Talia Schaffer. Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-539804-5. Price: US$65.00 /£40.00

Talia Schaffer starts this wonderful book by telling us that it has taken “an unusually long time” to write. Thank goodness. There are many things to celebrate about Novel Craft, but not least is its own carefully crafted structure, which accommodates serious and deep reflection on all angles of its complex subject. While the subject of handicraft may seem at first trivial and ephemeral, there is nothing trivial about Schaffer’s consideration of its place in Victorian British culture. She warns us early that “[w]hen we read Victorian domestic handicraft only as the silly products of bored housewives, we impose on it a criterion from a later generation that was explicitly designed to contest and eradicate that handicraft, instead of viewing it in its own terms” (25). Yet she makes no hasty overblown claims for the importance of handicraft but rather identifies “a complex of ideas” (4) which she calls “the craft paradigm”(4). Tracking this paradigm through the period, she shows how it gains and then loses cultural value between the 1840s and the 1860s. In so doing, she finds, almost to her own surprise, that she has rethought the Arts and Crafts Movement, restoring its context of struggle against a vast onslaught of dubiously embroidered spectacle cases and homemade wax table decorations. As she says, “[f]or the Victorians, domestic handicraft was utterly ubiquitous” (7). In exploring what exactly these Victorian women and some men were doing when they “did” handicrafts, Schaffer uncovers some surprising facts. Much more than we perhaps now imagine, Victorian crafters were buying pre-produced and manufactured materials for their craft projects. Schaffer’s welcome explanation of the mysterious “Berlin wool work” which crops up everywhere in Victorian fiction and journals shows that much of it was bought in kit form with the colors printed onto canvas as a guide, or onto paper which could be sewn over and onto the canvas (42). The result was a product that was half home-made and half bought, much like modern tapestry cushion-cover kits. Indeed, sometimes the aim seems to have been to imitate a mass-produced product in making it by hand. As Schaffer says, “[h]andicraft stages a tension between historicity and modernity” (7). She argues that the Great Exhibition, which itself staged just such a tension, “can be read as the climax of the handicraft movement” (36), boasting such exhibits as “W. Bridges’s ‘tapestry wool-work, ‘The Last Supper,’ after Leonardo da Vinci, containing five hundred thousand stitches’” (37). The imitative was much prized by the crafters of the 1840s and 1850s. Schaffer starts with an account of how to make imitation coral from wax. The craze for fish-scale embroidery involved women in scaling smelly fish and then drying and varnishing individual scales before sewing them onto fabric for a sequin effect that surely might have been more easily achieved with actual sequins. But it is precisely in the diversion of the natural object into the appearance of something else that the charm of craft seems to inhere in this period. Schaffer describes Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s eponymous heroine in Aurora Leigh as a typically excessive craft practitioner who “spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax” (31) in addition to dabbling in dangerous taxidermy and glasswork. Schaffer reads Aurora’s crafting mistake—sewing pink eyes into her shepherdess embroidery—as a resistance to normative imitative practice in craft, and by extension in Barrett Browning’s poem as a whole. Reading Aurora’s craft practice thus gives us early warning that “[t]his will be a text that undercuts and complicates its own ‘reality’” (59). In her reading of Yonge’s 1856 novel The Daisy Chain, Schaffer …