his is a very interesting and original book that fulfils the promise made by its cover – which bears a little-discussed painting by William Holman Hunt, Honest Labour has a comely Face (c. 1861) – of presenting fresh aspects of well-known figures. Its subtitle, "Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature," gives an accurate idea of the author's direction of travel: her chosen task is essentially to track the significance of the appearance in Victorian painting, poetry and fiction of ceramic items. Her search will thus interest those engaged by the painters and writers of the Victorian period as much as those whose main concern is 19th-century pottery and its near relations.
"Pottery" and "ceramics" are not the only terms that Gotlieb has for her core materials, and many words and names that rise to the surface of the reader's mind on opening the book will be put in a cogent relation to each other before the author is finished: china, porcelain, delft-ware, parian-ware, majolica, Meissen, Dresden, Minton and Doulton, and their separate and overlapping characters will be explained before the book is done. For although the objects of study are to be identified (whether buried or displayed) in works of verbal and pictorial fiction, the history of the commodity itself must be given in part if not in whole for the reader to appreciate the extrapolations the author makes from these sightings. Literature specialists and art historians may ultimately feel Gotlieb understands their stock-in-trade less well than she does ceramics itself, but will encounter in these pages, respectively, Eliza Cook, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Eliot, Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hood, Braddon, Disraeli, James and Hardy; and Richard Redgrave, Whistler, Rossetti, Albert Moore, George Hicks, Burne-Jones, Thomas Faed, Joseph Clark, Holl, Herkomer, Frank Stone, Mary Gow, Mary Ellen Best, James Collinson and James Campbell. With a little more effort, that second list could have included Marie Spartali, Rebecca Solomon, Louise Jopling, Cathy Madox Brown and a couple of Hayllar sisters as well, while the inclusion of an essentially American painter, Lily Martin Spencer, is an unjustified contrivance.
Paintings featuring ceramics. Left: Richard Redgrave's The Poor Teacher, 1844, in which the dainty china on the table suggests the conscious (and snobbish) refinement of the family employing the governess. Right: James Collinson's Answering the Emigrant's Letter, 1850, in which a pitcher may suggest the reason for the family's penury (alcohol).
A declared exercise in the material culture of the era (other volumes in this series include publications on jewellery, toys and jars), this book reads like the author's master's dissertation or doctoral thesis, dense with academic background and scholarly references and, now and again, overworked theorising that strains the reader's credibility. It includes good quality illustrations of key items referred to, which include a case study for each chapter. Gotlieb's premise is that "ceramics embodied much of the contradictory social values and attitudes of the time" (3), with her underpinning contention being that "pottery and porcelain should be viewed as portable tools of Anglo-imperialism embodying empire" (13). Her chapters move from ceramics "as an agent of design reform" (ch. 1), through an examination of the famous willow pattern (ch. 2), to a study of teacups (ch. 3) and pitchers or jugs (ch. 5), via an argument about ceramics embodying a notion of Britishness characteristic of the period (ch. 4). We hear how China's pre-nineteenth-century prominence in the production of ceramics gave way to Britain's ascendency (24), embodied perhaps by the adoption from 1814 of the willow pattern which Britain thenceforward brazenly exported in great volume to China itself (57ff), and accelerated by the British and French invasion of Beijing's Summer Palace in 1860. We learn that tea-drinking, already widespread in England by the mid-1780s, derived not from the Indian connection that many will have assumed but from trade with China. We are told that the South Kensington Museum began to collect in this field from 1852, enabling the research and study of this range of objects as well as its discussion and valorisation throughout the rest of the century.
The book's period, 1840-90, means that the voices of resonant names in the development of Victorian design such as Henry Cole, Owen Jones, Charles Eastlake, John Ruskin and Eliza Haweis are heard throughout, although a curiously minor role is played by William Morris, who isn't cited often enough to gain entry to the bibliography (even though some tiles worked under his aegis come in for examination in chapter 2.) Additional observers include the French head of Minton's, Léon Arnoux, poached from the renowned French centre of decorative ceramics, Sèvres (from 1849; who'd have suspected that?), writers of fashionable 'how to' books such as Jane Panton, Clarence Cook and Lucy Orrinsmith (the former Lucy Faulkner), and the politician William Gladstone (whom VW regulars are used to seeing cropping up in unexpected places). Designers, entrepreneurs, commentators, critics, collectors and consumers are all considered sooner or later in this generally well-researched book.
However, a drawback of the concepts organising the subject-matter, rather than the subject-matter itself leading the investigation, is that some pieces of evidence are viewed from only one side, towards one pre-ordained end, or picked up only momentarily in order to illustrate an argument, then left inadequately examined for the reader who knows them already in their entirety. Thus the Great Exhibition (1851), the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857), the Stoke potteries, Wedgwood's great pre-Victorian enterprise, the great popularity of Staffordshire-ware, the "Felix Summerly" project at South Kensington, and the very Victorian success of both Minton's and Doulton's slide in and out of focus – some in the length of one sentence - as they are called up by the selection of texts and pictures that Gotlieb has assembled.
The same might be said of the various essays, novels and paintings brought to bear on this journey, whose passing mention/image of an item of pottery merits inclusion to the author whether or not that speaks to the work's essence or significance. This only matters where a claim is made for meaning which really doesn't exist. To give a simple example, an art historian would point out that it was common in the period under discussion for a painter to accumulate a store of props and accessories useful for different types of picture, and that these would be employed as much for pragmatic as expressive reasons. Thus some of Gotlieb's observations seem much more valid than others. On the one hand, that Dickens parodied Henry Cole in the character Tom Gradgrind in Hard Times (1854) (29) as his friend Wilkie Collins had held Cole's aesthetics up to ridicule in the home of his hero's inamorata in Basil (1852) (39) illuminates the essential function and aim of those two novels while, on the other hand, the precise character of the pot in Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1868) (142ff) is surely not the key to this painting's intent or value. Nevertheless, many of the observations on novels, poems and paintings that the reader thinks they know well will refresh their recollection of those works of art: it's useful to be reminded that Whistler, in his well-known "Ten o'clock Lecture" (1885), posited the fashioning of clay as the original art-form; and there's a certain piquancy in George Lewes' judgment that Dickens "worked in delf[t] not in porcelain" (140) and that James in The Portrait of a Lady (1880-1) called his heroine Isabel Archer "a sliver plate not an earthen one" (141).
Two more paintings featuring ceramics. Left: George Hicks' Woman's Missions: Companion to Old Age, 1862, in which the china on the table is an indicator of domestic propriety and curated comforts. Right: William Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1867: granted its function as a monument, how much does the appearance of the pot really tell us?
Overall, then, this is a book with much to offer the student of Victorian culture, that will surely stimulate most readers to revisit their Victorian favourites, to take a trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and to pay closer attention to the crockery section on their next visit to a charity shop.
Links to Related Material
Bibliography
(Book under review) Gotlieb, Rachel. Ceramics in the Victorian Era. Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. Hardback, £90.00. ISBN 978-1-3503-5484-5.
Last modified 10 April 2013