The practitioners of ‘mere manual labour’ were now moving towards the more backward parts of the town where they were segregated from their ‘betters’. The business of trade, which had always been conducted as close as possible to the street – the gloves that Shakespeare’s father made were on show at the front window – were now relegated to a back room while the front quarters were for sleeping and eating.
The same changes were taking place in the world of agriculture. Small farms disappeared, and large enclosed farms became the standard for excellence. The small farmer gave way to the great agriculturalist who was the rural equivalent of the master manufacturer; he was already accruing vast profits from the easy availability of food. The labourer had once been part of the farmer’s household, eating at the same table, but that contiguity had ended. One labourer complained, according to Arnold Toynbee, that ‘the farmers take no more notice of us than if we were dumb beasts; they let us eat our crust by the ditch side’. The farm labourers themselves were now housed in a species of barracks.
This division between the ranks of society might have perilous consequences. By dint of schooling, even of the most elementary kind, the younger workers were becoming more literate and therefore less ignorant of the wider ways of the world. They were less abject and less easily led or cowed. New men might have new ideas. From the period of the ‘combinations’, for example, we may date the early organization of workers in a common cause, a movement that led to the emergence of Chartism in the late 1830s. The ties between the ranks or classes of society had been broken, provoking ambition, restlessness, or confusion.
It has been suggested that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries crime rose at an unanticipated rate, particularly in the newly urbanized and manufacturing regions. It had become necessary to supervise the people in a stricter and more organized fashion. In 1792 the creation of the London Police Magistrates initiated a trend for stipendiary magistrates in other urban regions. For most of the eighteenth century prisons were simply large and verminous dungeons where a variety of criminals was promiscuously held, so that by 1789 the prison reformer, John Howard, was suggesting the innovative model of ‘regular steady discipline in a penitentiary house’; he was advocating the modern form of prison, in other words, which can also be seen as one of the fruits of the Industrial Revolution.
The laments came in many forms. Some decried the changes in the landscape, where the mills had risen in the valleys and the great rocks were cut for limestone. The earth, in the striking phrase of John Britton, ‘is covered and loaded with its own entrails’. William Blake saw into the heart of the new dispensation and correctly estimated its consequences.
All the arts of life they chang’d into the arts of death . . .
And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel,
To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours
Of day & night the myriads of Eternity, that they might file
And polish brass & iron hour after hour, laborious workmanship,
Kept ignorant of the use: that they might spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread.
The literary complains were taken up by popular songs and street ballads, as in one poem composed by Joseph Mather against master cutler Watkinson who counted thirteen knives as a dozen when he paid his men:
That monster oppression behold how he stalks
Keeps picking the bones of the poor as he walks . . .
In an anonymous and powerful ballad, ‘The Complaint of a Kidderminster Weaver’s Wife to her Infant’, the master manufacturers are called ‘murderers’, ‘tyrants’ and ‘oppressors’:
Hush thee, my babe! thy feeble cry
Tells me that thou ere long wilt die:
I’m glad thou hast not liv’d to curse
Our cruel masters. That were worse.
The movement of Romanticism might itself be interpreted in one of its aspects as an assault upon, or retreat from, the new industrial age. In the eighth book of ‘The Excursion’ William Wordsworth is astonished by the fact of a ‘huge town’ emerging ‘where not a habitation stood before’. One of his editors cites the case of Middlesbrough, which in 1830 was no more than a farmhouse by the bank of the Tees and which fifty years later was a town of more than 50,000 inhabitants:
O’er which the smoke of unremitting fires
Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths
Of vapour glittering in the morning sun.
As so often in his work Wordsworth is equivocal, refusing to give judgement. In a subliminal way he seems to enjoy the experience of industrialism even as he denounces it.
