Abstract
The first critics of the industrial revolution and the Condition of England were the Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. Their actual knowledge of the details of industrialism was severely limited, but their prophetic insight into its dehumanising effects on the whole society was deep and far-sighted. Blake wrote of the ‘Satanic mills’, and believed that the industrial revolution was the natural consequence of the limited and perverted rationalism of the eighteenth century.
I turn my eyes to the schools and Universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire, Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation: cruel Works Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within Wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace
(Jerusalem, plate 15, 14–20).
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Notes
Sheila M. Smith, ‘Willenhall and Wodgate: Disraeli’s Use of Blue Book Evidence’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 13 (1962), 370.
Quoted by Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century, second edition (London, 1960), p. 219;
see also Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age (Oxford, 1960), who points out that Southey was not as pessimistic as Macaulay suggested in his hostile review of the Colloquies in the Edinburgh Review, pp. 180–1.
Dickens and Carlyle: The Question of Influence (London, 1973), p. 150; see also conclusion of Michael Goldberg, Carlyle and Dickens (Athens Georgia, 1972). ‘That part of Dickens’ thinking that was consciously regulated, the main line of his social criticism, was directly influenced by Carlyle’ (p. 227).
Mark Roberts, ‘Carlyle and the Rhetoric of Unreason’, Essays in Criticism, 18 (October, 1968), 397–419.
See Eric Trudgill, ‘Prostitution and Paterfamilias’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited H. J. Dyos and Michael Woolf, 2 vols (London, 1973), pp. 693–705. Having quoted the shocked reaction of a German visitor, Trudgill writes ‘How was it, wondered foreigners, that the British paterfamilias with his cult of domesticity, with his determination to avoid anything in public discourse that might bring a blush to the cheek of modesty, could yet allow the streets and places of public amusement to be infested with open harlotry?’ He shows how the paterfamilias had to abandon the false Victorian sexual and domestic ideals before the trade in prostitution could be curbed.
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© 1978 John Colmer
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Colmer, J. (1978). The ‘Condition of England’ Question. In: Coleridge to Catch-22. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15885-0_5
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