Arts and Crafts ,The Factory System, and The Highland Clearances: A Complex Relationship
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The Industrial Revolution is perhaps best described as a vast accumulation and centralisation of resources which, combined with new technologies and methods of production, created new goods, wealth and social classes. One of the greatest tools of this accumulation was the Factory System, a pioneering form of production characterised by its scale and propensity for fast, cheap output of goods. The factory system elevated a new class of industrial leaders and enriched many into a new bourgeois middle class, who, for the first time, provided a mass market for leisure activities and goods. However, this vast shift in methods of production also created a new urban poor; a proletarian working class who may once have been farmers or craftsmen but were now alienated from the product of their labour, and reduced to useless toil for pitiful wages. This essay will explore the catastrophic effects this accumulation had on rural communities in Scotland, and how the Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland was deeply interrelated with this emptying and shifting.
The Arts and Crafts movement was in many ways a reaction to mechanised production: Artists and aesthetes such as William Morris and John Ruskin, or Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Pheobe Anna Traquair in Scotland, saw the development of cheap, mass-produced goods as a negative force, replacing traditional skilled craftsmen and artisans and replacing their creations with inferior works. Many were liberals or socialists, and viewed the growing distance of workers from creative, worthwhile expression and the increasingly worse living conditions of the urban poor as a great evil. However, their relationship to the factory system was perhaps more complex than it seems; most of their crafts and works were sold to the middle and upper classes, who had been elevated to such positions by industrial and colonial wealth, and many of the architects of the movement were more than happy to design for Furthermore, the idyllic, natural landscapes they admired and praised greatly were more often than not products of industrialisation and urban growth. For example, the vast untouched wilderness and hunting grounds of Robert Burns’ “My Heart’s in The Highlands” (an inspirational text for many in the movement) were a product of the Highland Clearances and extensive environmental tampering and altering, with the goal of creating more space for extensive farming, to power the factory system. In this way it can be seen that although members of the Arts and Crafts movement appeared to be against mass industrialisation and the damage it did to communities and artisans, their position and outlook is deeply intertwined with the rise of the factory system.
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As Marx Highlights in chapter 27 of Capital, Expropriation of The Agricultural Population from the Land, the industrial revolution precipitated a great emptying of the countryside and a mass (forced) internal migration towards cities and towns. This is seen in stark relief in Scotland, where the traditional agricultural labour power of the Highlands was drained or forced into industrial hubs such as Glasgow. This process was set into motion with the dissolution of the clan system after Culloden and the creation of stronger incentives for Scottish landlords to extract as much wealth as was possible from their lands. Traditional Highland villages and farmsteads, which mostly relied on subsistence cattle farming, where destroyed in favour of extensive sheep runs and shooting estates. Tenants who had lived on the land for generations were evicted, forced to either live in cramped coastal towns, emigrate or travel to cities following the promise of employment and prosperity. The wool harvested from these newly founded sheep farms was used mostly abroad, in Britain’s colonial holdings, which in turn generated the business and wealth of the new cities; a cycle of colonial and domestic exploitation which formed powerful push and pull factors, pushing farmers and traditional rural workers and craftsmen away from their work and ancestral homes, and pulling them towards the city and the new industry.
The Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland was founded as a direct reaction to the social ills caused by this mass internal migration. The Kyrle society was founded in 1883 by members of the upper middle classes in Glasgow who were primarily concerned with the lack of decorative, “beautiful” spaces and activities for the working class. They believed that through philanthropic artistic works as well as traditional social reform campaigning, they could alleviate some of the worst aspects of industrial life and improve living conditions for all. Their ad-hoc program of public art, music, gardening and park maintenance in the poorest parts of the city proved popular, and it soon spread to other large towns and cities in Scotland. This formed part of a larger movement to take art and culture to the urban poor which was forming across Europe at this time, from Morris and others in England to the Narodnik movement of Russia. The art and design itself was of varying styles but took heavy influence from the work of William Morris and other Arts and Crafts practitioners from England; medievalism and natural realism were the popular styles for public work.
