Of Pyramids & Brick Kilns: The Industrial Sublime.
After his Tenth Plague of Egypt, Turner did one more- the Fifth Plague which he also included in his Liber Studiorum, a sort of boiled down compendium of his core works and ideas in drawings and etchings. Commenting on the Fifth Plague in the Liber Studiorum, John Ruskin expressed his displeasure at what Paley calls a possible “presentiment of modernity.” For Ruskin, the pyramids looked like “brick kilns” and the fire running along the ground resembled “the burning of manure.”[1] What Ruskin probably discerned is a link between scenes of apocalypse and the industrial revolution. One facet of the apocalyptic sublime that was overlooked in the early phase of romantic studies was the effect of the industrial revolution on apocalyptic sublimity. Paley understandably confines himself predominantly to history painting and landscape, the two main genres that tend to incorporate the concept of the sublime in visual art. But what of attempts to represent the “dark satanic mills,” Blake’s shorthand for the hellish nature of factories, mills, and other manifestations of industry that blighted people’s lives in the nineteenth-century? Fortunately, this omission was addressed in a direct way by the German art historian Francis D Klingender who combined the knowledge of an art historian with the specialist skills of a sociological and economic historian aware of issues like population growth and economic trends.[2] Klingender sought out imagery of industrial centres of power like Coalbrookdale and Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and compared the way different artists like Cotman, Martin and Wright drew and painted factories, bridges and other symbols of the industrial revolution. Klingender also delved into the causes behind the Industrial Revolution and the symptoms that characterised its malaise. After the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath, Europe succeeded to an “Age of Despair” with expressions of discontent even present in the drawings of a member of the comfortable, provincial middle-class like George Walker who drew factory children and coal miners in ragged clothes next to the machinery of the age (above) thus suggesting the deleterious effects of the industrial revolution on the working populace.[3] Despite the arguments of the father of political economy Adam Smith that the meanest individual in commercial society was better provided for in a “civilized” country than a “savage,” discontent grew and manifested itself in frame-breaking and repressive responses from the government. Nor were the romantic poets convinced by Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population that “misery and vice would always be the lot of mankind.”[4] Poets violently rejected this pessimistic judgement: Shelley condemned the “population principle” while Byron, Blake and Wordsworth each scorned the supplanting of art and humanism by political economy and science in their own way.[5]
[1] Ruskin, Modern Painters Vol III, cited in Paley, Apocalyptic Sublime, 105.
[2] Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, (Paladin, 1947).
[3] Ibid, 96-97.
[4] Ibid, 99.
[5] Blake, “The Four Zoas”- “Compel the poor to live on a crust of bread through soft mild arts.” Byron’s attacks on Malthus in “Don Juan,” “Thou shalt not marry- unless well.” Wordsworth’s sorrowful meditation of the effects of industry on the rural countryside where even the “short holiday of childhood” seems to have been taken from the workers in “The Excursion” and other poems.
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