?Fine Fingers?: Victorian Handmade Lace and Utopian Consumption

Abstract

A stroll around any contemporary crafts fair will quickly reveal that many handmade items are clunky, awkward, and often simply ugly. Such products can only be redeemed by the oft- repeated mantra: "It was made by hand." We include much that is not entirely or even predominantly handmade in this category—hand-knit sweaters of mechanically spun wool, for example. And we exclude much that is at least partly handmade. Think of, say, computer chips, fast food, and automobiles: all are in some very obvious sense made by hand, but they do not have the "aura" of handmade-ness. That aura is now largely authorized and confirmed by the (mass-produced) stickers that read "hand made"; the stickers we pointedly do not find on our cheeseburgers, our laptops, or our SUVs. The "hand made" is an ideologically overdetermined category, one that we have inherited in bits and pieces from a complex combination of nineteenth-century anticommodity discourses. Such discourses include Karl Marx on the commodity fetish and John Ruskin on the Gothic; much less famously, they include works that focus on particular modes of hand production. In this essay, I am going to focus on an admittedly marginal and largely neglected genre: the lace book. I argue that Victorian representations of handmade lace are significant in that they succeed in inventing a mode of apparently utopian commodity consumption—a mode that we still find at the crafts fair, and in the retailing of cheap, handmade goods produced for the most part by women in the Southern Hemisphere. 1 [End Page 625] Handmade lace, like many other Victorian handicrafts, was a means of economic development for rural women in the nineteenth- century first world; it became as well a means of economic development for rural women in the twentieth-century third world. 2