Theatricality and the Staging of Labour: The Daily News Sweated Industries’ Exhibition of 1906

Abstract

The Daily News Sweated Industries’ Exhibition took place in the Queens’ Hall, Regent Street, London in May 1906. In addition to publicising the appalling working conditions of women in ‘sweated’ employment, the organisers invited forty-five of those workers to perform their labour in the heart of London's West End. This essay explores the reception and impact of the Exhibition, and proposes that making a shift from a visual to a theatrical frame of interpretation reveals the full radical efficacy of this event. Through the staging of labour, the Exhibition revealed hidden relations of class, spectatorship and capital, and created conditions for sweated women workers to become increasingly visible in the public sphere—not as mere exhibitionary objects, but as political subjects in their own right.

The facts of sweating are well known. In newspapers, in reports of investigations, in reports of factory inspectors, we get ample details of underpayment, of overwork … Yet, still, the facts and figures that are given to us in these documents do not deeply impress us … [t]hey are not visualised, they are easily forgotten. The truth is that most of us lack imagination. When we read that a woman shirt worker earns one penny an hour we have to be assisted to understand a thing so monstrous. We have to see before us a veritable woman, to watch her sustained and anxious toil, hear from her own lips that thus she works each day and each week of her life … perceive for ourselves the pallor of her face and the weariness of her body.

Mallon, ‘The Need for Exhibitions of Sweated Industries’ ¹

The Daily News Sweated Industries’ Exhibition took place at the Queen's Hall, Langham Place, London, over six weeks in the Spring of 1906. The planning for this event drew together important figures from the nascent labour movement, the women's trade union movement, suffrage campaigns, journalism and charity work. Inspired by previous events in Bethnal Green (1904) and Berlin (1906), the Exhibition featured forty-five anonymous ‘sweated’ workers, who were invited to perform their labour as display. For hours each day, taking shifts at numbered stalls in the Queen's Hall, they staged the reality of the East End sweating system in a West End public venue.

The campaign against sweated labour was not new. From the mid-nineteenth century there had been numerous activities in both Parliament and wider public life to address the ‘evils’ of this particular form of exploitation. The Board of Trade received a report on sweating in the East End in 1887; the House of Lords Select Committee on the Sweating System heard evidence throughout 1888 and reported in 1889, and the Royal Commission on Labour (Employment of Women) reported in 1894. But the Exhibition, as a piece of extraordinary theatrical campaigning, captured the public imagination. Upwards of thirty thousand people visited over the six weeks that it was open. Over the following decade, more than fifty similar events would be staged across the country, from the great industrial centres of Manchester (1906), Birmingham (1907), Glasgow (1913) and Dundee (1913) to regional, rural and suburban locations such as Oxford (1907), Bristol (1908), Hayward's Heath (1912), Worcester, Weston-super-Mare and Eastbourne (all 1913). There was even an installation in 1907 in the House of Commons itself.

In 1906, in the wake of the London Exhibition, the all-party National Anti-Sweating League was formed, led by James Joseph (J. J.) Mallon, economist, political campaigner and Warden of Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. A further Parliamentary Select Committee on Home Work reported in 1908, the same year that the Sweated Industries Bill was presented to Parliament. Numerous employers, who visited the Queen's Hall Exhibition and the exhibitions which followed, made changes to their employment practices, and began the slow work of improving the conditions of workers enmeshed in the sweated industries. Far from being a practice limited to particular trades or districts, it became clear that sweated labour was endemic to every industry in the country. As Beatrice Potter (later Webb) wrote, ‘the sweater is, in fact, the whole nation’. ²

Initially the key campaigning focus was on so-called ‘home’ or ‘out’ working, which often, though not exclusively, involved the labour of women and children. Later, campaigners made increasingly forceful connections to campaigns for the extension of the franchise to women and working-class men, education, housing and sanitation, trade union rights and struggles for a minimum wage. The social evils of sweating became central to a series of interconnected agendas and campaigns within and around the wider labour movement.

This essay explores the work of the Sweated Industries’ Exhibition of 1906, reading it as a piece of public theatricality. Much critique of the exhibitionary mode has focused on the problems of visual display, and the ways in which it is understood to objectify the people and things that are being exhibited. In terms of the Sweated Industries’ Exhibition, this would mean that the women who took part were doubly victimised; first, by the exploitative circumstances of their lives and work, and secondly by being exposed to the objectifying gaze of middle- or upper-class spectators. I will argue that examining the work of the Exhibition through a theatrical, rather than a visual, lens opens up space for a more radical reading of the event. The presentation, not only of the women, but also of their labour, potentially disrupts the logic of the objectifying exhibitionary ‘gaze’. By staging the social, labour and class conditions of these workers, I propose that the Exhibition contributed to the process of working-class women becoming visible in the public sphere as political subjects in their own right. In this way, positioned within a series of relational matrices—spectatorial, economic and political –they were able to appear, not as mere objects of the gaze, but as the subjects of capital itself.

