs for her cap and decorative
leather leaves, her counterpart in Phoebe Junior, Ursula May, has no such creative
resource. Oliphant gives her no textile work except the extremely unromantic
chore of darning stockings, which she despises (153). A workbasket full of undar-
ned stockings is the sign of her unending domestic drudgery (107). Oliphant
thereby significantly reduces the status of sewing in the novel. If sewing is not
an art form, it is also not a source of money: “‘If I could earn any money I am sure
I would,’ [Ursula] cried, ‘and only too glad. I am sure it is wanted badly enough.
But how is a girl to earn any money? I wish I knew how’” (115). In 1876, it is not
a realistic option to sell small knitted or sewn articles; such a possibility never
occurs to anyone in the novel. Indeed, existing handicraft presents a problem
because it cannot circulate in the market. Too amateurish and unfashionable to
sell, it cannot even be given away. The May family owns “a case of wax flowers,
a production of thirty years since,” and it is an embarrassment that has been
“respectfully transferred to a china closet by Ursula’s better taste” (273). When
she places it on the table for visitors, her brother promptly returns it to the
closet. It circulates briefly from concealment to display and back again, never
achieving exchange. Ursula’s “respectful” treatment is presumably because the
artifact was made by a now-deceased family member, perhaps her mother, but
this association does not sanctify the flowers with sentimental value; it merely
renders it inconveniently impossible to dispose of the eyesore. The wax flowers,
the gold brooch—elements of mid-century handicraft taste are obtrusively,
unfortunately present for a generation that wishes to move beyond them.
T he C a r l i n g ford C o n t i n u u m
The Tozers seem to represent the town. They are, after all, leading citizens (at
least within the Dissenting community), prosperous, with a house on Grange
Lane and with influence over others in their social circle. Their daughter-in-law,
Mrs. Tom, shares their taste, showing up at an evangelical meeting in a bright
red gown and coveting Mrs. Tozer’s brooch. To this extent, the scene seems to be
set up for a comic collision between Phoebe, the sophisticated aesthetic urbanite,
and the Carlingfordians, provincial old-fashioned denizens.
158 Novel Craft
But Carlingford is more complicated than this, for it also contains some
transitional figures. The May family shares some of Phoebe’s tastes, although
it also hearkens to normative fashion. Ursula likes whatever is in fashion and
to be “lady-like” is “her only aspiration” in dress (79). She likes popular enter-
tainment, Madame Tussaud’s or the pantomime (70). Even her interest in
Phoebe derives from cultural clichés; Phoebe is the most popular girl at the
ball and looks just like the fashion plates of the day (150). But if Ursula
innocently admires whatever popular culture tells her to like, her father and
brother both have an aesthetic appreciation for the kind of antiquarian and
exotic decor associated with intellectual masculinity.38 Both the May men
want a Turkey carpet for their studies, while Mr. May the elder works his own
ruin by buying a fine antique oak bookcase for his study in lieu of repaying his
debts (317). The narrator remarks, “It made him feel more of a man somehow,
more like the gentleman and scholar he had meant to be when he started in
life.” This ideal “had not been carried out; but still he felt rehabilitated and
better in his own opinion as he stood beside” the bookcase (320). In typical
aesthetic mode, the fine furnishings instill moral idealism and confirm mas-
culine status. Not surprisingly, both the Rev. Mr. Mays are drawn to Phoebe,
one falling in love with her, the other carrying on a charming fatherly flirta-
tion. As the local representative of the culture to which they are drawn,
Phoebe is singularly attractive.
One more character shows Carlingford’s potential for conversion by aesthetic
mores. The Dissenting minister Horace Northcote begins his career in Carling-
ford with a spectacularly ill-judged act of mistaken discrimination, publicly exco-
riating the man who will turn out to be his closest friend, his brother-in-law, and
his model of a Christian. His first encounter with Phoebe is similarly comically
malapropos, as he condemns the local shopkeepers, not knowing that one is her
grandfather. But Northcote also has aesthetic taste, shown in his zealous china-
mania. As “an enthusiast,” Northcote explains that “a set of fine China is like a
poem. . . . My pleasure lies in seeing it entire, making the tea-table into a kind of
lyric, elevating the family life by the application of the principles of abstract
beauty to its homeliest details” (243). Indeed, he begins to reconsider his judg-
ments of the Mays (and High Church faith generally) because of the influence of
ecclesiastical architecture, as he reverently views a perfect fifteenth-century
chapel (256). What this clergyman has to learn is how to adapt his aesthetic eye
to living subjects, how to read neighbors and parishioners with the same keen
attention with which he regards teacups.
In short, as Phoebe enters Carlingford, she has a range of more or less sug-
gestible subjects. From the Tozers, wholly submerged in mid-Victorian taste, to
the May family’s fashionable and aesthetic susceptibility, to the minister who is
educated in china but not in people, Phoebe finds an audience whose deficiencies
in discrimination await her excellent training.
In departing from London, moreover, Phoebe leaves behind a competitor:

another model of art patronage, the wealthy philistine collector Mr. Copper-
head. Although Mr. Copperhead derives pleasure from collecting and curating
valuable artifacts, he does so to demonstrate his ability to keep money idle, not
to showcase his intellectual skills. The narrator explains:
Mr. Copperhead was fond of costly and useless things; he liked them for
their cost, with an additional zest in his sense of the huge vulgar use
and profit of most things in his life. This tendency, more than any
appreciation of the beautiful, made him what is called a patron of art. It
swelled his personal importance to think that he was able to hang up
thousands of pounds, so to speak, on his walls, knowing all the time
that he could make thousands more by the money had he invested it in
more useful ways. The very fact that he could afford to refrain from
investing it, that he could let it lie there useless, hanging by so many
cords and ribbons, was sweet to him. (47)
While Phoebe exercises discrimination to reevaluate artifacts like the Indian

shawl, Copperhead follows the marketplace estimate. What he wants is art
whose value is settled, instantly recognizable, and dependably high. “I ain’t a
judge of art,” he explains, “but everybody knows what a Turner means. . . . It
means a few cool thousands, take my word for it. It means that heaps of people
would give you your own price. . . . A Turner is worth its weight in gold” (348).39
Copperhead applies the middle-class self-made man’s criteria to art, seeking
expensive solidity as the guarantor of worth. But he is dimly aware that this is no
longer an adequate metric. As Copperhead accurately points out, “Buying’s one
thing, knowing’s another. Your knowing ones, when they’ve got any money, they
have the advantage over us . . . but fortunately for us, it isn’t often that they’ve
got any money” (349). Phoebe is a “knowing one” while Copperhead is a “buying
one,” and as they battle over the novel’s prize, Clarence, we see two ways of iden-
tifying and valuing artifacts.
In Art and the Victorian Middle Class, Dianne Satchko Macleod discusses
the Victorian stereotype of the assertive manufacturer-patron who collects
realist modern paintings instead of the Old Masters whose authenticity he
fears he cannot validate. Men like shipbuilder William Wells and pharmacist
Jacob Bell became the great collectors of the mid-nineteenth century, and
Copperhead may have been partially modeled on Robert Vernon, infamous
for his bossiness, quarrelsomeness, and bargaining with artists.40 The man-
ufacturer-patron, like Copperhead, is apt to put his faith in the judgments
of the mass marketplace (“everybody knows,” “heaps of people”) rather
than the individual expert. If the Tozers’ aesthetic judgments are univocal,
Copperhead’s are corporate.
160 Novel Craft
C re d i t i n C a r l i n g ford
The new credit economy is permeating Carlingford, with money as an
abstract quantity that floats about, instead of a material substance that can be
painstakingly accumulated. Ursula’s brother Reginald worries about his clerical
appointment, which offers more salary than the workload actually justifies. Vol-
unteering for extra work initially enables Reginald to balance the books on his
own, privately attempting to match his labor to his pay, but he soon gives up
that attempt, deriving his sense of self from the money and status of his new
position rather than its workload (208). As Monica Cohen points out, Reginald’s
sinecure problem indicates the novel’s deeper critique of the public valuation of
labor. “Although work and pay may coincide, one cannot be taken as evidence for
the existence of the other.”41 While Reginald suffers because he is receiving pay
without work, his sister Ursula has a complementary problem, her domestic
labor going unrecompensed. If the craft paradigm features women working
without pay, the new economic regime permits pay without work.42
For years, Reginald’s father, Mr. May, has been living in a credit economy in
which he never fully pays off debt but instead transfers or borrows money to
keep the debt going. For him, money arrives as windfalls, bank loans, or gifts
from his son James in India. It is unpredictable and unearned, and it derives
from male social networks rather than his actual job as perpetual curate. This
has given him a radically relativistic view of money:
There may have been said to be always a certain amount of quite ficti-
tious and visionary money floating about Mr. May, money which
existed only in the shape of symbol, and which, indeed, belonged to
nobody—which was borrowed here to-day, and paid there to-morrow,
to be re-borrowed and repaid in the same way, never really reaching
anybody’s pocket, or representing anything but that one thing which
money is supposed to be able to extinguish—debt. (181)
The inextinguishable floating debt gets localized when Mr. May forges
Mr. Tozer’s name as endorser for an accommodation bill for which Cotsdean
(a small corn factor) is the nominal beneficiary. In a transaction entirely engi-
neered by and for Mr. May, it is his name alone that does not appear on the bill.
Moreover, the money went for luxuries that Cotsdean never enjoyed and cannot
repay. Ruminating glumly on this situation, Cotsdean muses, “Strange that a
mere lump of money should live like this, long after it was, to all intents and
purposes, dead, and spent and gone!” (223). The social networks invoked by this
bill are the opposites of those associated with the brooch, which places the entire
family on display, in order, fixed in their proper places, their relationship a
matter of public knowledge. Tozer’s language works the same way. Mr. Tozer
describes his name as if it’s a living being: “My name; but I’ve kep’ it honest, and
out of folk’s mouths, and see if I’ll stand disgrace thrown on it now” (366). By
contrast, May’s bill hides identities and obscures real relationships; it is the trace
of a transaction that never occurred, involving people who do not know each
other and are unaware that they have been drawn into relation, whose names
bear no relation to real persons.
If Cotsdean is bemused by the new economy, that is only to be expected,
since his trade places him in the old one. He cannot imagine how he can ever
accumulate enough money from his “bushels of grain for chickens, penny-
worths of canary seed—oh! did any one think he could pay a hundred pounds
out of these?” (223). The old system of painstaking accumulation based on
small individual transactions for material goods cannot compete with the new
credit economy, where hundreds or thousands of pounds float around. The only
way Cotsdean can imagine making more money is by calling in customers’
accounts; he has no notion of speculation (222). If Tozer is a man of solid gold,
then Cotsdean is indeed, as he is often called, “a man of straw” (263), both in
the sense of being without solid financial backing and in the sense that he is
made of the stuff of the old agricultural economy.
It is Mr. May, who has been living in this atmosphere for years, who is able to
ask the important questions about it. “After all, what was it?” he inquires about
the accommodation bill.
Not a very large sum . . . and as for any other consideration, it was really,
when you came to think of it, a quite justifiable expedient, not to be
condemned except by squeamish persons, and which being never
known, could do no harm in the world. He had not harmed anybody by
what he had done. Tozer, who was quite able to pay it over and over
again, would never know of it; and in what respect, he asked himself,
was it worse to have done this than to have a bill really signed by a man
of straw, whose “value received” meant nothing in the world but a
simple fiction? (263)
Where, he asks, is the harm in forging an endorsement? It is an act with “no harm
done to any one!” It is “a mere act of borrowing, and borrowing was never
accounted a crime; borrowing not money even, only a name, and for so short a
time. No harm; it could do no one in the world any harm” (220). Mr. May sug-
gests that he “may” forge, because it is morally acceptable. It is a judgment echoed
by Phoebe. As the narrator comments, “After all, a few lines of writing on a bit of
paper is not a crime which affects the imagination of the inexperienced. Had it
been a malicious slander Phoebe would have realized the sin of it much more
162 Novel Craft
clearly; but the copy of her grandfather’s signature did not wound her moral
sense in the same way, though it was a much more serious offence” (372).
Although Phoebe and Mr. May are both part of the new credit economy, their
familiarity with the older trade economy makes it hard for them to see what value
is at stake. Nor were they alone; Victorians had trouble comprehending how a slip
of paper could really be money, as Henry Sidgwick complained in The Fortnightly
Review in 1879.43 He points out that even economic experts like Walter Bagehot
tended to conflate money with coinage, ignoring credit and checks.44
What, then, gives paper value? How does one understand this new phenom-
enon of the credit economy, a signed piece of paper that could be money, a record
of a debt, evidence of a crime, or, even, a story? And why couldn’t one manu-
facture (make, by hand) such a paper? Tozer’s bill raises some profound ques-
tions about both contract law and the origin of value. Is it acceptable to have a
promise signed by a “man of straw” who cannot fulfill it or a backer who, although
financially stable, has not in fact signed and therefore had no intention of enter-
ing into a contract to pay? In both cases, the referent is missing, and so the sign
floats, unmoored. Jean-Joseph Goux reads money in the modern economy as a
signifier that floats and always postpones its realization.45 The newly desirable
skill is not production—the ability to generate worth—but consumption, the
ability to determine which promises may be valid, to interpret small signs to
determine creditworthiness.
Phoebe Junior interrogates this issue in four important scenes of parsing paper:
a note from Tozer, a letter from Cotsdean, a fragment of Cotsdean’s note, and a
bill of accommodation. In each case, the slip of paper is apparently valueless, dirt-
ied by its carriers, and carelessly disposed of. However, in each case, shifting into
a special form of observation reveals a vitally important alternative story.
Toz e r ’s C h a rac te r
When Mr. May first spots Tozer’s signature, it is on a scrap of trash carried on a
wayward draft: “The last gust thus forcibly shut in made a rush through the
narrow hall and carried a scrap of paper to Mr. May’s feet. He picked it up almost
mechanically, and carried it with him to the light, and looked at it without
thought” (217). Like the waste “paper currency” that blows everywhere in
Our Mutual Friend, this paper gets blown by the wind, with no human agency or
intention, and Mr. May reads it with a similar lack of conscious intention,
“mechanically” and “without thought.” Although these descriptions enable
Oliphant to finesse the difficulty of making a gentleman read another’s corre-
spondence, they also have the effect of heightening the uncanny mobility of the
note, the way in which it is not part of human society. This note is not socially
exchanged like the notes in Cranford but moved by wind to be read without
thought. Its further circulation continues this pattern. Mr. May pushes some
papers off the table with his elbow by accident, picks them up and throws them
down in a heap in front of him. “On the top, as it chanced, came the little dirty
scrap of paper” (218). May tacitly compares this paper to the kind of note he
would prefer, musing that “bank-notes did not drop down out of the skies” as
this note, apparently, has (219). What May soon realizes is that, in the new
credit economy, many things can be made to equal a banknote, and there is not
much difference between a social note and a banknote after all.
The note itself, however, resists this easy substitutability by insisting on iden-
tity. It marks Tozer’s specific vocational and class position. It reads, “Your grand-
mother is took bad with one of her attacks. Come back directly. She wants you
badly. Saml. Tozer” (217). The formal signature contrasts oddly with the casual,
ungrammatical language and familiarity of the message. It would have been
more appropriate to sign himself “Grandfather” or to simply send a verbal mes-
sage by the maid instead of this formal pronouncement that she must carry. It is
as if the lifelong habit of commercial signature, on bills to customers, on notes
for inventory, has infected even intimate family dynamics. As Mr. May remarks,
Tozer’s “handwriting . . . was very strange to see on anything but a bill” (218). As
in Cranford, too, the note bears the marks of working-class intermediaries. The
little note was “not prettily folded, to begin with, and soiled and crumpled by the
bearer” (the maid who carried it) (217). Marked internally by lifelong habits of
small commercial transactions, marked externally by evidence of working-class
labor, the paper could belong to nobody but Tozer.
In noting these small identificatory details, the narrator is training us to regard
papers with a connoisseur’s eye. We need to disregard the note’s main informa-
tion and pay attention to the marginal markings, soilings, and habits of writing
instead. And our goal is to determine the note’s provenance, not to act on the
note’s instructions. Whereas the marks of working-class intermediaries in Cran-
ford presented unpleasant intrusions, in Phoebe Junior they offer key information.
May suddenly takes up this sort of scrutinizing gaze, focusing on the qualities
of Tozer’s signature: “It was a curious signature, the handwriting very rude and
unrefined, with odd, illiterate dashes, and yet with a kind of rough character in
it, easy to identify, not difficult to copy—” (219). It is when May shifts into the
connoisseur’s point of view that he is suddenly able to think of the note in a new
way. Parsing its shapes, its dashes, its character as an art critic would evaluate a
painting, he is for the first time in this novel able to imagine himself as a pro-
ducer: the producer of a debased and derivative artwork. His forgery is the only
thing he has ever produced on his own account (quite literally).
In wanting to copy Tozer’s signature, May associates himself with nineteenth-
century art forgers, who traced false artists’ signatures on their copies. The hand
of the artist, the unique identity of the producer, visible through tiny signs in
the image itself and through the signature, is being effaced in a forgery. That
164 Novel Craft
“hand” is “rude and unrefined . . . and yet with a kind of rough character in it”;
in other words, it carries the essence of the man himself, his working-class
roughness combined with his fundamental character for honesty. What is
disturbing is that the very hand that shows Tozer’s inmost “character” is all the
easier to copy. The more individual he is, the easier it is to replicate him. Yet forg-
ing his “character” ironically means one will never emulate his true character—
such strategic deception is deeply opposed to the rough honesty that characterizes
Tozer. Finally, we should not lose sight of the original meaning of character as a
letter, the usage that, according to Deidre Lynch, remained the dominant mean-
ing of character until the nineteenth century.46 Thus the “rough character” refers
to the shape of Tozer’s letters as well as the subjectivity of his letter. To copy
Tozer’s “character” is a profound act.
Mr. May’s shift to the connoisseur-forger’s point of view is a painful one.47
“Beads of moisture” break out on his forehead, his heart jumps, and when he
glimpses himself in the mirror, “he started as if he had seen a ghost. Some one
else seemed to see him; seemed to pounce upon and seize him out of that glass”
(219). Like Jane Eyre, he is “out of himself,” carried out of that glass by the
ghostly actor who is also himself, terrified by his disintegration into a wan, dim
spirit. When a social note produces a monstrous double as a bill of accommoda-
tion, a clergyman splits into an artificer and an enforcer. May sees “that bloodless
wretch in the glass with his staring face . . . only dimly sensible that this wretch
was himself” (219–220). The effect of multiple documents fictitiously referencing
value generates multiple selves who are mere shadows or ghosts, too. When a
person’s “character” is only something to copy, and when the copying itself under-
mines that character’s values, there is no basis of self. Nothing is grounded in
reality anymore. May’s split is embodied in his hands, one of which covers his
eyes, the other of which stealthily draws the paper closer to examine it (219). And
all night he practices his “writing,” which normally means his composition of arti-
cles for clerical journals but now takes on a new and more disturbing meaning.
His work, too, has generated a sinister double. May is manufacturing multiples,
copies, not only of the signature but also of his vocation and, indeed, his identity.
As identities replicate, so do the puns; only Oliphant’s characteristically double
meanings can do justice to these paper selves. Indeed, the shift from fixed “char-
acter” to puns in itself sums up the newly flexible, multiple meanings of language.
T he C o n n o i s s e u r i n C a r l i n g ford
Having produced a forged bill, good enough to circulate in the marketplace, May
can relax—until he mistakes the date that the bill falls due and it is actually
presented for payment. Typically, he is informed by a note, a letter from
Cotsdean carried upstairs by the maid in her apron (356). The paper carried by
the working-class intermediary bodes no good. Indeed, the news permanently
transforms May into the uncanny alternative self he had glimpsed in the mirror.
He falls, and his face “was very pale, of a livid colour, and covered with moisture,
great beads standing on his forehead” (357). The ghostly self with the beads of
moisture on its forehead has now taken over the host body. And just as he had
imagined someone pouncing upon him and seizing him, now his daughter Janey
rushes at him and “seiz[es] him by the arm,” while his son Reginald and
son’s friend Northcote lift him from the floor and haul him up to his bedroom
as he protests all the way (358). He permanently becomes a “strange, scared,
white-faced spectre,” like the bit of paper carried by eddies and breezes (373). He
lives in the “may,” the indeterminate space of uncertainty, possible permission,
unsure ability, multiple meanings, substitutable papers.
Just as in the first episode, this bodily crisis marks the moment of the con-
noisseur. While the Mays are tending to Mr. May, Phoebe seeks a clue as to the
cause of the seizure:
Several bits of torn paper were lying on the floor; but only one of these was big
enough to contain any information. It was torn in a kind of triangular shape,
and contained a corner of a letter, a section of three lines,
“must have mistaken the date
presented to-day,
paid by Tozer”
was what she read. She could not believe her eyes. What transactions
could there be between her grandfather and Mr. May? She secured the
scrap of paper, furtively putting it into her pocket. (358–359)
Just as in the first episode, the connoisseur picks up a scrap of waste paper from
the floor, seeing a mysterious value in it that requires further study.48 Here a line
Kathy Psomiades uses to describe a different text might apply very well to
Phoebe. One must replace “the logic of ownership with the logic of aesthetic
contemplation. . . . Along the way, readers are instructed in how to retrain their
eyes so as to see art where once they might have seen money.”49 That is just what
Phoebe does, seeing art instead of a receipt. Phoebe notices the shape of the
paper and the arrangement of the lines, an attention to form and composition
that bespeaks her artistic training.
Indeed, these apparently meaningless details carry poignant significance.
Torn into a triangle, the note bears a horrible resemblance to the period’s three-
cornered notes associated with love letters. And the lines, arranged in a kind of
grim parody of poetry, do just what poetry does, presenting the event in a highly
concentrated form, working up to the climax of “paid by Tozer.” The subject is
literally torn out of this note: there are no direct actors in the circulation of this
166 Novel Craft
bill of exchange. The first line leaves out the salutation and “you” (“[Dear
Mr. May, you] must have mistaken the date”); the second line excludes whoever
had the bill and the banker who paid it (“[the agent took it to the bank where it
was] presented to-day”). These two lines extend the effect of paper that circu-
lates without agency or intention, uncannily circumventing human actors. They
perpetuate the system in which the guarantor of identity, the hand or the char-
acter, is easily forged. But the final line rudely shatters that image. Almost noth-
ing is left out, perhaps just the words “it was” (“[it was] paid by Tozer”). Stark in
its clarity and its unmistakable ascription of agency, these words force the bill’s
circulation to a horrifying halt. All the fictions about how it is just borrowing a
signature that harms nobody end here: as Sidgwick reminded his readers in
1879, it is money after all, and someone has to pay. With Tozer, the buck (or bill)
stops here.
Tozer therefore gets constructed as the real, the substantial blockage to
endlessly airy abstract exchange. Paper flutters and falls against the solid gold
expanse of that brooch, the size of a warming pan. This reduces Tozer’s charac-
ter to mere physicality, a purely animalistic expression of rage. If Mr. May
turned into Jane Eyre in the red room, with ghostly face and arms specking the
gloom, Tozer turns into Bertha. “She had never seen her grandfather look so
unlike himself. The knot of the big white neckerchief round his neck was
pushed away, his eyes were red, giving out strange lights of passion” (362).
With “an outburst of coarse anger,” Tozer’s “grey eyes seemed to give out sparks
of fire. His hair bristled up on his head like the coat of a wild animal enraged.
He went up and down on the hearth-rug like the same animal in a cage, shaking
his fist at some imaginary culprit. ‘Once I get him, see if I let him go,’ he cried,
his voice thick with fast-coming words and the foam of fury” (365–366). Curs-
ing, shaking, foaming, red-eyed, animalistic, prowling, Tozer has become pure
matter, the basest of bodies. Because the floating network of credit has landed
on him, entrapped him, and forced him to provide its reference, he has lost
access to metaphorical language and logical argument. He is the gold standard,
the stuff that grounds the Carlingford credit economy. And because the econ-
omy casts him as pure stuff, he loses his human qualities, degrading visibly
into sheer matter.
What we have here is a radical dehumanization of men in the credit econ-
omy. May turns into a ghost, with drops of clear moisture in lieu of blood, with-
out the power to move (he must be seized and carried). Depleted of real stuff,
of value, he is even worse than “a man of straw”; he is a man of paper. Mean-
while, Tozer turns into an animal, with so much blood and fire it reddens his
very eyes, violently grabbing people. Cast as the repository of realness, he is too
solid, too material, a big, brash, gaudy object that others try to escape. If May
is a bill, problematically abstract, Tozer is coinage, and base coinage, too. The
old paradigm of the domestic handicraft cannot help these men. Mrs. Tozer’s
amateur skills are wholly inadequate to the crisis. “Oh!” she cries, “it ain’t often
as he’s like this; but when he is, I can’t do nothing with him, I can’t do nothing
with him!” (393). Tozer, a recalcitrant material, cannot be reshaped by the
domestic craftswoman.
Can Phoebe’s aesthetic skills do better? She needs to recalibrate the novel’s
economy, restoring the men to stable values. She picks up the bill—“a stamped
piece of paper, in a handwriting which seemed horribly familiar to her, and yet
strange”—and in an instant, she has intuited the whole sordid secret (367). The
handwriting is a pun, one “character” taking the form of another’s “character,”
but Phoebe can decode it. She recognizes the “hand,” the unique stamp of indi-
vidual authorship, which the clergyman’s embrace of the copy had seemed to
occlude. She notices it because, in the May family’s social circle, “various produc-
tions of [Mr. May’s] in manuscript had been given to her to read. She was said,
in the pleasant social jokes of the party, to be more skilled at interpreting
Mr. May’s handwriting than any of his family” (367). This expert’s natural skill
at understanding a particular type of artifact has been honed by practice.
Phoebe, trained and educated in the genre, can instantly divine not only the fact
that it is forged but also the real origin of the paper. As Aviva Briefel explains,
one of the major functions of the Victorian connoisseur was to identify fakes.
Indeed, the connoisseur could become associated with forgery:
The threat that forgery and connoisseurship posed to valued collections

