ABSTRACT
This paper will discuss the visual practices of elite engineers in the first half of the nineteenth century in relation to questions of professional formation. Buchanan (1983 and 1989) has described this as the pursuit of respectability; the desire to be considered ‘gentleman engineers’ that appears to be in accord with wider narratives of the ‘rise of the professional classes’ ascribed to this period by other writers (Reader 1966; Corfield 1995). While it is certainly true that a significant number of new occupational groups aimed to achieve such status (Buchanan 1989) this generalised notion of professionalisation in the nineteenth century has its limits. In the history of science, Rudwick (1976) and Golinski (1992) have shown how gentlemanly discourse and discipline formation can pull in different directions in specific cases. Furthermore, although the role of representations in the social construction of technology is now recognised (Lubar 1995; Lefevre 2004; Stevens 1995), most accounts of technical drawing in the nineteenth century posit only two positions: the powerful and the powerless. In this paper I will argue that the range of technological representations developed to assert professional status by engineers did not result in one uniform marker of social distinction, but instead display a fractioning of localised groups and sub-groups each vying for respect. In the process, drawing conventions could show an alarming instability of social cachet. I will take as an example the parallel perspective method of isometrical drawing, developed by William Farish in 1822 within the privileged liberal environment of Cambridge University, which later came to be associated not only with the context of artisan visual practice and but also with bravura draughtsmanship.