This emphasis on natural beauty is seen throughout the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement and is the first sign of its deep and problematic relationship to The Factory System and The Clearances. From the Romantic period of Robert Burns in the late 18th century onwards, The Highlands were declared to be the most beautiful place in Scotland, with writers such as Burns, Sir Walter Scott and later Robert Louis Stevenson describing it as a rugged, romantic place of myths, legends and savages. Highland beauty is almost always defined by emptiness in literature and art about Scotland – rugged glens, isolated lochs and fertile hunting grounds for roe and grouse. This fetishisation of the remote can be seen in several Arts and Crafts work, which although focusing on biblical or romantic scenes and characters, are set to a backdrop of empty burns and mountains. Pheobe Anna Traquair’s Cupid’s Darts and The Awakening are two such examples, paintings that show ecstatic biblical scenes superimposed over empty mountain ranges and heather covered hills. This background, which was presumably used to invoke a timeless ”Scottishness” is in fact a very clear product of its time, a time where capitalist farmers-cum-lairds cleared vast swathes of the Caledonian forest to create extensive shooting ranges, enclosed acres of commonty and common land to better extract wealth from it as grazing land, and forced thousands of common farmers to leave or become farm labourers, suffering heretofore unseen levels of hardship. This can be seen across much of Arts and Crafts products; the superficial celebration of an albeit landscape without any thinking or investigation into why the landscape looks the way it does. That the artists of The Arts and Crafts movement were not aware of the exploitative manmade origins of the ”natural beauty” they portrayed is perhaps unsurprising, but instead shows the privileged position the artists were in, and how even with the best intentions their work promoted a worldview of Scotland’s beauty as static, isolated and unrelated to human influence which they deplored and fought against in their philanthropic work. The Arts and Crafts movement instead focused on the deprivations and problems of urban areas, an ignorance that provided concealment for the violent capitalist acts committed in rural areas and weakened the Arts and crafts social cause.
The Highland Clearances elevated a class of middle managers, speculators and factory owners to new heights of wealth, and created opportunities for many more. Sheep farmers from the Lowlands and England gained profitable tenancies and vast flocks in the now empty glens. Old tacksmen, traditional village leaders and go-betweens, became the new rural middle class, managing large estates or now more populous villages and towns, becoming fabulously wealthy off the backs of the ever-poorer Highland peasantry. And in urban settings, booming wool production from the Highlands combined with ever expanding demand from colonial conquest allowed textile barons, merchants and mill owners to expand their businesses and become more and more wealthy (and exploit more and more people, often those who had already fled the exploitation of The Clearances).
It is in this group of people that the Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland found both its foremost patron and its proclaimed social enemy. William Leiper, an early member of the Glasgow Kyrle Society and prominent Arts and Crafts designer and architect in Glasgow and Helensburgh, extolled the virtues of art for all, and painted local hospitals and dispensaries pro-bono to hide the “bare and painful” walls. Yet Leiper also designed silver chalices that would cost more than most workers monthly wages and built houses like Brantwoode in Helensburgh for merchants and oil magnates, the very exploiters of the working classes. He famously designed the Templeton Carpet Factory near Glasgow Green for one of Britain’s most successful carpet manufacturers, a huge building made to be so grand that planners could not possibly refuse it. Many Arts and Crafts practitioners would defend the construction as one that was designed to improve worker‘s lives and their livelihood, it is hard to deny the exploitation necessary to accrue enough wealth in order to construct such a grand temple to industry and commerce, which killed 29 workers during its construction. The carpets too were made of homegrown Highland wool from the newly cleared sheep farms to the north - a clear product of The Clearances, and further evidence of complex web of problematic moral factors behind this and similar projects completed by Arts and Crafts architects. Leiper was clearly a man of conscience, taking part in many of the Kyrle Society’s public outreach and mural programs throughout the years of his work in Glasgow to support and uplift the working people of Glasgow and improve their public spaces. However, he still supported, aided and drew the vast majority of his income from the upper and middle classes - the very people who exploited and created the current living conditions for the working classes.
