Rage against the machine:
Victorian cast iron and its critics

Ruskin occupied a towering position in art and architectural criticism from the late 1840s to the end of the century and is still today revered by many as an enlightened polymath who railed against the excesses and contradictions of Victorian design and society. He also had an abiding hatred of cast iron and often unleashed torrents of abuse on ornament made from this material. In January 1875, the middle-aged Ruskin was out walking in the picturesque Lune Valley in Lancashire when he discovered the motif of a cast iron serpent on the legs of two benches, put up for contemplation of the surrounding views.

In his collection of essays Fors Clavigera, published later in 1875, this serpent motif mutated into a symbol of all the hellish consequences of rampant industrialisation produced by the work of manufacturers avid for profit – an infernal dragon that needed to be slain by all the honest workmen of Britain to restore the country’s moral standing. Ruskin’s equating of cast iron with the devil was the logical outcome of his long-standing hatred of the material., which he variously condemned as a deceitful, false, vulgar, cold, clumsy and paltry pretence to art: a cheap substitute for the real thing that, is allowed to proliferate in Britain, would ‘obliterate all our national feeling for beauty.’

This strong feeling – and it was not just Ruskin who went into paroxysms of vitriol over cast iron – resulted from a fundamental belief that machines should not try to imitate what the human hand had done unaided for centuries, and that there was something unique – something of the human soul – imparted into objects made by hand. Thus, attempts to create ornament using machines that imitated the intricacies of handicraft were seen by many critics as immoral – rather like a charlatan passing themselves off as someone they are not.

Behind this was a Victorian obsession with truth, perhaps most vociferously expressed by the architect A. W. N, Pugin who, in the early 1840s, condemned machine-made ornament as a ‘deception’ because it encouraged ‘cheap imitations of magnificence’ that resulted in design monstrosities – ‘glaring, showy and meretricious ornament’, or, a ‘a false show’. Of course, such arguments led to an emphasis on the taste of the would-be buyer of these kinds of objects – generally much cheaper than hand-made equivalents, they were feared by more refined critics as spreading a taste for the ostentatious, a form of vulgarity.

Yet, throughout the 19th century there was another strand of thinking that celebrated the machine and its reproductive powers as a revelatory wonder. Responding to the thousands of machine-made ornamental objects on show at the Great Exhibition, the architect John Burley Waring felt ‘wonder and pleasure’ at the sight of the machines that created those objects – that is, steam engines, which he believed rendered ‘the individual’s creativity universal’ by spreading their ‘generous thought’ to the many rather than the few. In this context, mechanical reproduction of ornament was celebrated as art’s democratizing agent that could be no more condemned than the printing press, which did the same for literature centuries earlier.

Taking up Waring’s argument with direct reference to cast iron, the architect Charles Driver argued in 1874 that those, like Ruskin, who railed against mechanical reproduction were guilty of ‘selfishness’ because they wished to ‘keep all the good things to themselves, grudging their poorer neighbours any of them.’ For architects like Driver who embraced cast iron, developing ornament appropriate for mass repetition became a central concern, whether seen in Owen Jones’s adoption of Islamic patterns for cast iron in his architecture of the 1850s and 1860s; Driver’s florid naturalism in pumping stations, seaside and railway buildings from the 1850s onwards; or Thomas Jeckyll’s eclectic Japanese-influenced designs of the 1870s.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, manufacturers of ornamental cast iron, often with the assistance of architects and designers, answered those who criticised their tendency to produce aesthetic monotony with an explosion of variety in their product ranges, from small-scale objects to entire buildings. So, for example, in Walter Macfarlane’s 1882 catalogue, potential and existing customers were presented with thousands of ornamental designs that offered unprecedented product differentiation.

Thus, in late century, the essentially mechanical nature of cast iron and its implied repetitiveness was countered by an extraordinary variety that gave customers a degree of choice that would help preserve their sense of individuality. For this extraordinary variety is no mere whimsy – after all, by the time this catalogue was published in the early 1880s, Macfarlane was operating a world-leading business; each product in this catalogue was targeted at a specific buyer or buyers to provide them with a sense of individuality amidst the world of mechanical reproduction.

In a sense, we can turn around both aspects of Victorian taste – the association of mass-produced decoration with vulgarity and the deadening qualities of the machine – into something positive if we think differently about what happens to a work of art – from the smallest object to an entire building – when it is made and reproduced by means of a mechanical process. Why is the imitation of hand-made products by machines a form of deceit to be shunned by any decent moral person with any pretence to having good taste? Even in the Victorian period there were a few brave critics who ventured to disagree with the likes of Ruskin. In 1873, the architect Henry Whitaker used the analogy of female cosmetics to argue that art itself was a form of deception because it ‘softened the asperities of everyday life’. For him, cast iron ornament was a ‘glory of modern civilisation’ because in its ‘more general distribution of God’s gifts’ it was a great ‘humanising influence’.

Yet, of course, this did not last. Already by the end of the 19th century, steel had largely replaced cast iron in structural work in metal; and steel was produced by an entirely different method from cast iron and was much more difficult (and therefore expensive) to fabricate into ornamental forms. Indeed, nearly three quarters of all ornamental ironwork was destroyed in the 20th century – by patriotic fervour in the second world war, modernist fervour in the decades that followed, or just neglect throughout. In a sense, the utopian meaning inscribed in all that has vanished has been taken over by the vast world of consumption that we now live in; yet, I think that, in contrast to the electronic devices of today – with their seeming infinite variety yet increasing sameness – the mass-produced objects of desire of the Victorian period express more clearly – if more strangely – how questions of taste are always infused with our dreams and desires.