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Histories of material objects-a cast-iron cooking pot, glass flowers, or a terracotta pot-are often illuminating, revealing the context of their making and subsequent history. Histories of materials, such as iron or steel, tend to be more focused on the industry concerned rather than how the material was used and what its different meanings were in time and place. Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain takes the latter path, giving us a history of a class of objects united by their material.
Cast iron is not a complex material to make and is very easy to produce in decorative forms. Paul Dobraszczyk’s approach is to link the material to its use as an ornamental as well as structural material, and to set the industry’s growth firmly in the context of debates about the appropriate use of ornament in nineteenth-century Britain. The author starts with John Ruskin’s hatred of the material, which he equated with the satanic, embodying all that was cheap, vulgar, false, cold, and clumsy. This was again reflected in twentieth-century modernists’ disdain for ornament, as in Sigfried Giedion’s comments about “decorative sludge.” The introduction sets the context for the critical reception...