Nearly two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley gave us a classic warning about the hubris of technology’s combat against nature. Her late Gothic novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), depicts the revenge nature takes upon the presumption of engineering life from the dead. Victor Frankenstein and his creation perish, of course; his “Adam” is as doomed as he is. If this monster cannot be saved by his father/creator, however, today’s cyborg/robot/Artificial Intelligence products do expect to be saved. For those at the forefront of technological innovation today, there will be no return to a previous, monster-free state.

From our hyper-tech world we can look back to Mary Shelley’s time and see the prototype, the arrival of modern techno-industrial reality. Between 1800 and 1820, England underwent the strains, storms and challenges of the ascendant Industrial Revolution. We are living with the outcome of that decisive battle-ground time.

Ugo Perone put it this way: “One day the big O with which the Ottocento [the eighteenth century] begins exploded, and philosophy as the great tale of totality started to be abandoned. The age of specializations began…” [1]

Of course, few changes happen overnight. Industrial output had been tending sharply upward since the early 1780s. [2] And one could easily look much further back, to deforestation in Neolithic and Bronze Age times, to find out why many moors and heathlands are now barren. [3] But it is in the early 19^th century that power was passing from the hands of the titled landowners to those who owned the factories and foundries. Much more fundamentally, the time and space of social existence were fundamentally altered. As the equality of all citizens before the law began to emerge, so did the reality of an unprecedented subjugation or domestication.

Nothing in the canon of the (fairly recent) Enlightenment, with its claims and promises, had prepared anyone for this. The road to complete mastery of the physical and social environments was indeed opening, as the industrial system became, in Toynbee’s words, “the sole dominant institution in contemporary Western life.” [4] The picture thus presented was laden with far more pain and absence than promise.

With the nineteenth century begins the winter of the West. [5] Spengler’s conclusion is more apt than he knew. It was not a beginning, but the beginning of the end. Dickens’ depiction of Coketown in Hard Times did much to capture the repercussions of industrialism: the new mass society, ruled by the regime of the factory and its pace, its polluted and despoiled landscape, its inhabitants anonymous and dehumanized. Spengler saw how “the machine works and forces the man to cooperate,” rending nature beneath him as this “Faustian” machine passion alters the face of the earth. [6]

There was a long lead-in to the pivotal developments, a long process of mechanization and privatization. In England, more than six million acres of open field and common pasture were enclosed between 1760 and 1844. [7] The pressures of the new industrial society were increasing enormously, pushing the dispossessed relentlessly toward the despotic mills and mines. New power-driven shearing frames and fully mechanized spinning machines encroached on the relative autonomy of family-based handloom weavers, for example. By the 1820s the pace of change was dizzying.

Especially in the late 18^th century, Enlightenment theories of rights were advanced as arguments against severe challenges to popular prerogatives. Although the dawn of 1789 had been a moment of great promise, the early idealism of the French Revolution was betrayed by authoritarian terror. In the first years of the 19^th century, however, “the solidarity of the community [and] the extreme isolation of the authorities” were still political realities. [8]

At issue, in an unprecedented way, is a new state of being, untouched by political claims and reform efforts: a world becoming decisively independent of the individual. The quantum leap in division of labor which is industrialism means the generic interchangeability of parts — and people. From identity and particularity to the stage, in Joseph Gabel’s term, of “morbid rationalism.” [9] Michel Foucault noted that up to the end of the 18^th century, “life does not exist: only living beings.” [10] The stakes were as high as they could be, the ensuing struggle a world-historical one in this first industrializing nation. It’s clear that Emile Durkheim had it entirely wrong when he proclaimed that “in the industrial societies … social harmony comes essentially from the division of labor.” [11]

The march of the factories was a sustained attack on irregular work routines, in favor of the time-disciplined work environment. [12] Centralized production aimed at control over recalcitrant and decentralized workers. By its nature it demanded discipline and regimentation.