This is a perhaps hypocritical aspect of most Arts and Crafts artisans who were socially minded. Artists and creative practitioners at the time were almost always reliant upon the patronage of the upper classes, or their own membership amongst them (Arts and Crafts practitioners discussed here were predominantly from the upper middle classes). This close relationship puts them at odds in many respects with the often more radical working class of Glasgow and Scotland, which since the early 19th century held a reputation for radicalism and violent unrest against the ruling class and government. Perhaps the working people of Scotland, so recently relinquished of their ancestral land and homes, might have preferred to own their own hospitals and factories instead of having them decorated prettily in the name of ”social betterment”.
Many artists and architects who participated in the Arts and Crafts movement did not even join in on the social, charitable causes mentioned above. For instance, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, although a radical iconoclast in his design and architecture, taking elements of Symbolist, Art Nouveau, and Secessionist work and Arts and Crafts attitudes to design and craftsmanship to create a unique, early modern style, stayed away from the more radical politics of his peers and influences like Morris and lecturers at The Glasgow School of Art. His buildings, like the Hill House, built for the son of a Glasgow publishing dynasty, or Mrs Cranston’s Willow Tearooms, designed to cater to the upper middle classes who so profited from colonialism, The Clearances and exploitation of the poor show that again, he was reliant upon the current systems of power and class violence to maintain his employment. Despite the radical facades and transformative power of his work, it seemed sequestered in the bourgeois world of Glasgow, reserved only for those who could afford it.
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The artists, designers and architects of The Arts and Crafts Movement developed a unique attitude to work and craft, centering the skilled artist and common craftsman above the Factory System and wage laborer, alienated from his work. They nominally stood against the exploitation of the working class and attempted to use their artistic outlets to pursue noble ends, campaigning and creating many works of public art around their cities and towns. But in Scotland they benefitted from strong links to some of the most brutal aspects of capitalist production, including The Highland Clearances, colonial expansion and the exploitation of workers under the factory system, that weakened their moral position and perhaps clouded their judgement. Architects frequently received lucrative commissions for homes and factories of wealthy industrialists, many directly linked with the Highland Clearances or colonial exploitation. Many more were designed solely for the middle and upper classes, creating items and realms of luxury for those who made their money off the destruction of others' lives and homes, be it within Scotland or abroad. Many of the artists involved held standards of natural beauty which were strongly influenced by the empty, rugged, mismanaged Highlands that centuries of exploitative land reforms and Clearances had created. Although many surely had good, noble intentions of creating a fairer, more beautiful world for all, the practitioners of The Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland could not escape their context, that of exploitative capitalism and a class system which benefitted them at the expense of those below them. And so, although they rallied against it, the movement was a product of the same class forces and groups as The Factory System and The Clearances it demanded.
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The Arts and Crafts movement was in many ways a reaction to mechanised production: Artists and aesthetes such as William Morris and John Ruskin, or Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Pheobe Anna Traquair in Scotland, saw the development of cheap, mass-produced goods as a negative force, replacing traditional skilled craftsmen and artisans and replacing their creations with inferior works. Many were liberals or socialists, and viewed the growing distance of workers from creative, worthwhile expression and the increasingly worse living conditions of the urban poor as a great evil. However, their relationship to the factory system was perhaps more complex than it seems; most of their crafts and works were sold to the middle and upper classes, who had been elevated to such positions by industrial and colonial wealth, and many of the architects of the movement were more than happy to design for Furthermore, the idyllic, natural landscapes they admired and praised greatly were more often than not products of industrialisation and urban growth. For example, the vast untouched wilderness and hunting grounds of Robert Burns’ “My Heart’s in The Highlands” (an inspirational text for many in the movement) were a product of the Highland Clearances and extensive environmental tampering and altering, with the goal of creating more space for extensive farming, to power the factory system. In this way it can be seen that although members of the Arts and Crafts movement appeared to be against mass industrialisation and the damage it did to communities and artisans, their position and outlook is deeply intertwined with the rise of the factory system.
