Money, Distinction and Liberality in the Making of Middle Class Culture in Victorian Brighton: A Study of Four Art Collections

The Graphic wrote in 1870 ‘The politics of Brighton are a puzzle. The most intensely aristocratic city in the kingdom, after the capital, is intensely Radical’. This political ‘puzzle’ is also relevant to the outlooks of the five rich and upwardly mobile Victorians whose collections are the focus of this thesis. Their private and public involvements including their art collections reflected a paradoxical amalgam of both liberal and patricianal views, of radical rhetoric and aristocratic aspiration. This is an analysis of art collecting and culture in Britain’s largest seaside resort in the nineteenth century, the local government and civil society of which reflected the growing influence of the urban middle class as much as in the classic industrial revolution cities of the north and midlands. The four collections were assembled by William Coningham (1815-1884), Henry Hill (1813-1882), Henry Willett (1823-1905) and Harriet Trist (1816-1896) and her husband John Hamilton Trist (1812-1891).
The main purpose of the thesis is to explore the relationship between the wealth of five aspiring members of the Brighton bourgeoisie and the social and political meanings of their art collections paid for out of fortunes made from sugar, tailoring, beer and wine. Coningham and Willett accumulated mainly old masters including niche collections of early Renaissance paintings. Hill is notable for his contemporary collection of realist and impressionist art including the works of Frank Holl and Edgar Degas. The main part of the Trist collection included Pre-Raphaelite and aestheticist works, particularly the paintings of Arthur Hughes.
There is no previous dedicated scholarly work on art collecting in nineteenth century Brighton. More generally the thesis in its emphasis on the ‘liberal paternalist’ outlook of upper middle class elite collectors and its focus on a town dedicated to pleasure and consumption rather than industry and production, provides an alternative interpretation to middle class art collecting to that offered by Dianne Macleod in Art and the Victorian Middle Class, Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (1996).