Heretofore the customary and numerous holidays from work were supplemented by the celebration of Saint Monday, a day of recovery and play following a typical weekend’s drinking. Enshrined in custom and long-standing local tradition, the popular culture — especially among artisans — was independent and contemptuous of authority. Hence factory servitude did not exactly beckon. F.M.L. Thompson noted that it was “extremely difficult to find satisfactory workers,” and that “even higher wages were not enough in themselves.” [13] For example, the reluctance of weavers (many of them women) to leave their homes has been widely documented. [14]

But at least as early as the beginning of the period under review, the beginnings of the destruction of the handicraft artisan and the yeoman farmer could be seen. “The small agricultural cloth-making household units… each so easily identifiable by its tenter of white cloth — would be gone in a few years,” observed Robert Reid. [15] Manchester, the world’s first industrial city, was one contested ground, among many other English locales, as everything was at stake and the earth was made to shift. By the late 1820s, Thomas Carlyle wrote this summary: “Were we required to characterize this age of ours by a single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but above all others, the Mechanical Age.” [16]

The widespread “hatred of authority and control” [17] and “general leveling sentiment” [18] meant that resistance was powerful and certainly predated the early 19^th century. The Northumberland miners destroyed pit-head gear with regularity during clashes with owners, leading to the passage of no less than eight statutes directed against such destruction between 1747 and 1816: quite ineffectual statutes, evidently. [19] The briefest sampling reveals the range of late 18^th century contestation: the anti-toll Bristol bridge riots of 1793, the great food riot year of 1795 (when groups of women waylaid shipments of corn, and attacked government press gangs seeking to kidnap men for military service), and naval mutinies at Portsmouth and the Nore in 1797, to cite only a few prominent examples. [20]

Machine-breaking and industrial arson soon became focused tactics against the ravages of industrialism, and to some often hard-to-pinpoint degree, against industrialism itself. Such forms of combat are seen among the west England “shearmen and clothing workers, in the Luddite resistance” to the introduction of mechanized devices between 1799 and 1803. [21] This was also the time (1801–1802) of the underground workers’ movement known as the Black Lamp, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Not coincidentally, the 1790s was the golden age of the Lancashire handloom weavers, whose autonomy was the backbone of radical opposition to the factory system.

Marx’s idea of revolution was severely limited, confined to the question of which class would rule the world of mass production. But even on those terms he completely failed to predict which groups were most likely to constitute a revolutionary force. Instead of becoming radicalized, factory workers were domesticated to a far greater degree than those who held out against “proletarianization.” The quiescence of factory workers is well known. It wasn’t until the 1820s that they were first drawn into protest against the progress of the industrial revolution. [22]

“Class” as a social term became part of the language in the 1820s, a byproduct of the rise of modern industry, according to Asa Briggs. [23] “It was between 1815 and 1820 that the working class was born,” as Harold Perkin had it,[24] but the distinctive consciousness did not, as noted, mean a militant, much less a radical orientation during the pivotal two decades under review. A workerist identity was “scarcely involved” in the Luddite risings between 1800 and 1820. [25]

The most sustained Luddite destruction of newly introduced textile machinery occurred between 1811 and 1816 and took its name from Ned Ludd, a young frame-work knitter in Leicestershire who had an aversion to confinement and drudge work. More than just identification with Ned’s famous frame-smashing episode, Luddism may be properly understood as a widely-held narrative or vision. [26] At the heart of this shared outlook was a grounded understanding of the corrosive nature of technological progress. The focus is underlined in Robert Reid’s wonderfully-titled Land of Lost Content, wherein he describes a Luddite attack on the hosiery workshop of Edward Hollingsworth on the night of March 11, 1811. Having successfully breached Hollingsworth’s fortified works, frame-breaking, ˆ la Ned, ensued. The armed workers proceeded “selectively. Only the wide machines which knitted the broader, cheaper cloth came under the destructive hammer.” [27] Such targeting exhibits a combative hostility to standardization and standardized, mass-produced life, hallmarks of industrial progress writ large. [28]

Byron, the most famous poet of the age, was moved to write, “Down with all kings but King Ludd!” [29] More important was the very widespread support for Luddite actions. Across the area, according to E. P. Thompson, “active moral sanction [was] given by the community to all Luddite activities short of actual assassination.” [30] Women did not play a key role in the machine-breaking attacks, but were very much a part of the movement. In the April 1812 assault on the Burton power-loom mill in Middleton, women were conspicuously present; five were charged with riot and breaking windows. [31]

Parallel examples of militancy were the East Anglian bread riots of 1815, and the victorious five-month seamen’s strike in the same year that paralyzed coal-shipping ports and the east coast coal trade. Frame-breaking had been made a hanging offense in 1812, and repression hit its high point in 1817 with suspension of habeas corpus rights.

