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‘The Indispensable Agent’: Coal and Its Displacements in Victorian Britain


 Despite the prominent role of fossil fuels in the technological and social shifts of nineteenth-century Britain, coal—as a tangible thing that touched many aspects of Victorian life—has often been left out of histories of design. A topic of keen political and cultural interest in the period, coal was both an object of displacement (extracted, circulated, consumed) and its agent, reworking Britain’s economic and geological landscapes. This article argues that the ‘coal fetishism’ of Victorian Britain was not an inevitable outgrowth of the material’s proliferation, but was produced in part through the activity of designers, civil servants and manufacturers. Examining coal through the paired notions of display and concealment, I first consider how the substance was elevated in cultural terms at spectacles like the Great Exhibition of 1851, where conjoined strategies of pageantry and didacticism reinforced its centrality to national prosperity. I then turn to explore the coal-burning devices shown in these same spectacular events, showing how the fuel forced designers and manufacturers to contain, conceal or otherwise displace its negative effects and by-products. Attempting to re-place the messy materiality of coal into the history of Victorian design, I argue, thus illuminates the larger tensions and ambiguities of industrial modernity.