was only one of the similarities that critics identified between them.
These two disciplines had a number of points in common that threat-
ened to erode the barrier keeping them apart. They both necessitated
an in-depth training in art history, a minute attention to details, a
sense of discipline, and a knowledge of material culture.50
Phoebe has all these qualities—art history knowledge, attention to detail, disci-
pline, and recognition of handwriting. And she uses her connoisseurship skills
to help the forger. Never is the bond between Phoebe and Mr. May stronger than
in the moment when Phoebe intuits the secret, and it is testimony to the power
of that covert sympathy that Phoebe instantly vows to protect the clergyman,
viewing him as a victim rather than a criminal.51
It is true that Phoebe is our ideal connoisseur, able to reconstruct the prove-
nance of a disputed artifact based on her particular expertise. But she is also our
ideal reader, who can apprehend the artifact with the proper sensitivity. As she
gazes at the forged bill, Phoebe experiences “an aching heart, and eyes that
seemed to ache in sympathy,” “her eyes filled with tears of pain and pity,” and “she
stood, temporarily stupefied, with her eyes full” (367). The narrator insistently
redirects our attention to her eyes, the connoisseur’s organ, away from the senti-
mental heroine’s heart. Just as her eyes spotted the forgery instantly, it is her eyes
168 Novel Craft
that suffer in imaginative sympathy. She therefore shows a fine apprehension,

both intellectual and emotional, the proper appreciation of an artifact in both its
affective power and provenance. She shows that she can identify—both in the
masculine connoisseurship model of recognizing something and in the feminine
sentimental mode of empathizing with someone. The eyes represent this dual
ability, eyes that both see keenly and yet fill with blinding tears.
Phoebe immediately begins to curate her find instead of exploiting its financial
or criminal utility. Indeed, her aim is precisely to keep it out of circulation, to
block its usefulness. Her first act is to fold it and put it into the little purse in her
pocket (369). She also changes out of her rustling silk dress into a soft merino
gown; neither she nor the bill will continue to crackle. The bill becomes an adjunct
of her own body, soft and noiseless and “always . . . at hand” (369). Indeed, her
careful curatorship already begins to enhance the value of the artifact. “The faint
perfume of the Russian leather had already communicated itself to the docu-
ment, which had not been so pleasant in Tozer’s hands” (372). For the first time,
the paper’s intermediary is not working class—not the maid who carried Tozer’s
note, not Betsy the servant who held it in her apron—but a lady who imparts
perfume instead of soiling the document. Moreover, instead of crackling, it is
“lying peacefully on her lap” (372). The female connoisseur here demonstrates her
worthiness; her personal delicacy renders her an ideal caretaker for the artifact.
When Phoebe takes out the bill, she also draws out Mr. May, its living ana-
logue. Like the bill, he has been lying peacefully in his bed, hidden by a curtain,
just as the bill is concealed by the purse. But when the bill is taken out, Mr. May,
too, awakens, and in his dialogue with Phoebe, he uncannily speaks the bill’s voice:
“‘Where am I?’ he said. With the lightning speed of sympathy and pity, Phoebe
divined what his terror was. She said, almost whispering, ‘At home in your own
bed—at home! and safe. Oh, don’t you know me—I am Phoebe’” (373). Like one
of those popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century object narratives, like The
Story of a Needle or Passages in the History of a Shilling, Mr. May expresses the anx-
iety of a thing that has been lifted into an unfamiliar locale, while Phoebe assures
him (it?) of safety in her keeping.52 It is not so much that Mr. May speaks for the
bill as that in a sense he has become the bill, his human solidity leached away, left
only with the thin subjectivity of a circulating paper. He has lost his character in
every sense: his character for honor and his unique selfhood. As Deidre Lynch
argues, eighteenth-century authors liked to pun on “character” as associated with
the imprinted mottos on coins, but in the late nineteenth century, when mone-
tary circulation occurs by paper bills rather than coins, character is simply erased.53
No wonder then that May has a “ghastly white face,” like the white paper, and that
he enacts a forgery analogous to the bill’s: “[He] peered at her from behind the
curtain with wild eagerness—then relaxed, when he met her eye, into a kind of
idiot smile, a painful attempt to divert suspicion” (372). Like the bill, Mr. May’s
false pretense is pathetically transparent, evoking pity in the viewer.
Like Mr. May and Mr. Tozer, Phoebe experiences physical change. Her “little,
cold, agitated hands, [were] worn by fatigue to nervous perception of every
touch” and a kiss on those hands gave her “a kind of electric shock” (375). She
has come out of it a better, more sensitive, discriminator. And on her walk home,
she experiences the kind of independence of “a man . . . who has his future all in
his hands” (375–376). What she experiences is her version of the bodily shift:
the rush of power of the masculine connoisseur. Her power is, indeed, “all in
his hands.” The encounter with the bill that turned the men into gibbering cari-
catures of the two extremes of the financial system has only consolidated her
identity. Phoebe is fond of assuring herself that she is herself whatever happens.
The bill only makes her more herself. “Her self-confidence reached the heroic
point. She knew that she was right, and she knew moreover that in this matter
she alone was right. Therefore the necessity of keeping up, of keeping alert and
vigilant, of holding in her hand the threads of all these varied complications was
not disagreeable to her. . . . Phoebe felt a certain sense of satisfaction in the great
rôle she herself was playing” (378–379).
For if Phoebe is now a full-fledged connoisseur, she is also the author. She
owns a much-coveted, unique specimen, the original bill. But that bill is also the
fulcrum of the plot. Thus while the bill has lost monetary value, it now repre-
sents narrative value. Its supposed “character” (handwriting, coinage, selfhood)
is gone, but it helps establish Phoebe herself as a new kind of character. Nothing
can proceed without the secret in that scrap of paper. Just as Miss Matty
revalued the waste paper bill in Cranford, just as Betty replaced the generic paper
in the mill with the sentimental letter in her breast, so, too, has Phoebe revalued
this bill, which is now doubly worthless: it has been paid off and it is forged. The
fantasy of reviving the dead bill, plumping it up with real (economic, sentimen-
tal) value, and thereby setting the economy back in motion, haunts these texts.54
Once Phoebe gets hold of that soiled scrap, the heretofore useless bill becomes
doubly desirable, offering both the plot resolution and a material object, with its
own crackle and scent. This is the moment of Phoebe’s supreme self-confidence,
when she holds the most valuable artifact by virtue of her unique skill at decod-
ing its signs and ascertaining its provenance, when her skill at curating has
enhanced the artifact’s value, and when she feels her own artistic sensitivity and
control at its height.
T he C o l l e c t i b l e a n d t h e C o m m o d i t y :
Revaluing C l arence
It is at this moment that the Copperheads return, reacting to Phoebe’s power by
trying to recode her as a collectible, rather than a connoisseur. Phoebe turns into
a commodity that can be exchanged among men, replacing the problematic
170 Novel Craft
accommodation bill. As she acquires more power, the men react by reconfiguring
her as an object. She is “a brazen young hussy,” according to her grandfather
(398); her golden hair parallels the golden threads in her shawl (176); and
Clarence wishes to make her into a Copperhead. Like the golden Bella Wilfer, a
commodity that is always looking up, so, too, does Phoebe get reduced to a mon-
etary prize. These metaphors are not only about money but also about metal, the
basis of money, the gold standard. Phoebe, brass or gold or copper, is the most
valuable thing in the novel. In this respect, she is truly the heir of the gold
brooch. To Phoebe’s annoyance, that is how Clarence Copperhead and Mr. Tozer
treat her. They brag about what their possessions cost (including, by implication,
herself), they direct her what to say, and they order her out of the way. “The girl
sat by them languidly, though with a beating heart, wondering, as girls will
wonder sometimes, if all men were like these, braggards and believers in brag,
worshippers of money and price” (390). Nor would we expect anything different
from Mr. Copperhead, who treats women as commodities, “the surplus we ought
to export as we export other surpluses” (323).
But Phoebe succeeds in reeducating Mr. Copperhead by teaching his son. We
first see Clarence with Phoebe at a ball; “he knew his duty, and did it with a
steady industry, working off his dances in the spirit of his navvy forefather”
(61). Industrious, even working-class in his work ethic, Clarence belongs to an
older economy. But exposure to Phoebe and the Mays educates him. “Let me
have her,” he begs Mr. Copperhead, “and I’ll make a figure, and do you credit”
(403). The puns are important, indicating not only the extent to which the Cop-
perheads are steeped in financial language but also a revaluing of Phoebe herself
in the new terms of the credit economy. If the Copperheads can lay out the
money for Phoebe now, Clarence suggests, later on they will accrue “credit” and
he will make “a figure.” Buying Phoebe is not buying a solidly valuable piece of
precious metal. It is buying a future opportunity, an investment in ability that
will bear interest. Eventually, Mr. Copperhead comes around. He continues to
imagine her as an object to be acquired, but he shifts from body to “brains.”
“When you want to make a figure in the world, sir, buy a few brains if they fall in
your way,” brags Mr. Copperhead. “They cost dear, but I’m thankful to say I can
afford that, ay, and a good deal more” (413).
Clarence has changed his thinking about value partly because his own worth
alters throughout the novel. In his father’s eyes, he is a collectible like the Turner.
“Mr. Copperhead was fond of costly and useless things. . . . This tendency, more
than any appreciation of the beautiful, made him what is called a patron of art”
(47). Thus Copperhead revels in the fact that the Turner is “as safe as the bank,
and worth more and more every year,” the ideal of a good object (349). What the
Turner looks like is wholly irrelevant, as is the whole panoply of expertise,
training, and artistic sensitivity that Phoebe has mastered. The idea of the sta-
ble investment opportunity governs Mr. Copperhead’s relation to his son, too.
“It was sweet to [Mr. Copperhead] to possess a perfectly useless specimen of