But upon the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, a long era began that was decisively centered on political reform (e.g. reform of parliamentary representation) and trade unionism. Unions, then as now, exist to broker the relationship between owners and workers. A more or less scattered, independent and often recalcitrant population becomes combined, represented, and disciplined via unionism. [32] This is much less some kind of conspiracy than an accommodation to the great pressures pushing industrial wage-slavery.

As early as Lord Holland’s 1812 efforts to channel Luddite energy in a reform direction, there had been interest in somehow moving it away from its real focus. Luddism had to do with something incomparably more basic than politics and unions, but it failed in its frontal assault. A major late-inning target was John Heathcote’s lace factory at Longborough in June 1816, and the Folly Hill and Pentrick risings a year later “can be regarded as the last flicker of Luddism in its desperate, violent and political phase.” [33] This last adjective refers to a key aspect of the defeat of machine destruction: its diversion into reform channels.

Oppositional energies could still be found, but from this point on they were more often in evidence in more approved contexts. In Bristol, for example, “gangs of disorderly fellows there assembled, throwing stinking fish, dead cats, dogs, rats, and other offensive missiles” during an election campaign. [34] The “Swing” riots throughout southeast England in 1830–1831 harkened back to anti-industrial militancy. Agricultural laborers resented threshing machines that were turning farms into factories; they resorted to destroying them and burning owners’ property. [35] Their direct action and communal organization marked them as agricultural Luddites. Another, and pretty much final outbreak was the Plug riots in the summer of 1842, when a thousand armed workers held Manchester for several days in a general strike. But the second and third generation came to accept as natural the confinement and deskilling of industrial labor. Only starvation could conquer a few holdouts, notably handloom weavers, terribly outflanked by the factories. What happened, or failed to happen, in the turning point years of 1800 to 1820 sealed people’s fate. The ultimate victor was a new, much deeper level of domestication.

The Luddite challenge to the new order stood out, and continues to inspire. Another, somewhat neglected aspect or current was that of religious utopianism, known as millenarianism. This movement (or movements) shed virtually all association with traditional religious belief. It was distant from that agent of social control, the Church of England, and turned its back(s) on the C of E’s main rival, Methodism (aka Dissenting or Non-Conformist). The millennials were anti-clerical and even at times anti-Christian. [36] They promised a vast transformation; their prophets threatened to “turn the world upside down,” similar to the aims of secular revolutionaries. [37] Millenarianism was “directed to the destruction of existing society,” and the reigning authorities believed in the possibility that it “might be sufficient to spark off the explosive mixture of social discontent and radical sentiment” then prevailing. [38]

The Methodist leadership recoiled in horror from the Luddite momentum and likewise from the many faces of millenarian extremism, some number of which were breakaways from Methodism. The Primitive Methodist Connection was steadily growing, along with the “magic Methodists” of Delamere Forest, and the “Kirkgate screamers” of Leeds, among the many disaffected offshoots. [39] Some of these (and other similar groups) were explicitly referred to as Ranters, recognizing a link to the Ranters (and Diggers) of the 17^th century millenarianist rebellion. Already in the 1790s “cheap reprints of long-buried works of Ranter and Antinomian [literally, anti-law] complexion” were circulating. [40]

The Scottish Buchanites, followers of Elspeth Simpson Buchan, wished to hold all things in common and rejected the bonds of official marriage. The Wroeites were largely wool-combers and handloom weavers, fighting against the extinction of their crafts. The more numerous Muggletonians, led by the tailor Ludovic Muggle, offered a refuge to the oppressed and excluded. Among the myriad groups and sects a range of millennial faiths can be found. Joanna Southcott, with her thousands of Southcottians, was a feminist–but not a radical one. Some of her flock, like Peter Morison and John Ward, were on the fiery side; in 1806 Morison preached the confiscation of “all the property and land belonging to the rich.” [41] Richard Brothers of the New Jerusalem proclaimed that “now is the whore of Babylon falling” and the future will see “no more war, no more want.” [42] Robert Wedderburn, a black sailor, attracted the “most extreme and impoverished radicals” to his London chapel. [43]

The millenarian impulse was by no means an isolated, cranky, or unrepresentative passion. In the 1790s it emerged “on a scale unknown since the 17^th century,” judgedE.P. Thompson. [44] “From the 1790s to at least the 1830s radical millenarianism could pose a real threat” to the dominant system, precisely because it did not accept the ruling paradigm or participate within it. [45] It was an active critique of the deep assumptions of the ruling order.

