In contrast to the situation in France, information about technical draughtsmen in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century is elusive below the level of elite individuals. This does not mean that there was no interest in technical education, however. Constant anxiety about trade rivalry with French manufacturers gave rise to a complex cultural debate in which questions of worker education, improvements in machine production, industrial design, and the development of good taste, were all intermingled and enunciated under the single topic of draughtsmanship. These debates were carried on both by elite reformers and by artisans themselves, in journals and magazines, in places of education such as the Mechanics’ Institutes, and gained a particular focus in the Government Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835-6. Indeed, witnesses from the Select Committee often gave unwitting testimony of draughtsmanship for the factory even whilst they were lamenting the lack of it. The idea that was set in motion at that time of the ‘apathy’ of British workers and their ignorance of mechanical theory and technical draughtsmanship still has some purchase today (Booker 1979: 130). This perception however is clearly contradicted by the material residue of activity, the visual testimony of technical drawings in archives and publications. With this material record of objects, why have the human actors become invisible? I will argue this is largely due to changes in the workplace after 1820 that led to the development of the specialist occupation of ‘draughtsman’.

Technical drawing is a technique of industrial production and innovation, often described as the place where the theory and practice of material shaping intersect. This conceptualisation is in accord with the way in which pupil engineers worked as draughtsmen as part of their training, one aspect of ‘mechanical science on the factory floor’ (Jacob 2007: 197-202) in the early nineteenth century. This notion of three-dimensional materiality is fairly straightforward, and is clearly situated in an industrial environment. By contrast, I will argue that as specialist draughtsmen became confined to the drawing office towards the middle of the century they entered the two-dimensional Flatland of the paper world. In this environment they were also subject to wider debates about the unique cultural value of drawing as the bearer of good taste.

In this paper, I will discuss the kinds of knowledge that were acquired and displayed by draughtsmen in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, whilst arguing that the perception of backwardness in relation to France is misleading. Furthermore, the very invisibility of draughtsmen is the result of discomfort caused by the difficulty of judging the cultural and social status of these workers and their drawings.