The 1760s and 1770s became known as ‘the age of sentiment’ guided by ‘the sentimental muse’; it was a time of high feeling and moral sensibility which can be seen as an alternative to the harsh and unremitting world of industry and manufacture. What was natural; what was free; what was spontaneous and governed by the heart. Such were the themes of Robert Blair’s The Grave of 1743 and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts of 1745. These were the precepts of a movement that excluded from view the mills and the chimneys. Since The Grave and Night Thoughts were established upon artifice and false nostalgia, they could not endure as the poems of the ‘Romantic age’ managed to do.
There was as much or more to be said for the art, rather than the poetry, of the Industrial Revolution. If you could surpass nature, as some of the industrialists had done, it should be possible to reach the sublime in another sphere. The industrial landscapes of John Martin are filled with fulminating life as if the energies of the earth had finally been manifested in flame, smoke and fiery blaze. He was in particular inspired by the spectacle of the Black Country than which, as Martin’s son said, ‘he could not imagine anything more terrible, even in the regions of everlasting punishment. All he had done, or attempted in ideal painting, fell far short, fell very far short of the fearful sublimity of effect when the Furnace could be seen in full blaze in the depth of night.’ This was the painting of magnificence and chiaroscuro. His canvases seem to roar, whether in rage or in defiance. He drew upon Egyptian, Oriental and Greek imagery to conjure up visions of sublimity and terror, where the unfamiliar landscape of caves, ruins and pyramids whispered of ancient powers now once more unleashed upon the earth. Another Cyclops might walk among the mills and manufactories. In mezzotint he scraped away blackness to create form.
A more gentle sensibility had also come to life. When a professional architect, John Wood, listed the pleasures of industrial change he mentioned deal floors covered with carpets, marble rather than stone hearths, mirrors and trinkets in the ‘Chinese’ or ‘Oriental’ manner, walnut and mahogany furniture. He was concerned in other words with the material stuff of life that had been improved by the age of the machine. ‘I went to see the beautiful manufacture of silk, carried on by Mr Fulton and Son’, William Cobbett, no avid champion of industrialism, wrote. ‘I never like to see the machines, lest I should be tempted to endeavour to understand them . . . as in the case of the sun and the moon and the stars, I am quite satisfied with witnessing the effects.’ He wrote these words as late as 1833, at a time when it would have been hard to believe that England was indebted for her success and prosperity to Arkwright and Watt rather than to Nelson and Wellington.
27
Fire and moonlight
Science and industry were the twin horses of the eighteenth-century apocalypse. Even as parts of the landscape were altered by ironworks and manufactories, so itinerant ‘experimentalists’ or ‘natural philosophers’ would tour the larger towns and houses with their compendia of wonders. In taverns, in coffee-shops and in the houses of the wealthy, they would bring out their alembics, their orreries, their lunaria and their electrical machines in order to elucidate the workings of the universe to a largely uninstructed audience. They were the conjurors of the eighteenth century. It was the first public phase of the scientific revolution.<
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It needed, perhaps, the genius of an artist to see it clearly. Joseph Wright was born in Derby, in 1734, just thirteen years after the first fully mechanized factory was erected in the vicinity. Lombe’s Mill has already entered these pages as one of the wonders of the new age, and it soon became an object of pilgrimage for those who wished to view the new engines of power. Since much of Wright’s subsequent work is devoted to the manifestations of industry, we may fairly guess that he was one of its admirers.
This is the context in which to set one of Wright’s most celebrated paintings, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768). A travelling experimenter, with a magus-like flourish, has set up an air pump for the delectation of the members of a wealthy family (perhaps of merchant stock from the midlands); in the glass dome of its receiver a white cockatoo is clearly struggling for life and breath as the air is drawn off. Two small girls can barely look while their father reassures them; another well-dressed man is timing the action with a watch while in the background a young couple are looking into each other’s eyes rather than at the experiment on the beleaguered bird. An older man, sitting in the foreground, contemplates a glass vessel containing what seems to be a pair of human lungs.
