Novel Craft; Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction explores the world of amateur domestic handicrafts – the wildly popular form of handicraft against which William Morris, John Ruskin, and the Arts and Crafts movement rebelled. I focus on the ‘craft paradigm,’ the central values of amateur handicraft: imitation, ephemerality, preservation, and quasi-industrial reproduction. These constitute a set of values that would disappear once Arts and Crafts taught people to valorize the authentic, handmade, and natural. Moreover, handicraft participated in a fascinating parallel economy that emulated but also critiqued mainstream industrialism. I read Cranford, Our Mutual Friend, The Daisy Chain, amongst other novels, to show how much the values associated with amateur handicraft dominated Victorian ideas about artistic production, and how a woman’s mode of creative labor might have filtered into the novel form.

Reviews:

Sharon Marcus, Nineteenth-Century Literature NCLReview

Clive Edwards, Nineteenth-Century Contexts NCCReview

Patricia Zakreski, Textual Practice TextualPracticeReview

Suzanne Daly, Victorian Studies VSReview

Clare Simmons, Women’s Writing WomensWritingRev

Trev Broughton, The Times Literary Supplement

Janice Holland, Victorian Review VictorianReview