Published by EH.Net (July 2022).

Anton Howes. *Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a
Nation*. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. 387 pp.
£28.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-18264-3.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Robert Bud, Emeritus Keeper, Science Museum in
London.



This ambitious volume is both an institutional history and an account of
how three industrial revolutions over two centuries have looked from the
position of an idiosyncratic but long-lived and occasionally influential
London body. The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) was founded as the Society for
the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London in 1754. The
subtitle of this book is “How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation.”
It might more appropriately, if less poetically, have been “How the Royal
Society of Arts Grappled with Expectations That It Would Change a Nation.”
For *Arts and Minds* is distinctive in its treatment of unsuccessful as
well as successful endeavours, and the tensions between the industrial
environment and the ambitions of members, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts —
among them the Society’s leadership. Dedicated to extracting the benefits
of “progress” for the nation, the RSA has found modernity to be both a
constant aspiration and a worrying threat.

The RSA was founded in 1754, on the verge of the first “industrial
revolution,” famously centred in the North of England and led by former
tradesmen, many of them untutored. Meanwhile, the Society established far
away in London was dominated by aristocrats. The first half of *Arts and
Minds* is devoted to their unfamiliar and uneasy view of this turbulent
era. The Society’s grandees supported diverse institutional innovations
motivated by mercantilist or cameralist visions of the roots of prosperity
including the Board of Agriculture and the Royal Institution. Whereas war
with France on the one and industrial success in the mass production of
cheap textiles and iron typically dominate the histories of late
eighteenth-century Britain, this book focuses on the mercantilist
competition with the old rival and the search for innovations in luxury
items that would minimise the need for imports. For the RSA, the challenge
was France’s superiority in the production of fine consumer goods such as
lace. Through a focus on institutional history, this book thus develops the
historiography of a side of British history all too rarely explored and
much needed.

The Society is well known for its encouragement of innovation through
prizes and premia at a time when the patent system was living through its
dysfunctional infancy. By the 1840s, this policy was seen as a failure and
instead the integration of invention (whether patented or not) with art,
design and science is increasingly favoured by the society’s leadership.
Competition with France is the background too to the treatment of social
change and societal renewal in the 1840s and 1850s across three chapters.
Howes’ treatment of the rebuilding of the society around a new membership
and elite leading to a focus on exhibitions and the role of the society as
a vehicle for a completely new group of institutional entrepreneurs such as
Henry Cole is at the centre of the book. The careful integration of its
treatment of competition with the French, the development of the Society’s
own exhibitions, the Great Exhibition and a new leadership is perhaps the
highlight of the volume. The chapter on examinations focuses on the
important innovations of the 1850s.

The book deals with the era of the industrial revolution of the later
nineteenth century and early twentieth century with much less detail than
the earlier period. A long-standing but oft-challenged “declinist”
tradition suggests that Britain “fell behind” such other countries as
Germany, France, and the United States at this time. Britain, her
educational system, and much of industry were, however, transformed in an
era of newly introduced technologies. *Arts and Minds* treats the
introduction of “technological” examinations in the 1870s in just a few
lines and gives little emphasis to the fact that the man encouraging the
Society, John Donnelly, was himself responsible for the government’s
Department of Science and Art examinations. Like Cole, Donnelly was using
the Society to do things that his civil service role would not permit and
lay outside the role of the Victorian public sector. The poster-boys of the
Second Industrial Revolution, shaping our world for a century from 1870,
“electricity”, “telephones”, and “chemicals” have not merited entries in
the index. However, the author does point out that the Society was an early
British venue for the demonstration of Bell’s telephone, the first British
venue for the exhibition of an Edison light bulb, and after the First World
War a public message was sent by teleprinter from Paris to the Society’s
Great Hall. It is perhaps a shame the meaning of such demonstrations to an
elite public has been left for others to explore. The lecture series the
RSA sponsored such as the Cantor Lectures (only mentioned by name in a
footnote) provided a serious context for the discussion of contemporary
industrial issues. The dimension of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century national change the book does explore in depth is
engagement with design and the past. The chapter entitled “A Society
against Ugliness” covers a vast territory and sets the RSA’s contribution
within the context not just of such prophets as Morris and Ruskin but also
within the context of a swiftly thickening network of heritage
organisations such as the National Trust.

Above all the treatment of the early twentieth century is taken as an
opportunity to deal with the RSA’s own development, whose treatment
suggests the neologism “snobbification.” As the “England” brand moved from
association with brash materialism, obsession with commerce, and vulgarity
to imagery replete with tradition, horse-guards, and etiquette, so the
Society revelled in its new-found “Royal” moniker awarded in 1908. Members
came to be known as “Fellows” as if this was a learned society.

This emphasis on status is a very nice counterpoint to the treatment of the
subsequent rise of a managerial membership. Attention to the shift towards
a base in the civil service and large corporations provides a way of moving
the narrative to the post-World War II era characterised by talk of a yet
further “industrial revolution.” This brings in the role too of a new
modernising Prince Consort, Prince Philip. The tensions between elite
leadership and the wider society with little interest in being led are
explored through the detailed tracking of the failure to initiate a
national “Industry Year” in 1986. Although the context of the rapid decline
in employment in manufacturing industry over the last decades of the
twentieth century is neglected, the book’s highlighting of such moves and,
indeed, of Prince Philip’s and the Society’s encouragement of environmental
protection is worthwhile.

The last section of the book deals with the rise of the role of the
Society’s own Secretary, whose title evolved into that of Director in the
late twentieth century. *Arts and Minds *shows how this was associated with
a new radicalism. It takes the example of the “Education for Capability”
movement. Certainly, this had its institutional roots in the RSA, but it
was rather wider and because this book looks principally at the RSA
dimension, much else is missed. The important role of Sir Toby Weaver
(1911-2001) is overlooked. (See Burgess 2001). So, typically for this
volume, fascinating stories and important developments are brought to the
reader’s attention but require further exploration.

Writing a history of the Royal Society of Arts is akin to clearing a
weed-ridden garden. The archives themselves are rich, and the history was
certainly overrun by more than two and a half centuries of diverse growths.
Great efforts are required to see the greatly significant patterns which
undoubtedly lurk amidst the diverse undergrowth, and many will be missed.
If some progress can be made and the garden is left more beautiful and
meaningful than it was found, then good will have been done. *Arts and
Minds* builds on the efforts of previous historian-gardeners to bring
order. The earlier official histories of 1913, 1954, and 1998; several
doctoral studies; and the work of the William Shipley Group have done much
detailed work on the Society’s history, particularly in its early years.
(See, for example, Bryden 2019). This book points the way to further
integrating the RSA’s experience within the broader economic and social
history of several successive eras up to the twenty-first century.

References

Bryden, David. “Innovation in the Design of Scientific Instruments in the
Georgian Era: The Role of the Society of Arts.” WSG Research Paper No. 3.
2019. Internet:
https://williamshipleygroup.chessck.co.uk/Occasional%20Papers

Burgess, Tyrrell. “Sir Toby Weaver” *The Guardian*. 13 June 2001.



Dr Robert Bud is an Emeritus Keeper at the Science Museum in London and
holds honorary positions at the Department of HPS at Cambridge and STS at
University College London. He has worked extensively on the history of
applied science, including the book *Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of
Science in the Early Twentieth Century, *ed. with Paul Greenhalgh, Frank
James, and Morag Shiach (London: UCL Press, 2018).

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