Domestic servants and small shopkeepers were among the adherents, as well as artisans and other dispossessed craftspeople who were the spearhead of the Luddite ranks. And in 1813 a New Connection minister, George Beaumont, was charged with inspiring the Luddite attacks in the Huddersfield area.

Thomas Spence was an influential, apocalyptic figure who found inspiration in the 17^th century visionaries. He reprinted a Digger tract from that era by Gerald Winstanley, and likewise attacked private property as standing against God’s common storehouse. Spence was convinced that “God was a very notorious Leveler” and that it was possible and necessary for humble men to turn the world upside down. [46]

Alas, the world wasn’t turned upside down. The civilizing machine persevered through the storms. Religion, in its usual role, taught respect for authority and had a new weapon in its arsenal: the evangelical revival’s campaign for industrial discipline.

William Blake, of “dark Satanic mills” fame, was an enigmatic, idiosyncratic figure who certainly played a part in this period. Not fully a millenarian or a Romantic either, Blake took as his central theme “the need to release the human spirit from bondage.” [47] Starting from an orientation toward class struggle, Blake ultimately opposed kingship, and rulership itself. [48]

His Songs of Experience (1790s) point in a radical and millenarian direction, and he provided a radical critique of the limits of Swedenborgianism. But Blake can be characterized more as a Jacobin reformer than a revolutionary millennial. Consistency may be hard to find overall, though some observations, rendered in his own inimitable style, hit the mark. He found the factory and the workhouse terribly wrong and, as with the Luddites, saw the destruction of traditional workmanship as the end of working people’s integrity. Mechanized time was a particularly important target: “the hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure,” for example. [49]

Blake’s outlook on both nature and women has to be seen as quite flawed. His anti-feminism is hard to miss, and there is a contempt for nature, as female and therefore secondary to the male. Social harmony is a major goal, but harmony or balance with nature, as championed by the Romantics or William Morris, for instance, was of no interest to Blake. [50] He desired the “Immediate by Perception or Sense at once,” [51] but it did not occur to him to ground this desire in the non-symbolic natural world.

E.P. Thompson clearly went too far in asserting, “Never, on any page of Blake, is there the least complicity with the kingdom of the Beast.” [52] More accurate was his appraisal that few “delivered such shrewd and accurate blows against the ideological defenses of their society.” [53]

The first two decades of the 19^th century were the heart of the Romantic period, and the course of this literary movement reflects what took place socially and politically in those years. At the beginning, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and others gave voice to “an explosion of millenarial and apocalyptic enthusiasm for the new dawn.” [54] Writing in 1804, Wordsworth recalled the exhilaration of ten years or so earlier, when the French revolution announced a new world and the factory system had not yet metastasized: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very Heaven!” [55] In its first bloom especially, Romanticism sought to reconcile humans and nature, consciousness and unconsciousness. As Northrup Frye put it, “the contrast between the mechanical and the organic is deeply rooted in Romantic thinking.” [56] Rene Wellek noted that such thinking could be seen as “an upsurge of the unconscious and the primitive.” [57]

Events, soon to be defined by Marx and other industrializers as Progress, undid optimism and a sense of possibilities, as we have seen. Sunny Enlightenment predictions about the perfectibility of society were already turning to ashes, as people became increasingly separated from nature and entered the state of modern, industrial slavery. A great sense of disappointment overtook the earlier aspirations, which were rapidly being destroyed by each new advance of industrial capitalism. From this point onward, disillusionment, ennui, and boredom became central to life in the West.

William Wordsworth acknowledged the existence and importance of a spirit of wild nature, which Blake resisted in him. Wordsworth was particularly moved by the decline of the domestic or pre-industrial mode of production and its negative impact on the poor and on families. [58] Privation, a sense of what has been lost, is a key theme in Wordsworth. His well-known decline as a poet after 1807 seems linked to the pessimism, even despair, that began to get the upper hand. He saw that the Enlightenment enshrining of Reason had failed, and he abandoned Nature as a source of value or hope.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s anguish at the erosion of community brought surrender and drug addiction. His Rime of the Ancient Mariner testifies to the erosion of values in the absence of community. His “Michael” poems completed a series on abandonment and meaningless loss. A major poet who collapsed back into Anglican orthodoxy — as did Wordsworth — and nationalist conservatism.

One who kept the liberatory Romantic flame burning longer was Percy Bysshe Shelley. Influenced by the anarchist William Godwin, Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) contains these lines: