Urbanisation: Discourse class gender in mid-Victorian photographs of maids – reading the archive of Arthur J. Munby1

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between discourses held in early photography and the negotiation of new urban class and gender-based identities in the mid-nineteenth century in England. It will do this by examining part of the early photographic archive compiled by Arthur J. Munby (1828–1910). I will examine a previously overlooked part of Munby's photographic archive, the large number (around 70) of photographs (ambrotypes and carte-de-visite) of working-class women who lived or worked in central London taken between 1859 and 1865. The article considers Munby as a flaneur and examines the relationship between the voyeurism of the flaneur, the formation of class-based identities and these photographs of working-class women. Munby's diaries offer invaluable information on the early appearance of a new type of discursive medium, the photograph, and a new subject matter, the new working-class (women) in the urban environment of mid-Victorian London. I suggest that, by rebuilding the visual discourses held within these photographs, critical discourse studies can begin to appreciate the complex relationship that existed between realism, painting, photography and discourses of class. The article proposes that Munby's ‘use’ of these photographs, as a flaneur, allows us to consider the complex symbiotic relationship between class authenticity, photographic realism and shifting visual discourses.

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