The magus or scientist stares out of the painting with a wild look and an expansive gesture of his arms as if to welcome the spectator to a new world. It is not at all clear whether the bird is to live or die, and this dramatic tableau does nothing to resolve the matter. It is a moment of maximum intensity, conveyed by the chiaroscuro that models the human figures. Joseph Priestley, a member of the Lunar Society and well known to Wright, argued in a public lecture at Warrington that ‘real history resembles experiments by the air pump, condensing engine and electrical machine which exhibit the operation of nature and the God of nature himself’. It is not clear, however, whether this is a study in the inevitability of death or, if the stopcock is released, in the blessings of God’s air. Wright himself suffered from severe asthma, perhaps as a result of nervous melancholia, and his condition lends significance to the pair of human lungs under glass. The despair of his desire for air, and the rapture of relief, give the painting its air of intensity and foreboding.
The air pump of the painting is, however, a curious anomaly. Its design is taken from Sir Robert Boyle’s early ‘pneumatic engines’ first used by him in the late 1650s. By the time of the painting’s composition the glass receiver had been replaced by a leather ‘plate’ on which a bell-jar rested. But Wright retained the then anachronistic glass globe. It was for him an emblem more important than the claims of scientific accuracy. The empty globe, the bubble, was in his period a profound symbol of transitoriness and deceit. Glass balls, empty globes and soap bubbles were the familiar language of vanitas painting. That is why Wright felt moved to create a hybrid machine, with the double-barrelled pumping mechanism of the eighteenth century and the glass globe in use a century before. Pictorial, scientific and religious connotations reinforce one another.
We may put as its companion piece another painting, completed two years before, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp Is Put in the Place of the Sun, where another travelling lecturer is demonstrating the mechanical contrivance used to mark the movements of the sun and the planets. A concealed light casts illumination on the faces of the principal spectators while leaving the room in darkness; the spherical bands of the scientific instrument are viewed in all their internal geometry, while the intent faces gazing at the experiment are like planets caught in the radiance of a fleeting sun. It is one of the most arresting depictions of the light of knowledge, and the fire of invention, that came from the mid-eighteenth century.
A subsequent series of five paintings from the early 1770s, including A Blacksmith’s Shop and An Iron Forge Viewed from Without, have been classified as ‘night pieces’ largely as a consequence of Wright’s continued employment of chiaroscuro to celebrate the quality of light. But they might easily qualify as industrial pieces because of the intensity of their focus on industrial labour and industriousness itself. Servitude to work is now celebrated as a spark of the divine.
In An Iron Forge Viewed from Without Wright paints the new machinery of the ironworks in the light of the eighteenth-century sublime. The iron worker may be seen as a modern Vulcan, the god of fire who was often portrayed with a smith’s hammer; the white-hot ingot, created in a shed or manger-like structure, can be seen as an image of the Christ Child or Robert Southwell’s ‘The Burning Babe’ in the paintings of the Nativity. The light is holy. We may take as its text some words from William Beckford’s Fragments of an English Tour, published in 1779. ‘The hollow wind in the woods mixing with the rushing of waters, whilst the forges thundered in my ear. To the left, a black quaking bridge leading to other wilds. Within, a glowing furnace, machines hammering huge bars of red-hot iron, which at intervals cast a bright light and innumerable sparks through the gloom.’ The tone and sentiment of early nineteenth-century Romanticism are beginning to emerge. It had an early apotheosis in France.
28
The red bonnet
In the summer of 1788 the political order seemed secure. The first minister, William Pitt, had the full confidence of George III, and their congenial partnership promised a long period of stability. In the phrase of the time Pitt was ‘the king’s friend’. He had cause to be. He had helped to mend the finances of the administration by producing budget surpluses and cutting the national debt; he reduced smuggling, and managed to raise the revenues. He repaired the fleet and, by means of a triple alliance with Holland and Prussia, he restored the country’s standing in Europe and elsewhere. When Spain attempted to seize British trading vessels off the western coast of Canada, she was forced to yield and return the ships; her ally, France, had been in no position to help her. So England was known for her domination of the sea.