‘The Sweater is … the Whole Nation’ ³

James Schmiechen notes that there has been some difficulty for historians in arriving at a clear definition of sweated labour, as in many respects it seems to resemble ‘the old “putting-out” system of the pre-modern cottage industry, in which goods were produced in part or in their entirety in the home’. ⁴ However, he argues, as the manufacturing of goods became increasingly concentrated in factories, a sweated workforce grew up alongside it: a workforce based in the home, or in domestic workshops, to whom goods were outsourced for ‘finishing’. These workers were situated at the end of a long chain of subcontracting, and far out of reach of any of the legislation that was gradually impacting and improving the conditions of work in factories. Their daily toil was typified by piece-work, long hours, appallingly low levels of pay, and squalid and unhygienic conditions, which encouraged the spread of disease. Although trades such as tailoring (in which sweated conditions were endemic) were practiced in unlicensed and unregulated workshops, for many, workplace and dwelling were the same. In 1849 social critic and journalist Henry Mayhew recorded first-hand evidence from those involved in this kind of work:

One sweater I worked with had four children, six men, and they, together with his wife and sister-in-law and himself, all lived in two rooms, the largest of which was eight feet by ten. We worked in the smallest room and slept there as well, all six of us…. There was no ventilation. Almost all the men were consumptive—we were sick and weak. Each of the six of us paid two shillings and sixpence a week for our lodgings. ⁵

Sweated home work was not by any means undertaken exclusively by women, but as a consequence of the industrialisation of traditionally male trades into factory and other environments, it was work which was widely undertaken by them, often assisted by their children. For some, it would be a means of supplementing the low wages of a husband in employment: often, the women were widows, or supporting men who were incapacitated, unemployed or unable to find work in casualised and unskilled trades such as labouring or dock work. A typical account is given by Edith Hogg of the Women's Industrial Council, who wrote in 1897 of the experience of fur pullers. She described the ‘joyless days and months and years, passed in ceaseless and repulsive toil, with the reward of starvation wages’. ⁶ Fur pulling was indeed a foul employment, in which workers removed the hair from rabbit skins in unventilated rooms, where the air was thick with fluff. A fur puller was able to do ‘a turn and a half’ in twelve hours, with one turn comprising sixty skins. They were paid eleven pence a turn, which yielded a wage of one shilling and two pence for twelve hours of work. Hogg wrote of them that, ‘they belong one and all to that most pitiful, most helpless, most hopeless class which is produced by modern industrial conditions—those who acquiesce in starvation of body and soul as the state of life in which they were born, out of which they can never rise, in which they are doomed to die.’ ⁷

Workers were scattered, and therefore hard to organise into trade unions, which might have offered some protection from the worst of the conditions. This exclusion was exacerbated, of course, by the tensions within the wider trade union movement over women's work itself, which was perceived to undercut men's rates of pay. In his 1888 Report on conditions in the nail and chain making industries, John Burnett noted that the men

seem to feel that the cheaper labour of their wives and daughters is forcing them to lower and lower wages, while on the other, their earnings are so minimally low … that they fear to give up the few shillings which the female workers add to the family income. They are between the devil of cheap labour competition and the deep sea of family poverty. ⁸

The children, as social historian Sheila Blackburn notes, were effectively born into these trades and as education legislation increasingly insisted that they go to school, they were either kept at home, or they returned after the school day to long hours of work. ⁹ George Shann, writing of hook and eye carders in his essay for the 1906 London Exhibition handbook, observed: ‘No wonder that the children, with their deft little fingers, are initiated as young as five years of age into the mysteries of linking … But as a mother said, ‘you must either make the children work or let them starve’. ¹⁰

Blackburn observes that ‘although a concept of sweating was not unknown in pre-industrial Britain, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that it became recognised as a serious issue’. ¹¹ In the 1840s and 1850s, Punch magazine ran a series of satirical and biting cartoons depicting skeletal sweated workers sewing as bloated manufacturers looked on. In 1843 the magazine ran what is probably the most well-known account of the life of a sweated seamstress, the poem ‘Song of the Shirt’, which initially appeared anonymously, and was later revealed to be the work of Thomas Hood.

With fingers weary and worn

With eyelids heavy and red

A woman sits in unwomanly rags

Plying her needle and thread

Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!

