Turner and the Keelmen: Landscapes of Labour and Resistance in the Fossil Economy

This essay examines J. M. W. Turner’s portrayals of the keelmen, river workers who ferried coal from Newcastle to the River Tyne’s estuary. When Turner visited the district, railways and steamers were threatening their employment, prompting strikes and riots that were severely repressed. In the watercolour Shields, on the River Tyne (1823), Turner highlights the communal labour practices that allowed the keelmen to resist rising fossil-fuelled technologies. He returned to the subject in Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835), a canvas commissioned by a Manchester cotton industrialist deeply involved in mechanisation and labour unrest. Here, Turner invokes the keelmen’s dissolution while insisting on the working body’s disruptive force within a sublime industrial scene. By tracing shifting forms of human action and visibility across media, this essay argues that Turner’s Tyneside views reveal overlooked histories of agency and dispossession within coal-fired modernity.