Pandaemonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers

by Humphrey Jennings

this one from G.K. Chesterton, which has been my own motto for years. I’m a children’s writer. I believe my job is not to dazzle with new wonders, but to scrub off the patina of familiarity so that my readers can see again how dazzling things already are.

Progress is not motivated by money. Progress comes from those who are happy to embark on a course of action without quite knowing where it will lead, without doing a feasibility study, without fear of failure or too much hope of reward. The engine of innovation is reckless generosity –

A nation is what Philip Larkin would call ‘a frail, travelling coincidence’ – a ragtag of people on a journey together.

At a certain period in human development the means of vision and the means of production were intimately connected – or were felt to be by the people concerned – I refer to the Magical systems under which it was not possible to plow the ground without a prayer – to eat without a blessing, to hunt an animal without a magic formula. To build without a sense of glory. In the two hundred years 1660–1860 the means of production were violently and fundamentally altered – altered by the accumulation of capital, the freedom of trade, the invention of machines, the philosophy of materialism, the discoveries of science.

The relationship of production to vision and vision to production has been mankind’s greatest problem.

‘He was, though quite unaffectedly a leader, not at all a bully. He was not interested in “mastering” people or “possessing” them, let alone frightening them or bribing them – in fact he was rather unconscious of other people, except as an audience – he did have a good deal of consciousness of whether he was swinging round his audience to vote to his side.’

Like Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn he was intensely patriotic, believing that patriotism was not just the possession of the right.

it raining hard upon the water, I put ashore and sheltered myself, while the King came by in his barge, going down towards the Downs to meet the Queen; the Duke being gone yesterday. But methought it lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the rain.

Hooke is secularizing the sky, or heaven, long thought of as a divinity or home of divinities, its aspects exerting magical influence on the lives of man. He is making out of it the subject matter for the new science of meteorology. But in doing so he continues to use animistic language. The sky has ‘faces’ that are sometimes ‘bearded or hairy’.

The idea that living creatures are machines is in these years gaining ground. God is admired as an inventor or engineer and the scientists are in the god-like position of being able to create machines which are like living creatures. The analogy which begins with insects, whose movements are compulsive, is not at first openly continued up to man, the animal with a soul. But the distinction is dropped in practice, or blurred, when human labour begins to be organised on a ruthlessly rational basis.

It is I think interesting to give the exact line of reasoning that leads to the inclusion of this image. It is this: when the ‘bourgeoisie’ took over in 1660, they began the final subjugation and exploitation of this island. They had amassed the necessary capital, ‘fixed’ the church on the laws of usury, tamed the power of the feudal monarchy. The tasks that lay before them were the taking of the land from the people by the Enclosure Acts, the creation of the factory system and the invention of machines and means of power to run them. Before any of these things could be done it was necessary to make an analysis of the materials and forces existing in nature and in these islands which would contribute to the scheme. Hence the financial backing of the Royal Society. Among these forces was electricity – not merely as a source of power but also as an essential part of the development of chemistry. Electricity was studied among other ways by the study of thunder and lightning. Before these phenomena could be studied a radically new attitude had to be developed towards them, and to all natural phenomena. One of strict realism. In this image then we have a contributor to the papers of the Royal Society giving a cold, inch-by-inch analysis and reportage of the effects of a thunderstorm equally without reference to God or man. Without a trace of human feeling for the victim or on the other hand of the ancient awe with which ‘the glance of God’ had been regarded for centuries, even ...

A love of power is predominant in every creature: a love to punish is often attendant upon that power. The man who delights in punishment is more likely to inflict it than the offender to deserve it. He who feels for another will not torture from choice. A merciful judge punishes with regret, a tyrant with pleasure.

The abstract horror of this image derives in part from the unspoken acknowledgement of the truth that as far as the 18th century poor were concerned the factory the school the workhouse the prison were all the same building.

the weak Part of it is a Love of System, wch runs thro’ it, the most contrary Thing in the World to a Science, entirely grounded upon Experiments, & that has nothing to do with Vivacity of Imagination.

For him light labour spread her wholesome store; Just gave what life requir’d, but gave no more; His best companions, innocence and health; And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.

Dr Darwin’s wit against Divine truth, aimed cautiously at first, but afterwards more openly, recoiled innocuous. ‘My dear Madam,’ said he, ‘you have but one complaint; it is one ladies are very subject to, and it is the worst of all complaints; and that is, having a conscience. Do get rid of it with all speed; few people have health or strength enough to keep such a luxury, for utility I cannot call it.’

