The creative spirit in the machine age

Abstract

The Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of a new age: one of rapid technological innovations that not only transformed the very nature of industry, but also gave birth to a new mindset that welcomed practical progress and looked forward to new discoveries. Such changes could not fail to affect every aspect of life. Moreover, the swiftness of change that we at the beginning of the twenty first century tend to take for granted, brought about a confrontation between old and new values for late eighteenth and nineteenth century society. This is reflected in the literature of the period as writers increasingly adopted the form of the novel to express themselves in the face of social transformation. This is the theme focussed on in chapter 1. As the fruits of Baconian science, and tradition came face to face, novelists including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, attempted to portray, understand and appreciate the good and bad prospects of the new social order. The sudden lack of contact and understanding between the employers and employees of industrial manufacture was considered by many to be one of the most serious issues, particularly during the 1840s, a period of great social distress that witnessed the rise of the much feared and ill-understood Chartist movement. Chapter 2 considers the treatment of this theme in the work of various novelists throughout the nineteenth century: from the Christian Interventionism encouraged by Elizabeth Gaskell and the Christian Socialism of Charles Kingsley in the mid-nineteenth century, to the communist utopian visions of William Morris at the end of the century. This chapter concludes with a brief examination of early twentieth century dystopian fiction, being to some extent, a continuation of the same trend of social criticism.