humanity, which had cost him a great deal, and promised to cost him still more”
(47). Specifically, Clarence is “a nice delicate piece of china for a cupboard, like
your mother before you. However, thank Heaven, we’ve got the cupboard. . . .
a nice big ’un too, well painted and gilded” (49). Copperhead’s art doesn’t circu-
late but remains conspicuous consumption, a purchase proving his wealth. His
son is there to be stored in a cupboard.
But as Clarence begins to assert himself more, Mr. Copperhead’s artistic lan-
guage begins to change. In describing Clarence to Mr. May, he says, “His mother
and he, sir, are made of different clay from me; they are porcelain and I am delft.
They want fine velvet cupboards to stand themselves in, while I’m for the kitchen
dresser” (325). In this passage, he retains the identification of Clarence with an
inanimate collectible but ascribes a certain amount of agency to that artifact. In
what sense could a piece of china “want” a cupboard? Want does carry the older
meaning of need here, but it is an Oliphantian pun, for it also carries the sense of
desire, borne out by the similarly undecidable preposition. “I’m for the kitchen
dresser.” I’m destined for it? Or I’m in favor of it? In some sense, the commodity
stirs to life, wants or demands its placement. But this vision of a half-alive arti-
fact cannot persist.55 The intimation of independent life becomes disturbing
when Clarence insists on choosing his own bride. What happens when the Dres-
den figure moves out of the cupboard?
Phoebe views Clarence differently—not as porcelain, but as raw material
that is still in process. She views his value as potential, not actual. A good
connoisseur could shape him into something valuable. “She was willing, quite
willing, to undertake the charge of him, to manage, and guide, and make a man
of him. . . . He was but a poor creature, but Phoebe knew she could make some-
thing of him, and she had no distaste to the task” (337–338). The notion of
Clarence as raw, unformed matter agrees better with Clarence’s developing
sense of independent agency. Clarence agrees that Phoebe is the only one with
the skill to move him out of the status of expensive collectible. As he tells his
father, “I don’t mind going into parliament, making speeches and that sort of
thing, if I’ve got her to back me up. But without her I’ll never do anything, with-
out her you may put me in a cupboard, as you’ve often said” (403).
Clarence as artifact to be displayed fit into an earlier economic understanding
in which objects have permanent, stable values: a brooch or a Turner. But Clarence
as raw material requiring intervention partakes of the new credit economy, in
which value may be actualized in the future or may never come to fruition, and
speculators have to predict what will happen. Clarence acquires a floating
exchange value. When Copperhead threatens to withdraw his financial backing,
his son suddenly becomes valueless, a “man of straw.” Although Phoebe considers
herself still bound to take him for her husband, she views the future with dread.
She has bought her shares, but the stock is plummeting. At this moment of crisis,
172 Novel Craft
Mr. Copperhead reconsiders. He realizes that he cannot give up his boy and that
“a great many reasons might be given to the world why [Phoebe] had been chosen
instead of a richer wife for the golden boy. Golden girls, as a general rule, were not
of so much use” (412). Viewing her as a facilitator and a coach, a connoisseur
instead of a “golden girl,” a commodity made of precious metal, the millionaire
buys into the new theories of value.
All these formulations collide at the climactic confrontation scene, when
Mr. Tozer, Mr. Copperhead, Mr. May, Phoebe, Reginald, and Mr. Northcote all
meet over the disputed bill. Tozer is in “a white heat, and was no longer to be
controlled”; foaming with fury, he seizes Phoebe and demands the bill, shouting
that the law will send the forger to prison (399). Meanwhile, his ghostly counter-
part, Mr. May, is trying to escape the young men’s hold and pleads to go. Phoebe
seizes the moment. “ ‘Grandpapa,’ said Phoebe in his ear, ‘here is your bill; it was
he who did it—and it has driven him mad. Look! I give it up to you; and there he
is—that is your work. Now do what you please—’ ” (399). Startled and awed by
the intimation that he has produced something, that he is the author of this
ghastly, struggling madman, Tozer takes the bill. Sign and referent, bill and
money, confront each other. “For a moment they looked at each other in a com-
mon agony, neither the one nor the other clear enough to understand, but both
feeling that some tremendous crisis had come upon them” (399). Can the two
halves of the monetary system, the two sundered selves, the representatives of
the two financial visions, come together?
The novel’s final somatic alteration occurs. Tozer sobs and feels “as sharp an
anguish of pity and shame as could have befallen the most heroic. It seized upon
him so that he could say or do nothing more, forcing hot and salt tears up into
his old eyes, and shaking him all over with a tremor as of palsy” (400). He is
experiencing the pity that is part of the Aristotelian response to tragedy, which,
in this novel, signals the shift to connoisseurship. The suffusion of the eyes, the
symptom Phoebe had felt, signals the achievement of sensitive aesthetic vision.
And spurred by a touch on the arm from Phoebe, he tells her to burn the bill.
Momentarily lifted out of himself, into the viewpoint of the aesthete, he is able
to achieve a new perspective.
Thus Phoebe Junior’s climactic scene features the same event that occurs in
Cranford. Like Miss Matty, Mr. Tozer confers value by deliberately accepting a
worthless bit of paper. This act restores the economy in both Cranford and Phoebe
Junior. The worrisome specter of the floating bill, the valueless paper that can be
endlessly copied (manufactured, forged), gets realigned with the proper value of
unique, solid worth. In both novels, this heroic revaluation occurs through the
financial self-sacrifice of a member of the older generation, mediated by a sym-
pathetic younger woman. Cranford’s Mary and Phoebe Junior’s Phoebe facilitate
this restoration of value, although Mary does it through sentimental sympathy
and Phoebe does it through connoisseurship. In these moments, however, the
younger woman effaces herself, because the deep drive of the novel is to show
the older character blessing the new economy and thereby instilling value where
value seemed worrisomely absent.
C a r l i n g ford I s H i s to r y
In Phoebe Junior, the craft world and its industrial economy and emphasis on
production have been thoroughly superseded by a consumer economy. Nobody
makes anything in this novel, except Mr. May’s shameful, false bill. I have argued
that the gold brooch starts out as the symptomatic craft object of Phoebe Junior,
but the artifact that supplants it is, in fact, the bill. If that bill is the signature
product of Phoebe Junior, perhaps that is because it is a parodic craft object.
It turns the craft paradigm’s love of imitation into forgery. No longer is it a
delightful exercise in skillful reading to spot a successful imitative art. Now, imi-
tation provokes nothing in the viewer but rage, pity, or disgust, a sickening of the
heart. After all, in the new aesthetic dispensation, art provides moral lessons, and
valid art is crucial for training viewers in proper thought. Good art, like Mr. May’s
bookcase or Phoebe’s lace, demonstrates truth to materials, which imitative arts
thoroughly violate. The bill becomes the novel’s emblematic craft object, a manu-
factured item: soiled by its association with working people, revoltingly false,
outrageously valueless, and restored only when the upper-class connoisseur gets
hold of it. Thus this novel trains us to despise the craft object by transforming it
into a criminal bill. And it trains us to scan objects for the minute signs that
reveal their true history, instead of parsing their emotional, sentimental truths.
Phoebe Junior makes us see crafts as revolting forgeries and teaches us how to
read like a connoisseur.
But is the new world really so different from the old? In fact, it is Tozer’s
money that pays for the credit economy and the connoisseur’s skills. The money
painstakingly accumulated over a lifetime of small trade transactions funds
Mr. May’s library and supports Phoebe, his heir. The old craft paradigm and pro-
duction-centered economy bankroll the successors who despise them. When
Mr. May copies Samuel Tozer’s name, he performatively makes himself into
Tozer. He adopts Tozer’s “character.” To forge, as Stephen Dedalus reminds us
(and as Oliphant surely meant the pun), is to create as well as to falsify. What
May forges, however, is not the uncreated conscience of his race, but a debt to
another era—the greatest debt of his life.
And it is that uncanny connection that Phoebe Junior sustains. The threat of
losing the Tozer money is what brings Phoebe to Carlingford, setting the plot in
motion. That money is despised yet desired by every character, from the Bee-
cham parents who send Phoebe to Carlingford, to the fabulously wealthy
Clarence Copperhead who nonetheless remarks, “Look here, that’s serious, that
174 Novel Craft
is; not that I mind a little pot of money like what the poor old fellow’s got; but
what’s the good of throwing anything away?” (398).
One of the semicomic but remarkably persistent issues in Phoebe Junior is how
to evaluate the worth of the elderly. It is the subject of the first direct conflict
between the competing ministers, Northcote and Reginald May. Reginald thinks
that “a home for the old and poor is surely as fine a kind of benevolence as one
could think of,” and when Northcote objects that it would be better to value the
young, Reginald asks, “Because they will pay . . . because we can get something
out of them in return; while we have already got all that is to be had out of the old
people? A very modern doctrine, but not so lovely as the old-fashioned way” (254).
It is the ground of the disagreement between Mr. May and Mr. Copperhead, as
Copperhead complains that Carlingford carries “‘Christianity too far . . . I call it
encouraging those old beggars to live,’ said Mr. Copperhead; ‘giving them permis-
sion to burden the community as long as they can manage it; a dead mistake,
depend upon it, the greatest mistake in the world’” (332). It is the basic question of
Reginald’s sinecure, whether his job of caring for the old constitutes work that
deserves pay, and it is the basic problem of Phoebe’s presence in Carlingford, how
to care gracefully for her embarrassing grandparents. This persistent sub-theme
suggests the novel’s deep concern about how modernity relates to the past. It sug-
gests that in spite of the novel’s disdain for the Tozer aesthetic, these elderly people
cannot simply be erased. The novel needs to accommodate, even celebrate, history,
to find some way to value the economic and aesthetic work of the last generation.
One might suggest that the entire novel works to consolidate Phoebe’s inherit-
ance, to “forge” that link between Phoebe and the Tozers. In this sense, the novel
asks a larger question: how can the new generation of aesthetes, acquiring antique
lace through credit, relate to the mid-Victorian generation for whom money was
small coinage and craft was homemade crocheted collars? Mrs. Tozer’s brooch
preserves a different kind of body from these financial bodies: the family body,
but preserved forever, curled up together, mounted on solid gold. The story of
cozy relationship and basic worth told by the craft is, ultimately, more powerful
than the three-cornered note. It is the most stable basis of character. It may be
true of the new aesthete, as the Tozers say sadly, that “she ain’t one of our sort”
(133). But it is also true that she is “the very moral of her mother, and of you too,
granny. As you stand there now, you’re as like as two peas” (141). In one of this
novel’s characteristically sly double meanings, Phoebe is indeed “the moral” of her
mother and grandmother. The novel’s moral is that the Arts and Crafts connois-
seur derives from the domestic handicraft world. No matter what her last name,
no matter whom she marries, Phoebe remains, irrevocably, Junior, owing her
very identity to those who came before. For that she deserves, we may say, credit.
So, too, Mary Smith, Miss Matty Jenkyns, Ethel May, Norman May, Jenny
Wren, and Betty Higden deserve our credit. So, too, may we credit Elizabeth
Gaskell, Charlotte Yonge, Charles Dickens, and Margaret Oliphant. Caught in a
changing world that exhilarated and affrighted them, they took the humblest
material culture available to them, the homemade object, as the marker of what
might be. Handicraft was not, as it turned out, a pragmatic answer to the prob-
lems of modernity, but it was a theoretical answer, and its very inefficacy allowed
these writers to play with it, to imagine fascinatingly alternative ideas about
production, evaluation, circulation, and preservation. They used handicraft to
celebrate ideas and individuals that were rapidly slipping into the realm of the
historical; they made belatedness a virtue. They used handicraft to insist on the
value of the solid in an era of fluidity and on the importance of the sentimental
in a world of generic exchangeability. At the core of the craft narrative is the
spectacle of the incised daisy on a stone, the solid gold hair brooch: the incontro-
vertible, imperishable, inconveniently assertive real. In an era of increasingly
abstract information, the handicraft stood athwart the way. Yet I would also say
that at the heart of the craft narrative is the miraculous vision of paper waste
suddenly charged with intense meaning. When Mary’s letter reaches Peter,
when Betty’s letter circulates to the Boffins, when Phoebe explains the bill
to Tozer, we are granted a moment of luminous, profound delight. In these
moments, an uncertain author whose characters ineptly stumble (due to lack of
knowledge of the language, illiteracy, forgery) finds that, miraculously, the
words have reached precisely the right readers. I started this book with a theory
that handicraft training shaped the mature fiction of middle-class women writ-
ers. It turns out that handicraft did do so, but not necessarily by giving writers
the alternative models of representation that I expected. Rather, handicraft gave
writers a language to express a poignant desire: that they could make a real arti-
fact whose value would transcend the terrible vulnerability of paper.
Figure P.1 Pringles Ribbon Bracelet.
Postscript
T H E N O V E LT Y O F C R A F T
Pringles Ribbon Bracelet: Cut a wide ring from an empty can of Pringles
chips. Glue a piece of quilting batting to the outside and a plastic curl
cut from a milk jug on the inside. Pin a ribbon to the plastic curl, and
wrap the ribbon around the batting-covered Pringles ring. When the
ring is entirely covered with ribbon, superglue the ribbon end in place
and wriggle out the pin.1
I began this book with wax coral, wire with wool twined around it and dipped into
molten wax. Almost one hundred and fifty years later, I offer you the Pringles
bracelet (figure P.1), where, once again, a handicrafter wraps a decorative textile
around a cheap material to create the simulacrum of a more costly consumer item.
I began by asking what could have motivated Victorian subjects to consider a
craft like wax coral desirable. It seemed to violate every category of craft we hold
today, and I was curious about what kinds of aesthetic codes could have encour-
aged such a product. And yet, when I read the Pringles instructions, I had to ask
whether the wax coral really should have felt so alien. The Pringles bracelet sug-
gests that very similar values, methods, and materials are thriving today. Indeed,
craft is a nearly $30 billion per year industry, with stores, magazines, websites,
and manuals.2 In this postscript, then, I explore how modern handicraft relates
to the Victorian pursuit we have been examining in Novel Craft. I ask, not about
novel craft, but about the novelty of craft. Is the Pringles bracelet the great-great
granddaughter of the wax coral? Or to put it more seriously, does modern hand-
icraft derive from the Victorian domestic handicraft, and if so, how might
acknowledging that relationship help us read the contemporary craft industry?
177
178 Novel Craft
One reason scholars have not explored this issue is that domestic handicraft
has not received much critical attention. These artifacts can provoke an almost
visceral revulsion among art historians, art critics, and curators because they
look like tragicomic failures to achieve basic craft standards. As Jo Turney
explains:
The marginalization of home crafts from academic discourse is largely

based on an understanding that both practices and objects are “un-
creative,” repetitive and mundane, existing outside the world of the
innovative, creative, challenging avant-garde. These objects and prac-
tices are presented as examples of “bad” taste and popular culture—an
anti-thesis of Modernism.3
Indeed, Turney explains, “any discussion of home-crafted objects is marginal-

ized to the level of all that is ‘bad’ in art, design and craft.” Handicraft “embodies
the modernist antithesis of art extolled by Clement Greenberg and Harold
Rosenberg. The decorative becomes associated with the mediocre, the middle
class and the mundane.”4 Certainly, it is hard to think of anything more alien to
the goals of avant-garde postmodernist art than domestic handicraft. All those
who endorse Greenberg’s idea of art would want to distance themselves from
domestic handicraft. Moreover, for art critics interested in craft, there are
plenty of better respected fields: folk art, outsider art, indigenous arts, studio
craft, Arts and Crafts history. Working in one of these areas allows one to
explore many of the same concerns about daily craft practices outside the art
world, without tainting oneself by alliance with a profoundly unfashionable
popular pursuit.
Domestic handicraft is problematic not only because it violates modernist art
ideas but also, more disturbingly, because it evokes practitioners, regions, and
artifacts that violate elite preferences in modern American culture. While the
media holds up youthful glamour as the ideal, the handicraft is associated with
middle-aged housewives or screaming kids at summer camp. While the advertis-
ing industry trains us to covet high-priced commodities to prove our status,
handicrafts seem like lumpy, frumpy, embarrassing imitations. The people who
want Prada are not going to be happy wearing Aunt Betty’s home-knitted pull-
over (unless they do it with irony). And because we associate good culture with
urban coastal living, domestic handicraft, which evokes midwestern Middle-
American suburbs, seems hopelessly outré. Moreover, domestic women’s work
tends to provoke misogynist rejection. Debbie Stoller, founder of the feminist
zine BUST and leading exponent of knitted crafts, points out that her friends
would have applauded if she had taken up a male-identified pursuit like wood-
working or basketball, but they despised the hobby she actually embraced, knit-
ting. Stoller responds,
All those people who looked down on knitting—and housework, and

housewives—were not being feminist at all. In fact, they were being
anti-feminist, since they seemed to think that only those things that
men did, or had done, were worthwhile. . . . Why couldn’t we all—
women and men alike—take the same kind of pride in the work our
mothers had always done as we did in the work of our fathers?5
Similarly, Jean Railla, exponent of the “New Domesticity,” regards her journey
toward domestic handicraft as a feminist one, a mission to restore the respect
that women’s work has been denied.6 In gender, class, regional, and commodity
terms, domestic handicraft suffers. Middle-class, middle-aged, midwestern, it
gets written out of an art world and a popular culture devoted to youthful urban
coastal culture.
Of course, handicraft also experiences a poor reputation partly because all
crafts do. Applied arts tend to suffer low regard. Even the most culturally privi-
leged of the craft practitioners, studio crafters—woodworkers, textile artists,
jewelry makers, and ceramicists—do not achieve the kind of status given to
painters or sculptors. Craft museums and galleries notoriously get fewer visi-
tors, less money, and less attention than art museums. A cushion is still less
impressive than a painting.
How much worse, then, when the cushion violates the basic precepts of craft
manufacture? Domestic handicraft, as we have seen, does not adhere to the
dogma of the Arts and Crafts movement. For modern viewers, Ruskin’s and
Morris’s ideas have, quite simply, become internalized. It seems obvious to us
that handicrafts should showcase good materials, sound construction, trained
skill, traditional design, professional knowledge of the history of the practice,
and original ideas. What would be the alternative? Championing cheap materi-
als, poor construction, amateurism, mass-produced design? In a word: yes. It
would mean defending something like knitting, with its inexpensive wools, easy
technique, and prebought patterns. Knitting—like all domestic handicraft—is
the antithesis of Arts and Crafts ideas. Their opposition makes historical sense,
since Arts and Crafts developed against domestic craft. But our unconscious
embrace of Arts and Crafts ideas means we tend to read domestic handicraft as
an egregious violation of craft principles, whereas we really should regard it as a
separate, earlier notion of craft altogether.
What happens, then, if we take up this challenge to read domestic handicraft
as an independent school of thought dating back two centuries? In the rest of
this postscript, I read contemporary domestic handicraft as a practice deriving
from a Victorian tradition, quite distinct from the professional studio crafts
movement. I analyze handicraft’s three major schools: Martha Stewart, women’s
magazine traditional craft hobbies, and the newest form of handicraft, which is
sometimes called radical craft, indie craft, DIY craft, or alt craft.7 I see these
180 Novel Craft
three as fundamentally related in spite of their different methods. For instance,

if asked to make an attractive sweater, each group would do it differently. The
Martha Stewart followers might sew antique handkerchiefs onto an old sweater,
the domestic handicrafters could iron a magazine-insert floral pattern onto a
sweatshirt, and the alt crafters would unstitch different vintage sweaters from
flea markets and reassemble the pieces. None would approve of the others’ work,
but they are all engaged in the act of making a garment that expresses their aes-
thetic preferences by organizing preexisting components rather than making
the garment from scratch. The three craft groups also share certain presupposi-
tions that may be masked by their variable outcomes. They all value inexpensive,
common materials; they all identify as amateur craftspeople; they all invest
labor to transform common material into something that seems more valuable;
they all enjoy enthusiastic use of new communications technologies, ranging
from glossy magazines to blogs and websites; and they all see the artifact’s worth
as derived from sentimental attachments rather than monetary price.
In these respects, domestic handicraft today perpetuates many of the values of
its Victorian predecessor, including salvage, amateurism, and sentiment. Inter-
estingly, however, domestic handicraft practitioners are largely unaware of this
history. In Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design, Faythe
Levine and Cortney Heimerl argue vigorously for the value of a resurgent,
amateur, enthusiastic craft ethos. It emerged, according to their time line, in
approximately 1994.8 If craft participants are not aware of a longer lineage, nei-
ther are the scholars of the handicraft movement. For instance, Pat Kirkham’s
groundbreaking work on interwar handicrafts is framed by her assumption that
the movement’s roots “go back to the ideas of John Ruskin and William Mor-
ris.”9 This assumption shapes her subsequent analysis; Kirkham marvels at the
apparently new amateur and female participation in craft and argues that the
1920s marked the first time craft was reconceptualized as a leisure hobby rather
than professional work.10 Craft is, according to Larry Shiner, “a great social and
aesthetic movement that began with Ruskin’s and Morris’s call to restore hon-
our to the crafts.”11 Peter Greenhalgh agrees that women’s domestic handicrafts
fell from the heights of the Arts and Crafts model; in his words, “it is a vision of
craft void of the original political commitment.”12 But to read domestic handi-
craft against Arts and Crafts is backward. As we know, it was Arts and Crafts that
actually reacted against domestic handicraft. Domestic handicraft carries its
own political and aesthetic ideas and articulates culturally significant solutions.
It need not be read as an inadequate version of studio crafts or a decline from the
ideals of Arts and Crafts. It is not an inadequate imitator; it is a predecessor
steeped in a quite different paradigm.
Domestic handicraft’s fierce amateurism and retrograde taste make it suscep-
tible to ridicule and ripe for the occasional reformer who can lift it into a more
high-status realm, and, in the late twentieth century, her name was Martha
Stewart. Stewart introduced an aspirational, professional credo into crafts,

aligning crafts with the fashionable style of the day instead of using it as a locus
of residual aesthetic standards. Stewart’s crafts resembled the French country
style popular in the 1980s and 1990s, the artfully aged farmhouse look with its
crackle glazes, repurposed milk bottles and pails spilling over with flowers, bat-
tered white-painted wooden furniture, and wreaths made of berries and
branches cut from one’s own grounds. They also participate in the consumer
marketplace. For instance, in “From the Garden: Urns,” published in Martha
Stewart Living in November 2007, Stewart simply advises the maker to use a
large metal urn with an “aged, blue-gray patina” as the perfect receptacle for a
particular floral arrangement. One hundred years earlier, Rosamund Marriott
Watson had similarly instructed readers to place flowers in “the classic copper
tea-urn of the Georgian era” in The Art of the House.13 This is more than a coinci-
dence, for Marriott Watson and the aesthetic reformers of the 1890s were Stew-
art’s Victorian analogues. Mary Eliza Haweis, Marriott Watson, Rhoda and
Agnes Garrett, Jane Panton, and the writers of art needlework handbooks,
taught readers how to fill their homes with the aesthetic hues of salmon, terra-
cotta, sage, and the aesthetic collectibles of blue and white china, old bronze
urns, and Indian spice jars. In both cases, Stewart and the aesthetic reformers
played a crucial role in showing women with traditional skills a way to make
those skills relevant to contemporary tastes. In their work, actual craft is less
important than the vision of a tasteful home. Indeed, the craft instructions may
be beside the point; in Stewart’s case the actual artifacts are often famously
impossible to produce in ordinary homes anyway.14
Meanwhile, traditional domestic handicraft—what I identify here as wom-
en’s magazine crafts—continues to enact many of the issues we have seen in
its Victorian predecessor. Perhaps most fundamentally, it imagines its own
production in archaic terms. Jo Turney has found that domestic craftswomen
are very concerned to “tidy up” their work spaces, to show finished products
and gloss over the process of labor.15 Studio craft, by contrast, foregrounds the
labor by which the craft is made, inviting the viewer to scrutinize the quality of
the object’s construction. Often this is accomplished by leaving thumbprints
(on pottery), exposed seams (on textiles), or visible joints (on woodwork). But
in domestic handicraft, the craft is a product rather than a process. In this
respect, the domestic handicraft emulates a commodity, aiming to be a purely
finished, perfect product that forestalls queries about its construction. For
instance, the Pringles bracelet is introduced this way: “Hello. My mum brought
back some bangles from london. . . . i really like them but i dont feel like shell-
ing out 20 bucks for a whole collection, so, being a craftster, the cogs started
grinding and i came up with these.” The inventor of the bracelet explicitly
designs it to replicate a purchased item, rather than expressing her own origi-
nality. The aim is to transform trash into something that looks like it cost $20,
182 Novel Craft
Figure P.2 CareBear Afghan.
to make an item visually indistinguishable from a store-bought object. Steven

Gelber comments:
The product of [crafters’] leisure work is almost always a representation