Man has but five gates of knowledge, the five senses; he can know nothing but through them; all else is a vain fancy, and as for the being of a God, the existence of a soul, or a world to come, who can know anything about them? Depend upon it, my dear Madam, these are only the bugbears by which men of sense govern fools; nothing is real that is not an object of sense.’

The unequal division of property and labour, the differences of rank and condition among mankind, are the sources of power in civilised life, its moving causes, and even its very soul. The quotations above are from Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, by John Davy,

It appears to me the most calamitous effect, which has followed the measures which have lately been pursued in this country, is a rapid decay of the domestic affections among the lower orders of society. This effect the present Rulers of this Country are not conscious of, or they disregard it. For many years past, the tendency of society amongst almost all the nations of Europe has been to produce it. But recently by the spreading of manufactures through every part of the country, by the heavy taxes upon postage, by workhouses, Houses of Industry, and the invention of Soup-shops &c. superadded to the encreasing disproportion between the price of labour and that of the necessaries of life, the bonds of domestic feeling among the poor, as far as the influence of these things has extended, have been weakened, and in innumerable instances entirely destroyed.

In the mean time parents are separated from their children, and children from their parents; the wife no longer prepares with her own hands a meal for her husband, the produce of his labour; there is little doing in his house in which his affections can be interested, and but little left in it which he can love.

all men are poets in their way, tho’ for the most part their ways are damned bad ones.

Now Chemistry makes a young man associate these feelings with inanimate objects – & that without any moral revulsion, but on the contrary with complete self-approbation – and his distant views of Benevolence or his sense of immediate beneficence attach themselves either to Man as the whole human race, or to man, as a sick man, or a painter, as a manufacturer etc., and in no way to man as a Husband, Son, Brother, Daughter, Wife, Friend, &c. &c.

On the night-images of Coleridge recorded in Anima Poetae, the thing, for us, is how they are half way (roughly) between the scientific weather-descriptions of natural history or astronomical reports of the 18th century – Halley, Philosophical Transactions, Gray, White – where always the struggle was to be objective only and to omit all personal feelings, and the soul-diary of Jefferies or the Journal of Hopkins in the 19th century. The fact of course is that the objective and subjective descriptions over both centuries divided, one line being science, the other poetry or meditation, one for the use of the body, the other for the use of the soul, and in the end were to become so clear of each other that they were to forget their common origin and clash. Compare Tylor on animism, 1871 (338).

and no sooner does the little possessor examine into the structure of his new acquisition, than he flings it aside, or breaks it to pieces and tramples it under foot, as if to revenge himself upon it for belying the promise of its exterior. This succession of longing and loathing is a more serious evil than may at first be apprehended. If it be true that youthful curiosity cannot be frequently baulked with impunity, every such disappointment may be considered as some advance toward dullness.

the perseverance of these miserable men in their proceedings tends to prove that nothing but absolute want could have driven a large, and once honest and industrious, body of the people, into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their families, and the community. At the time to which I allude, the town and county were burdened with large detachments of the military; the police was in motion, the magistrates assembled; yet all the movements, civil and military, had led to – nothing. Not a single instance had occurred of the apprehension of any real delinquent actually taken in the fact, against whom there existed legal evidence sufficient for conviction. But the police, however useless, were by no means idle: several notorious delinquents had been detected, – men, liable to conviction, on the clearest evidence, of the capital crime of poverty; men, who had been nefariously guilty of lawfully begetting several children, whom, thanks to the times! they were unable to maintain. Considerable injury has been done to the proprietors of the improved frames. These machines were to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of employing a number of workmen, who were left in consequence to starve. By the adoption of one species of frame in particular, one man performed the work of many, and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment. Yet it is to be observed, that the work thus executed was inferior in quality; not marketable at home, ...

The general adoption of a system of consuming smoke would render the London air as pure as that of the country, and diminish many of the nuisances and inconveniences of a town residence. It must in a future age be as difficult to believe that the Londoners could have resided in the dense atmosphere of coal-smoke above described, as it is now hard to conceive that our ancestors endured houses without the contrivance of chimneys, from which consequently the smoke of fires had no means of escape but by the open doors and windows, or through a hole in the roof!

