Art as Witness

Unseen Souls was my first novel and, although it is historical fiction, it is deeply personal to me.

I grew up in a mining community in the South Wales Valleys. My father and grandfather were miners and both died before their time. As a student, I worked in the coke yards at Trethomas, the village where I grew up. It was manual labour, with the danger, noise, heat, dirt and physical demands that went with it. It was not the nineteenth-century world I would later write about, but some aspects of it were not so very different.

When I began writing Unseen Souls, I found myself returning to that industrial landscape through Dowlais, where members of my family had lived and worked. I researched the ironworks and coke yards, the streets and houses, working conditions and the lives that had grown around them, but I wasn’t interested only in reconstructing an industrial town. I wanted to write about the people whose lives were shaped by it.

Eliza Turner emerged from that world.

She has a talent for drawing and, after she is orphaned, is taken from Dowlais into service in a grand house in Mayfair. Yet as her circumstances change, the people she chooses to draw and paint remain influenced by the lives she has known.

That presented me with an interesting question. What might an artist like Eliza actually have painted?

I began looking more closely at the artists who depicted the harsher realities of Victorian life. Frank Holl painted grief, exhaustion and poverty. Hubert von Herkomer drew and painted working people, the elderly and the poor. Luke Fildes confronted viewers with homelessness in Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward, based upon an engraving originally commissioned by The Graphic.

What interested me was not simply their choice of subject, but what happened when those subjects were placed before an audience that might otherwise encounter them only through reports, newspapers or statistics.

A report can tell us how many people were homeless. A parliamentary inquiry can record the conditions in which people worked. Both are important historical evidence, but a picture can confront us with an individual human being.

That difference became increasingly important as I developed Eliza.

Her first significant body of work, This Industrial Life, grows directly from her experience of Dowlais. She draws and paints people shaped by physical labour, whose bodies, clothes and expressions carry evidence of the work they do. She isn’t observing industrial life as a visitor. It is the world she came from.

In London, her attention turns towards another kind of labour.

Laundry was essential to Victorian ideas of cleanliness and respectability, but the immaculate white linen that appeared in wealthier homes depended upon work that was physically exhausting and largely invisible. Laundresses spent long hours in heat and steam, lifting wet cloth, working with boiling water and heavy irons, their labour taking place beyond the sight of the people who benefited from it.

That became the basis of Eliza’s The Price of White.

The title mattered to me. The whiteness of a shirt, sheet or tablecloth appears effortless when we see the finished object. Eliza’s paintings ask what it cost another person to make it appear that way.

A woman leaning over a wash tub, hands damaged by work, clothing damp from steam, might communicate something that a description of working conditions cannot. She ceases to be simply one of an anonymous number of Victorian laundresses and becomes somebody whose presence has to be acknowledged.

I realised as I developed these fictional paintings that there was something of my own experience in the way I had conceived Eliza.

I knew what it was to grow up among people whose working lives rarely appeared in conventional accounts of history. My father and grandfather were not historical figures. Neither were the miners, steelworkers and other working people I grew up with. Yet their lives mattered every bit as much to the people around them as the lives of those whose names survive in histories of industry.

That, I think, is what I was trying to portray in Unseen Souls. The Dowlais Ironworks employed thousands and helped transform nineteenth-century Britain, but history on that scale can easily become a history of companies, owners, production, technology and economic change. The individual lives beneath it are harder to recover.

Eliza gave me another way of looking at them. Through her, I could ask not only what industrialisation produced, but what it required of the people whose labour made it possible.

The Victorian artists I encountered during my research became important for the same reason. Their work did not abolish poverty or improve working conditions by itself, and it would be too easy to claim a direct relationship between a painting and social reform. But they placed lives that could easily be overlooked before a wider public.

Perhaps that is what I eventually came to understand by art as witness. Sometimes the act of looking carefully at another person’s life, and then asking others to look as well, is enough.

That became Eliza Turner’s purpose as an artist and, somewhere during the writing of Unseen Souls, I realised it had become part of mine as a novelist too.