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Munby, Arthur

The seven albums of photographs collected by Munby, a Victorian barrister, poet and diarist of independent means, include many of pithead girls or female colliers. He arranged for them to be photographed in a studio, still coal-smeared and wearing their working gear of jackets and padded trousers. The photographs add a curious dimension to his activities as a social reformer, supporting female suffrage and education. (He taught Latin at the Working Women’s College.) His unstinting advocacy of the right of women to work, and his opposition, for instance, to the restriction on female labour in the mines, was accompanied by an obsessive interest in strong working class women, whom he studied, talked to and often had photographically recorded, noting age and height on the back of the photograph. That this was more than socially-concerned anthropology is evident from his relationship with Hannah Collwick (1833-1909), a domestic servant whom he married but could not and would not acknowledge publicly (Hudson 1974). The conflict between social position and sexual attraction remained unresolved. While undoubtedly casting light on the troubling “association of dirt, coal dust and working-class sexuality” (Thesing 2000:13), Munby’s photographs also conform to well established 19th-century photographic traditions of recording the costumes and customs of peoples exotic and local, as in cartes de visite. In Munby’s albums, among the photographs of collier women there are also images of French and Austrian peasant girls, circus pin-ups and “Zulu women”. DA