In poverty hunger and dirt

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

Would that this tone could reach the Rich!

She sang the ‘Song of the Shirt’ ¹²

This poem is typical of the somewhat emotive representations of sweating in the mid-century. The London Journal ran a series called ‘Slave of the Needle’ from February to March of 1850, a prurient tale of a young and innocent woman keeping herself from the risks of moral decay and prostitution only through her ceaseless labour. ¹³ The same year, Charles Kingsley's novel Alton Locke compounded the melodramatic trend of mid-century representations, with women ‘appearing only briefly—as pathetic “fallen” seamstresses … or impossibly pious rescue workers’. ¹⁴ It also pointed to an overly simple demonisation of the ‘middle-man’ and increasingly problematic racial and antisemitic constructions of who the sweater was supposed to be. As Stewart and Hunter note

[t]he increase in the use of sweated labour … had coincided with the rapid rise in the number of refugee Jews fleeing the pogroms since the 1880s. Dislike and distrust of foreigners had always been one of the more irrational English characteristics. It helped to obscure the fact that the evils of the clothing industry were due to underlying economic causes affecting all who worked in it. ¹⁵

Later inquiries and reports would do much to undermine these representations, and also to dispel at least some of the antisemitic constructions that underpinned them. Nevertheless, it is clear in the testimony given to the 1888 Select Committee that a number of the assumptions about sweating being the fault and responsibility of wicked middle-men remained in place. Among others, Arnold White (later a Conservative MP) testified that a sweater ‘is one who grinds the face of the poor . .. a man who contributes neither capital, skill nor speculation, and gets profit—the middle-man’. ¹⁶ The social campaigner Lewis Lyon told the Committee ‘a sweater is a person who practices the subdivision of labour for his own private ends’. ¹⁷ Yet the wider evidence taken by this Committee revealed that, while the middle-man was certainly often part of a particular chain of piecing out of work, it was not the case that this was the figure uniquely responsible for the appalling conditions at the bottom. Beatrice Webb, in her 1926 memoir, My Apprenticeship, observes that there was something of an obsession with the sinister figure of the ‘sweater’, but she notes that even by 1888, the wholesale manufacturers were increasingly giving out the work themselves to be finished—effectively cutting out the middle-man entirely, and retaining the savings made thereby for themselves. Needless to say, ‘the actual worker gains absolutely nothing by the disappearance of the subcontractors … or so-called “sweaters”’ ¹⁸ . Webb's most fulsome comment on this appeared in her 1892 talk ‘How Best to Do Away with the Sweating System’:

I do not wish you to imagine that I deny the existence of the sweater in the sweated industries. But I deny that the sweater is necessarily, or even usually, the subcontractor or employing middle-man. The sweater is, in fact, the whole nation. The mass of struggling men and women whose sufferings have lately been laid bare are oppressed and defrauded in every relation of life: by the man who sells or gives out the material on which they labour; by the shopkeeper who sells them provisions on credit, or forces them under the truck system; by the landlord who exacts, in return for the four walls of a bedroom, or for the undrained or unpaved backyard, the double rent of workshop and dwelling, and lastly, by every man, woman and child who consumes the product of their labour. ¹⁹

Eventually, Lord Derby and his colleagues concluded in the final Select Committee Report that sweating was not in fact a particular form of industrial organisation, but rather a widespread condition of labour typified by ‘earnings barely sufficient to sustain existence; hours of labour such as to make the lives of the workers periods of almost ceaseless toil; and sanitary conditions which are not only injurious to the health of the persons employed, but dangerous to the public’. ²⁰ It was left to J. J. Mallon, in the Morning Post some twenty-odd years later, to address the other pernicious legacy of this view, when he wrote, ‘The Jews had been most deeply wronged in all that had been said about them with regard to sweating.’ ²¹

Yet, despite the several Select Committees, campaigns and inquiries, by 1906 it seemed that very little was being practically done to alleviate these conditions. For this reason, it was decided to stage an Exhibition of the Sweated Industries in the heart of the West End of London, and the Daily News Sweated Industries’ Exhibition opened at the Queen's Hall on 2 May 1906.