-
As Marx Highlights in chapter 27 of Capital, Expropriation of The Agricultural Population from the Land, the industrial revolution precipitated a great emptying of the countryside and a mass (forced) internal migration towards cities and towns. This is seen in stark relief in Scotland, where the traditional agricultural labour power of the Highlands was drained or forced into industrial hubs such as Glasgow. This process was set into motion with the dissolution of the clan system after Culloden and the creation of stronger incentives for Scottish landlords to extract as much wealth as was possible from their lands. Traditional Highland villages and farmsteads, which mostly relied on subsistence cattle farming, where destroyed in favour of extensive sheep runs and shooting estates. Tenants who had lived on the land for generations were evicted, forced to either live in cramped coastal towns, emigrate or travel to cities following the promise of employment and prosperity. The wool harvested from these newly founded sheep farms was used mostly abroad, in Britain’s colonial holdings, which in turn generated the business and wealth of the new cities; a cycle of colonial and domestic exploitation which formed powerful push and pull factors, pushing farmers and traditional rural workers and craftsmen away from their work and ancestral homes, and pulling them towards the city and the new industry.
The Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland was founded as a direct reaction to the social ills caused by this mass internal migration. The Kyrle society was founded in 1883 by members of the upper middle classes in Glasgow who were primarily concerned with the lack of decorative, “beautiful” spaces and activities for the working class. They believed that through philanthropic artistic works as well as traditional social reform campaigning, they could alleviate some of the worst aspects of industrial life and improve living conditions for all. Their ad-hoc program of public art, music, gardening and park maintenance in the poorest parts of the city proved popular, and it soon spread to other large towns and cities in Scotland. This formed part of a larger movement to take art and culture to the urban poor which was forming across Europe at this time, from Morris and others in England to the Narodnik movement of Russia. The art and design itself was of varying styles but took heavy influence from the work of William Morris and other Arts and Crafts practitioners from England; medievalism and natural realism were the popular styles for public work.
This emphasis on natural beauty is seen throughout the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement and is the first sign of its deep and problematic relationship to The Factory System and The Clearances. From the Romantic period of Robert Burns in the late 18th century onwards, The Highlands were declared to be the most beautiful place in Scotland, with writers such as Burns, Sir Walter Scott and later Robert Louis Stevenson describing it as a rugged, romantic place of myths, legends and savages. Highland beauty is almost always defined by emptiness in literature and art about Scotland – rugged glens, isolated lochs and fertile hunting grounds for roe and grouse. This fetishisation of the remote can be seen in several Arts and Crafts work, which although focusing on biblical or romantic scenes and characters, are set to a backdrop of empty burns and mountains. Pheobe Anna Traquair’s Cupid’s Darts and The Awakening are two such examples, paintings that show ecstatic biblical scenes superimposed over empty mountain ranges and heather covered hills. This background, which was presumably used to invoke a timeless ”Scottishness” is in fact a very clear product of its time, a time where capitalist farmers-cum-lairds cleared vast swathes of the Caledonian forest to create extensive shooting ranges, enclosed acres of commonty and common land to better extract wealth from it as grazing land, and forced thousands of common farmers to leave or become farm labourers, suffering heretofore unseen levels of hardship. This can be seen across much of Arts and Crafts products; the superficial celebration of an albeit landscape without any thinking or investigation into why the landscape looks the way it does. That the artists of The Arts and Crafts movement were not aware of the exploitative manmade origins of the ”natural beauty” they portrayed is perhaps unsurprising, but instead shows the privileged position the artists were in, and how even with the best intentions their work promoted a worldview of Scotland’s beauty as static, isolated and unrelated to human influence which they deplored and fought against in their philanthropic work. The Arts and Crafts movement instead focused on the deprivations and problems of urban areas, an ignorance that provided concealment for the violent capitalist acts committed in rural areas and weakened the Arts and crafts social cause.
The Highland Clearances elevated a class of middle managers, speculators and factory owners to new heights of wealth, and created opportunities for many more. Sheep farmers from the Lowlands and England gained profitable tenancies and vast flocks in the now empty glens. Old tacksmen, traditional village leaders and go-betweens, became the new rural middle class, managing large estates or now more populous villages and towns, becoming fabulously wealthy off the backs of the ever-poorer Highland peasantry. And in urban settings, booming wool production from the Highlands combined with ever expanding demand from colonial conquest allowed textile barons, merchants and mill owners to expand their businesses and become more and more wealthy (and exploit more and more people, often those who had already fled the exploitation of The Clearances).
It is in this group of people that the Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland found both its foremost patron and its proclaimed social enemy. William Leiper, an early member of the Glasgow Kyrle Society and prominent Arts and Crafts designer and architect in Glasgow and Helensburgh, extolled the virtues of art for all, and painted local hospitals and dispensaries pro-bono to hide the “bare and painful” walls. Yet Leiper also designed silver chalices that would cost more than most workers monthly wages and built houses like Brantwoode in Helensburgh for merchants and oil magnates, the very exploiters of the working classes. He famously designed the Templeton Carpet Factory near Glasgow Green for one of Britain’s most successful carpet manufacturers, a huge building made to be so grand that planners could not possibly refuse it. Many Arts and Crafts practitioners would defend the construction as one that was designed to improve worker‘s lives and their livelihood, it is hard to deny the exploitation necessary to accrue enough wealth in order to construct such a grand temple to industry and commerce, which killed 29 workers during its construction. The carpets too were made of homegrown Highland wool from the newly cleared sheep farms to the north - a clear product of The Clearances, and further evidence of complex web of problematic moral factors behind this and similar projects completed by Arts and Crafts architects. Leiper was clearly a man of conscience, taking part in many of the Kyrle Society’s public outreach and mural programs throughout the years of his work in Glasgow to support and uplift the working people of Glasgow and improve their public spaces. However, he still supported, aided and drew the vast majority of his income from the upper and middle classes - the very people who exploited and created the current living conditions for the working classes.
This is a perhaps hypocritical aspect of most Arts and Crafts artisans who were socially minded. Artists and creative practitioners at the time were almost always reliant upon the patronage of the upper classes, or their own membership amongst them (Arts and Crafts practitioners discussed here were predominantly from the upper middle classes). This close relationship puts them at odds in many respects with the often more radical working class of Glasgow and Scotland, which since the early 19th century held a reputation for radicalism and violent unrest against the ruling class and government. Perhaps the working people of Scotland, so recently relinquished of their ancestral land and homes, might have preferred to own their own hospitals and factories instead of having them decorated prettily in the name of ”social betterment”.
Many artists and architects who participated in the Arts and Crafts movement did not even join in on the social, charitable causes mentioned above. For instance, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, although a radical iconoclast in his design and architecture, taking elements of Symbolist, Art Nouveau, and Secessionist work and Arts and Crafts attitudes to design and craftsmanship to create a unique, early modern style, stayed away from the more radical politics of his peers and influences like Morris and lecturers at The Glasgow School of Art. His buildings, like the Hill House, built for the son of a Glasgow publishing dynasty, or Mrs Cranston’s Willow Tearooms, designed to cater to the upper middle classes who so profited from colonialism, The Clearances and exploitation of the poor show that again, he was reliant upon the current systems of power and class violence to maintain his employment. Despite the radical facades and transformative power of his work, it seemed sequestered in the bourgeois world of Glasgow, reserved only for those who could afford it.
-
The artists, designers and architects of The Arts and Crafts Movement developed a unique attitude to work and craft, centering the skilled artist and common craftsman above the Factory System and wage laborer, alienated from his work. They nominally stood against the exploitation of the working class and attempted to use their artistic outlets to pursue noble ends, campaigning and creating many works of public art around their cities and towns. But in Scotland they benefitted from strong links to some of the most brutal aspects of capitalist production, including The Highland Clearances, colonial expansion and the exploitation of workers under the factory system, that weakened their moral position and perhaps clouded their judgement. Architects frequently received lucrative commissions for homes and factories of wealthy industrialists, many directly linked with the Highland Clearances or colonial exploitation. Many more were designed solely for the middle and upper classes, creating items and realms of luxury for those who made their money off the destruction of others' lives and homes, be it within Scotland or abroad. Many of the artists involved held standards of natural beauty which were strongly influenced by the empty, rugged, mismanaged Highlands that centuries of exploitative land reforms and Clearances had created. Although many surely had good, noble intentions of creating a fairer, more beautiful world for all, the practitioners of The Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland could not escape their context, that of exploitative capitalism and a class system which benefitted them at the expense of those below them. And so, although they rallied against it, the movement was a product of the same class forces and groups as The Factory System and The Clearances it demanded.
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