Grand Designs sets out to put labor closer to the center of the history of the design reform movement, which has hitherto been viewed more exclusively from the standpoint either of the reformers themselves—seeking to educate British taste—or of the reformers’ target, the consumers. Lara Kriegel properly reminds us that design reform was originally intended to work upon the supply of as much as upon the demand for high-quality industrial products. In doing so she is able to retain a sense of the producers as actors and not again as simply objects of reformers’ ambitions.

The Government School of Design, established in Somerset House in 1837 as one of the first palpable fruits of the movement, was after all aimed at training artisans. In her most vivid and challenging chapter, Kriegel gives voice to the trainees, young men from a variety of backgrounds with a lively range of personal, vocational, and aesthetic aspirations, who grumbled about the poor conditions and chafed—on occasion rebelled—against the narrow discipline imposed upon them by their betters. (Young women had their own separate school established in 1842—another story, not told by Kriegel because her focus on “labor” and her nervousness about the middle-class takeover of the art schools makes her cleave closely to the male artisans.) The pedagogical regime at the Manchester School of Design, founded in 1838, seems to have been more generous, although its accommodation in the basement of the Royal Manchester Institution was equally insalubrious. This Manchester School won support from local calico manufacturers not normally seen as part of the design reform movement. Yet Kriegel shows how their campaign for copyright extension on textile designs brought together, even though sometimes only temporarily, small masters and artisans in a common discourse defending the “property of skill” from the cheapening effects of mass production and design piracy.

The centerpiece of the design reform movement was of course the Great Exhibition, portrayed here as a “celebration of labor” as well as an entertainment, a spectacle, a bazaar, and a trade fair. Kriegel is not of course blind to the mounting attention paid to the consumer and the tourist, at the exhibition and at its successor institutions such as the South Kensington Museum. But she reminds us that many of these consumers and tourists were also themselves producers, like the mechanics who took pride in the skill required by their machines portrayed by John Cassell in his artisans’ guide to the exhibition or the cabinetmaker tempted to appraise by hand the fine furniture on display at the Bethnal Green Museum. Worker visitors’ interests were at the heart of intense debates over the location of art and design museums—was South Kensington too suburban? was Trafalgar Square too smutty?—which led to the experiment of establishing a South Kensington outpost in Bethnal Green in the 1870s. These working-class art patrons represent a reservoir of hitherto unacknowledged cultural capital that substantially inflected Victorian debates about art and design, the assertion of which represents Kriegel's most substantial achievement.

Kriegel is not immune from that old occupational disease of labor history, the tendency to romanticize its subjects or at least to assume that it knows what was best for them. Her discussion of design education adopts from Tim Barringer a dichotomy between “aspiration” and “containment,” identified respectively with the unlikely working-class hero B. R. Haydon and the equally unlikely utilitarian antihero William Dyce, when her own evidence indicates that the “aspirations” of the artisans concerned were pretty mixed. Were those artisans who preferred a practical, vocational course that might get them a better job necessarily (or unfortunately) less “aspirational” than those attracted to Haydon's melodramatic rhetoric about “genius” and his passion for figure study? The “aspirational” students did not in fact rebel against Dyce and his alleged policies of “containment” but against his successor Charles Heath Wilson, for reasons that may have had little to do with his ideology or his curriculum and much to do with his dictatorial managerial style. It is striking that Samuel Smiles, whose contemporary injunctions to artisans were exceptionally popular and are not easily categorized either under aspiration or containment, makes not a single appearance in this book. The Penny Magazine does, but its equally complex blend is dismissed in a familiar way as “contradictions” (45). In such characterizations and in her privileging of the Hoxton cabinetmaker Benjamin Lucraft, Kriegel expresses a clear personal preference for a kind of ideal-type artisanal radical and tends to take their pronouncements on behalf of the working class too much at face value. Lucraft, after all, was not just any Hoxton cabinetmaker but a lifelong activist on the militant fringe of working-class politics in Britain, the archetypal author of the self-aggrandizing “myth of the artisan” as described by Jacques Rancière. (He was not, however, the editor of the positivist newspaper the Bee-Hive, as suggested at p. 180—given the symbolic value Kriegel attributes to Lucraft, she could have done a great deal more to specify his social and ideological position.)

There are other features of the book that partake not of older tendencies but of newer ones. Much effort is made to internationalize the subject. Special attention is drawn to the depiction of design pirates as resembling the “Turkish Pacha in the despotic East” (69). Assessments of what constitutes good design are made in comparison with Irish, French, Indian, and “Gothic” craftsmanship. These are real subjects, but they cannot easily be sorted out within the scope and framework of this book; as a result, they are handled more descriptively, and they lead Kriegel to rather limp conclusions—“a broad range of interlocutors marshaled laboring figures from across the globe,” which “offered important rhetorical tools that working men would employ in the years to come” (123). Nor do they help to vindicate a vague and overblown claim to redraw “the very contours of historical practice” (5). What this book does do is quite enough—it restores a degree of “social embeddedness” (13) to a particular subject in cultural history that has in some recent treatments rather lost its sense of those moorings. As such it makes a truly significant contribution to our understanding of Victorian debates over design and industry.