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Victorian Material Culture
Richard Menke, Richard Menke
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Victorian Material Culture
Richard Menke, Richard Menke
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From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things.
This collection brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material and culture. This third volume, 'Invention and Technology', will look at a variety of Victorian inventions, both foundational and short-lived.
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PART 1 The march of invention
Alexander Somerville [‘One Who Has Whistled at the Plough’], The Autobiography of a Working Man [extract] (London: Gilpin, 1848), pp. 358–361.
John Stoughton, The Palace of Glass and the Gathering of the People: A Book for the Exhibition [extract] (London: Religious Tracts Society, 1851), pp. 18–25.
Michael Angelo Garvey, The Silent Revolution, or the Future Effects of Steam and Electricity upon the Conditions of Mankind [extract] (London: Cash, 1852), pp. 1–13.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ode for the Opening of the International Exhibition’, Fraser’s Magazine, 65 (1862), p. 803.
F. R. Conder, ‘The Best Friend of the Working Man’ [extract], Fraser’s Magazine, new series 19 (1879), pp. 231–232.
‘The World in a Hurry’, Sewing Machine Gazette and Journal of Domestic Appliances (1 March 1881), p. 30.
‘The Latest Patent’, Answers (29 August 1891), p. 249.
A. R. Bennett, On the Telephoning of Great Cities [extract] (London: Whittaker, 1892), pp. 4–7.
Alfred Russel Wallace, The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Failures [extract] (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1898), pp. 1–3, 150–153.
Victorian writers often treated invention and the appearance of new technological objects as a story of human progress. For the radical working-class journalist and former soldier Alexander Somerville, a first view of the railway and locomotive engines in Manchester when he was a young man becomes intertwined with the prospects for political change just then opened up by the Great Reform Act of 1832; both new technology and political advancement would take us closer to the ‘universal brotherhood’ that Somerville, along with many other optimistic Victorians, believed was the ultimate destiny of the world. In an account by the non-conformist minister John Stoughton, the glories of art and industry on display at the 1851 Great Exhibition – as well as the Crystal Palace, the huge iron and glass structure that housed them – give us a sense of the power of the human mind, the aspirations of the human soul, and the still greater glory of the God who created them. The exhibition also inspires Michael Angelo Garvey’s reflections on the sublime capabilities of the human mind and the great future of the human race.1 In his capacity as Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson was charged with commemorating great events in the life of the nation, and his ode for a later London exhibition picks up these notes, as well as paying tribute to the late Prince Albert, the patron of the 1851 event; set to music, it was performed at the opening of the International Exhibition of 1862.
But the wonders of machinery and invention did not always seem so obvious, especially once the impact of sheer novelty or the spectacle of a public exhibition faded. Francis Conder, a civil engineer who worked on the railway, complains that ignorance and envy have prevented workers from understanding that the steam engine is actually a boon to the working class – never mind any brief, merely personal difficulties for the labourers whom the machines might replace. For a writer in the Sewing Machine Gazette, the proliferation of modern labour-saving machinery is both the sign and the agent of a world of increasing speed and hurry, whose ultimate logic is suicidal. Or, to take a different angle from such alarmed handwringing, perhaps the insatiable quest for invention and efficiency is simply comical, as a light piece from the penny newspaper Answers suggests, imagining a new machine that will automate the feeding, care and amusement of babies. Still, this cheerful vision of smoothly inhuman child-rearing also manages to convey a sense of unease just behind the farce.
Nevertheless, at the end of the century, even the call for a better British telephone system, and for new legislation to encourage it, could unleash electrical engineer Alfred Bennett’s vision of universal telephone service as part of humanity’s sacred destiny. Arguing that the nineteenth century has produced 13 out of the 20 greatest inventions since human beings first tamed fire, the evolutionist and devout spiritualist Alfred Russel Wallace worries only that the very ubiquity of the century’s culture of invention has made those great achievements harder to appreciate and recognise.2
Notes
- 1 One of the major cultural events of its era, London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 inspired an extensive amount of writing since even before it opened. For a look at how the Victorians wrote about and viewed the exhibition, see Jonathon Shears (ed.), The Great Exhibition, 1851: A Sourcebook (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as The Crystal Palace Exhibition Illustrated Catalogue, London (1851) (New York: Dover Publications, 1970). Important recent accounts of the exhibition include Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud: Sutton, 1999); and Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- 2 As the introduction to this volume notes, the Victorians did not have a unified term such as technology that covered both equipment or devices and the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. But many Victorians were fascinated by machinery and by advances in what were called the useful arts (that is, manufacture, craftsmanship or invention). Herbert L. Sussman’s influential Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968) argues for a split in Victorian culture between literary technophobia and a rising culture of machinery and invention. More recent scholarship on Victorian print culture – including work by Sussman himself – has found closer relationships between imaginative literature and technology: Herbert L. Sussman, Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009); Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Joseph Bizup, Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003). For a fascinating collation of writing on machines from the English Restoration to the Victorians, see Humphrey Jennings, Pandæmonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge (New York: Free Press, 1985).Illustrated Victorian patent records have regularly provided material for anthologies of odd or impressive nineteenth-century inventions; the best of these is Stephen Van Dulken, Inventing the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
1 ALEXANDER SOMERVILLE, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A WORKING MAN [EXTRACT] (London: Gilpin, 1848), pp. 358–361
DOI: 10.4324/9781315400303-3
Nothing occurred on my journey from London to Liverpool which I need remark upon, except that at Manchester I saw a railway, locomotive engines, and railway trains, for the first time. Upon the railway, not then out of the second year of its age, I proceeded to Liverpool. The opening of that railway is an epoch in the history of the world. In memory, I see my first whirl upon it, standing so prominently out among other recollections, that it seems like an epoch of my life. All sights which I had seen, in London or elsewhere – the beautiful, the grand, the wonderful – shrunk into comparative nothingness, when, after reaching Liverpool, I went into the country a week, in the neighbourhood of Prescot, and saw (each day I sought to see it, each hour of the day I could have stood to see it again) the white steam shooting through the landscape of trees, meadows, and villages, and the long train, loaded with merchandise, men and women, and human enterprise, rolling along under the steam. I had seen no sight like that; I have seen nothing to excel it since. In beauty and grandeur, the world has nothing beyond it. In wonder alone, the electric telegraph outstrips the railway; but they belong to the one family of wonders. I used to stand and look at it, and dream as I stood; and when I ventured to relate any of those dreams, people used to say that I was very dreamy indeed. Related now that sixteen years have passed, those thoughts would seem very sober realities.
The Reform Bill had just then passed into law. Some people saw no good in the Reform Bill, but much evil; some saw no good in the railways, but much evil; others saw no evil in either, yet not much good; the greater number saw boundless good in both. But many of those who saw boundless good in the Reform Bill, turned in the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, or ninth years of its existence, and did all they could, by fair means and unfair means, by their own votes, and by their influence over the votes of others, to oppose the principles of the Reform Bill, and the faithful adherents of it: they promoted the political principles opposed to it, and supported its opponents, because the boundless good which they expected to come out of it, did not come in the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, nor ninth years of its existence. The same order of minds who foresaw boundless good from the establishment of railways, and who did not see it come in the shape, and within the time, that they expected it to come, would have put their backs to the locomotive engine, and would have prevented another train from starting, had they been strong enough.
To those who advocated the reform of 1832, it may be almost deemed a triumph, to have lived to see that it has done no harm. The opposition to it was not founded upon the probability of it doing no good, but on the certainty of its doing positive and irreparable mischief. He must be a bold reasoner, or a man too weak to reason, who says it has done no good. He must be a bolder or a weaker man, or one in whom both qualities are compounded, who says that the Reform Act has done evil. The first principle of magnitude – the greatest of all, indeed, solved by the establishment of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, was this, that the innovation upon old customs was safe. The railways have proved that, and much more. The greatest principle established by our experience of the Reform Act, which gave Manchester two members for the first time, is, that innovation upon old customs, of admitting a large number of the population to share in the privileges of the constitution, is safe. The Reform Act has proved that, and much more.
And if the doors of the constitution were opened again, I have no fear but all the predictions of mischief to follow, would be like the predictions before the enactment of the Reform Bill; there would be no wrong, nor danger of wrong. Like the hopes formed of the Reform Bill by the sanguine, and those who do not accustom themselves to the use of reason, or who, being weak in the faculties which deal with cause and effect, cannot understand the operation of reason, there would be expectations formed only to be disappointed. No acts of parliament can make a population well clothed, well supplied with food, well lodged, and happy; but acts of parliament can remove the artificial hinderances to those desirable ends, and promote their accomplishment. Comfort and happiness depend on the self-exertions of those who seek them, and cannot be conferred by others. But so long as men are excluded from the political privileges of their birth-right as men, it is natural for them to think that they could make themselves more comfortable and happy, if they had the exercise of their natural rights.
The time when I first saw the railway uniting Liverpool and Manchester – spanning the bog where human foot could not tread – stands, as I have said, in memory, like an epoch of my life. I looked upon that most poetical and most practical of the grand achievements of human intellect, until people thought I stood and slept; and, when they heard the dream, they said it was very dreamy, indeed. I should fear to tell the dreams which I have now beside the electric telegraph, and on the railways, and within the regions of the god-like inventors and makers of machinery. There is a time coming when realities shall go beyond any dreams that have yet been told of those things. Nation exchanging with nation their products freely; thoughts exchanging themselves for thoughts, and never taking note of the geographical space they have to pass over, except to give the battery a little more of the electric spirit, if the distance which the thought has to go be many hundreds of miles; man holding free fellowship with man, without taking note of the social distance which used to separate them, except, perhaps, the lord (landed lord or cotton lord,) shall use a little more of the moral electricity, when conveying a thought to a working man, at the opposite end of the social pole, who used to be very far distant; that lord may put on a little more of the moral electricity, which shall then be discovered, to carry the instantaneous message of one feeling, one interest, one object, one hope of success from the lordly end, to the working man’s end of the social world. Universal enfranchisement, railways, electric telegraphs, public schools (the greatest of the moral levers for elevating mankind named last – because last to be advocated, which should have been first); these are some of the elements of a moral faith, believing in the universal brotherhood of mankind, which I daily hold, and never doubt upon; which I believe will as certainly be realised, as I believe that good, and not evil, was the object of all creation, and is the end of all existence.
2 JOHN STOUGHTON, THE PALACE OF GLASS AND THE GATHERING OF THE PEOPLE: A BOOK FOR THE EXHIBITION [EXTRACT] (London: Religious Tracts Society, 1851), pp. 18–25
DOI: 10.4324/9781315400303-4
The sight of these interesting objects is suggestive of important reflections. Imagining oneself left alone in the vast building – permitted to tread in silence the deserted halls – what musings might arise relative to themes awfully beautiful, which the giddy portion of the daily crowd within the walls have never entertained!
This repository of art, with all its varied contents, is the production of the human mind. Its constructive skill is singularly exhibited in the edifice itself; not such constructive skill as can be confounded with the instinct of the bird or bee, not a blind impulsive power; but a clear-eyed intelligence, which can survey, and consider, and contrive, and adapt, and fashion, according to the exigency of the case, in ways more various than art can classify. Of the power of human discovery, the detection of latent qualities in nature, a remarkable example is afforded in the history of the material out of which the building itself is chiefly wrought. – That the vitrification of sand and nitrium, noticed accidentally by the Phœnician mariners, according to the once generally received account by Pliny; or that some other occurrence at a much earlier period, as is now commonly believed, should have led men to perceive, in materials perfectly opaque, capabilities of transformation into a substance perfectly transparent; that out of dingy masses of mineral could be spread forth sheets of liquid diamonds, broad as the awning over the Coliseum at Rome; that it was possible to mould this brittle material, as if it were so much wax or clay; that, hard as rock, it might be blown into a bubble soft an...