“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

(Originally posted Friday, August 8, 2008)

Ford Madox Brown, Work (1865)

This justly famous picture was probably the apogee of Brown's social commentary. Brown (1821 - 1893) was associated with the antiquarianizing Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but took from them mainly a taste for bright colors. Many of his paintings were comments (typically neither especially liberal nor conservative) on the conditions of his day. Work was a panoramic painting intended to portray all that was really important in contemporary English life; thus we see laborers, children, older and wealthier people, even dogs and cats. The whole is blended so as to convey a remarkable impression of energy.

In some respects, Work is a pictorial echo of the same strain of thought that in America occasioned the poems of Walt Whitman. In England, it was during Brown's lifetime that Charles Babbage (the inventor of the digital - but not electronic - computer) produced his On the Economy of Machine and Manufacture, the first significant book in the discipline now called "operations management." Babbage's work had a profound influence on the study of both management and, more generally, economics.

The middle half-century of Queen Victoria's reign was, in both Britain and America, a time of astonishing social and economic development. When she came to the throne in 1837, Victoria knew a world in which one wrote letters; by the time she died in 1901, the telephone and telegraph were common, and radio was not far away. Yet the social and economic foundations of all that progress, the subject of Brown's picture above, are all too often ignored. It is easy to get lost in the history of labor unions and international capitalism, but to do so misses the point, a point that Brown understood: there was an unprecedented shift from an economy based mainly on farming and farm labor, with distribution focused first and foremost on villages and small towns, to an industrial economy based on wage labor, with distribution centered on immense cities such as London and New York.

Brown's picture is largely optimistic, even humorous; one can, of course, find plenty of paintings and other works from the 19th Century to tell the other side of the story. To me, the most telling fact from the years when Brown was painting works such as the one shown above is the following: throughout the latter part (at least) of the United States' Civil War (1861 - 1865) Federal forces repeatedly made us of prefabricated steel bridges. Typically, they ordered the bridges (using telegraph, if possible) from warehouses (such as the one at Memphis). What is remarkable is this set of facts: (a) the officers knew about the bridges and how to order them; (b) the United States was producing these bridging units to inventory, not on demand; and (c) the telecommunications and logistics systems needed to order the units and get them to the right place were taken for granted. Probably we ought to add also that the soldiers in the field had the necessary know-how and equipment to make use of the bridges once they were delivered. All of these facts would have been unthinkable only fifty years earlier, even to Napoleon.

As an aside, the most famous example of military bridge-building before modern times is surely Caesar's astonishing accomplishment (Gallic Wars IV 17-18) of bridging the Rhine in ten days (a feat that could not be duplicated by modern engineers in a well-known History Channel experiment). The Roman engineers of Caesar's time were superb in their specialties, highly trained, literate, intelligent men.

And it is the occurrence of "literate" that leads me back to the last point about Brown's painting. Off to the far left side is a wall plastered with printed notices of many kinds; there are other evidences of writing also. Britain was far away from the time when universal literacy would be taken for granted, but literacy was already widespread enough that cheap, plentiful reading material of all kinds (from newspapers to books) was a central feature of society and economy. Today, hardly anyone would question the notion that the ability to store, disseminate, and utilize information was a central feature of the explosive economic growth of many Western countries in the 19th Century; those parts of the World where literacy was reserved for the elite few fell behind .

Perhaps, then, Work is not merely about the diversity and energy of the working world, but also about the intelligence and social systems that stimulated such intelligence. In other words, education works really, really well.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me