‘A Bazaar Belonging to Dante's Inferno’ ²²

The Queen's Hall was a large and airy space: it had been built in 1893, and had a footprint of 21,000 square feet. The Exhibition was opened by Princess Henry of Battenberg, accompanied by her daughter Ena. The cost of admission was one shilling which, as Sheila Blackburn tartly observes, was about one day's wage for a sweated seamstress, and the event received wide coverage in the press over the six weeks of its run. ²³ It was sponsored by the Daily News, a liberal-leaning newspaper whose proprietor was the chocolate manufacturer and philanthropist George Cadbury. The paper's editor, A. G. Gardiner, chaired the organising committee, and the project was led by Richard Mudie-Smith. Among others, the executive included Clementina Black, Mrs Despard, George Lansbury, Mary Macarthur, Mrs. Ramsay Macdonald, Gertrude Tuckwell, Rev. J. A. Watts-Ditchfield, J. J. Mallon, Keir Hardie MP, Mrs Pethick Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. The Exhibition took inspiration from the 1906 Berlin ‘Heimarbeit’ Exhibition and also from the first exhibition in the UK to address sweated labour, which had taken place in Bethnal Green two years previously. ²⁴ The Rev. J. A. Watts-Ditchfield had been struck by the fact that women in his parish taking in work from sweating firms then had to apply for out-relief to supplement their meagre earnings, effectively creating a situation where the state was subsidising the sweater. He organised a small display of articles produced through sweated work in the hall of his church, St Michael-the-Less. He noted, however, that the East End was the wrong venue for such an exhibition: the wealthy did not come there, and to the poor, the conditions of sweated work were only too familiar. ²⁵ In locating their exhibition in the heart of London's fashionable West End, the aim of the organisers was nothing less than ‘to acquaint the public with the evils of Sweating and to cultivate an opinion which shall compel legislation that will mitigate, if not entirely remove, these evils.’ ²⁶

The Hall contained some 450 sweated artefacts, ranged, according to R. B. Suthers of the Clarion, in ‘neat, varnished stalls displaying goods, as it might have been at a fancy fair or bazaar’. ²⁷ Most notably, the Exhibition also presented forty-five workers at twenty-five stalls arranged down the centre of the hall. These workers were engaged in their trades, including vamp beading, vest-making, shirt-finishing, bible-binding, flower-making, hook and eye carding, boot finishing, brush-making, box-folding and making toys, luxury goods and coffin tassels. Alongside each of the participants was a card, containing information about their working lives, their personal circumstances and the amount they received for the products of their labour. Worker no. 17 demonstrated brush drawing. The woman was a widow, who had worked at the trade for fifty-seven years, beginning when she was six years old. Her rate of pay was six shillings and five pence per thousand holes, and it took a little over four hours to do a thousand. Her average weekly earnings was six shillings, her weekly rent for one room was two shillings, and she lost seven and a half hours per week fetching and returning work to the manufacturer. Worker no. 5 was a hook and eye carder, whose work involved first stitching ‘eyes’ to a card, then linking a ‘hook’ to each eye, and finally stitching the hook on to the card as well. Her pay was nine pence for a pack of two dozen gross hooks and eyes: in other words, a gross of completed cards, with two dozen hooks and eyes on each. This meant 384 hooks and 384 eyes were to be linked and stitched on to a card for the sum of one penny. Worker no. 19 worked fourteen hours a day and earned on average six shillings a week as a vamp beader, sewing tiny beads onto ladies’ shoes. Pay was between one shilling and seven pence to two shillings and sixpence per dozen pairs of shoes; the work was highly skilled, as each bead had to be stitched separately by hand. An artificial flower-maker, a woman with an invalid husband, worked fourteen hours a day for ten shillings a week. She would sometimes supplement her income by making mourning flowers, little black wreaths of flowers known as ‘ragged roses’, and, as the Manchester Evening News explained, her ‘half-blind husband will rise from his bed … and dispose of them at a mourning warehouse for threepence halfpenny per complete spray.’ ²⁸ The warehouseman would then mark the sprays for sale at between sixpence and nine pence.

By bringing together women engaged in separate industries, the Exhibition reinforced Beatrice Webb's point about the endemic nature of sweating across a huge range of industries. Equally shocking statistics were provided for these other workers too, and all of these details were reproduced in the Exhibition handbook, which also contained contextualising essays by members of the Exhibition committee, notable social commentators and campaigners. The handbook had an initial run of five thousand copies, and a further twenty thousand were printed in the wake of the event. It records a lecture programme of prominent speakers, including Gertrude Tuckwell, Ramsay MacDonald, George Lansbury and George Bernard Shaw, and contained a series of documentary photographs of the workers engaged in their trades in their home environments.

