A chandelier by W. A. S. Benson, an arts-and-crafts metalworker who produced his goods in a large factory.
The sailing ship effect is a phenomenon in which old technologies undergo rapid change after being challenged by new technologies. It’s named after the fact that in the fifty years after the emergence of steamships, the design of yachts underwent more improvements than they had done in hundreds of years previously. It’s partly that the old technology improves in an attempt to avoid being displaced by the new one, partly the spill over of elements of the new technology, and partly the spotlight that the new technology casts on the old one.
The sailing ship effect explains the emergence of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Its leaders were worried about the loss of old technologies and deliberately employed them in the production of goods like wallpaper, furniture, books and textiles. But the Arts and Crafts Movement was as much a movement in style as technology and when it became the dominant style in middle-class homes, it was sometimes produced using new technologies, like W. F. Benson’s metalwork, which was made in a modern factory, and William Morris’s textiles, which were woven on a Jacquard loom.
Morris summed up his work as a holy crusade against the age and he said that he wanted everyone to work together as friends and gentlemen. The Arts and Crafts were in part a gentlemanly reaction against the vulgarity of cheap goods and a preference for luxury goods. Thorsten Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, saw the handmade as conspicuous consumption, a radical undercutting of the self-perception of the Arts and Crafts as the Simple Life.
Design reform was entangled with moralising about the bad taste of the poor, despite the socialism of many of the Arts and Crafts leaders, who thought capitalism might be abolished silversmith by silversmith and cabinet maker by cabinet maker. Morris, after 1880, took a different view, envisaging some kind of Marxist revolution, and seeming to separate his craft practice from his politics.
After Morris’s death, the yacht and the steamship parted ways. Socialism was taken up by the Labour Party, which sought to improve the lives of factory workers, and the crafts were taken up by a later generation of gentlemen and ladies, who retired to utopian communities.
MARSHALL COLMAN 