Yet in the autumn of the year all was changed. There was something wrong with the king. Pitt received a note from the king’s physician that his patient was in a state ‘nearly bordering on delirium’. He had always spoken rapidly and with decision, but now he became chattering and incoherent. It is widely accepted that his were the symptoms of porphyria, which is not a sign of madness or mental disorder but rather a physical condition that affects the toxins of the nervous system and thus the brain. It is believed that he had inherited the condition by indirect means from the Stuart line. It might be called the royal disease. None of this was known at the time, of course, and the king had all the appearance of a howling lunatic.
The dilemma was for Pitt acute. It was not a situation any first minister had ever been forced to confront. The king was completely incapacitated, and his future sanity in doubt; the prince of Wales would be his successor, but the prince was on very bad terms both with the king and with the king’s ministers. The prince was, in addition, close to Fox and to the Whig cause. He was Pitt’s worst enemy. It was in Pitt’s interests therefore, to postpone any regency for as long as he could. He believed that the security and peace of the country would otherwise be jeopardized.
He presented his proposals to Prince George on 30 December. The regent would be granted no powers to create peers or to bestow places for life; the regent would have no share in managing the king’s estate; the queen would be responsible for all household matters. The prince was not impressed. He had in effect been deprived of any powers of patronage, which was the lifeblood of rule.
He was too eager for his own good; he insulted his father and quarrelled with his mother, all the time anticipating with infinite satisfaction his acquisition of the throne. His supporters were no less indiscreet. Fox in particular declared that the prince had an inherent right to become monarch, thus contradicting or disowning his Whig preference for parliamentary privilege. Pitt was heard to say that he would ‘unwhig’ Fox for life. Fox then peremptorily removed himself to Bath, where he was treated for dysentery. His fellow Whig, Edmund Burke, was no more subtle or restrained; he dilated on the problems o
f insanity, and the possibility of a relapse. When he stated that he ‘had visited the dreadful mansions where the insane are confined’, even some of his party were horrified at his presumption and lack of tact.
Prince George was not himself a model of royal deportment. His life had been guided by pleasure rather than by principle and his politics were fashioned on the basis of convivial companions rather than settled convictions. He was accused, justifiably, of greed and drunkenness, compounded by gambling and sexual profligacy. It was also widely believed that he had contracted a forbidden marriage with Maria Fitzherbert, a Roman Catholic; she was a woman of some charm and authority so that, in the phrase of the time, she was a ‘whapper’. But as a Catholic she was not eligible to be the prince’s wife, and so she became the cause of lies and prevarications and ambiguities that did nothing to recommend the prince to the public. Prince George himself seemed to forget about the clandestine marriage and soon attached himself to Caroline of Brunswick, this time his wife by legal marriage, but with equally disastrous consequences.
Pitt put himself forward as the champion of George III and of constitutional monarchy, a position all the more satisfying as it became evident that the king was beginning slowly to recover his mental powers. Pitt’s decision to delay any sudden intervention by the prince or his supporters now proved eminently successful; by the time a Regency Bill was about to pass, the king’s recovery was declared by his doctors to be complete. The vessel, as contemporaries said, had righted itself. On 23 February 1789 the king, in full possession of his wits, wrote: ‘I am anxious to see Mr Pitt any hour that may suit him tomorrow morning, as his constant attachment to my interest and that of the public, which are inseparable, must ever place him in the most advantageous light.’ The illuminations and bonfires, on the news of the king’s return to health, stretched from Hampstead to Kensington. Pitt himself was also the hero of the hour. The king’s son, however, was now lampooned for his heartlessness and ambition. The opposition Whigs were believed, at the very least, to have wanted judgement. The reign of Prince George was postponed for thirty-one years.
Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4 Page 34