Despite widespread coverage, approximately thirty thousand visitors during the run, and the eager interest of the two hundred thousand readers of the Daily News, the Exhibition suffered a good deal of criticism from sections of the public and press, and it is these perspectives which reappear later as a part of the broader theoretical critique of exhibitionary culture, particularly as an event involving the display of living persons. Both focus on the supposed ‘failure’ of the Exhibition to reproduce the conditions of the worker's lives accurately, thus denying to the spectator an affective experience of vicarious identification. At the time, several newspapers complained that what the spectator was owed was an immersive experience, in which they could empathise with the sweated workers, and even project themselves into their situation. Journalist Robert Bentley (R. B.) Suthers wrote: ‘There is nothing revolting enough to make people writhe with shame at the horror of it, nothing to sting them into instant and effective action.’ ²⁹ Even the Daily News was not uncritical, citing a visitor to the Hall:

‘What a pity you cannot exhibit the houses too,’ said a sanitary inspector from the East End, who made a careful tour of the stalls. ‘I see the same kind of worker that I come across in my visits in East London, but I feel you want the background of the homes before you can give a full conception of what sweating means.’ ³⁰

In 1907, commenting on a later exhibition at the Bishopsgate Institute, the Jewish Chronicle reported that

The exhibition, judging from the standpoint of effect, suffers from its surroundings. The sweating evil is largely a matter of environment—the mean street, the crowded garret, the weary frame and the hungry face. But the exhibition at Bishopsgate is gathered in the fine, lofty and spacious hall. Samples of sweated products, with history on card (attached) do not make quite the same effective appeal as the evil itself, in operation in its actual surroundings. Here and there, to be sure, are streaks of local colour. Two of the women-workers at a sweated trace, for instance, here brought their little one with them, and a baby lies comfortably sleeping in a packing case! But the fact that the improvised cot is planted in the Bishopsgate Institute, and not say in Seven Dials, robs the situation of most of its pathos. ³¹

The Exhibition organisers were clearly anxious about communicating enough of the squalor of the environments in which sweated labour was taking place. Although there was no attempt to reproduce in exact detail the sordid and insanitary environments in which these women were forced to work, vivid descriptions were provided in the accompanying handbook. Gertrude Tuckwell wrote of the ‘squalid room’ that a Miss Vine, HM Inspector of Factories, had visited in 1904: ‘one room has to serve the manifold use of bathroom, laundry, drying ground, scullery, bedroom, living room, sick room, workshop and, it may be, mortuary as well.’ ³² George Haw, in an item on the home life of the sweated, reports an encounter with a women engaged in fur pulling:

two young children were sleeping on a bed with rabbit skins strewn about … 'Shut the door, for God's sake,’ cried the woman, as the draught set the throat-sticking substance in a whirl. ‘I guess it's the others you’ve come to see and not the likes o’ me. Never a visit do I get from anyone, and my youngest been dead a matter o’ seven days, and me a-slaving from morning till night trying to get enough scraped together for the funeral’ … the woman went to the bed … and tossing aside a heap of rabbit skins … revealed the shrunken form of a dead child. ³³

The several documentary photographs of the workers in their domestic environments (some of whom were the same women present at the Exhibition), were deemed to be doing the work that the exhibition was not, in creating a supposedly accurate and appropriately pathetic picture of the lived conditions of sweating.

Yet this is to assume that the key purpose of the Exhibition was to provide an experience for the viewer through which they would be moved, appalled, educated or even entertained by what they encountered; in other words, to reproduce the pathos of the 1840s and 1850s with their innocent seamstresses and wicked middle-men. Several of these perspectives later appear in critical analysis of exhibitionary culture: Kristina Huneault identifies a ‘modality of vision determined by pathos’, which the Exhibition, by separating the workers from the squalid conditions of their lives, undermined. ³⁴ More broadly, and drawing particularly on the work of Foucault, key theorists such as Tony Bennett and Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett propose that the spectatorial gaze constructed by the visual object is inherently exploitative and freighted with power. As Bennett observes, ‘institutions … not of confinement but of exhibition, form a complex of disciplinary and power relations’ in which the objects of display, subjected to regimes of surveillance, are formed as docile and receptive objects. ³⁵ In other words, the exhibitionary mechanism itself positions the human figure on display within an already existing framework of objectification, repeating and reinforcing, in this instance, the helplessness and victimhood of the women in the hall. In this way, the women in the Sweated Industries’ Exhibition are deemed to be doubly oppressed: by the conditions of their work in the first place, and then by being turned into mute, static objects of pity, gawked at by curious spectators in search of spectacle and entertainment.

I want to propose here that while the exhibition is certainly a visual format, it is not exclusively so. The mechanism of objectification assumed for the gaze is, I suggest, disrupted by aspects of what we might rather read as a structure of theatricality, inflected through modes of presence, space and action, and ultimately, the agency of the participants to determine the conditions of their own representation. In this context they appear, not as objects, but as actors. What happens when the ‘object’ of a gaze looks back, intervenes, speaks? Are there perhaps ways in which this supposed ‘object’ (here, the participating woman worker) can resist not just the power of the gaze, but also the subsequent reading of that gaze? And might the frame of theatricality, as opposed to visuality, open space for a counter-reading of this Exhibition, allowing the sweated workers to appear as political subjects in their own right?