In the last case, it seems scarcely to have been observed. But perceived, or not perceived, such, by the speakers in question, has been the motive and efficient cause of the prodigious importance attached by so many to the term property: as if the value of it were intrinsic, and nothing else had any value: as if man were made for property, not property for man. Many, indeed, have gravely asserted, that the maintenance of property was the only end of government. From ‘Constitutional Code’ by Jeremy Bentham, first published in 1815, and in Works, edited

Realism, at any given moment, equals the next step in historical development.

be assured no greater delusion ever existed than that the matchless ingenuity of your people, in the construction of mechanical aids, can in any possible sense be an evil. I was shocked, indeed, to hear of outrages, which I should have expected only to have existed amongst the very dregs of a civilized people. The mistaken or rather the delirious incitement, is when numbers are unemployed; but how many more would be without employment, or rather how many thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands would be starving, if the machinery they attack were overthrown?

The disfigurement I mean is the miasma of London.

Owen in reality deceives himself. He is part-owner and sole Director of a large establishment, differing more in accidents than in essence from a plantation: the persons under him happen to be white, and are at liberty by law to quit his service, but while they remain in it they are as much under his absolute management as so many negro-slaves. His humour, his vanity, his kindliness of nature (all these have their share) lead him to make these human machines as he calls them (and literally believes them to be) as happy as he can, and to make a display of their happiness. And he jumps at once to the monstrous conclusion that because he can do this with 2210 persons, who are totally dependent upon him – all mankind might be governed with the same facility. Et in Utopia ego. But I never regarded man as

But Owen reasons from Cotton Mills to the whole empire. He keeps out of sight from others, and perhaps from himself, that his system, instead of aiming at perfect freedom, can only be kept in power by absolute power. Indeed, he never looks beyond one of his own ideal square villages, to the rules and proportions of which he would square the whole human race. The formation of character! Why the end of his institutions would be, as far as possible, the destruction of all character. They tend directly to destroy individuality of character and domesticity – in the one of which the strength of men consists, and in the other his happiness. The power of human society, and the grace, would both be annihilated.

For he had an indestructible animosity towards what, to his devout, old-world imagination, seemed the keen polar atmosphere of modern science.

165 CARLYLE IN LONDON December 14, 1824 Of this enormous Babel of a place I can give you no account in writing: it is like the heart of all the universe; and the flood of human effort rolls out of it and into it with a violence that almost appals one’s very sense.

There is an excitement in all this, which is pleasant as a transitory feeling, but much against my taste as a permanent one. I had much rather visit London from time to time, than live in it. There is in fact no right life in it that I can find: the people are situated here like plants in a hot-house, to which the quiet influences of sky and earth are never in their unadulterated state admitted.

You are packed into paltry shells of brick-houses (calculated to endure for forty years, and then fall); every door that slams to in the street is audible in your most secret chamber; the necessaries of life are hawked about through multitudes of hands, and reach you, frequently adulterated, always at rather more than twice their cost elsewhere; people’s friends must visit them by rule and measure; and when you issue from your door, you are assailed by vast shoals of quacks, and showmen, and street sweepers, and pick-pockets, and mendicants of every degree and shape, all plying in noise or silent craft their several vocations, all in their hearts like ‘lions ravening for their prey.’

Annihilated by any one of the elements if singly opposed to its power, he by his genius yet brings their united forces into bondage, and compels obedience from all their manifold combined strength. We penetrate the earth, we turn the course of rivers, we exalt the valleys and bow down the mountains; and we die and return to our dust, and they remain and remember us no more. Often enough, indeed, the names of the great inventors and projectors have been overshadowed or effaced by mere finishers of their work or adaptors of their idea, who have reaped the honor and emolument due to an obscure originator, who passes away from the world, his rightful claim to its admiration and gratitude unknown or unacknowledged. But these obey the law of their being; they cannot but do the work God’s inspiration calls them to.

I think it is better for me, however, to look at the trees, and the sun, moon, and stars, than at tunnels and docks; they make me too humanity proud.

The venerable trees struggle for existence under the destroying influence of sulphureous acid; while the grass is withered and the vegetation everywhere blighted. I sat down on an elevated part of the ruins, and looking down upon the extensive district, with its roaring and blazing furnaces, the smoke of which blackened the country as far as eye could reach; and as I watched the decaying trees I thought of the price we had to pay for our vaunted supremacy in the manufacture of iron. We may fill our purses, but we pay a heavy price for it in the loss of picturesqueness and beauty.

