Spellbound 

Frederick George Cotman painted ‘Spellbound’, we think, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. The image presents us with a young woman, perhaps a girl, kneeling by a fireplace with a spinning wheel. The title suggests she is in a kind of trance or captivated state. What does this scene tell us about the role of women, particularly young, working-class women, in Britain at the time? The Industrial Revolution had brought enormous changes to the British economy and British society. The spinning wheel, a symbol of domestic labor, was increasingly displaced by factory production. Did the artist intend to make a social comment? Was he perhaps, in a conservative mode, lamenting the loss of traditional ways of life? Or, on the other hand, was he suggesting that this young woman was literally "spellbound" by new and exciting possibilities? As art historians, we can look to sources such as census data and economic reports to discover more about the context in which Cotman was working. This helps us to understand the public role of art and the social conditions that shape its production.