The Extraordinary Archive of Arthur J. Munby
Photographing Class and Gender in the Nineteenth Century

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In the mid-1860s Arthur J Munby began to collect the first mass-produced photographic images of working-class women in England, recording fascinating details about the women, the places he purchased the photographs and the raging debates on this new commercial practice of photography, in accompanying diaries.Many of these images not to mention Munby s fascinating diaries have never been published before. This book examines this previously un-investigated archive, offering a fresh and arresting perspective on the interrelationships between photographic representations of working-class women, the creation of new identities of class and gender and the evolution of popular conceptions of photography itself."

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Reading this book, I experienced the same astonishment that I have felt reading previous studies of Munby ... The notes, records, sketches, and photographs brought together in the archive are of the utmost importance to historians of nineteenth-century society and culture and, as we now also appreciate, to historians of photography. - Victorian Studies