of a similar object in the commercial world. Needlework, household
decorations, models, do-it-yourself furniture—the crafter makes all
these things to be like similar items made by machines. Both the process
and the product of handicrafts carry a double message about the
meaning of the modern workplace: production is good, but the circum-
stances in which it occurs are not.16
The modern domestic handicrafter emulates the commodity just as the Victori-
ans did, and this imitation carries a comparably ambivalent charge.
Domestic handicrafts also maintain a temporal distance from the present.
Turney points out that crafters favor bucolic, nostalgic, or fine art scenes, con-
structing home as “a stable and unchanging environment” or, with samplers or
alphabets or cartoon characters, introducing a “‘traditional’ or ‘old-fashioned’”
tone in the nursery (figure P.2).17 Like Victorian crafters, today’s crafters use
strictly contemporary images that are, at most, a generation or two old (Disney
characters) in the service of a myth of historical stasis. Moreover, the kind of
bucolic scenes the crafters produce are themselves old-fashioned, out of sync
with contemporary art. Whereas the Victorian producers of domestic handicraft
Figure P.3 Snow White Pendant.
used 1840s–1850s bright colors and recycled industrial materials, the modern
producers of domestic handicrafts use 1940s–1950s Cinderella and Snow White
depictions of femininity (figure P.3). In both cases, the power of the craft is pre-
cisely in dignifying the recent past with the imprimatur of tradition. This makes
a strong emotional case for valuing elements of the past that might otherwise be
seen as superseded.
Contemporary domestic handicraft thus perpetuates central elements of the
Victorian craft paradigm. It insists on the model of the leisured female pro-
ducer. It aims for the craft to resemble a purchased commodity. And it decorates
that craft with visual cues from one or two generations past. The domestic
handicraft uses inexpensive materials and boasts of the easiness and accessibil-
ity of its instructions. Its target audience is middle-aged female homemakers.
Finally, like Victorian domestic handicraft, modern handicraft is distributed
through mass-produced means, websites, women’s magazines, and kits and
craft manuals. (All these factors are true of the Pringles bracelet, for instance,
which imitates fashionable bangles, uses cheap materials and easy steps, and is
posted on a website.) These are not accidental connections. Contemporary
domestic handicraft continues, at least in part, because it articulates women’s
economic situation in ways that bear somewhat sobering resonances with the
nineteenth century.
Just like their Victorian forebears, modern women can still be excluded from
the normative economy. Sara Mosle has found that the typical seller on the
184 Novel Craft
hugely popular craft marketplace Etsy.com is “a married woman with (or about
to have) young children, with a higher-than-average household income, and a
good education. These should, in sum, be highly employable women. So what are
they doing . . . on Etsy?”18 Mosle shrewdly supposes that for these women, craft
offers an appealing fantasy of flexible, remunerative work that can be combined
with family in an era when law, medicine, and business—the jobs for which
these women may have trained—make little effort to accommodate family life.
Craft speaks to the poignant fantasy that women’s home work—the love and
care for family and friends—can be solidified into artifacts and pronounced val-
uable by the marketplace.
For these women, amateur handicraft is the sign of economic marginaliza-
tion. Like a buoy bobbing on the surface, the craft marks the site of a sub-
merged population, a group excluded from the mainstream economy. But for
other makers, we might see it not as a buoy, but as a flag. In its newest incar-
nation, handicraft is actually the banner of allegiance to an alternative realm,
a space bravely imagined and staked out beyond the consumer economy. In
the work of the indie-DIY-alt crafts movement, we see crafters not drowning
but waving.
The alt crafts movement consists of youthful bohemian artists who may
come to it through the punk music scene, underground zines, or digital media.
It weds traditional craft skills like knitting or beading with an irreverent, ironic
stance. Typical products would include quilts sewn with Pac-Man appliqués,
sock puppets in the form of space aliens, jewelry made of repurposed keys from
a computer keyboard, and belts decorated with unspooled audio cassette tape.
The enormous online craft mart, etsy.com, places such items in a category called
“geekery.” (See figure P.4.) As these examples show, indie crafters generally
incorporate elements of contemporary technology and pop culture in their arti-
facts. A large part of the indie craft scene is finding flea market or thrift store
bits that can be reworked, with an aim of being funky, individualistic, witty, and
clever. This affiliation to reused debris sets alt-crafters apart from women’s
magazine handicrafters, who generally prefer to create clean new pieces that
look like store-bought commodities. However, both groups use craft to express
their alienation from the mainstream marketplace. While the alt-crafters are
demonstrating their urban street smarts and environmentalist credentials by
participating in an economy of recycled, secondhand items, the women’s maga-
zine crafters are expressing their yearning for decorative collectibles that are
out of their price range. Domestic handicraft expresses one’s inability (or
unwillingness) to buy the things one covets, whether due to punk youths’ pov-
erty or environmentalist reuse ethos, or to middle-aged residents’ lack of
income or access to stores.
Although radical craft owes a good deal to these other craft movements, it
is deeply invested in differentiating itself from them. The motto of craftster.
Figure P.4 Captain Kirk Cameo Pendant.
org , one of the largest alt-craft websites, is “no tea cozies without irony.”19
Greg der Ananian’s Bazaar Bizarre is subtitled Not Your Granny’s Crafts. Accord-
ing to Time Magazine, “‘This isn’t your grandmother’s craft,’ observes Bosto-
nian Leah Kramer, 30, who likes to take old boxy rock-concert T shirts and
transform them into baby-doll fashion statements.”20 We might wonder just
why it would be so important to assert that it is not “your grandmother’s
craft.” Part of the identity of indie crafts derives from its oppositional stance,
a critique of mainstream norms that seems to confirm its countercultural sta-
tus. Indie crafters deliberately seek out outrageously kitschy projects partly to
reinforce their rejection of anodyne decorative elements like hearts and flow-
ers and kittens. Nor are they any more attuned to the highly professionalized
style of Martha Stewart. Kathy Cano-Murillo describes her Latina-vernacular
craft style as the opposite of Martha Stewart’s: “Martha has always been an
inspiration to me, in a weird way, because I cannot do her type of crafts, no
matter how hard I try. . . . So my thing has been embracing that I can’t do it—
and celebrating my own style.”21 Such assertions suggest that indie craft might
be a typically postmodern movement aimed at teasingly deconstructing an
inherited tradition.
Interestingly, however, radical craft does not seem particularly antago-
nistic to studio craft; in fact, Andrew Wagner, the editor of American Craft
Magazine, redesigned his publication to include both realms. Although Wagner
acknowledged that studio craft practitioners resented the cheerful amateurism
of indie craftspeople, he insisted that the energy of the new craft movement is
more important than considerations of quality. “It’s still about working outside
186 Novel Craft
the mainstream,” Wagner insisted.22 Here Wagner takes alt craft’s characteristi-
cally oppositionalist assertion and cleverly turns it around to make it the
grounds for an alliance between two craft schools. Instead of endorsing a divide
between studio crafts and alt crafts, he unites them in their shared unconven-
tional opposition to normative culture. Similarly, Bruce Metcalf, a prominent
member of the studio craft community, has spoken out about the need to
embrace alt craft.23 Metcalf believes that mainstream craft has become too staid
and needs to learn from alt craft’s energy, sense of fun, creativity, youthfulness,
and communal practice.
Craft’s oppositional stance is, in fact, central to its identity, according to con-
sumer analyst Rob Walker:
“Crafting is a political statement,” Jean Railla, the founder of GetCrafty.

com, argued in the first issue of a magazine called Craft, which appeared
in late 2006. “With globalism, factory labor, and giant chains like Star-
bucks, McDonald’s, and Old Navy turning America into one big mini-
mall, crafting becomes a protest.” . . . Reiterating the political and
“antiauthority” aspects of “the ethic of Do It Yourself,” she mused: “In
the age of hypermaterialism, Paris Hilton, and thousand-dollar ‘It’
bags, perhaps making stuff is the ultimate form of rebellion.”24
Railla’s argument is interesting because it targets both the cheapest and the
most luxurious goods. From Old Navy to thousand-dollar bags, the entire con-
sumer system is sick. Somewhat oddly, the very act of prizing material goods,
the “hypermaterialism” she critiques, can apparently be combated by making
other material goods.
Radical craft’s oppositional mind-set is more important than the specific cat-
egory against which the speaker is situating her own work. Whether alt craft is
opposed to women’s magazine craft, to Martha Stewart, or to the mainstream,
the point is that it defines itself by its difference, its negation of values others
accept unproblematically. Handicraft continues to act as a nexus of dissatisfac-
tion, a way to imagine alternatives. And it does so because it has remained true
to several key principles that were developed in the nineteenth century.
First, modern domestic handicraft and Victorian craft both stress recycling,
but for different reasons. The Victorian domestic handicraft recycled debris to
prove household thrift, while the modern craft recycles to demonstrate eco-
logical awareness. Jean Railla’s 2004 book, Get Crafty, features a chapter on
secondhand finds, and the title of Steve Dodd’s book says it all: Re-Creative: 50
Projects for Turning Found Items into Contemporary Design. Virtually all indie
craft publications enthuse about reworking thrift store items; Greg der Anani-
an’s Bazaar Bizarre: Not Your Granny’s Crafts! prints interviews with alt-crafters
asking, “What is your fave craft resource (website, store, dumpster, etc.)?” Their
answers foreground thrift stores, salvage yards, street finds, eBay, and flea mar-
kets.25 The ribbon bracelet could have been based on any cheap new bangle
bought at a dollar store, but instead it insists on reusing a potato chip can, with
reinforcing material cut from a plastic gallon jug of milk. The writer also sug-
gests that for those with bigger hands, the cardboard tube from a roll of packing
tape could replace the Pringles can. The reuse of trash is clearly part of this
project’s appeal.
Second, modern craft (especially alt craft) replicates the alternative sales loci
of the nineteenth century. Both the Victorian domestic handicraft and the mod-
ern craft express deep mistrust of the mainstream consumer economy and pride
themselves on generating an alternative system for the distribution of goods.
This system is coded as morally superior because it avoids the dehumanizing
effects of capitalism. Where Victorian domestic handicrafters used charity bazaars,
modern handicrafters distribute their wares through enormous online market-
places like Etsy.com but also through increasingly popular annual craft fairs:
the Renegade Craft Fair, the Bazaar Bizarre, Crafty Bastard, and the Urban
Craft Uprising. For women’s magazine handicrafts, the suburban hobby supply
chains like Jo-Ann, Michael’s, and A. C. Moore often become loci of local craft
communities, with classes and gatherings. These highly divergent craft styles
all desire personal contact between the buyer and the maker of craft, a value
developed in the nineteenth century, although for somewhat different reasons.
For the Victorians, personal exchange primarily meant escaping the worri-
somely impersonal qualities of the newly mass-produced artifacts of industrial-
ism. For modern handicrafters, it means evading the ecological and financial
ravages of rampant consumerism. But the result is the same: engagement in an
alternative marketplace.
Third, modern crafts resemble their Victorian counterparts in another way:
skill level is unimportant, and in fact, errors can be prized as evidence of authen-
ticity, particularly in the alt craft movement. This aim obviously exists in tension
with the desire to make something that looks like a polished “real” commodity,
which is more characteristic of the women’s magazine craft style. The discrep-
ancy derives from domestic handicraft’s ambivalence about the commodity. The
handicrafter’s typical assertion, “I could make one of those!” allows her to express
contradictory feelings simultaneously: desire for expensive commodities cou-
pled with disdain for them. The Pringles bracelet maker wanted more bangles
but would not or could not buy them. Yet, interestingly, she passes up the oppor-
tunity to make her replacement bracelet as smooth as the original purchase, as
if deliberately including a flaw that will reveal the artifact as homemade.
She instructs: “get your ribbon, and pin it in place (you could superglue/e6000
it if you have the patience, but i don’t, so meh).” In this case supergluing, not
itself a particularly skilled pursuit, is ruled out as excessively fussy. The ribbon’s
tendency to unwind once one removes the pins would then be taken as evidence
188 Novel Craft
of the maker’s charmingly devil-may-care attitude, not as bad craft. In reviewing

Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl’s history of DIY crafts, Alissa Quart asks,
“How can we even judge a form that celebrates the bumpy and the half-cocked?”26
This “bumpiness” is a sign of a virtuously authentic homemade effort. Profes-
sional-level skill is suspect. That half-unraveled bit of crochet is meant to reveal
the maker’s enviable emotional state, although the Victorian domestic handi-
crafter was supposed to be indicating her household management, while the
modern handcrafter is expressing a childlike joyous innocence. Another way
to put this difference is to say that the obviously amateur domestic handicraft
reaffirms the modern crafter’s imaginative youth and the Victorian crafter’s
managerial maturity, respectively.
Fourth, and this is the element of craft most confusing to scholars who are
steeped in an Arts and Crafts dictum, the Victorian domestic handicraft and the
modern craft both rely on the most global, fluid, avant-garde technologies of the
day, whether those are mass-produced magazines or websites. Love Jönsson
reminds us:
The majority of today’s craftspeople (and not least the followers of

grass-roots crafts movements: knit-outs, “radical crafts,” “extreme
craft,” to name but a few), consciously use the web for communication,
documentation, and self-promotion. Consequently, these movements
cannot unambiguously be inscribed into an account of anti-modern or
anti-technologic ideals.27
Jönsson sounds baffled by the convergence he documents, cautioning readers to

“remember that in general, technological development has always been regarded
as a threat to the crafts.”28 Yet if we place modern domestic handicraft back into
its own history (instead of superimposing the Arts and Crafts Movement’s anti-
industrialism), we realize that it has actually always embraced contemporary
information technologies. Domestic handicraft aims to come to terms with
modernity by (literally) remaking it, while Arts and Crafts aims to escape from
modernity. The stitched watch pocket of the Victorian domestic handicraft
movement matches the crocheted iPod cover of today’s indie crafts (figure P.5).
By wrapping a highly valued technological item in another material, they offer a
complicated reaction to the gadget: competing with it, celebrating it, and yet
indicating what it lacks.
Like our Victorian predecessors, we are struggling to reconcile material life
with a new form of value that is worrisomely fluid, ineffable, and vulnerable.
For the Victorians, it was paper money—the worthless note of the Town and
Country Bank, the ledgers of bad debts at Pubsey and Co, the fragment of a
forged accommodation bill. Today, it is the information economy. We experience
daily worries about the complex derivatives, the student research via Wikipedia
Figure P.5 Felt Cassette iPod Case.
and Googling, the crashed hard drive, the 404 website not found, the unsaved
document, and the text not readable by the new program that upgrades against
our will. No wonder, then, that we increasingly fetishize handwork. As Railla
points out, “We work on computers all day. Crafting allows us the experience of
the tactile world, the non-virtual, the ‘real.’ In a world where only a few manufac-
ture products, making something that you can touch, wear, or inhabit is satisfy-
ing on an almost spiritual level.”29
Finally, modern craft communities are not particularly interested in the
Victorian craze for “imitative arts”; they do not, for instance, generally work
to make a glass bottle look like porcelain. However, they do often use nostal-
gic memories of beloved childhood products, preferring a somewhat campy,
kitsch copying of 1970s pop culture to an earnest striving for authentic
originality. Indie crafts often reproduce cartoon figures, ads, children’s char-
acters, toys, and game pieces in craft materials (figure P.6). The deliberately
kitschy product also allows space to revel in a sentimental affiliation com-
bined with an intellectual rejection of the worth of the beloved item. This is
typical of domestic handicraft’s fixation on a period one or two generations
ago, rather than the Arts and Crafts movement’s preference for an era hun-
dreds of years past. Meanwhile, women’s magazine items aim for a precise
copying of recognizable images, usually landscapes, flowers, or cartoon char-
acters. Their interest in representational fidelity is extremely close to that of
190 Novel Craft
Figure P.6 Pacman Coasters.
their Victorian predecessors. Indeed, they often imitate the naturalistic floral
patterns so popular in the nineteenth century (figure P.7). In both cases, this
literal realism constitutes a rejection of the dominant aesthetic of high art,
which favors more conceptual, abstract, and formal designs. Thus although
the precise objects made by modern handicrafters differ from Victorian prod-
ucts, they are generated by many of the same feelings: sentiment, reversion
to an earlier (but not too much earlier) aesthetic, commodity emulation, and
realist imitation.
If we read modern handicraft as the descendant of Victorian domestic
handicraft, we can see that it is a coherent movement expressing its own con-
sistent ideas. If the specific cultural practices have changed over the centuries,
the formal structure in which one can see these values working has not. The
central virtues of homemade craft for the past two hundred years have
remained: recycling, sentiment, economic alterity, amateurism, imitation,
nostalgia, and technophilia.
The Victorians contrasted paper value to solid worth and, via craft, tried to
resolve the problem of how to combine the older generation’s savings with
their grandchildren’s skills. They hoped to achieve a vision that could be read
in two registers simultaneously. The old letters get burnt, but the new narrator
paraphrases them into a permanent publication. The original natives grow
like weeds and die, but their heavenly selves bloom forever. The book manu-
script may be a pile of waste paper, but it is also the work of a story weaver
at his loom. The connoisseur may identify the artifact, but she weeps at the
sight of the incriminating information. This is the crisis of historical change
that handicraft cries out to resolve. It tries to infuse contemporary abstrac-

tion with the solidity of the past. So, too, do our crafts today, particularly
indie craft, try to unify older values with a modern practice. In making jew-
elry out of old motherboards, in selling fleece baby blankets via websites, in
melting old LPs into flowerpots, in stitching cartoons with real thread,
handicraft propels itself urgently toward a viable union of the two ways of
making in our era. That is why alt craft incorporates technological and pop
cultural elements. It tries to make digital media real, and it tries to render
the real virtual, and both components are crucial to the fantasy of a merged,
compromise realm.
If Novel Craft is itself a handicraft, it, too, tries to reconcile a mute past com-
posed of inconveniently solid fragments into something that might be legible as
valuable information in the contemporary world. I have not used cardboard
rings covered with ribbons, wire coated in wax, notes twisted into spills, or wild
growths pressed into patterns. But I have tried to do something that is, in a way,
similar. I have picked up the debris of a vanishing culture and stitched it together.
This book builds on odd, forgotten, dusty artifacts made of scraps of cardboard,
pits, papers. It reuses yellowed pages of craft manuals, new articles, brittle
papers of old magazines, even glowing screens of websites. I have reworked and
refashioned them just like any handicrafter, connecting them with my ideas
instead of with ribbons or wool. I have hoped, in the end, to have laid a paper
pathway to the past.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Marjorie Henderson and Elizabeth Wilkinson, Cassell’s Compendium of Victorian Crafts
(London: Cassell, 1977), 140. Selected projects chosen from four volumes of Cassell’s
Household Guide, 1875.
2. I frequently use “Victorian domestic handicraft” or “domestic handicraft” to remind the
reader to differentiate them from the craft object of Arts and Crafts, although, due to the
unwieldiness of this term, I have allowed myself to use “craft” sometimes, too, if the
context makes it clear that it is domestic handicraft to which I am referring.
3. Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 165.
4. Rosamund Marriott Watson, The Art of the House (London: G. Bell, 1897), 45.
5. Examples of enormously valuable theoretical treatments include Gaston Bachelard, The
Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1994); and Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique
of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
6. Nineteenth-century American handicrafts often celebrated raw nature and frontier
thrift and ingenuity, incorporating twigs with the bark still on, acorns, and pine needles.
They also demonstrate Native American influence in terms of beadwork. By contrast,
British handicrafts usually stage nature in a processed, mediated way (as this book will
show) and show very little interest in Native American crafts. For examples of American
handicraft, see Kenneth Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian
Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); and Catherine E. Beecher and
Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1975; first ed. 1869).
7. Amanda Vickery has reminded us, however, that the shift was not nearly that simple.
See Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and
Chronologies of English Women’s History,” in Women’s Work: The English Experience
1650–1914, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London: Arnold, 1998), 294–332.
8. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England, 2nd ed. (London: Fisher, n.d. [1839?]), 18.
9. “Candle,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 5, 11th ed. (New York: Encyclopedia Britannica,
1910), 178.
10. Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), chapter 4,
especially 146–150; also chapter 2 in Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation
and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
11. Briggs, Victorian Things, 152–155.
12. The Victorian Catalogue of Household Goods, intro. Dorothy Bosomworth, catalogue by
Silber and Fleming, c. 1882 (New York: Studio Editions, 1991).
13. Irene Guggenheim Navarro, “Hairwork of the Nineteenth Century,” Magazine Antiques
(March 2001), 484–93.
193
194 Notes to Pages 10–16
14. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 133.
15. Judith Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (London:
Harper, 2006), 75–77.
16. W. Hamish Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914 (Hamden, CT: Archon,
1981). Also see Gary R. Dyer, “The ‘Vanity Fair’ of Nineteenth-Century England: Com-
merce, Women, and the East in the Ladies’ Bazaar,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46, no.
2 (1991), 196–222, 200.
17. Thomas Richards describes the emergence of this system in The Commodity Culture of
Victorian England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
18. F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon,
1980), 49–51.
19. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 54.
20. Town Hall (Birmingham, England), Programme of Grand Bazaar, Town Hall, Birmingham,
October 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th, 1879, in aid of the Aston Parish Church Restoration
Fund, etc. Birmingham, 1879 (British Library shelfmark 4705.a.66), p.18.
21. “A Charity Bazaar,” Cornhill Magazine 4 (1861), 338.
22. “A Charity Bazaar,” 338–339.
23. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith had claimed that a commodity’s natural price was
the value of the rent, wages, and profit necessary to bring it to market. But none of these
factors applied to women’s handicrafts, whose producers paid no rent, received no
wages, and expected no profit.
24. “A Charity Bazaar,” 339.
25. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 67.
26. “A Stall Holder,” A Fancy Sale (London: William Hunt, n.d. [1875?]), 4, 14. The bazaar’s
financial shenanigans could become threatening when one considers that many bazaars
were held in churches. One dissenting minister went so far as to publish a leaflet called
“Church Desecration,” in which he warned, “the Shades of the Wesleys will not be there,
but the Devil will make amends for the loss” (Savill Hayward, Church Desecration. A
bazaar . . . for the sale of divers vanities, etc. Chelsea, [1865?] [BL shelfmark 1879.cc.8(16)]).
27. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine 6, series 3 (1869), 108–109.
28. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine 6, series 3 (1869), 49.
29. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The
Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 73.
30. A typical example: the writer of an article on “A Charity Bazaar” imagined a lovely young
stallholder, forgetful of her duties, who became deeply immersed in conversation with a
handsome man. “A Charity Bazaar,” 338–339.
31. John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008), 17.
32. Plotz, Portable Property, 17.
33. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), 8.
34. Freedgood, The Ideas in Things, 142.
35. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.
36. Bill Brown, Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Armstrong, Victorian
Glassworlds; Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science
(Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 2007).
37. Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 164.
38. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London:
Women’s Press, 1984; rev. ed. 1996).
39. Information about albums comes from Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 124–136; also
Patrizia di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England (London: Ashgate,
2007); and Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).
Notes to Pages 16–21 195
40. On the relation between Dickinson’s stitching and poetry, see Sandra M. Gilbert and
Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 641.
41. Anthea Callen, Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement 1870–1914
(London: Astragal, 1979), 187. Callen discusses women’s participation in the printing
and bookbinding trades on 180–187.
42. Margaret Stetz, “Keynotes: A New Woman, Her Publisher, and Her Material,” Studies in
the Literary Imagination 30, no. 1 (Spring 1997), 89–106.
43. Ruari McLean, Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing (London: Faber and Faber, 1963;
rev. ed. 1972), 210–214. Volumes bound in wooden and papier-mâché bindings can be
seen in the collection of the Library Company in Philadelphia.
44. The connection between authorship and prostitution has a long history. According to
Catherine Gallagher, it governed the careers of some of the first professional women
writers in the seventeenth century. See Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing
Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994).
45. On the relations between authors and publishers, see N. N. Feltes, Literary Capital and
the Late Victorian Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Peter Keating,
The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Martin
Secker and Warburg, 1989).
46. Leah Price, “Getting the Reading Out of It: Paper Recycling in Mayhew’s London,” in
Repetition, ed. Michael Moon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and in
Bookish Histories, ed. Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (London: Palgrave, 2009), 148.
47. Price, “Getting the Reading Out of It,” 148.
48. For a fascinating discussion of the many extraliterary uses to which rag-based paper was
subject, see Price, “Getting the Reading Out of It.”
49. J. Munsell, A Chronology of Paper and Paper-Making, 3rd ed. (Albany, NY: J. Munsell,
1864), 8.
50. Henri-Jean Martin explains that wood pulp had been one of many types of vegetable
fibers with which papermakers experimented in the first half of the nineteenth century,
but it came to the fore in 1860, when a process was developed for separating the fibers
and chemically “cooking” the pulp. See Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of
Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; 2nd ed.,
1994), 402.
51. Martin, The History and Power of Writing, 402–412.
52. Flanders, Consuming Passions, 148–149.
53. Martin, The History and Power of Writing, 453.
54. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865; New York: Penguin, 1964), 168–169.
55. Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in 18th- and 19th-Century
Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
56. Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, 62, 48.
57. Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, 89.
58. Patricia Zakreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–1890: Refining Work for the
Middle-Class Woman (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), 21.
59. Mary Lamb, “On Needlework,” The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. I: Miscellaneous
Prose 1798–1834, ed. E.V. Lucas (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 176.
60. Frances Power Cobbe, “The Little Health of Ladies,” Contemporary Review 31 (January
1878), 288. The original version was a talk sponsored by the London Suffrage Society,
December 2, 1877.
61. Among many studies of the connection between the needle and the pen are Kathryn
R. King, “Of Needles and Pens and Women’s Work,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14
(1995), 77–93; Cecilia Macheski, “Penelope’s Daughters: Images of Needlework in Eigh-
teenth-Century Literature,” in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed.
Mary Anne Schofield and Cecelia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 85–100;
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 519–526, 638–642; Rohan Amanda Mait-
zen, Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing (New York: Garland, 1998), 61–69.
62. King, “Of Needles and Pens,” 87.

63. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 520.
64. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 521–526.
65. “Female Novelists,” New Monthly Magazine 95 (May 1852), 17–23; reprinted in B. C.
Southam, ed., Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, 1811–1870 (London: Routledge,
2001), 147.
66. Maitzen, Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing, 74.
67. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen,
1987), 17.
68. In this book, I tend to focus on female makers of handicraft because domestic handicraft
was strongly identified with middle-class female subjectivity in the popular imagination,
which means that its ideological values are aligned with Victorian feminine ideals. How-
ever, men did participate in handicraft production. The fictional men who are depicted
as engaged in handicraft are often feminized figures, like youths still living at home or
clergymen whose professions associated them with the caregiving and homebound and
pious work of Victorian middle-class womanhood. For instance, in the novels discussed
in this book, male craftsmen include the schoolboy Norman in The Daisy Chain and the
rather domestic Mr. Venus in Our Mutual Friend; one might also think of Mr. Farebrother,
with his collection of insects, in Middlemarch.
Chapter 1
1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (New York: W. W. Norton,
1996, from revised ed. of 1859), 19 (1:455–458).
2. Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art from Plato to Winckelmann (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1985), 89–90.
3. Barasch, Theories of Art, 120–127, 174–179.
4. Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn (New York: Random House, 1963),
9–16. Also see chapter 2 in Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance
Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
5. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London:
Women’s Press, 1984; rev. ed. 1996); Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing.
6. John Styles, “Manufacturing, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-Century England,”
in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Rout-
ledge, 1993), 544–545.
7. Lorna Weatherill, “The Meaning of Consumer Behavior in Late Seventeenth- and Early
Eighteenth-Century England,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer
and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 214.
8. Jane Toller, The Regency and Victorian Crafts, or, The Genteel Female—Her Arts and
Pursuits (London: Ward Lock, 1969), 90–93. Also, Elizabeth Stone describes Marie
Antoinette’s passion for “untwisting” in The Art of Needle-Work from the Earliest Ages
(London: Henry Colburn, 1840), 389.
9. Toller, The Regency and Victorian Crafts, 12–15.
10. Mrs. William Parkes, Domestic Duties; or, Instructions to Young Married Ladies (London:
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 99.
11. Mary W. Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1993), 46.
12. Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal, 25.
13. Sophia Frances Anne Caulfield and Blanche C. Saward, The Dictionary of Needlework: An
Encyclopaedia of Artistic, Plain, and Fancy Needlework (New York: Arno, 1972; reprint of
1882 edition), 102. Aurora’s crocheting occurs in 1:1035–1052.
14. Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 16 (1:380–384).
16. Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
154–157.

18. John Styles, “Manufacturing, Consumption and Design,” 530–531; Beverly Lemire,
Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 87–88, 94.
19. A painted tea tray, a Staffordshire figurine, some decorative china were prized markers
of luxury for the working poor. Hippolyte Taine’s comment is revealing: “You draw near
a house, look in, and, in the half-light of a passage, see mother and grown daughter
crouching, wearing little more than a chemise. What rooms! A threadbare slip of oilcloth
on the floor, sometimes a big sea-shell or one or two plaster ornaments” (cited in Jules
Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain 1550–1960
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 228–229). Here the starving women
would rather have plaster ornaments than decent clothing, surely a strong testimony to
the psychological appeal of such luxury items.
20. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, “The Hidden Investment: Women and the Enter-
prise,” in Women’s Work: The English Experience 1650–1914, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London:
Arnold, 1998), 280.
21. Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853; New York: Signet Classic, 1987), 13.
22. John Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens,” in Sesame and Lilies (New York: H. M. Caldwell, n.d.
but first pub. 1865), 152.
23. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the
Collectible (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 139.
24. Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992).
25. Stone, The Art of Needle-Work, 318.
26. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The
Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 73–75.
27. Daryl M. Hafter, European Women and Preindustrial Craft (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1995), ix–xii.
28. Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 175–178; Barbara Morris, Victorian Embroidery (London:
Herbert Jenkins, 1962), 32–37; Anthea Callen, Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and
Crafts Movement 1870–1914 (London: Astragal, 1979), 138–142.
29. Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 96.
30. Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 26.
31. Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and
Chronologies of English Women’s History,” in Women’s Work: The English Experience
1650–1914, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London: Arnold, 1998), 294–332.
32. Some writers tried to assert women’s importance in the new national economy by
writing industrial novels that positioned them as inspiring or softening forces. Thus
female influence supposedly made hard factory life bearable. (See, for instance, Dickens’s
Hard Times, Brontë’s Shirley, and Gaskell’s North and South and Mary Barton.)
34. Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York: Columbia
35. Queen Victoria’s craft achievements are noted in Anne Hulbert, Victorian Crafts Revived
(London: B. T. Batsford, 1978), 22; and Frances Lichten, Decorative Art of Victoria’s Era
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 7–8.
36. Miss Lambert’s The Handbook of Needlework (London: John Murray, 1842) was dedicated
to Princess Mary, the Countess of Wilton edited E. Stone’s The Art of Needle-Work from
the Earliest Ages (London: Henry Colburn, 1840), and C. H. Hartshorne dedicated her
English Medieval Embroidery to Marianne, Viscountess Alford (London: John Henry
Parker, 1848).
37. John Steegman, Victorian Taste (London: Thomas Nelson, 1970; reprint of Consort of
Taste, 1830–1870, 1950), 221–222.
38. Patrick Brantlinger, “Household Taste: Industrial Art, Consumerism, and Pre-Raphaelitism,”
Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 9 (Spring 2000), 83–100.
39. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of
All Nations (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), vol. 2:iii, no. 144, p. 560.
40. Kriegel, Grand Designs, 96–97.
41. Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale
42. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle,
1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 4.
43. Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 564.
44. Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 573, 564.
45. Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 824, 561.
46. Lambert, Handbook of Needlework, 22–23.
47. Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 823, 826, 561.
48. Brantlinger, “Household Taste,” 92.
49. Edward Lucie-Smith, The Story of Craft: The Craftsman’s Role in Society (Oxford: Phaidon,
1981), 200.
50. Potichomanie and diaphanie, with associated arts, are described in Marjorie Henderson
and Elizabeth Wilkinson, Cassell’s Compendium of Victorian Crafts (London: Cassell,
1977), 67; and George Dodd, “Art-Amusements for Ladies,” St. James’s Magazine 12
(1865), 197–206.
51. Wax coral instructions can be found in Henderson and Wilkinson, Cassell’s Compendium
of Victorian Crafts, 140.
52. Lady’s Album of Fancy Work (London: Grant and Griffith, 1850), 22.
53. A leader in the Times on July 1, 1851, complained about the “imitative rage” among
the carpets and pottery at the Great Exhibition (cited in Asa Briggs, Victorian Things
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 71–72).
54. Briggs, Victorian Things, 291.
55. Asa Briggs discusses the Victorian salvage economy in Victorian Things, 49–50.
56. Barbara Morris, Victorian Embroidery, 161–162. Also see L. B. Urbino and Henry Day, Art
Recreations (Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1861), 302.
57. Urbino and Day, Art Recreations, 301.
58. Briggs, Victorian Things, 49–50.
59. Miss Linwood’s Gallery of Pictures, in Worsted, Leicester Square (London: Weed and Rider,
1820); Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 144–146.
60. Lambert, Handbook of Needlework, 20–21.
61. Lambert, Handbook of Needlework, 40.
62. Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 561.
63. Charlotte Yonge, Abbeychurch (1844; New York: Garland, 1976), 230–232.
64. The title alludes not to Japan, but to japanning, an effect emulated by the varnishing.
65. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, “The Hidden Investment: Women and the Enter-
prise,” in Women’s Work: The English Experience 1650–1914, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London:
Arnold, 1998), 258.
66. The use of perforated paper in embroidery is discussed in Kenneth L. Ames, Death in the
Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1992), 97–146.
67. Barbara Morris, Victorian Embroidery, 21–23.
69. Logan points out that the circulation of handicraft kits and patterns meant that hun-
dreds of Victorian women were simultaneously working on identical projects, in a kind
of mass production. See Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 166.
70. Stone, The Art of Needle-Work, 399.
71. G. A., “Decorative Decorations,” Cornhill Magazine 42 (1880), 599.
72. Regarding Hay’s influence on the design of the Catalogue of the Great Exhibition and
Owen Jones’s work, see Kriegel, Grand Designs, 138.
73. The Lady’s Album, 7.

74. Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, August 1865, 255; March 1869, 124–126.
75. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England, 2nd ed. (London: Fisher, n.d. [1839?]), 18.
W. Jerdan agreed, asserting that the purpose of the Bazaar was “to encourage FEMALE
AND DOMESTIC INDUSTRY” (Jerdan, New Monthly Magazine, February 1, 1816, 27.)
Miss Lambert quotes another writer approvingly: “When the higher duties of our situa-
tion do not call forth our exertions, we may feel the satisfaction of knowing that we are,
at least, innocently employed” (Lambert, Handbook of Needlework, 22–23, citing Mrs.
Griffiths, Essays, 65.)
76. See Karen Chase and Michael Levenson’s chapter on Ellis in The Spectacle of Intimacy: A
Public Life for the Victorian Family (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 76.
77. Dodd, “Art-Amusements for Ladies,” 197.
78. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 110.
79. Cornelia Moore, cited in Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 109.
81. The Lady’s Album, iv.
82. “Decorative Arts for Ladies,” All the Year Round 25 (new series) (1880), 60. The same
writer adds that paper flower making is “another of those pleasing graceful arts in which
ladies who do not admire idleness can spend a few hours occasionally” (62).
83. The Lady’s Album, 10. A similar design for a watch pocket made of straw and ribbons
appears in The Lady’s Newspaper (later The Queen) 11 (June 5, 1852), 342–343.
84. W. Hamish Fraser discusses the thriving mother-of-pearl industry in Birmingham in
1851; it suffered from foreign competition after the 1860s and then dwindled almost to
nothing by World War I. See Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914 (Hamden,
CT: Archon, 1981), 189.
85. Cited in Clive Edwards, “‘Home Is Where the Art Is’: Women, Handicrafts and Home
Improvements 1750–1900,” Journal of Design History 19, no. 1 (2006), 16.
86. Gelber, Hobbies, 169.
87. Cassell’s Household Guide 1 (1869), 164–165.
88. Cassell’s Household Guide 1 (1869), 165.
89. Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Maga-
zine, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996), 100–101.
90. See, for instance, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine 21 (3rd series) (October 1876).
91. On women’s magazines, see Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own; Alison Adburgham,
Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Acces-
sion of Victoria (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972); Cynthia L. White, Women’s Magazines,
1693–1968 (London: Joseph, 1970).
92. Nancy Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2000) traces the rise of visual culture. Also see Thomas Richards, The Com-
modity Culture of Victorian England; and Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual
Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
93. The Design Reform movement refers to the mid-century reformers like Sir Henry Cole,
Owen Jones, and Richard Redgrave, who reacted to the quality of art manufactures at the
Great Exhibition by vigorously championing new rules for decorative art and by setting
up the South Kensington Museum to educate Britons about good design. It was strongest
in the 1850s (the Great Exhibition was 1851), and its participants were prominent gov-
ernmental figures. The Arts and Crafts movement got its name from the first Arts and
Crafts exhibition in 1888, although its participants were, of course, active earlier. Flour-
ishing between the 1850s and 1870s and, obviously, overlapping with the Design Reform
movement, their ranks included artists and art critics John Ruskin, William Morris,
Walter Crane, and the Pre-Raphaelite painters. They rebelled vociferously against the
domestic handicraft. The next generation, the aesthetes (between the 1870s and 1890s)
built on their predecessors’ achievements but elaborated their belief in beautiful objects
into a philosophy that governed personal behavior, morality, literature, and leisure; they
included Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Lucas Malet.
94. William Morris, News from Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs (Middlesex, Eng-
land: Penguin, 1984), 97.
95. Todd S. Gernes, “Recasting the Culture of Ephemera,” in Popular Literacy: Studies in Cul-
tural Practices and Poetics, ed. John Trinbur (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2001), 109.
96. On Cole’s exhibition, see Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste, 271; [Henry Morley], “A House
Full of Horrors,” Household Words, no. 141 (December 4, 1852), 265–270; [Frances
Power Cobbe], “South Kensington Museum,” Echo, February 13, 1872, 1; Briggs, Victo-
rian Things, 77; Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottes-
ville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 32; and Kriegel, Grand Designs, chapter 4.
97. My summary of the naturalist-conventional debate is indebted to Jules Lubbock’s excel-
lent account in The Tyranny of Taste, 252–283.
98. Briggs, Victorian Things, 71–72, 74–75; Steegman, Victorian Taste, 305–307; John Gloag,
Victorian Taste: Some Social Aspects of Architecture and Industrial Design, from 1820–1900
(New York: Macmillan, 1962), 137, 151.
99. Kriegel, Grand Designs, 139. Kriegel also discusses Design Reform’s principles of sym-
metrical design and using nature as a guide rather than copying nature directly.
100. Although John Ruskin seems as if he should belong to the conventionalizing group, in
fact he defended naturalistic patterns because he felt that they displayed the artist’s skill
and taste better. See Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste, 279–287.
101. Kriegel, Grand Designs, 201.
102. Elvina M. Corbold, The Lady’s Crewel Embroidery Book (London: Hatchards, [1878]).
103. Lady Marion Alford, Needlework as Art (London: Samson Low, 1886), vii–viii.
104. Art-Needlework: A Guide to Embroidery in Crewels, Silks, Appliqué, Etc. (London: Ward,
Lock, n.d. [1882?]), ii, iii, 13.
105. Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 180.
106. Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 180–181.
107. Lucie-Smith, The Story of Craft, 216.
108. Kriegel, Grand Designs, 182.
109. Callen, Angel in the Studio, 52–54.
110. “Artistic Homes,” Temple Bar 43 (1875), 676.
111. In the 1880s and 1890s, reformers like Lady Cadogan and Alan S. Cole saw that Irish lace
making had survived as a cottage industry and could become a source of national pride
and a luxury industry. Lady Cadogan sponsored the influential Textile Exhibition of
1897, while Cole wrote books and articles touting the value of Irish lace. The recalibra-
tion of Irish lace paralleled the new status of lace among aesthetes, who collected antique
examples and admired the lace maker’s artistry. For instance, in Ouida’s Moths (1880),
one character demonstrates his artistry with a lace-making pattern he learned from
Belgian nuns.
112. [Charles Eastlake] “The Art of Furnishing,” Cornhill Magazine 31 (1875), 542.
113. J. Beavington Atkinson, “The Arts in the Household; or, Decorative Art Applied to
Domestic Uses,” Blackwood’s Magazine 105 (March 1869), 367, 361.
114. “Artistic Homes,” 676, 677, 678.
115. Day, “The Woman’s Part,” 458.
Chapter 2
1. Tim Dolin, Mistress of the House: Women of Property in the Victorian Novel (Aldershot,
England: Ashgate, 1997), 39.
2. See Dolin, Mistress of the House; Hilary Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth
Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Elizabeth
Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Jeffrey Cass, “‘The Scraps, Patches, and
Rags of Daily Life’: Gaskell’s Oriental Other and the Conservation of Cranford,” Papers on
Language and Literature 35, no. 4 (1999), 417–433; Andrew Miller “The Fragments and
Small Opportunities of Cranford,” Genre 25 (1992), 91–111; James Mulvihill, “Econ-
omies of Living in Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘Cranford,’” Nineteenth Century Literature 50, no. 3
(1995), 337–356.
3. Hilary Schor claims, “Mary Smith is the perfect guide to Amazonian life,” since her
unique position alternating between Drumble and Cranford allows her to mediate
between the two realms (Scheherezade in the Marketplace, 118). Similarly, Tim Dolin sug-
gests that Mary is so adaptable and generous that “Mary consistently hands over to the
ladies of Cranford their own narration, relinquishing her role as historian” (Mistress of
the House, 49).
In this chapter, I use the terms “Cranfordian” and “Amazon” interchangeably to
refer to the social group that Cranford describes. Both terms are somewhat problem-
atic: “Cranfordian,” because it erases the other inhabitants of Cranford in a way this
chapter tries explicitly to reverse, and “Amazon,” because its derisive/comic attitude is
part of the narrator’s attitude that I want to problematize rather than perpetuate. In
lieu of a better term, I tend to rely more heavily on “Cranfordian” as being at least
neutral in tone.
4. Elizabeth Gaskell, Further Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. John Chapple and Alan Shelson
(Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000), 4, 10, 35, 48.
5. Private Voices: The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and
Anita Wilson (Keele, England: Keele University Press, 1996), 70.
6. Langland, Nobody’s Angels, 113–114.
7. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 694–695.
8. Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,
1993), 45.
9. John Chapple, “Unitarian Dissent,” in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, ed.
Jill L. Matus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 164–176. Also see Jenny
Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, 6–7, for a brief account of the rational, optimistic, progressive
social and intellectual mission of Gaskell’s Unitarianism.
10. Jill L. Matus, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, 8.
11. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford/Cousin Phillis (1853; London: Penguin, 1976), 54. Further
references to this edition will be noted parenthetically in the text.
12. Miller, “Fragments,” 97. Also see Schor, who describes “its commitment to the fragmen-
tary” (Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace, 106), and Dolin, who agrees that “frag-
ments and small opportunities do not constitute the novel’s background, but its very
structure” (Dolin, Mistress of the House, 47).
13. Margaret Case Croskery, “Mothers without Children, Unity without Plot: Cranford’s
Radical Charm,” Nineteenth Century Literature 52, no. 2 (1997), 198–220.
14. Langland, Nobody’s Angels, 121.
15. Dolin (Mistress of the House, 40) agrees that charity bazaars would have been central to
the Cranfordian financial imagination.
16. See Erika Rappaport, “Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the
Mid-Victorian Tea Party,” in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power, and Identity in
the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 125–146.
17. Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace, 118.
18. The elderly Amazons would be unlikely to adopt such a new fashion as Berlin-wool work,
since they have long since settled down to their preferred fancywork hobbies. Miss Pole,
who “was always the person . . . to have had adventures,” rather daringly shifts her loy-
alty from knitting to crochet as the novel opens, but we hear of no other new hobbies,
and Miss Pole soon settles down (129, 51).
19. Elizabeth Rosevear’s A Text-Book of Needlework, Knitting, and Cutting Out, with
Methods of Teaching (London: Macmillan, 1893) gives precise directions for teaching
needlework to working-class girls destined for factories or workrooms. In infant

