CFP: Pre-Raphaelite Society Review – Working Wonders: Work, Pre-Raphaelites, and Utopian Visions

Pre-Raphaelite Society Review

Special Issue: Autumn/Winter 2025

Title:  Working Wonders: Work, Pre-Raphaelites, and Utopian Visions

Our Autumn/Winter Special Issue aims to dispel the notion that the Pre-Raphaelites were only interested in high literary culture and art, rather than politics, current affairs or the lives of working people.  D.G. Rossetti famously wrote ‘My friends […] consider me exceptionally averse to politics, and I suppose I must be, for I never read a parliamentary debate in my life!’.   Although it may be tempting to view members of the movement through such a lens, that is part of a comfortable middle-class disconnected from the struggles of working people, socially conscious paintings such as Found (1854-1881), The Awakening Conscience (1853), Work (1865), Take your son Sir! (1851-6), and even Christ in the House of His Parents foreground, sympathise with, and deify working people.  The associations do not end with Pre-Raphaelite depictions of work, working classes, and labour movements however, as individual members were affiliated with, and worked for, Chartists, Christian Socialists, and Italian Nationalists.  For example, Rossetti and John Ruskin taught at the Working Men’s College in Kentish Town, which was established by Christian Socialists with the express aim to provide an education in the arts to adult learners irrespective of class. 

More than escapist dreamers, the social and political actions of the Pre-Raphaelites were varied, international, and at times revolutionary, offering sites of transformational change in an era of materialism, industrialisation, urban poverty, and political agitation.  Working Pre-Raphaelites is focused on how British artists, poets, writers, and crafts people encountered and transformed nineteenth-century ideas about work, working people and their pursuit of enfranchisement, which impacted artistic developments into the twentieth century.  Of particular interest will be essays focused on female artists who were involved in campaigns for suffrage, e.g. Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Evelyn De Morgan, Mary Watts, Marianne Stokes, Christiana Herringham and Annie Swynnerton as these have been under-researched areas of investigation.

Suggested topics for essays might include (but are not limited to):

• Lesser-known working-class models, artists or writers.  Especially working women artists
• Studies of individual artists and their relationship with political movements, social reform, working people (possible subjects might include Socialist, Chartist, Suffragist networks, Walter Crane, William Morris, Ancoats Brotherhood, and more).
• Impact of nineteenth century ideas about ‘work’ and what it meant to have a strong work ethic for Pre-Raphaelite artists, writers or poets, or being a workaholic in the nineteenth century.
• Exploring ‘[art]work’ as commerce (or commodity) and the implications of this for an artist’s reputation e.g. J.E. Millais’ Bubbles.  Or ‘work’ as pleasure, e.g. as expressed in William Morris’ utopian News from Nowhere.
• Figures of interest might be but are not limited to: Walter Crane, Ford Madox Brown, William Morris, L.S. Lowry (influenced by Pre-Raphs) Elizabeth Siddall, Jane Morris; Fanny Cornforth, Fanny Eaton, (a drive to work for Rossetti led in part to his chloral abuse)

Contributions beyond the scope of those listed here may also be considered on a case-by-case basis.  Articles should be between 1,500 and 3,000 words.​

Deadline for submissions: 1^st September 2025. 

For expressions of interest please contact Dr Zaynub Zaman (University of Manchester) at editorpreraphreview@gmail.com