I think some of the difficulties here are based in part on misunderstandings of theatrical practice in general. Finding a reference in one of the papers to ‘living pictures’, Huneault notes, ‘the language is unintentionally revealing, for despite the fact that living people have supplanted two-dimensional images, the sweated industries exhibition provided this: pictures, representations, visual texts.’ ³⁶ The term ‘living pictures’ is of course a familiar one to nineteenth-century theatre scholarship and does not indicate a two-dimensional presentation at all: rather it references ‘tableaux vivants’, a particular mode of live performance done by actors—not a mode, incidentally, which is being enacted in the Queen's Hall.

Secondly, Huneault writes that ‘accounts give very little sense of who the women were. We know almost nothing about what they thought, how they felt, or what they experienced as they sat on display’, and concludes that ‘the presence of the actual women only seems to highlight their absence from any effective contribution to their means of representation.’ ³⁷ This, to my mind, effectively merges the work of the historical record with the work of the live event, and over-writes the live event with its own archive. Theatre scholarship has spent significant time considering the issue of what remains when a performance is concluded: the record does not, and cannot, necessarily contain or reflect the experience of the people who were there.

What is more, the implication that the women were simply passively ‘put’ on display excludes any possibility of their own agency: in fact, many of the participants were invited at the behest of Margaret MacDonald, who had known and worked with them in the East End for over a decade,and there is evidence that they were proud of their participation ³⁸ . Reading the event as live permits the possibility that interaction, speech and agency took place—whether the record has captured it or not. The women may, to an extent, have become images to history. But they were not images in their own time.

'She Has Come Forward on their Behalf' ³⁹

It is clear that the presence of the women was central to how the event was being experienced at the time. The novelty of being able to speak to and engage with the experience of the women is a repeated feature of the newspaper reporting. In the Morning Post on 27 May 1906 the following exchange appeared:

‘Are you engaged in this work all year round?’ asked one lady of a dejected-looking woman engaged in making strawberry baskets. ‘Only when I can get it, mum,’ she answered with a sigh, adding ‘I get three shillings a gross for these, and find my own materials, which costs me one and nine, mum’. ‘That only leaves one shilling and threepence for yourself’. ‘Yes, mum, and I have three little children to keep’. ‘Dear me, it is terrible’ remarked the visitor as she turned to the next stall. ⁴⁰

Not all of the reported exchanges are as pathetic: the mordant wit of some of the women was also featured in the coverage. The Daily News on 3 May 1906 featured an overheard snippet of conversation between a visitor and a participant: ‘how do you spend your money?’ asked the visitor. The woman replied: ‘I put it in the building society. I've just bought one house and I'm going in for another.’ ⁴¹

The women did remain anonymous, and while to an extent this might appear to rob them of individuation, there was a practical motive: to avoid any repercussions or victimisation that they might experience from employers. The Daily News indemnified the women from ‘the possibilities of action against them which may result in loss of work’ and it is clear that the workers were not to be treated as either exhibits, or charity cases. ⁴² A clear directive was given at the event that ‘the Workers are forbidden to accept any gratuities’, although Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone apparently felt compelled to purchase a shawl for one woman he perceived to be shivering. ⁴³ The participants were paid to be there and, at later exhibitions, were accommodated appropriately and taken on tours of the sights of the various towns which staged the displays.

Most significantly, there were frequent opportunities for the women to speak as and for themselves. In the initial Exhibition, the lecture programme included a talk by ‘One of the Sweated’. A letter entitled ‘De Profundis’ headed the Worker's Section in the handbook and was written by an ex-machinist. The continued participation of the women in both the London Exhibition and the ones that followed cannot but read as a demonstration of their active engagement. The Evening Standard, reporting an exhibition in High Wycombe in 1913, observed that ‘Workers were shown at their various occupations. Some were making matchboxes at the rate of five shillings and four pence per gross; others busy stitching boys’ knickers at the rate of nine shillings a dozen, a dozen taking six hours to sew’. ⁴⁴ The South Wales Argus on 29 April 1914 related that ‘some [of the women at an exhibition in Newport] will describe the conditions of their industry and relate this experience’. There was no compulsion for them to attend, and yet they continued to do so.