school, girls learned to thread a needle, hem, and darn, while later lessons involved
making buttonholes and marking initials, cutting out, netting, knitting, and some
fancy stitches.
20. One might object that Deborah and Mrs. Jenkyns gave those lessons as part of their
philanthropic work, whereas Matty’s selling those skills would be shameful. However,
the shift from charitable to paid work does not seem problematic in this case. It would
have a strong precedent, since working-class women did charge for lessons, and a strong
excuse, since Matty’s need for money is well known in Cranford.
21. Chapple, “Unitarian Dissent,” 167.
22. Dolin, Mistress of the House, 34; for another assertion of Cranfordian extinction, see
Cass, “‘The Scraps, Patches, and Rags of Daily Life,’” 420. Langland, Nobody’s Angels, 119;
for another resurrectionist idea, see Case Croskery, “Mothers without Children.” Inter-
estingly, the view that Cranford is doomed seems to be predominant among male critics,
while most female critics tend to argue that Cranford is self-replicating.
23. Jonathan Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002), 113–114. Although Grossman is writing about Mary
Barton, his explanation works for Cranford as well.
24. For instance, in Sense and Sensibility (1811), Lucy Steele makes a toy basket decorated
with rolls of cut paper.
25. For instance, a picture of the white acacia had 543 leaves and 120 stamens in a single
bloom, and her collage of the melon thistle, with 399 spines, used ten shades of paper
simply to compose the stem. See Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers
(London: British Museum Press, 1980), 141, 146.
26. Jane Toller, The Regency and Victorian Crafts, or The Genteel Female—Her Arts and Pursuits
(London: Ward Lock, 1969), 39–51.
27. Clive Edwards, “‘Home Is Where the Art Is’: Women, Handicrafts and Home Improve-
ments 1750–1900,” Journal of Design History 19, no. 1 (2006), 15–16.
28. An American example is telling. In the early 1860s, newsprint paper cost 25 cents per
pound, but by 1897, due to the use of wood pulp, newsprint paper cost less than a cent
per pound. See David Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft
(New York: Dover, 1978), 380.
29. The novel begins in 1836, as we can tell from the fact that The Pickwick Papers is just
appearing in numbers, and Matty tells Martha she’s fifty-one.
30. Whatnot: A Compendium of Victorian Crafts and Other Matters, ed. Marjorie Henderson
and Elizabeth Wilkinson (New York: William Morrow, 1977), 132.
31. The steel pen seems to have been first standardized, manufactured, and sold in bulk in
the 1830s. By 1866, the steel pen superseded the quill. See Henry Bore, The Story of the
Invention of Steel Pens (New York: Ivison, Blakeman, 1890).
33. Matty consults her account books to ascertain her income from the Town and County
Bank, leaving it unclear whether her daily expenditures are recorded there as well (179).
34. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund offer a different and perhaps more genial reading of
this scene, stressing the way the newspaper path responds “to the natural order of the
sun’s movement,” as well as “the patterns of social and family life.” They see Mary’s ques-
tion about London as expressing pride in the Jenkynses’ achievement. See Linda
K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell’s Work (Charlottes-
ville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 87.
35. Gaskell, Letters, 748; Dorothy W. Collin, “Strategies of Retrospection and Narrative
Silence in Cranford and Cousin Phillis,” Gaskell Society Journal 11 (1997), 25–26. Peter
Keating agrees that during these first few numbers, “it is also reasonable to assume that
Mrs Gaskell was coming to realize the potential of the Cranford sketches, and was con-
templating how they could be given a greater sense of unity than she originally intended.”
See Peter Keating, “Introduction,” Cranford/Cousin Phillis, 8.
36. Charles Dickens, “Letter to Mrs. Gaskell, February 5, 1850,” in The Pilgrim Edition of the
Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 6, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 29. The “resting-place for our feet” is an allusion to Genesis
8:9, the dove leaving Noah’s ark to search for land.
37. Elsie B. Michie, Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian
Woman Writer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
38. In 1850, Dickens incorporated her story “Lizzie Leigh” into Household Words in a way
that made it seem to support his cause, emigration, but Gaskell countered by donating
some of her proceeds from the story to her cause, refuges for fallen women (Michie,
Outside the Pale, 91, 95). The ghost story “theft” annoyed Gaskell, too: “Wretch that he is
to go and write MY story of the lady haunted by the face,” she expostulated to a friend
(Dickens, Letters, November 25, 1851, 545–546).
39. Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace, 92.
40. Collin, “Strategies of Retrospection,” 26.
41. For more information on the Gaskell-Dickens quarrels, see Schor, Scheherezade in the
Marketplace, 88–97; Michie, Outside the Pale, 83–98.
42. Eileen Gillooly, Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 161.
43. “The editorial involvement Dickens prided himself on often felt like interference to
Gaskell,” Schor explains (Scheherezade in the Marketplace, 92).
44. Michie, Outside the Pale, 86–87.
45. For analysis of the profusion of different forms of written documents in Cranford, see
Hughes and Lund, Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell’s Work, 87–89.
46. Collin, “Strategies of Retrospection,” 32.
47. Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 252.
48. Knutsford residents testified that Gaskell had accurately recorded town lore (Miller,
“Fragments,” 96). Indeed, the documentary aspect of Cranford has received much atten-
tion since Hilary Schor first pointed out that it has the quality of an anthropological field
report (Scheherezade in the Marketplace, 105). Miller explores this realistic depiction of
the everyday in “Fragments and Small Opportunities,” while Boris Knezevic interest-
ingly extends the notion of Cranford by reading it as a field report from a vanishing
outpost of provincial genteel society as it copes with the threat of modernization. See
Boris Knezevic, “An Ethnography of the Provincial: The Social Geography of Gentility in
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford,” Victorian Studies 41, no. 3 (1998), 405–426.
49. When Miss Pole invites Mary for a visit to Cranford, her presumably formal request is a
“letter,” but Matty’s “circuitous and very humble” invitation is only a “note” (63).
51. Andrew H. Miller, “Subjectivity Ltd: The Discourse of Liability in the Joint Stock Com-
panies Act of 1856 and Gaskell’s Cranford,” ELH 61, no. 1 (1994), 139–157. On the other
hand, James Mulvihill explains that the Cranfordians practice household economizing:
thrift, conservation, sharing of resource, moderating supply and demand. Yet for Mulvi-
hill, these practices are not opposed to mainstream economic work but simply local
expressions of it (Mulvihill, “Economies of Living in Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘Cranford,’” 337–356).
52. Knezevic, “An Ethnography of the Provincial,” 415.
53. John Plotz reads the dualism of Mary’s letter as making it a perfect representative of
“portable property,” Victorian objects invested simultaneously with public value and pri-
vate worth. See John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 10–12.
Chapter 3
1. Q. D. Leavis, “Charlotte Yonge and ‘Christian Discrimination,’” Scrutiny 12, no. 2 (1944),
153–154.
2. Review in the Nation, July 13, 1865, cited in Kim Wheatley, “Death and Domestication
in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family,” SEL 36 (1996), 898. I have dis-
cussed Yonge’s emphasis on self-punishment in “The Mysterious Magnum Bonum:
Fighting to Read Charlotte Yonge,” NCL 55, no. 2 (2000), 244–275.
3. Though the first parts were published in the Monthly Packet, Yonge’s magazine, the novel
soon grew too big, and serial publication ceased. The final book version did not appear
until 1856. See Georgina Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge; The Story of an Uneventful
Life (London: Constable, 1943), 93.
4. Charlotte M. Yonge, The Daisy Chain, or, Aspirations: A Family Chronicle (1856; London:
Macmillan, 1890), 560. Subsequent references will be to this edition and noted paren-
thetically in the text.
5. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 144.
6. Wheatley, “Death and Domestication,” 912.
7. Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström, Be Good Sweet Maid (Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist &
Wiksell, 1984), 15.
8. Charlotte Mary Yonge, Heartsease: Or, The Brother’s Wife (Leipzig, Germany: Bernhard
Tauchnitz, 1855), 1:195.
9. Gavin Budge, “Realism and Typology in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe,” Victo-
rian Literature and Culture 31, no. 1 (2003), 193–223; and Gavin Budge, Charlotte M.
Yonge: Religion, Feminism, and Realism in the Victorian Novel (London: Peter Lang, 2007).
Also see Sandbach-Dahlström, Be Good Sweet Maid, 16–20; and George Landow, Victo-
rian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought
(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
10. This technique is recommended by George Dodd in “Art-Amusements for Ladies,”
St. James Magazine 12 (1865), 203–204.
11. L. B. Urbino, Henry Day, et al., Art Recreations: Being a Complete Guide to Pencil Drawing,
Oil Painting . . . with Valuable Receipts for Preparing Materials (Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1861),
242. Dodd’s version of the craft lays more stress on the construction of the cardboard
pattern and less on the drying and painting of the leather.
12. Urbino, Day, et al., 242, Art Recreations.
13. Urbino, Day, et al., 241, Art Recreations.
14. Frank R. Stockton and Marian Stockton, The Home: Where It Should Be and What to Put in
It (New York: Putnam, 1873), 163. Asphaltum is the dark, sticky bituminous deposit
that is a crucial ingredient in modern asphalt.
15. See Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2001); and Michelle Henning, “Anthropomorphic Taxidermy and the Death of
Nature: The Curious Art of Hermann Ploucquet, Walter Potter, and Charles Waterton,”
VLC 35 (2007), 663–678.
16. Lorraine Daston, “Glass Flowers,” in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science,
ed. Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone, 2004), 223–254.
17. Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 159.
18. June Sturrock, “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian
Debate over Women (University of Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1995), 43–44.
19. Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, noting that Sarah Stickney married the mis-
sionary and author of exhaustive critiques of Polynesian and Malagasy life, William
Ellis, even suggest that the Polynesian other was necessary for the development of
a notion of Victorian domesticity. William’s account of the barbarous familial anar-
chy ascribed to the “native” justified Sarah’s vision of a harmonious, private British
family. See Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public
Life for the Victorian Family (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000),
68–71.
20. Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 147–155. While Johnston’s research focuses on Polynesia, Melanesia
probably worked similarly, since it, too, was associated with problematic native sexual
availability (though less so than, say, Fiji and Tahiti) and since its missionaries were
trained by the same organizations.
21. Aunt Flora in New Zealand does, however, recall seeing her Sunday bonnet on the head
of a Maori woman after Hone Heke’s Rebellion (251).
22. Margaret Mare and Alicia C. Percival, Victorian Best-Seller; The World of Charlotte M. Yonge
(London: George G. Harrap, 1948), 148.
23. Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Trial; More Links of the Daisy Chain (1864; London: Macmillan,
1914), 5. Further references will be noted parenthetically. The Trial is the sequel to The
Daisy Chain. I have limited my use of it here to quoting lines that shed light on The Daisy
Chain’s issues because it is a different novel, with its own dominant metaphors and
complex structure. For instance, The Trial is largely set in the American backwoods and
therefore engages with ideas of native wildness and colonial control in its own way.
24. Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the
Pacific, 1795–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117.
25. This idea is most famously represented in Matthew Arnold’s lectures “On the Study of
Celtic Literature” (1865–1866) in which Arnold argues for a sensitive, ardent, feminine
Celtic genius as opposed to the stolid, Germanic Anglo-Saxon type, but it cannot be
Yonge’s source since The Daisy Chain predates it.
26. Catherine Hall, “The Nation Within and Without,” in Defining the Victorian Nation: Class,
Race, Gender, and the British Reform Act of 1867, ed. Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland,
and Jane Rendall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 213. Yonge’s descrip-
tion of Cocksmoor seems like a textbook case of anti-Irish discourse at mid-century.
Michael de Nie describes the enormous migration of Irish to English towns. These refu-
gees from the Famine were generally desperately impoverished, ill, and emaciated. Thus
“Irishness . . . connoted everything that the British were not: superstitious, feckless,
improvident, duplicitous, violent, excitable, subservient to priests and demagogues, and
given to drink. According to Britons these qualities left the Irish, like other subject peo-
ples of the empire, half-civilized, unstable, and unprepared to govern their own affairs.”
See Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 23.
27. Nicholas Thomas, In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1997), 133–155.
28. Charlotte M. Yonge, Life of John Coleridge Patteson (London: Macmillan, 1875), 89–90.
29. Yonge, The Trial, 316.
30. Yonge’s disregard of native craft is typical of the period. Lara Kriegel has shown that at
mid-century the leaders of the Design Reform movement admired Indian designs, which
they saw as evidence of a timeless artisanal tradition,but regarded Chinese crafts as dis-
tinctly inferior. They viewed the artifacts as indices to the level of civilization reached by
each region (Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Cul-
ture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 113–120). It was not until the late
1860s that the most influential Victorian art reformers begin to look to “uncivilized”
arts for models. Charles Eastlake speculated in Hints on Household Taste (1868), “I cannot
help thinking how much we might learn from those nations whose art it has long been
our custom to despise—from the half-civilized craftsmen of Japan, and the rude barbar-
ians of Feejee” (199).
31. Yonge, Life, 133.
32. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 76.
33. This information comes from Yonge Life, chapter 6.
34. The Black Prince was Edward (1330–1376), son of Edward III, the dashing commander
prince who won the famous battles of Crecy and Poitiers. Yonge’s The Lances of Lynwood,
which follows a hero through the ranks of the Black Prince’s army, was published serially
in 1853 and 1854.
35. Contrast this vision with Patteson’s later description of conditions on Lifu, one of the
islands: “Their house is one round room, a log burning in the centre, no chimney, the
room full of smoke, common receptacle of men, women, boys, girls, pigs, and fowls. In
the corner a dying woman or child. No water in the island that is fresh, a few holes in the
coral where water accumulates, more or less brackish; no cleanliness, no quiet, no cool
fresh air, no proper food, a dry bit of yam” (Life, chapter 7). Indeed, Patteson had to
relinquish his missionary station on Lifu because of the lack of food and fresh water, as
well as inconveniences like the jagged coral ground that cut his shoes to shreds and made
it impossible to grow crops (Life, chapter 7). Other information about Selwyn’s and
Patteson’s activities can be found in E. S. Armstrong, The History of the Melanesian Mis-
sion (London: Isbistser, 1900); H. H. Montgomery, The Light of Melanesia: A Record of 35
Years’ Mission Work in the South Seas (London: SPCK, 1896); and Frank Paton, Patteson of
Melanesia (New York: Macmillan, n.d.).
36. Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire, 169–174.
37. One of the few times Tom condemns his tormentors is when he exclaims that one is “a
mean-spirited, skulking, bullying—,” and Norman immediately cuts him off: “Hush,
hush, Tom . . .” (213).
38. Of course, Tom resents the Loyalty Islanders for attracting Norman, his favorite brother.
Norman’s defection is both a personal loss and a career blow for Tom, who must now
stay in Stoneborough to take over their father’s humdrum country doctor’s practice.
39. Tom’s career is, however, more complex than this chapter has space to discuss. He does
in fact succeed his father as a country doctor, in spite of his doubts. In The Trial, Tom
emerges as one of the main characters, bravely going into the rough American frontier
to seek out lost, ill members of a Stoneborough family. Tom seems to require this immer-
sion in unclaimed wilderness, either to negate his earlier heathenism or to prove that he
has successfully overcome it.
40. Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge, 136–137.
41. Mare and Percival, Victorian Best-Seller, 150.
42. Mare and Percival, Victorian Best-Seller, 148; Paton, Patteson of Melanesia, 65.
43. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (New York: W. W. Norton,
1996, from rev. ed. of 1859), 16 (1:380–384).
Chapter 4
1. See Nancy Aycock Metz, “The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in Our Mutual Friend,”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34, no. 1 (1979), 59–72; Natalka Freeland, “Trash Fiction:
The Victorian Novel and the Rise of Disposable Culture” (dissertation, Yale University,
1998); Catherine Gallagher, “The Bioeconomy of Our Mutual Friend,” in Subject to His-
tory: Ideology, Class, Gender, ed. David Simpson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1991), 47–64; Pamela Gilbert, “Medical Mapping: The Thames, the Body, and Our Mutual
Friend,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William Cohen and Ryan Johnson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 78–102; Michelle Allen, Cleansing
the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008).
Edmund Wilson was among the first to note this, as he wrote in 1941: “As the fog is the
symbol for Bleak House and the prison for Little Dorrit, so the dust-pile is the symbol for
Our Mutual Friend.” See Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Litera-
ture (Cambridge: Riverside, 1941), 75.
2. Dickens knew Mayhew, and Dickens scholars, starting with Harland S. Nelson in 1965,
have made a strong case that he was influenced by London Labour and the London Poor
when he was writing Our Mutual Friend. See Harland S. Nelson, “Dickens’s Our Mutual
Friend and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor,” Nineteenth-Century Fic-
tion 20, no. 3 (1965), 207–22; Harvey Peter Sucksmith, “Dickens and Mayhew: A Further
Note,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24, no. 3 (1969), 345–349.
3. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861), 144.
4. Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 147.
5. Cassell’s Household Guide 1 (1877), 289–291.
6. Parlour Recreations for Ladies (London: Wm. S. Orr, 1858), 110, cited in Logan, The Victo-
rian Parlour, 164–165.
7. Mrs. C. S. Jones and Henry T. Williams, Household Elegancies: Suggestions in Household