Whilst the engine runs the people must work – men, women, and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine – breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering – is chained fast to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness. . . .

The general order of things on a railroad is curious from its novelty; in this new description of property, the vested right of the public in the way and footpath is not acknowledged, yet their advantages are increased by rapidity of locomotion, while the disadvantages of the thoroughfare to the proprietors of the soil, in comparison with those attendant on highways in general, are diminished in an equal proportion.

And in this mood did they achieve for themselves that Greatness which leaves the Moderns pigmies, because we lack the mental dignity by which it was accomplished. For this reason, likewise, have the Moderns, although studious of forms, overlooked the Living Soul of Things, disenchanting Life, and encumbering the Earth with the most uninteresting Automatons imaginable. No Fawn, no Satyr now, no shy

June 1st–5th. – Lecturing till I am sick. I am not happy in Manchester. The associations of these hideous mill-prisons for children destroy my enjoyment in society. The people are quite insensible to it; but how they can go on as they do in all luxurious enjoyments with those huge factories overhanging them, is most extraordinary. 17th, 18th. – This was imagination. I have since examined large factories – 2000 in one room, and found the children healthy and strong, and the room well aired and wholesome.

But the sudden dissolution of a system which had grown up gradually in the preceding fifty years and had become an accredited part of the parochial arrangement, was impossible. The children could not be sent back to ill-constructed workhouses, often in unhealthy parts of London. Nor was there any other place ready to receive them. Some ameliorations could be effected. The number of children in certain establishments could be limited. The dietary could be improved. Means of cheerful recreation could be devised. The instruction in industry could be modified. But every change cost money. The contractors had friends on the board who could make a formidable resistance to improvements, however obvious, which involved a new and more costly contract. Consequently the ameliorations were imperfect. Even that which seemed imperative for the health of the children was obtained only with difficulty.

But so it was; and stranger still – though this is a thing of every day – the warm young heart palpitated with a thousand anxieties and apprehensions, while that of the old worldly man lay rusting in its cell, beating only as a piece of cunning mechanism, and yielding no one throb of hope, or fear, or love, or care, for any living thing.

But allowing that no error occurred, what a slaughter! Good God what work! to send grape-shot from four guns into a helpless mass of fellow-citizens; sweeping the streets with fire and charging with cavalry, destroying poor people whose only crime is that they have been ill-governed, and reduced to such straits that they seek redress by arms, ignorant that of all ways that is the most certain to increase the evils they complain of. On one side we have an ill-used people suffering want, and thinking, justly, that if they had their rights the want would be relieved. But how are those rights to be gained? By changing our government into a republic say the vagabonds who want power, and do not want to see their countrymen fed; who like Daniel O’Connell delight in seeing them poor and miserable, as a means of continuing their popularity and power: keep the people aggrieved and we will keep power by declaiming against those grievances. On the other hand, what do the Whigs and Tories do? Madly refuse the people’s rights, thereby convincing them the democrats speak truly, and that aristocracy will yield nothing; that the people are lost if they trust to anything but arms. Madness on both sides. One seeking right in a wrong way, the other wrong in a wrong way.

Of course I do not mean that if a labourer has at present his proper proportion for twelve hours work, he should have the same sum for ten. But I do believe that he has not his proper proportion, that capital tyrannises over labour, and that Government is bound to interfere to prevent such bullying; and I do believe, too, that in some way or other the problem now solved by universal competition or the devil-take-the-hindmost may receive a more satisfactory solution. It is manifestly absurd that, to allow me to get my stockings a halfpenny a pair cheaper, the operative stocking-weaver should be forced to go barefoot.

What a place is Manchester – silent and solemn; the rumble of carriages and groaning of mills, but few voices and no merriment. Sad in its very activity; grave and silent in its very agitation. Intensely occupied in the production of material wealth, it regards that alone as the grand end of human existence.

Others look up, and with fixed eyes admire That wide-spanned arch, wondering how it was raised, To keep, so high in air, its strength and grace: All seem to feel the spirit of the place, And by the general reverence God is praised: Profane Despoilers, stand ye not reproved, While thus these simple-hearted men are moved?

poor lank-jawed men, who would doubtless have manifested less interest in the nonsense of the orator, had they been less hungry at the time,