This is the first comprehensive analysis of trade union emblems to address the genre, the designers and the social history at the heart of the images. These banners and certificates are very much part of an industrial and union heritage, as the emblems were the art of and for the toiling masses. Art and Ideology celebrates working-class culture and shows how it could be both innovative and derivative. Annie Ravenhill-Johnson's exploration of the artistry of the emblems sets these images of labour in their historical, cultural and ideological context. Practically and intellectually this has not been an easy task. John Gorman did wonderful work promoting research into the banners, and then writing about them in his volumes Banner Bright and Images of Labour in the 1970s. R. A. Leeson produced a marvellous and succinct book on the certificates in 1971. However, these visual records present significant challenges for historians of working-class culture.

Nick Mansfield (2004) argued cogently for the value of these emblems as insights into the material conditions and political movements of the Victorian working class. His chapter ‘Radical Banners as Sites of Memory’ in Contested Sites: Commemorative, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain describes the documenting of surviving emblems in the National Banner Survey held at the People's History Museum. Yet Katy Layton-Jones (2008) notes in Visual Resources (vol. 24) that such artistic resources are still underused for the purposes of historical research.