In all these aspects, the women appear to have been treated as agents of their own appearance. As Blackburn notes, ‘Sweated workers were no longer represented as they had been in the popular press, painting and plays of the past, as uncomplaining and inert victims; they were active participants in a dynamic living spectacle.’ ⁴⁵ More importantly, I suggest, they were there, not as individuated victims of circumstance, but as collective members of a class, and perhaps the most persuasive measure of the women's ability to represent themselves, and the impact of their presence, lies in the changes to industrial practice which followed in the wake of the exhibitions. The attendees were not exclusively well-heeled and curious spectacle-seekers: the exhibitions also provided a clear view of the lived experience of sweating to politicians, and to those more directly implicated in the sweated trades. Manufacturers who claimed that they had been unaware of the conditions of labour were shamed into recognising the actual circumstances in which their out-workers lived and worked. The Ilford Exhibition handbook of 1908 records that ‘it is gratifying to learn than as a result of the (Bristol) Exhibition some of the local manufacturers made concessions to their workpeople. The boot worker, who is at present working in this exhibition, had the rate of payment raised threepence per dozen boots as a result of the influence exerted by the exhibition.’ ⁴⁶ The 1909 report of the Anti-Sweating League minuted that

The Executive Committee have been gratified to learn that in particular districts their propaganda has caused employers to voluntarily improve wages. The makers of Rounder Boots at Kingswood, nr. Bristol, received an increase when the Bristol Exhibition called attention to this trade and the enquiry of the Leicester Branch in to the wages of glove workers has caused employers to increase their piece rates by twenty-five per cent. ⁴⁷

Most importantly, union membership and organisation among the workers themselves increased. The 1912 Report recorded that successes on the part of chain makers in re-negotiating conditions had inspired hollow-ware and brick workers to enrol in large numbers in the National Federation of Women Workers, and, furthermore, some employers had voluntarily conceded minimum piece work prices in the hope of avoiding the creation of a Trade Board. ⁴⁸ That the women themselves understood their presence at the Exhibition in these terms is borne out by the account in the Daily News of 3 May 1906, which reported ‘each worker … accepts her present role in no spirit of merely personal concern. She is there rather as a missionary, sustained in the ordeal of publicity by the thought that advantage will result to her multitude of suffering sisters. She has come forward on their behalf.’

‘An Unveiling of the Hidden Things of Dishonesty and Misery’ ⁴⁹

This mode of theatrical display allowed the sweated women to appear in public space; a prerequisite for the possibility of political action. The most immediate effect of the Exhibition was to transplant impoverished sweated workers into the wealthy leisure district of the West End of London and stage aspects of their experience there for a wide audience to encounter. As Watts–Ditchfield had noted, the evils of sweating were very well known to East End populations, and also of course to charity workers, social explorers and political campaigners. The aim of the Exhibition was to bring the public into contact with sweated workers and reveal the full extent of their hidden exploitation and impoverishment.

For Bennett, this dragging of the private into the public sphere is one of the limitations and problems with the exhibitionary gaze. ‘The institutions comprising the “exhibitionary complex”’, he writes, ‘were involved in the transfer of objects and bodies from the enclosed and private domains in which they had previously been displayed … into progressively more open and public arenas where … they formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power … throughout society.’ ⁵⁰ The problem with home work, however, was the opposite. It was a mode of labour in which forms of ‘public’ relationships—ones based on contracts, capital, production and consumption—were secreted and hidden in the domestic. Away from the structures of scrutiny and surveillance such as the Factory Acts, or Trade Union organisation, the sweated worker was beyond the reach of help or relief. As George Bernard Shaw pointed out, ‘You can sweat people in their homes to an extent that you cannot in factories. You can make as many laws as you like enabling factory inspectors to enter these private homes, but they can’t get there. All the evil deeds are hidden away.’' ⁵¹ The act of publicity—of staging of the women's work and experience in the Queen's Hall—was less a violation produced by the visual structures of objectification and more a necessary public revelation of systemic and private exploitation.

On 7 May 1906 the Blackburn Telegraph reported a sermon delivered by a Dr Clifford at the Westbourne Park Chapel in which he commented on the Exhibition:

It was not a show, or a Royal Academy display of portraits and landscapes; it was rather an unveiling of the hidden things of dishonesty and misery. It was a place to which people should go to obtain information and prepare for the solution of some of the serial problems of our social life. It might properly be regarded as a court of justice in which a grave indictment was brought against our existing social and industrial system. ⁵²

