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Source publication
The Victorian fascination with the world of manufacture—exemplified in the Great Exhibition of 1851—was concomitant with, and probably fuelled by, progress in technical drawing fluency and literacy. Periodicals such as The Mechanics’ Magazine (founded 1823) and The English Mechanic and World of Science (founded 1865) included increasingly sophistic...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... visitor is being instructed by the engineer while crowds squeeze against the banister in the background. One of the great masters of the Factory interior sub-genre was Thomas Allom , an architect and topographical illustrator, a founding member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, sadly neglected by posterity. In Powerloom Weaving ( fig. 2), an engraving Allom made after his own drawing, linear perspective creates the illusion of depth thanks to the symmetrical rows of vertical objects: pillars on the left and drive belts on the right, which seem to recede in the distance. The composition of the picture is simply and powerfully organized along the two diagonals which ...
Citations
This polemical essay argues that Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, and her novels North and South , and Mary Barton , portray her as an overlooked, early political economist. The objective of the paper is three‐fold: (1) to dismantle taken‐for‐granted truth claims that Alan Fox is the preeminent thinker on pluralistic forms of employee engagement (2) encourage further development and enlargement of the field and what constitutes its history, and (3) to argue for the recognition of Elizabeth Gaskell as an early political economist. Guiding this exploration is the question: How do we also make sense of Fox’s privileged situatedness in scholarship and the absence of potential early theorists like Gaskell? The paper adopts a feminist reading and polemical writing to engage in feminist critical historiography. The author draws on audience theory to help readers reorient themselves to Gaskell and to help see her as an overlooked political economist. Feminism is conceptually presented as ontology, epistemology, method, and style of writing. Despite the ongoing credit Alan Fox receives as first theorizing the frames of reference and pluralistic forms of engagement starting in the 1960s, Elizabeth Gaskell was contemplating and critiquing the employment relationship starting in the 1850s. She not only provided a rich historical understanding of the inequalities of class and wealth, but her ideas and insights remain unacknowledged in industrial relations scholarship. The paper offers a unique feminist perspective on Elizabeth Gaskell and makes the case that she is neglected early political economist. Further, the paper makes a link between the world of Victorian era fiction as historical understanding of early capitalist society and demonstrates how ideas are taken up by the field in unconscious and unjust ways.