Art and Tasteful Home Decorations (New York: Henry T. Williams, 1877), 111. This Amer-
ican manual also features frames decorated with pinecones, acorns, popcorn, seeds,
corn, barley, beans, and rice. This type of ornamentation showcased native agricultural
products and was typical of American crafts. In a British craft book, the maker of the pit
frame would probably have been instructed to varnish, wax, or paint these elements to
emulate carved marble or mahogany. While American handicrafts patriotically featured
regional flora, British handicrafts aimed to transform those products into a simulacrum
of something more expensive.
8. Mrs. C. S. Jones and Henry T. Williams, “Fish-Scale Embroidery,” in Household Ele-
gancies, 111.
9. Cassell’s Household Guide 3 [c. 1870], 281–282. In www.victorianlondon.org.
10. “Irene,” “Handsome Picture Frames,” in Home Notes (London: C. Arthur Pearson,
1895–1896) November 30, 1895, 254.
11. For instance, see R. H. Horne’s 1850 article, “Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed,” Household
Words I (July 13, 1850), 380, 382, 383; [John Capper] “Important Rubbish,” Household
Words (May 19, 1855), 376–379; [George Dodd] “Penny Wisdom,” Household Words
(October 16, 1852), 97–101; [Edmund Saul Dixon] “Dirty Cleanliness,” Household Words
(July 24, 1858), 121–123. These are described by Metz, “The Artistic Reclamation of
Waste,” 68.
12. This summary comes from Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household
Words: The Social Life of Goods (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008), 153. Dodd’s domes-
tic handicraft article is “Art-Amusements for Ladies,” St. James Magazine 12 (1865),
197–206. He was also known for his 1840s “Days at the Factories” series, published in
Penny Magazine (Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words, 85), and many
books about industrial and imperial life.
13. Dickens and homes have received a good deal of critical attention; see Murray Baumgarten,
ed., Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (New York: AMS Press, 1999);
Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1997); Gail Turley Houston, Consuming Fictions: Gender, Class, and Hunger in
Dickens’s Novels (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994).
14. For an explanation of how Dickens invented the modern Christmas celebration, see
Judith Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (London:
Harper, 2006).
15. For a discussion of Cole’s development of this exhibit and the Household Words reportage,
see Lara Kriegel, Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007), chapter 4.
16. Juliet McMaster, Dickens the Designer (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1987), 194.
17. Brian Cheadle, “Work in Our Mutual Friend,” Essays in Criticism 51, no. 3 (2001), 315. See
also Natalka Freeland’s “The Dustbins of History: Waste Management in Late-Victorian
Utopias,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 225–249.
18. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (New York: Penguin, 1964), 102. Further references
will be to this edition and will be noted parenthetically within the text.
19. Metz, “The Artistic Reclamation of Waste,” 64–65.
20. Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping 1800–1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1964), 192.
21. Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, 193.
22. Natalka Freeland agrees that the novel traces two different ways of dealing with trash,
the accumulated and the recycled (“Trash Fiction,” 176).
23. Lothar Cerny, “Life in Death: Art in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend,” Dickens Quarterly 17
(2000), 33.
24. Bill Brown, Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
25. Indeed, Rokesmith does “send home a beauty,” making Bella spend a rare day with
her family.
26. Brian Cheadle notes that “with Jenny [Dickens] displaces the effects of bending daily
over fine work by having her crippled by birth” (Cheadle, “Work in Our Mutual Friend,”
313), but in fact we have only Jenny’s authority for saying that she was born disabled,
and it seems more likely that her bad back and stunted legs are caused by sitting hunched
over fine sewing “since she could crawl.” I suspect the displacement is Jenny’s rather
than Dickens’s.
27. It is, of course, possible that the Harmons do pay her privately for the doll. But the point
is that this monetary transaction cannot be represented in the text; the novel shows the
doll being given as a free gift, even if we suspect a discreet payment in the background.
28. Judith Flanders identifies the price of new ribbons for dress trimmings (in the fashion-
able tartan pattern, no less) at less than 1 shilling in Consuming Passions: Leisure and
Pleasure in Victorian Britain (London: Harper, 2006), 221.
29. For the cost of baskets, see Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 56, 210. While
Mayhew does not itemize the cost of wool, he puts the cost of a packman’s supply of
cotton, tapes, and the like at 1 shilling each and laces at 2 shillings, so one would expect
wool to be comparable (486). If anything, it was probably cheaper, as it was a raw mate-
rial, whereas Mayhew’s hawkers sell finished items. Twenty years later, middle-class
readers of a genteel needlework guide were offered cottons, yarns, and crewel wools that
cost between 3½ and 8½ pence per dozen skeins, and balls of macramé string at 7 shil-
lings per dozen balls. If wool was comparable, 10 shillings would have been enough to
buy Betty the basket and an enormous supply of wool. Ad for “Wakeford Brothers Artis-
tic Needlework, Wool, Knitting Yarn, and Fancy Emporium” in The Young Ladies’ Journal
Complete Guide to the Work-Table, 2nd ed. (London: E. Harrison, 1885), 12.
Harper, 2006), 54, 75–77. Mayhew also interviews peddlers who believe the trade is
declining because of the spread of shops and the reluctance of people in great houses to
see packmen. See Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 377–380. Carole Shammas
confirms that the eighteenth century saw a rivalry between peddlers and shopkeepers.
See Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1990), 255.
31. Of course, this novel is full of illiterate characters, including Gaffer Hexam and Rogue
Riderhood, and Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wrayburn engage in an erotic rivalry to
teach Lizzie Hexam to read.
32. Robert L. Patten, “The Composition, Publication, and Reception of Our Mutual Friend,”
in Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages, Dickens Project, available at http://dickens.
ucsc.edu/OMF/patten2.html.
33. Allen, Cleansing the City, 110.
36. J. Munsell, A Chronology of Paper and Paper-Making, 3rd ed. (Albany, NY: J. Munsell,
1864), vii.
37. The realistic representation of flowers was attacked by the nascent Arts and Crafts move-
ment, whose members preferred conventionalized design. Dickens famously parodied Sir
Henry Cole’s disdain for naturalism in the opening pages of Hard Times. As David Parker
points out, Dickens was a strong partisan for mid-Victorian design: bright colors, spar-
kling French-polished ornaments, sentimentally meaningful artifacts. Throughout his
life, he retained a preference for the styles and colors popular from the 1830s to the
1850s. See David Parker, “Dickens at Home,” in Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian
Imagination, ed. Murray Baumgarten and H. M. Daleski (New York: AMS, 1998), 65–75.
38. See Mary Poovey, “Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy
in the Culture of Investment,” Victorian Studies 45, no. 1 (2002), 17–41.
39. Michael Cotsell, “The Book of Insolvent Fates: Financial Speculation in Our Mutual
Friend,” Dickens Studies Annual 13 (1984), 125–142; Mary Poovey, “Reading History in
Literature: Speculation and Virtue in Our Mutual Friend,” in Historical Criticism and
the Challenge of Theory, ed. Janet Levarie Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1993), 42–80. Poovey reads Lammle, not Fledgeby, as the main object of Dickens’s anti-
speculation vitriol (“Reading History,” 55).
40. Cotsell, “The Book of Insolvent Fates,” 135.
41. Similar concerns about floating bills turning money into waste paper are voiced in
Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–1853), Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) and The
Way We Live Now (1874–1875), and Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior (1876).
42. Deborah Heller, “The Outcast as Villain and Victim: Jews in Dickens’s Oliver Twist
and Our Mutual Friend,” in Jewish Presences in English Literature, ed. Derek Cohen and
Deborah Heller (Montreal, Quebec: McGill University Press, 1990), 40–60.
43. Cotsell, “The Book of Insolvent Fates,” 140.
44. J. Hillis Miller, “Afterword,” Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865; London: Signet Classics,
1964), 904.
45. Freeland 184.
47. I am not saying that these are the only economic issues in this very complicated novel.
One of its major ideas is the need for middle-class subjects to learn to enjoy working for
a living, as John Harmon, Eugene Wrayburn, and Bella Wilfer all do.
48. Dickens does not seem to have had a strong religious feeling, except for his intense dis-
taste for sectarian conflict and evangelicalism. He admired Jesus and tried to lead a
moral life, but he did not have much to do with organized religion. Fred Kaplan explains,
“He aspired to a religion of the heart that transcended sectarian dogma. To the extent
that he was habituated to Anglicanism, he sometimes found it benign enough to provide
him an institutional way of expressing his admiration for the moral and religious
example set by the life of Jesus.” See Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998), 175.
49. Richard D. Altick claims that Dickens made the mill owners Jewish as part of his amends
to Mrs. Eliza Davis when she reproached him for creating the famous icon of Jewish
criminality, Fagin. See Richard D. Altick, “Education, Print, and Paper in Our Mutual
Friend,” in Nineteenth-Century Literary Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Lionel Stevenson,
ed. Claude de L. Ryals (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974), 252.
50. Jonathan Grossman, “The Absent Jew in Dickens: Narrators in Oliver Twist, Our Mutual
Friend, and A Christmas Carol,” Dickens Studies Annual 24 (1996), 49.
51. Plotz, Portable Property, chapter 3, especially p. 81.
52. Murray Baumgarten, “Seeing Double: Jews in the Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles
Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot,” in Between “Race” and Culture: Representa-
tions of “the Jew” in English and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1996), 51.
53. Bryan Cheyette has drawn our attention to the mobile, unfixed racialism of the Jew in
the nineteenth century in “Neither Black nor White: The Figure of ‘the Jew’ in Imperial
British Literature,” in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed.
Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 31–41. Sander
Gilman’s The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991) points out how the Jewish body
was ascribed racialized features, including wide lips and curly dark hair.
54. Both Baumgarten and Heller note Riah’s feminization.
55. We last see Riah comfortably discussing dolls’ outfits with Jenny, and when Jenny gets
word that Eugene is dying, she rushes out, with “the good Jew . . . left in possession of the
house” (805). These words would normally name a conventional scene in which the Jewish
agent takes possession of the debtor’s domicile. Instead, Dickens ascribes new significa-
tion to this sentence. Here, Riah keeps the home safe where craft is made. His repossession
is sentimental, not financial. Riah is mentioned once more, as the recipient of the Harmons’
generosity (877); no longer an active economic agent, he is housekeeper, kindly advisor,
and recipient of largesse, in other words, a pretty fair example of the bourgeois wife.
56. I do not discuss Lizzie Hexam in this chapter, as she seems to derive from a different
problematic, one that has more to do with uneasy admiration of physical skill in manual
laborers than any anomalous attempt to affiliate them to middle-class norms. Perhaps
this is because Lizzie is the one character unmistakably raised to middle-class gentility,
through marrying Eugene Wrayburn. Like the other middle-class women (Bella, Sophronia,
Georgiana), she is not provided with handicraft interests, even though they are by far
the most probable population to engage in these activities.
57. Interestingly, Bella acquires domestic skills (notably, cooking) but never shows any
interest in fancywork.
58. Freeland, 171.
59. Freeland 172.
60. Freeland 173.
61. According to Robert L. Patten in “The Composition, Publication, and Reception of Our
Mutual Friend,” Our Mutual Friend “contains the largest number of advertising sheets
of any Dickens serial,” and 30,000 copies of the opening number of the novel were sold,
not counting the copies sent to publishers for reprinting in New York, India, Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, Germany, and Italy.
Chapter 5
1. In this chapter I use “connoisseur” to refer to anyone who uses special expertise in eval-
uating objects, rather than in its specific usage of a professional art critic.
2. Phoebe brings no “work” to Carlingford, somewhat to her grandmother’s surprise,
while Ursula and Janey “had no time . . . for fancy work.” Margaret Oliphant, Phoebe
Junior (1876), ed. Elizabeth Langland (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002),
135, 153. Further references will be to this edition and will be noted parenthetically
in the text.
3. “May,” Def. B1, 2, 3, 4, The Oxford English Dictionary, 1933.
4. Margaret Oliphant, The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant, ed.
Mrs. Harry Coghill (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1899), 7.
5. Laurence Oliphant, “The Autobiography of a Joint-Stock Company (Limited),” in
Traits and Travesties: Social and Political (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons,
1882), 107.
6. Margaret Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oliphant, His Wife
(Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1891), 2:152.
7. Margaret Oliphant, “The Grievances of Women,” in Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors,
ed. Susan Hamilton (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004), reprinted from Fraser’s
Magazine, May 1880, 208.
8. Oliphant, The Autobiography, 23.
9. Oliphant, “Grievances.”
10. Deborah Lutz mentions hairwork instructions in “the English Woman’s Domestic Maga-
zine, The Family Friend, and Cassell’s Household Guide and popular books of instruction
like The Lock of Hair by Alexanna Speight” in “The Dead Still among Us: Victorian Hair-
work, Secular Relics, and Evangelicism,” paper presented at the North American Victo-
rian Studies Association, Victoria, British Columbia, October 13, 2007, note 24. I am
grateful to Lutz for sharing this paper and explaining the hair jewelry industry to me.
Helen Sheumaker also transcribes instructions from Godey’s Lady’s Book and Cassell’s
in Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 33.
11. Sheumaker, Love Entwined, x.
University Press, 2008).
13. Mark Campbell, Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair Work (New York: self-published, 1867).
14. Campbell, Self-Instructor, 137.
15. Phoebe’s mother’s real concern is that if Mrs. Tom is allowed a free hand, “you and I
would never see a penny of the money, Henery, nor our children—not a penny!” (33)
Concern about her mother comes several lines later.
16. John Plotz, “Discreet Jewels: Victorian Diamond Narratives and the Problem of Sen-
timental Value,” in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in
Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press, 2007), 329–354. In this passage, Plotz is actually discussing The Eustace Diamonds.
An extended version of this argument can be found in his Portable Property.
17. In Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2000), however, I point out that female aesthetes managed
to compromise between the new aesthetic codes and the older model of the women’s
sphere, designing home decoration that was informed by both sets of values.
18. See Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes; Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste:
Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1990).
19. J. Beavington Atkinson, “The Arts in the Household; or, Decorative Art Applied to
Domestic Uses,” Blackwood’s Magazine 105 (March 1869), 367; Lewis F. Day, Every-Day
Art: Short Essays on the Arts Not Fine (London: B. T. Batsford, 1882), 204–205.
20. Not only was the house as a whole the woman’s responsibility but also the drawing room
was particularly the woman’s space.
21. Lewis F. Day, “The Woman’s Part in Domestic Decoration,” Magazine of Art 4 (1881), 459.
Similarly, in 1868, F. T. Palgrave argued that taste had to be learned through studying
nature, materials, artistic laws, and the history of each nation. See F. T. Palgrave, “How
to Form a Good Taste in Art,” Cornhill Magazine 18 (1868), 170–180.
23. Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale
25. He blames this tendency on kindly friends who praise whatever the women make (Day,
“The Woman’s Part,” 462). Nor does he like his women students’ inadequately deferen-
tial attitude: “If they have any aptitude, they are too readily persuaded that they know
all about it, when in reality their knowledge is infinitesimal; they are too impatient, too
ambitious, too little aware of the difficulties before them, and of the limits of their
ability” (Day, “The Woman’s Part,”462).
26. Day, “The Woman’s Part,” 458–459.
27. Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (1868; New York: Dover, 1969; replica of 4th
rev. ed., 1878), 104.
28. Eastlake, Hints, 189–190.
29. Atkinson, “The Arts in the Household,” 378.
30. C. R. Ashbee, Craftsmanship in Competitive Industry (London: Essex House, 1908), 37–38.
31. We should note that this perspective does not represent the entire movement—there
were, of course, male professional artists within the Arts and Crafts movement who
worked with female decorative artists quite happily. William Morris, most famously,
employed his daughter May to run his tapestry work, although both Barbara Morris and
Rozsika Parker point out that his repetitive embroidery patterns were merely transposi-
tions of his wallpaper designs, not well suited to the craft. For more examples, see
Anthea Callen, Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement 1870–1914
(London: Astragal, 1979); and Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of
the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984; rev. ed. 1996).
32. Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes.
33. See Mary Poovey, “Writing about Finance in Victorian England: Disclosure and Secrecy
in the Culture of Investment,” Victorian Studies 45, no. 1 (2002), 17–41.
34. Christina Crosby, “ ‘A Taste for More’: Trollope’s Addictive Realism,” The New Economic
Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics , ed. Martha Woodmansee
and Mark Osteen (London: Routledge, 1999), 252.
35. Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market
Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 11. Also see Elsie Michie, “Buying
Brains: Trollope, Oliphant, and Vulgar Victorian Commerce,” Victorian Studies 44, no. 1
(2001), 77. Mary Poovey’s introduction to her The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century
Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) offers a useful summary of this period.
36. For a fascinating account of the development of this idea, see Douglas Mao, Fateful
Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860–1960 (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Harper, 2007), 78.
38. For details about the masculinized Eastlakean interior, see my Forgotten Female Aesthetes.
39. This association with Turner allies Copperhead with Ruskin but in a different sense from
Phoebe. Phoebe follows Ruskin as an arbiter of taste (as in her dress), whereas Copper-
head emulates Ruskin as a wealthy collector who appreciates and enhances the value of
Turners, following the example of his businessman-collector father.
40. Dianne Satchko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of
Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38–40. Also see Kathy
Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
41. Monica Cohen, “Maximizing Oliphant: Begging the Question and the Politics of Satire,”
in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Diane Thompson (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 102–103.
42. Of course, sinecures were hardly a new economic development and were in fact being
reformed in the latter part of the nineteenth century. But Oliphant uses the sinecure
to represent the floating nature of money, its unmooring from labor or product, thus
emphasizing a very contemporary aspect of this hoary practice.
43. Henry Sidgwick, “What Is Money?” Fortnightly Review 31, no. 25 (1879), 563–575;
republished in Mary Poovey, The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 98–111.
Margot C. Finn reminds us, however, that credit had a long history in British trade, and
for mid-Victorians, credit and cash were not always opposed but might rather be read
as “unstable positions on the kaleidoscopic spectrum of exchange mechanisms avail-
able to the modern English consumer.” See Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Per-
sonal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 284.
44. Sidgwick, “What Is Money?” 104–105.
45. Jean-Joseph Goux, “Cash, Check, or Charge?” in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at
the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen
(London: Routledge, (1999), 98–110.
46. Deidre Lynch, “Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions,” in The Secret Life of Things:
Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell
(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 63–91.
47. For the close link between the forger and the connoisseur, see Aviva Briefel’s fascinating
discussion in chapter 2, “Intimate Detections: Connoisseurs, Forgers, and the Thing
between Them,” in The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 53–82.
48. For an account of the circulation of objects through dominant categories like rubbish
and durable goods, see Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction
of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Phoebe’s action resembles that of the
collector who decides to revalue an artifact consigned to the category of rubbish.
49. Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, 102.
50. Briefel, The Deceivers, 59.
51. In this respect, Phoebe perpetuates the nineteenth-century sympathy for the forger.
Briefel explains that Victorians were fascinated by art forgers, often imagining them as
talented artists ensnared by vicious dealers or by economic desperation (The Deceivers,
20–31). Phoebe Junior bears out Briefel’s description, evincing great sympathy for the
forger and working hard to exonerate him from punishment.
52. A.L.O.E. (John D. Felter), The Story of a Needle (New York: Alexander Strahan, 1867);
Mrs. C. L. Balfour, Passages in the History of a Shilling (London: S. W. Partridge, n.d.). I am
grateful to Elaine Freedgood for these references. For readings of eighteenth-century

it-narratives, see Blackwell, The Secret Life of Things.
53. Lynch describes “the tradition of comparing coins to characters, of comparing the leg-
ends that are inscribed on coins’ surfaces and make metal disks into legal tender to the
so-called characteristic marks that make bodies into telltale, self-evident transcripts of
identities and enable foundlings to be identified and ‘owned’ ” (79).
54. The Daisy Chain shares this interest in transforming problematic paper into something
more solid, but it is dealing with a spiritual rather than an earthly economy. Yonge’s
fantasy is about transforming leaves (of paper, of trees) into permanent petrified leather
leaves, replacing the temporary with the imperishable.
55. Interesting discussions of Victorian anxieties about apparently half-alive commodities
can be found in Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction
and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Elaine Freedgood,
The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006); Bill Brown, Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); John
Plotz, “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory,” Criticism 47, no. 1 (2005), 109–118.
Postscript
1. Paraphrased from “The New Trend: Ribbon Covered Bangles” posted on Craftster.org;
see www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=123500.0.
2. According to the website of the Craft and Hobby Association, the international trade
organization for the craft industry: http://www.hobby.org.
3. Jo Turney, “Here’s One I Made Earlier: Making and Living with Home Craft in Contem-
porary Britain,” Journal of Design History 17, no. 3 (2004), 279 n. 4.
4. Turney, “Here’s One I Made Earlier,” 268.
5. Debbie Stoller, Stitch n’ Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook (New York: Workman, 2004), 7.
6. Jean Railla, Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec (New York: Broadway, 2004), 2.
7. Of course, domestic handicraft had its own history in the twentieth century. Space for-
bids a full explanation of it, but readers interested in the first craft revival of the 1920s
can see Fiona Hackney, “ ‘Use Your Hands for Happiness’: Home Craft and Make-Do-and-
Mend in British Women’s Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s,” Journal of Design History
19, no. 1 (2006), 23–38; Pat Kirkham, “Women and the Inter-War Handicrafts Revival,”
in A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women, and Design, ed. Judy Attfield and Pat
Kirkham (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 174–183; Lisa Tiersten, “The Chic Interior and
the Feminine Modern: Home Decorating as High Art in Turn-of-the-Century Paris,” in
Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher
Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); and Peter Greenhalgh’s controversial treat-
ment, “The History of Craft,” in The Culture of Craft: Status and Future, ed. Peter Dormer
(Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1997), 20–52. For the 1950s craft
movement, shaped by plastics, easy-to-assemble kits, and DIY, see Steven M. Gelber’s
excellent Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999); and Amy Bix, “Creating ‘Chicks Who Fix’: Women, Tool Knowledge, and
Home Repair 1920–2000,” WSQ 37, nos. 1–2 (2009), 38–60. Gelber and Bix both describe
American crafts, but many of their conclusions apply to the British craft scene as well.
8. Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl, Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and
Design (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), xiv.
9. Kirkham, “Women and the Inter-War Handicrafts Revival,” 175.
10. Kirkham, “Women and the Inter-War Handicrafts Revival,” 182, 174.
11. Larry Shiner, “The Fate of Craft,” in Neocraft: Modernity and the Crafts, ed. Sandra Alfoldy
(Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2008), 33.
12. Greenhalgh, “The History of Craft,” 37.
13. Martha Stewart, “From the Garden: Urns,” Martha Stewart Living, November 2007,
available at www.marthastewart.com/article/from-the-garden-urns; Rosamund Marriott
Watson, The Art of the House (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1897), 126.
14. For an example of Stewart’s famously difficult instructions, see Great American Wreaths:
The Best of Martha Stewart Living (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996), 19, which cheer-
fully instructs the reader, “To make the Mississippi wreath, cut 200 branches of Magnolia
grandiflora into 10″ long sections, and gather into bundles of 5 branches each. . . .”
16. Gelber, Hobbies, 155.
18. Sara Mosle, “Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy,” Double X, June 10, 2009; avail-
able at www.doublex.com/section/work/etsycom-peddles-false-feminist-fantasy.
19. See www.craftster.org/.
20. “Pretty Crafty,” Time Magazine, March 1, 2005.
21. Rob Walker, “Happy Medium: How an Indie-Crafts Venture Found Mainstream Expres-
sion,” New York Times Magazine, March 1, 2009, 20.
22. Cited in “The Ambassador of Handmade,” New York Times, September 4, 2008, 4.
23. Bruce Metcalf and Andrew Wagner gave this speech together. Bruce Metcalf, “DIY,
websites, and Energy: The New Alternative Crafts,” lecture given at the 2008 Society
of North American Goldsmiths [SNAG] conference, Savannah, Georgia. Available at
www.brucemetcalf.com/pages/essays/diy_websites_energy.html.
24. Rob Walker, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are (New
York: Random House, 2008), 237. Railla’s article is “Why Making Stuff Is Fashionable
Again,” Craft 1 (2006), 10, although this piece does not seem to include the latter part of
Walker’s quote.
25. Steve Dodds, Re-Creative: 50 Projects for Turning Found Items into Contemporary Design
(New York: HP Trade, 2006); Jean Railla, Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec (New York: Broadway,
2004); Greg der Ananian, Bazaar Bizarre: Not Your Granny’s Crafts! (New York: Viking
Studio, 2005).
26. Alissa Quart, “The Needle and the Damage Undone.” I.D. Magazine, January–February
2009, 102.
27. Love Jönsson, “Rethinking Dichotomies: Crafts and the Digital,” in NeoCraft: Modernity
and the Crafts, ed. Sandra Alfoldy (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design, 2007), 246. Also see Mike Press, “Handmade Futures: The Emerging Role of
Craft Knowledge in Our Digital Culture,” in NeoCraft, 249–266.
28. Jönsson, “Rethinking Dichotomies,” 247.
29. Railla, “Why Making Stuff Is Fashionable Again.”
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INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to figures.
aesthetes, 174, 200n111, 211n17 in alt crafts, 185, 187

