ABSTRACT
Dickens’s understanding of the connection between work and personality can, as we have seen, be related to a rich iconographic tradition of urban typology which dates back to the Cries of London but was particularly active in the 1840s. When we turn to his depiction of the laboring body, however, it soon becomes apparent that it is much more diffi cult to place Dickens’s conceptions and representations of manual workers convincingly in a visual context. This might seem surprising given the number of great Victorian paintings that take manual work as their primary subject. Major examples include Ford Madox Brown’s endlessly interesting and frequentlydiscussed Work, Daniel Maclise’s Peter the Great at Deptford Dockyard (1857), and William Bell Scott’s Iron and Coal (1861). The growing critical literature on the issue of Victorian labor is also overwhelmingly visual in its emphases.1 Tim Barringer signals this at the very start of his study Men at Work. He explains, in fact, that this visual turn responds to an omission in previous scholarship on the subject:
Histories of the period have acknowledged the ideological importance of the ‘gospel of work’ and of the ‘languages of labour’ in Victorian culture. In this book I argue that the sphere of the visual image, and more specifi cally the representation of the male labouring body, provided the most powerful and signifi cant formulation of work as the nexus of ethical and aesthetic value.2
