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Abstract
When people read George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire, many tend to look upon it as a series of images that capture Yorkshire life and occupations at the beginning of the nineteenth century: just another costume book. While this is a valid way of reading Walker, it is suggested in this article that he had a more political motive bound up with traditional ideas about the nature of society. It is argued that the region of Yorkshire in which Walker lived was in the throes of social change, and that the book he produced allowed him to put forward a moral and political commentary on it by visual means.
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Professor Dave Russell, Yanina Sheeran and Professor Geoff Timmins for their helpful advice and comments on an earlier draft of this article. Illustrations from Costume of Yorkshire are reproduced from the YAHS collection, with the kind help of Paul White. Figures 1 (Wellcome Trust, Potters, Wellcome L0067759) and 2 are reproduced from Wikimedia Creative Commons.
Notes
1. George Walker, The Costume of Yorkshire (Leeds, 1885) – quotation from the later Caliban edition (Firle, 1978), p. 7, to which all subsequent references in this article are made.
2. Martin Hardie, English Coloured Books (London, 1906), p. 153; Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (St Albans, 1971, first published 1947), pp. 71, 96; Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (London, 1987), p. 189; Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape, Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (New Jersey, 1993), p. 119; Sam Smiles, Eyewitness: Artists and Visual Culture in Britain, 1770–1830 (Aldershot, 2000), pp 77–110.
3. See George Sheeran, ‘Walker, George (1781–1856)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, on-line edition, Sept. 2014.
4. R. G. Wilson, Gentlemen Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700–1830 (Manchester, 1971), p. 156.
5. Costume of Yorkshire, ‘Biographical Notice’, p. 6.
6. Costume of Yorkshire, ‘Biographical Notice’ p. 6.
7. Borthwick Institute for Archives, York, Probate Papers, YDA/11, vol. 242, fol. 246 (George Walker, Oct. 1856).
8. Sheffield Archives and Local Studies, MD7048, ‘Misses Shaw and George Walker, Album of Drawings and Watercolours c.1810–1820’. [NB, the description is incorrect: it should read Shore, not Shaw and the date range goes to the 1840s.].
9. Costume of Yorkshire, ‘Biographical Notice’, p. 6.
10. The catalogue is in Leeds Central Library, Local and Family History Services.
11. See for example Leeds Mercury, 20 Apr. 1811.
12. Sheffield Archives and Local Studies, MD7048, ‘Misses Shaw and George Walker’.
13. Costume of Yorkshire, ‘Biographical Notice’, p. 7.
14. University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, YAS/MS1000.
15. Costume of Yorkshire, author’s introduction, p. 13.
16. For further discussion of this point see Sam Smiles, ‘Defying Comprehension: Resistance to Uniform Appearance in Depicting the Poor, 1770s to 1830s’, Textile History 33:1 (2002) pp. 22–36.
17. See his commentary on Plate XII, ‘Nor and Spell’, Costume of Yorkshire, p. 40.
18. Joseph Strutt, A Complete View of the Dress and Habits of the People of England from the Establishment of the Saxons in Britain to the Present Time (London, 1796); The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England … from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (London, 1801).
19. John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 120–21.
20. William Henry Pyne, Microcosm: Or A Picturesque Delineation of the Arts, Agriculture and Manufactures of Great Britain … for the Embellishment of Landscape, 2 vols (London, 1806).
21. A. E. Santaniello, introduction to a reissue of the Microcosm, (New York, 1970), p. 7.
22. For a further discussion of the artistic treatment of the poor see Barrell, Dark Side of the Landscape.
23. Introduction to volume 1 of Microcosm (no page number).
24. Smiles, Eyewitness, p. 86.
25. Costume of Yorkshire, p. 13.
26. Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, p. 189; Daniels, Fields of Vision, p. 119.
27. The ‘Great Chain of Being’ can be identified with some Greek philosophers and with Neo-Platonic thought. It has been examined in some detail, a seminal work being Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: Studies in the History of an Idea (Massachusetts, 1936).
28. For a fuller discussion of this point see J. C. D. Clarke, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 423–88.
29. E. P. Thompson, ‘The Patricians and the Plebs’, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 16–93.
30. For example Robert Hird, writing from 1808 and later, records the passing of customs and festivals in Bedale and adjacent villages. See Hird’s Annals of Bedale, ed. Lesley Lewis, 4 volumes (Northallerton, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 146–7; vol. IV, pp. 495–6.
31. Smiles, ‘Defying Comprehension’.
32. Costume of Yorkshire, p. 96.
33. See Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, p. 99.
34. D. G. Wright, Popular Radicalism, the Working-Class Experience, 1780–1880 (Harlow, 1993) remains an insightful and accessible summary of the issues and debates.
35. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, p. 97.
36. Peeps into the Past, being Passages from the Diary of Thomas Asline Ward, Alexander B. Bell, ed. (London, 1909), p. 192. Ward was a fellow Unitarian and one wonders whether he knew Walker.
37. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, p. 99.
38. Barrell, Dark Side of the Landscape.
39. Smiles, Eyewitness, p. 108.