antagonism towards domestic handicraft, of, in Cranford, 65, 201n15
56–57 in The Daisy Chain, 99–100, 105
definition, of, 199n93 in Our Mutual Friend, 124
dominant tastemakers, 4, 50 Berlin-wool work, 13, 26
Prince Albert, 3, 36, 51 Cranford, in, 66, 201n18
alt craft movement, 179, 180, 191 industrialism, associated with, 42–44, 54, 58
fundamental preferences of, 184–188 modernity of, 8, 28, 49, 69
historical ideas of, 189 products made with, 20–21, 52
illustrations, typical of, 176, 185, 189, 190 Briefel, Aviva, 167, 212n47, 212n51
amateurism, 8, 16, 58, 124, 166–167, 184–185, Brown, Bill, 15, 126, 213n55
187–188 Budge, Gavin, 94, 115
handicraft principles, part of, 8, 28, 51, 57, 151,
156, 179–180, 190
feminized, 22, 151–154, 180 Callen, Anthea, 16, 195n41, 211n31
problematic status, due to, 34, 35, 55, 58, 157, candle-lighters. See spills
180–181 Cassell’s Household Guide, 48–49, 193n1, 198n50,
Armstrong, Isobel, 14, 15 198n51, 210n10
Arts and Crafts, 25, 88, 174, 178, 193n2, 208n37, illustrations from, 2, 60, 121
211n31 spills in, 70–71
dominant idea of craft today, 179, 180, 188, 189 taxidermy in, 120–122
embattled against domestic handicraft, 5, 8, 28, wax craft in, 48–49
50–58, 151–155 Cole, Sir Henry, 5, 51–55, 123, 151, 199n93,
relation to other art movements, 199n93 200n96, 207n15, 208n37
Ashbee, C. R., 5, 153 commodity, 24, 49, 66, 124, 136, 179
Atkinson, J. Beavington, 56, 152–154 craft, emulating , 8–9, 28, 120, 181–182, 183,
Aurora Leigh, 27, 31, 42, 45, 57–59, 117, 196n13 187, 190
Austen, Jane, 22 craft, offering alternative to, 10, 13–14, 34,
44–47, 194n23
paper, as, 18, 77, 135
Bagehot, Walter, 162 in Phoebe Junior, 169–172
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, see Aurora Leigh connoisseurship, 190, 210n1, 212n47
bazaars, 7, 16, 20, 21, 51, 194n26, 194n30, antagonism to women, 151–154
199n75 emerging in 1870s, 24, 51, 56–58, 151
as alternative economic system, 6, 11–13, 17, in Phoebe Junior, 25, 145, 148, 154, 155,
44, 151, 153 163–165, 174–176
history of, 10–11, 153 Cotsell, Michael, 134, 136
224
Index 225
craft rhetoric, 9, 22, 28, 44–46, 207n7 Design Reform movement, 199n93, 200n99,
late-Victorian decline in, 48–50 205n30
craft paradigm, 4, 22, 23, 57, 93, 129, 143, 145, domestic handicraft, with, 28, 50–53
160, 173, 183. See also: amateurism; Phoebe Junior, in, 25
ephemerality; fragility; imitative arts; Dickens, Charles, 6, 18, 19, 39, 91, 145, 174,
realism in craft; salvage; technology 197n32, 206n1, 207n13, 207n14, 209n48,
Arts and Crafts, versus, 5, 55, 180 210n61. See also: Our Mutual Friend
class, and, 128, 134, 142, 183 influenced by Mayhew, 119, 206n2
financial system, versus, 10, 14, 19, 23, 25, 85, relations with Gaskell, 74–75, 88, 203n38,
146, 154, 166 203n38, 203n41, 203n43
mid-Victorian, 6, 24 other works:
principles, 9–10, 62, 82, 98, 120, 125, 183 Bleak House, 123, 126, 135, 206n1
typological realism, overlap with, 94–95, 115, Hard Times, 52, 123, 197n32, 208n37
116 Household Words, 73–75, 123, 132, 203n38,
Cranford, 10, 23–24, 93, 119–120, 129, 136, 139, 207n15
146, 148, 156, 162, 172, 202n23, 202n35, Little Dorrit, 123, 141, 206n1
203n45, 203n48. See also: Gaskell Nicholas Nickleby, 123, 141
anxieties about history, in, 23, 67, 80, 82, 88, Our Mutual Friend: see Our Mutual Friend
202n22 The Pickwick Papers, 74, 77, 88, 202n29
anxieties about paper, in, 18, 62, 68, 73–74, DIY, see alt craft
75–77, 81, 87–89, 115, 130, 169, Dodd, George, 45, 123, 204n10, 204n11, 207n12
201n49 Dolin, Tim, 67, 201n3, 201n12, 201n15,
handicraft and, 61–67, 77 202n22
Mary as narrator, in, 61–62, 66–67, 68, 72, 73, domestic ideology. See also: craft rhetoric
78, 89, 201n3 aesthetic hostility to, 55–57, 153
Matty, hidden emotional life, 62, 72, 78–79, contemporary culture, in, 179–183
81, 88 handicrafts, used to reinforce, 99–100, 106–107
working class in, 64, 67, 76–77, 83–84, 163 mid-Victorian ideas of, 32–36, 49–50, 120,
credit economy, see financial innovations 204n19
crochet, 3, 15, 20, 21, 155, 174, 188 separate spheres, emergence of, 5–6, 35, 193n7
in Aurora Leigh, 31 women’s self-expression, 25, 44–47
colors used in, 43
in Cranford, 201n18
ornaments produced by, 29, 65, 125 economic change, see financial innovations
Croskery, Margaret Case, 64, 75, 202n22 Eastlake, Charles, 5, 51, 152–154, 205n30,
212n38
Eliot, George, 21–22
The Daisy Chain, 18, 24, 91, 93–97, 99, 108, 115, Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 7–8, 45, 199n75, 204n19
120, 139, 146, 148, 157, 196n68, 205n23, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 13, 43, 49, 69
213n54. See also: preserved horticulture; ephemerality, 48, 51, 114, 138. See also: craft
typological realism; Yonge paradigm, paper
contrasted with Phoebe Junior, 146 in Cranford, 23, 68, 80, 91, 120
education in, 100–101, 110–112 handicraft principles, part of, 8–9, 28, 62
Ethel May, 93, 98–100, 102, 103–107, 110, 112, Etsy.com, 184, 187
113, 114, 115, 117, 174
Irishness in, 104–105, 107, 108, 110, 113, 114,
117, 203n25, 205n26 factory production, see industrialism
preservation, 18, 23, 91, 93, 96–97, 120 fancy-sewing , see needlework
Melanesia, 23, 93, 101–104, 107–114, 116, 117, fashion and craft, 36, 49, 66, 67, 69, 181, 185,
204n20, 205–206n35, 206n38 201n18. See also: craft paradigm
missionary work and, 23, 92, 93, 97, 101–103, fashion system, allied with, 8, 15, 28, 36, 48, 57,
108, 110, 112–114, 116–117, 138 88, 125, 153, 183
Norman May, 93, 95, 97–103, 106, 107, handicraft principles, part of, 9, 28
110–117 unfashionability of craft, 4, 25, 44, 57, 58, 71,
racial ideas, 24, 93, 101, 103–104, 110, 113, 114 150, 156–157, 178
Daston, Lorraine, 15, 96 financial innovations, 10, 27, 119–120, 147, 169,
Day, Lewis F., 5, 57, 152–154 174–175, 212n42, 212n43.
Delany, Mary, 29–30, 30, 69, 202n25 See also: commodity, industrialism
der Ananian, Greg, 185, 186 consumerism, 24, 145–146, 154–155, 173
226 Index
debt management, 25, 135–138, 139–141, pre-Victorian handicraft, 11, 22–23, 27–33, 35,
160–162 57–58, 62, 67–68, 69–71, 87, 89
paper notes, 19–20, 126, 135–139, 154–155, twentieth-century handicraft, 57, 180–181,191,
160–163, 166 213n7
stocks, 134–135, 171–172 Victorian modernity, expresses, 7–10, 28,
Flanders, Judith, 18, 156, 207n14, 208n28 43–44, 51, 88, 96, 175, 182–183, 188
on peddlars, 10, 129, 208n30
fragility of craft, 47–49, 57, 61, 96, 151. See also:
craft paradigm; paper crafts imitative arts, 6, 28, 39, 41, 95, 99, 189. See also:
Freedgood, Elaine, 212–213n52, 213n55. craft paradigm, realism
See also: thing theory Design Reform, opposed to, 52, 56–57
theory of thing culture, 14–15 Great Exhibition, at the, 36–39
Freeland, Natalka, 137, 142, 207n22 handicraft principles, part of, 9, 50, 57, 173
indie craft, see alt craft
industrialism, 15, 50, 51, 197n32
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 18, 19, 174, 201n9. See also: Arts and Crafts opposition to, 55–57, 151
Cranford mass-produced craft components, 8–9, 14, 179,
compared with Yonge, 91, 114, 138, 140 182–183
experience with handicraft: 6, 62–63 handicraft as alternative to, 24, 57
other works: handicraft as emulating , 34–36, 39, 42–46, 50,
Mary Barton, 63, 197n32, 202n23 51, 57, 58, 120, 151, 198n69
North and South, 63, 197n32
Ruth, 63, 75
Sylvia’s Lovers, 63 Johnston, Anna, 101–102, 204–205n20
Wives and Daughters, 63 Jones, Owen, 43, 51, 52, 198n72, 199n93
relations with Dickens, 74–75, 88, 203n38,
202n35, 203n38, 203n41, 203n43
Gelber, Steven, 36, 182, 213n7 Keble, John, 95, 115
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, 21–22, 195n40, King, Kathryn, 21, 195n61
195n61 Knezevic, Boris, 84, 203n48
Great Exhibition, 28, 198n53, 199n93 knitting , 19, 21, 66, 118, 184, 201n18
Design Reform movement, reacting to, 51–52, in Our Mutual Friend, 24, 119, 124, 125, 129, 143
199n93 unfashionable pursuit, 125, 157, 178–179
showcasing handicrafts at, 36–39, 41, 58 working-class activity, 201–202n19,
Grossman, Jonathan, 68, 139, 202n23 208n29
Kopytoff, Igor, 13, 34
Kriegel, Lara, 35, 36, 198n72, 207n15
Hall, Catherine, 42, 104, 205n26 on Design Reform, 205n30, 200n96, 200n99,
hair jewelry, 8–9, 25, 148–151, 175, 210n10 205n30
illustrations of, 9, 144, 149 on East End outpost of South Kensington
Hay, David Ramsay, 43, 198n72 Museum, 53–55
Heller, Deborah, 135, 140, 209n54
Helms, Mary W., 30, 46
history, handicraft ideas about, 25, 88. See also: lace, 50, 69, 125, 173
history of domestic handicraft; paper craft, in Aurora Leigh, 58–59
history handmade, embrace of, 51, 56, 155, 174,
Arts and Crafts medievalism, contrasted with, 200n111
51, 53, 56 machine-made, advent of, 35, 37
eighteenth century, contrasted with, 62 Lambert, Miss A., 40–41, 197n36, 199n75
mid-Victorian, associated with, 50 Langland, Elizabeth, 63, 64, 67, 72, 84, 202n22
nostalgia, expresses, 24, 182–183, 189, 190 leather leaves
tradition and modernity, mingled, 7–10, 44, craft manuals, in, 95–96, 153, 204n11
190–191 The Daisy Chain, in, 18, 23, 95, 98, 112, 114,
history of domestic handicraft. See also: alt crafts; 115, 117, 148, 157, 213n54
Arts and Crafts; history, handicraft ideas effect on Norman May, 99, 101, 115–116
about; paper, history of Leavis Q.D., 92–93
Arts and Crafts, critiques, 51–53, 57, 151 Linwood, Mary, 39–42, 40
contemporary handicraft, 177–191 Logan, Thad, 4, 15, 31, 35, 99, 120, 194n39,
medieval craft, 28–29 198n69
Index 227
Loyalty Islands, see Melanesia Betty Higden, 119–120, 124, 125, 126,
Lubbock, Jules, 52, 197n19, 200n97, 200n100 128–133, 134, 141, 142, 143, 169, 174,
Lynch, Deidre, 164, 168, 213n53 175, 208n29
domesticity in, 123, 133, 141–142
Jenny Wren, 124, 125, 127–129, 138, 139, 140,
Macleod, Dianne Satchko, 159 141, 142, 143, 174, 208n26
Maitzen, Rohan Amanda, 22, 195n61 Jewishness in, 132–133, 138–141, 209n49,
Marriott Watson, Rosamund, 4, 5, 7, 181, 209n53, 209n55
199n93 paper mills in, 129–130, 132, 133, 139
Martin, Henri-Jean, 18, 195n50 Mr Venus, 124–125, 126–127, 140, 141, 142,
Matus, Jill L., 63, 68 143, 196n68
Mayhew, Henry, 39, 119, 128, 135, 206n2,
208n29, 208n30
Menke, Richard, 80, 86 paper, anxieties about. See also: paper crafts;
Metcalf, Bruce, 186, 214n23 paper, history of
Metz, Nancy, 124–125, 143 Cranford, in, 23, 80–82, 84, 87–89, 91
Michie, Elsie, 74, 75, 203n38, 203n41 newspapers, 73–77
Miller, Andrew Hoxton, 64, 84, 203n48 paper, role in new finance, 20, 81, 162, 165–166
Morris, William, 24, 41, 55, 57, 211n31 waste paper, 18–19, 22, 135, 148, 175, 188,
Arts and Crafts reformer, 5, 37, 53 190, 213n54
domestic handicraft, connected to, 54, 211n31 paper crafts, 94, 120. See also: imitative arts; Mrs
influential ideas, 51, 179, 180, 199n93 Delany
Munsell, J., 17, 132 book as craft object, 16–17, 22, 37, 89, 115,
142–143, 190
eighteenth-century, examples of, 69–71, 89,
needlework, 3, 11, 15, 49, 54–55, 182, 208n29, 198n66, 202n24
198n66. See also: Berlin-wool work; imitative arts, in, 37–39
Miss Linwood mid-Victorian, examples of, 4, 8, 20, 70, 89,
aristocratic associations with, 28, 33, 36, 114, 199n82
53–54 potichomanie and diaphanie, 38, 55, 70, 89,
art needlework, 53–54, 181, 211n31 153, 198n50
Aurora Leigh, and, 42, 58–59 spills, 23, 59, 60, 68, 70–72, 77, 148, 191
Daisy Chain, in, 100 paper, history of
fish-scale embroidery, 7, 39, 120, 122 availability, increasing in 19th century, 29, 135,
Gaskell’s life, and, 62–63 202n28
mid-Victorian embroidery, 37, 39–41, 42 eighteenth-century, uses of, 57–58, 69–71,
Oliphant’s life, and, 147–148 77–78, 89
popularity of, 7 paper mills in nineteenth century, 129–130,
sewing, 5, 15, 16, 17, 21, 29, 30, 35, 62–63, 132, 133, 139
66–67, 107, 157, 208n26 wood-pulp paper, invention of, 17–18, 195n48,
women’s work, as, 21–22, 152, 201–202n19 195n50
Parker, Rozsika, 54, 211n31
Patteson, John Coleridge, 102–103, 108–109, 117,
Oliphant, Margaret, 6, 19, 22, 91, 162, 164, 171, 205–206n35
173, 174, 210n2, 212n42. See also: Phoebe Phoebe Junior, 10, 19, 25, 136, 157, 162, 163, 172,
Junior 173–174, 209n41, 212n51
economic experiences, 146–148 attitude to aestheticism, 154
other works: attitude to finance, 145–148, 151, 161–162,
The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. 209n41
Oliphant, 22, 148 attitude to handicraft, 151, 156–157, 201n2,
Hester, 147, 148 210n2
Miss Marjoribanks, 147, 148 contrasted with The Daisy Chain, 146
Our Mutual Friend, 18, 39, 130, 131, 145–146, domesticity in, 155–157
148, 154, 162, 196n68. See also: Dickens Mr. May, 146, 158, 160–169, 172, 173, 174
attitude to handicraft, 24, 123–126, 134, 138, Phoebe as connoisseur, 25, 151, 154–155,
143, 208n37 157–159, 165, 167–173, 174, 212n39,
attitude to finance, 24–25, 134–136, 138 212n48
attitude to class, 128, 134, 137–138, 141–142 Mr. Tozer, 155–157, 158, 160–161, 162–169,
attitude to trash, 119–120, 123–126, 143 170, 172
228 Index
plain-sewing, see needlework Sheumaker, Helen, 148, 210n10

Plotz, John, 138, 139, 151, 211n16. See also: thing Sidgwick, Henry, 162, 166
theory Sivasundaram, Sujit, 103, 110
theory of portable property, 13–15, 149, South Kensington Museum, 51–55, 199n93
203n53, 213n55 Stewart, Susan, 10, 33, 93
Poovey, Mary, 134, 208–209n39, 211–212n35 Stewart, Martha, 179, 180–181, 185, 186,
theory of credit economy, 19, 20 214n14
preserved horticulture, 8, 61, 91, 93, 94, 96–97, Stoller, Debbie, 178–179
113, 117, 121–122, 191 Stone, Elizabeth, 34, 42, 196n8, 197n36
American handicraft style, 193n6, 207n7
Mrs. Delany’s paper flowers, 29–30, 30
illustrations of, 90, 97, 116 taxidermy, 31, 41, 57, 58, 95, 96, 120–121, 121,
leather leaf rhetoric, 95–96, 153, 204n11 124–125, 133, 142, 143
leather leaves in The Daisy Chain, 18, 23–24, 95, technology. See also: craft paradigm; industrialism
98, 99, 101, 112, 114, 115, 117, 148, 157, alt crafts, 180, 184, 188–189, 191
213n54 Arts and Crafts, versus, 8, 51
nature in The Daisy Chain, 93, 96, 103, 108–109 handicraft principles, part of, 8, 190
seaweed collages, 29, 31, 39, 41, 57, 96, 117 nineteenth-century inventions, 17–18, 32, 35,
wax flowers and fruit, 29, 31, 41, 55, 133, 49, 69, 188–189
142, 157 textiles, see needlework, Berlin-wool work
Price, Leah, 17, 195n48 thing theory, 13–16, 126
Pugin, A. W. N., 41, 52 trash, see craft paradigm, salvage
Turney, Jo, 178, 181, 182
radical craft, see alt craft

Railla, Jean, 179, 186, 189, 214n24 Vickery, Amanda, 35, 193n7
realism in craft, 42, 93, 96, 193n6. See also: craft Queen Victoria, 36, 44, 197n35
paradigm; imitative arts Victorian color theory, 43–44, 50, 53, 133, 155,
Berlin-wool work, and, 42, 52 156, 183, 208n37
literal realism, 6–7, 9, 41, 125, 189–190
naturalistic design, 52–53, 55, 58, 123, 156,
190, 200n97, 200n99, 200n100, 208n37 Wagner, Andrew, 185–186, 214n23
typological realism, 94–95, 115 wax coral, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 25, 47, 48–49, 177,
recycling , see craft paradigm, salvage 198n51
Redgrave, Richard, 5, 51, 52, 199n93 women’s-magazine traditional crafts, 182
Richards, Thomas, 37, 194n17 Arts and Crafts idea, versus, 179
Ruskin, John, 5, 33, 53, 54, 179, 180, 199n93, Victorian domestic handicraft, resembles,
200n100, 212n39 181–184, 186, 187, 189–190
salvage, 25, 33–34, 122, 181, 191, 198n55. Yonge Charlotte, 6, 18, 19, 63, 138, 140, 174,
See also: craft paradigm 204n3, 205n30, 205n34. See also: The Daisy
alt craft, in, 184, 186–187 Chain, preserved horticulture
handicraft principles, part of, 9, 10, 57–58, attitude towards moral development, 91–92,
180, 190 204n2
household debris, and, 28, 39, 58, 64–66, attitude towards realism, 92–95. See also:
121–123 typological realism
Our Mutual Friend, and, 119–126, 134–135, other works:
137–138, 143, 148, 207n22 Abbeychurch, 41
paper and, 18–19, 81–82, 84 The Clever Woman of the Family, 92
Sandbach-Dahlström, Catherine, 94, 115 Heartsease, 94–95
Schor, Hilary, 66, 201n3, 201n12, 203n41, The Heir of Redclyffe, 102
203n43, 203n48 The Magnum Bonum, 92–93, 204n2
Selwyn, George Augustus, 102, 108, 109, The Trial, 103, 108, 109, 114, 115, 205n23,
205–206n35 206n39

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Novel Craft

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Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

List of Illustrations viii

Introduction: How to Read Wax Coral, and Why 3

CHAPTER 1. Women’s Work: The History of the Victorian

CHAPTER 2. Ephemerality: The Cranford Papers 61

CHAPTER 3. Preservation: The Daisy and the Chain 91

CHAPTER 4. Salvage: Betty as the Mutual Friend 119

CHAPTER 5. Connoisseurship: Giving Credit

Postscript: The Novelty of Craft 177

I.1 Wax Coral. Reproduced from Cassell’s Household Guide, vol. 1,

1.7 “Strawberry Thief,” textile pattern by William Morris (1883).

How to Read Wax Coral, and Why

handicrafts, and I hope that anyone trying to contextualize an example of

by saying that my subject’s adherence to forms of realism must have derived

Handicraft and Histor y

Figure I.2 Hair Jewelry.

it happily incorporated mass-produced items. These contradictions name the

Selling Domestic Handicraft: T he Bazaar

Figure I.3 The Bazaar.

Another way to transform handicrafts into commodities was presented by

The portaging of sentiment in beloved objects is a predictable, even

survivals of traditional manufacturing and distribution practices. This gave

The mid-Victorian ornately gilded, densely ornamental book covers expressed

innovations allowed paper manufacturers to create continuous sheets of paper

That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the

which he prefers to envision his own manuscript as a woven textile rather

Marg inal Economies

ﬁctional fabric.”64 Thus Eliot guarantees her character’s intellectual stature by

domestic handicraft construction and describes handicraft’s growing popularity

that oﬀers an unusual idea of racial essentialism and philanthropic labor.

embroiderers while simultaneously fulﬁlling the emergent ideology of middle-

development of a middle-class craft pastime. The late seventeenth and early

Figure . Mary Delany, “Physalis, Winter Cherry, a paper collage,”

Figure . Shell Nosegay, Mid-Eighteenth Century.

Thus, while the personal memento is of little material worth, often

connection to biography and its place in constituting the notion of the

those numberless pretty and not unuseful tokens of remembrance,

The plight of impoverished lacemakers was especially pitiable as they desperately

Figure . Mary Linwood, Needlepoint Portrait of Napoleon.

Needlework may be regarded (if we may be allowed the expression) as

so admired by Pugin and Morris, because it fails to “produce as true a picture of

desirable in a factory: reliable and economical production methods, without

At mid-century, then, the handicraft articulated its producers’ contempora-

Figure . Standing Workbasket, .

mid-Victorian color contrast theory, and cheerfully participating in mid-Victo-

most tasteless items from the Great Exhibition—featuring Berlin-wool work

Design reformers did eventually choose to champion the conventionalized

these ways, art needlework was constructed as an appropriate expression of the

Figure . Textile Pattern Identified by Henry Cole as Poor Design,

Figure . “Strawberry Thief,” Textile Pattern by William Morris.

objects into permanent decorative arrangements. By mid-century, “ornamental

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–1853) is notably patched together out of

C ra n fo rd and the Domestic

Instead of the conspicuous consumption and waste of a “vulgar”

The practitioners of this genteel recycling construct themselves against those

of femininity: domestic management and communitarian mutual support, while