This interpretation aligns very clearly with other forms of campaigning Edwardian political theatricality. Many suffrage campaigners were heavily involved in the production of sweated labour exhibitions throughout the period, and Lisa Tickner writes of the ‘working class women’ who were central to the WSPU (Women's Social and Political Union) procession that marched to Trafalgar Square in 1906: pit-brow women carrying model Davy lamps, chain-makers with miniature hammers and anvils, weavers with the golden spider emblems of their craft. ⁵³

Crucially, what all of these representations model is the increasing entrance of working women into public and political life during this period of time. They were invited to give evidence to Select Committees and to participate in delegations and campaigns to formally empower them as citizens and voters. Clearly, this is not to claim all this as a direct consequence of a six-week exhibition. But as part of a wider trajectory in which working women (and working men) were struggling to be recognised by the state as political subjects, the Exhibition contributed to this through the theatrical tactic of staging working-class experience in the public sphere. By enabling the sweated workers to be present as political subjects in public space, the theatrical exhibitionary space staged and constituted not the power of the gaze, but the politics of relation.

Staging Labour

Finally, the women were working. They were not static images, no matter how hard visual culture may try to make them so in retrospect. These were people already enmeshed in exploitative relations of production and consumption. In other words, before they could be oppressed and objectified by the ‘gaze’ in the exhibitionary encounter, they had already been oppressed and objectified by capitalist modes of production. Unlike other forms of human cultural display, this Exhibition did not stage the native crafts and folk traditions of a constructed ‘authentic’ culture, but the system of sweating itself. The women played themselves, but also performed their position in the unequal relations of capitalist exploitation.

In this way, what appeared in the exhibitionary space was the system of exploitation itself—and the audience were implicated in its oppressive work not merely as spectators but also as consumers. As Beatrice Potter had observed, it was not the wicked middle-man who was the villain, but the whole nation: in other words, anyone who bought or consumed sweated goods. When R. B. Suthers complained in the Clarion of the gross contradiction that ‘Princess something or other opened this exhibition and she wore a love of a gown. I wonder how many YEARS wages of a button-carder it cost’, it is as though this was a failing of the Exhibition's dramaturgy. ⁵⁴ He neglected to notice that this paradox was in fact a consequence of the Exhibition's dramaturgy. Such a gross contradiction was only made visible and palpable by the presence of both of these figures in the same space, and through the operation of theatrical structures of meaning. For, seen through the lens of campaigning theatricality, it becomes apparent that what the Exhibition did was to cause the spectators to appear in the exhibitionary space as participants in the relations of sweated labour. As the Daily News noted on 4 May 1910, ‘It is something that we should have the opportunity of seeing, many of us for the first time in our lives, the labourer behind the finished article, of realising that, say, the artificial flowers which adorn our hats do not bloom by the direct dispensation of Providence’. Or as Gertrude Tuckwell framed it: ‘The time was when people hugged themselves in the delusion that the condition of things was caused by the introduction of middle-men who doled out the work and consumed the profits. This idea has been discredited—we find that… the sweater is in fact ourselves.' ⁵⁵

Might the supposed ‘failure’ of the Exhibition as visual culture in fact reveal its success as theatrical culture, as it produced and staged political agency and change? Perhaps the work of the Exhibition was never for the respectable spectator to somehow ‘see themselves’ in the sweated woman—even vicariously as a way of understanding their experience through empathy. It was rather to see themselves as themselves: complicit in the system of exploitation, as consumers and customers of the sweated goods, and as beneficiaries of the sweating process.

Theatre, like visuality, may pretend its audience is not there, but theatricality as a structure always implicates and stages the spectator. In other words, the theatrical exhibitionary space is a totality. It is not the divided space imagined by visual culture, in which individuals are presented to the external gaze, and the spectators stand neutrally outside the representation. In fact, the spectators appear in this space too, in their jet-beaded bonnets and fancy embroidery, in their smart boots and shirts, with muffs of rabbit fur and posies of artificial flowers on their hats. The theatrical encounter stages the audience in relation to the sweated worker: as consumer of their products, as spectators of their labour and as complicit in their immiseration.

If we examine the Sweated Industries' Exhibition as a theatrical staging of the relations of class, spectatorship and capital, a differently inflected event comes into focus. The radical potentialities of the event open up: the capacity to intervene, to make change and, most importantly, to allow working women to enter the stage of public political action as subjects, with agency, speaking with their own voices, in their own right. The Exhibition can be seen to operate, not as a simple visual mechanism of exploitation, but as a dramaturgy of relations. It stages, through the theatrical encounter of the spectator and the human subject on display, the relation of the well-heeled consumer of sweated goods to the women who produce them. The exhibitionary space therefore becomes one in which spectator and spectated both appear, and what is staged is the web of relations between them: spectatorial, theatrical, economic, and finally, political.