Mechanism and Meaning: British Natural Theology and the Literature of Technology, 1820-1840

As Carlyle recognized—and Arnold deplored—the nineteenth century was the ‘Age of Machinery’. Increasingly ubiquitous physical things, machines were also increasingly important cultural objects. In this project, I track how the meanings of machines were constructed by an emergent ‘literature of technology’ and ask what cultural work those meanings accomplished. From popular expositions of steam engines to mechanics textbooks to industrial travel narratives to histories of technology, the material, literary, and generic forms of these texts constructed the ‘machine’ as an intelligible object of public culture, as part of nature, as passive servant to human agents, and as the product of complex development. The cultural impact of such significances reverberated beyond debates on technology to shape seemingly irrelevant discourses: these meanings were harnessed by mechanical metaphors to do work in other cultural domains from poetics to political economy to religion. As a case study, I trace how each of these meanings supported or challenged the plausibility of natural theology in the 1830s, a religious discourse built on an analogy between machines and natural objects. Drawing on often-read texts like Babbage’s 'On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures' and Ure’s 'Philosophy of Manufactures' and lesser-read texts like the Bridgewater Treatises, Lardner’s 'The Steam Engine', Head’s 'A Home Tour through the Manufacturing Districts', and Whewell’s 'Mechanics of Engineering', this project ultimately argues that the way technology is talked about matters

"Tools and the man" : Samuel Smiles, lives of the engineers, and the machine in Victorian literature.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-87).While Victorian responses to the machine varied greatly, a distinct literary strain emerged with Carlyle and ran through Ruskin and Dickens which understood the machine as a threat to human agency. In their fear, they focused on machinery itself as sublime or horrible. Samuel Smiles's series of engineering biographies, entitled Lives of the Engineers, argues against this position by highlighting the engineer, the human element, who creates and controls the machine. Interacting with concepts from Carlyle, Smiles's biographies show engineers as Captains of Industry, dynamic men who shape themselves and lead others. By combining a narrative of these self-made men with a narrative of technological history, Smiles shows that machines are products of human agency rather than threats to it. This presentation facilitates the inclusion of engineers in subsequent works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling.by Courtney Salvey.M.A