Everyday objects are now well within the sights of cultural historians. Overlooked items are asked to bear witness to large questions of social and cultural change, despite their equal presence in theory as solid, obdurate and silent ‘things’. Drawings, by contrast, are seen as slight objects, almost virtual in their materiality and their conceptual functions, and notoriously challenging as sources for historians. Even within art and design disciplines, drawings are seen as deliberately irresolute in meaning. To designers, for example, drawings might have the function of ‘boundary objects’ (Henderson 1999) that allow members of different groups to hook in to a common endeavour of production. In the developing visual economies of industrialised production in the nineteenth century, drawings and objects were closely linked, when the shaping, symbolism, and marketing of an increasing number of everyday mass-produced artefacts relied increasingly on the input of designers and draughtsmen. This paper will examine the interaction of these two visual discourses, of objects, and drawings, in relation to various methods and approaches of cultural history.

Specifically, the paper addresses the design and marketing of architectural decorative cast iron artefacts made in the Glasgow-based Saracen foundry that circulated throughout Britain and her Empire, in relation to the cultural politics of various publications on ornamental drawing and design held in manufacturers’ design offices and in the government schools of design in the last decades of the nineteenth century. On the one hand these promoted antiquarian beliefs in an enduring legacy of meaning, while on the other, they encouraged a ceaseless manipulation of symbolism in design for manufacture.

With particular focus on orientalising styles, this paper reconsiders the notion of the ‘invention of tradition’ when manifested through the production of prefabricated decorative structures in the malleable medium of cast iron, centrally designed with one eye on various libraries of ornament, and the other roving anxiously across many and various local markets.