Combines cultural and labour history of Victorian Britain centred on the pre-history of the V&A

With this richly illustrated history of industrial design reform in nineteenth-century Britain, Lara Kriegel demonstrates that preoccupations with trade, labor, and manufacture lay at the heart of debates about cultural institutions during the Victorian era. Through aesthetic reform, Victorians sought to redress the inferiority of British crafts in comparison to those made on the continent and in the colonies. Declaring a crisis of design and workmanship among the British laboring classes, reformers pioneered schools of design, copyright protections, and spectacular displays of industrial and imperial wares, most notably the Great Exhibition of 1851. Their efforts culminated with the establishment of the South Kensington Museum, predecessor to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which stands today as home to the world’s foremost collection of the decorative and applied arts. Kriegel’s identification of the significant links between markets and museums, and between economics and aesthetics, amounts to a rethinking of Victorian cultural formation.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including museum guidebooks, design manuals, illustrated newspapers, pattern books, and government reports, Kriegel brings to life the many Victorians who claimed a stake in aesthetic reform during the middle years of the nineteenth century. The aspiring artists who attended the Government School of Design, the embattled provincial printers who sought a strengthened industrial copyright, the exhibition-going millions who visited the Crystal Palace, the lower-middle-class consumers who learned new principles of taste in metropolitan museums, and the working men of London who critiqued the city’s art and design collections—all are cast by Kriegel as leading cultural actors of their day. Grand Designs shows how these Victorians vied to upend aesthetic hierarchies in an imperial age and, in the process, to refashion London’s public culture.

"“[A] bold and focused monograph. The book is a successful grand design itself, as the author buries for the foreseeable future myths about Victorian indifference to the many facets of creating and displaying the beautiful and useful, and its attendant association of the nineteenth century with ugly melodramatic statues and equally hideous painted iron bridges. . . . [An] artfully illustrated and skillfully researched study. . . .”" - American Historical Review

"“[A]n ambitious, important book that studies the design reform movement of the mid-nineteenth century, giving special attention to questions of industry and labor. . . . [T]horough and imaginatively conceived.”" - Victorian Studies

"“In this fascinating interdisciplinary study, Lara Kriegel has woven strands of nineteenth-century economic theory, design history, social developments, and cultural events into a richly textured portrayal of how aesthetics were contemplated and manipulated by various audiences. . . . In a well-written, engaging narrative that flows easily among the various disciplines that inform this study, Kriegel has produced a significant and substantive addition to the literature on nineteenth-century design. The content will be intriguing to scholars of design, social/cultural history, and economic history.”" - Enterprise & Society

"“Kriegel’s Grand Designs is an important addition to the study of museums as they developed and operated culturally in the nineteenth century. . . . The great triumph of the book is to take seriously the mid-Victorian reformers’ concern to improve the labouring and artisanal classes through education and to examine the means by which they undertook this task.”" - Social History

"“The book is well illustrated and is an excellent addition to both historical studies of design and social histories of labour—two worlds that rarely intersect in academic discourses but have been made to do so with wonderful deftness by Kreigel.”" - Journal of Design History