Dark Satanic Mills: The Return of the Sublime in the Age of Capitalist Endeavour.
According to Klingender, the sense of despair at the rise of political economy and divorce of art from science caused painters to turn back to the eighteenth-century to reclaim the sublime. Then as now, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Frankenstein conceived at the Villa Diodati might have suggested the dangers of unleashing forces beyond the control of humans on the world; but for painters there was a ready-made symbol of the “scientific forces in society”- Milton’s Satan.[1] Added to this was an interest in the ruins of the ancient East, particularly Nineveh and Babylon which the painter John Martin explicitly connected with the “contemplation of the grand and the marvellous,” i.e. the sublime. Writing on his Fall of Nineveh exhibited in 1827, Martin observed “Seen through the mist of age, the great becomes gigantic, the wonderful flows into the sublime.”[2] Interestingly, this preoccupation with ancient Eastern civilization crossed over to the language of architecture and engineering during the Industrial Revolution. Use of oriental words and terms infiltrate descriptions of modern factories, bridges and engineering as in writers like Sir Walter Scott who drew parallels between the energy of James Watt in an introductory epistle to his novel The Monastery, and “Gouls and Afrits [Mohammedan devils] of the Eastern stories.”[3] And certain monuments of the Industrial Revolution like the Liverpool terminus of the Liverpool and Manchester Railways had Moorish designs, thus certifying the link between architects and archaeologists in the romantic period.[4] But it is the Christian Hell filtered through Milton’s sonorous poem that influences both written and painted descriptions of the infernal regions which are easily convertible into critiques of the monuments of capitalism as in Joseph Wright’s Arkwright’s Cotton Mill (above) which shows the lighted windows of an all-night cotton mill, inviting radicals to make the connection between the artificial light inside needed to keep the wheels of industry turning and the fires stoked by Satan in the infernal regions. This was to be most famously expressed in Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” and his comparison of the “turning wheels of heaven” to the “mills of industry” in his poem “Milton.”[5] Here, the mills have cosmic significance since they might also denote the mechanism of the Newtonian universe which provides the momentum for the planets to move in their courses, and by extension the economic system to continue on earth until the end of the world.
[1] Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 104.
[2] Cited in Ibid, 105.
[3] The appearance of this word in early 19th century literature may owe something to Beckford’s oriental fantasy Vathek (1786) which uses the aesthetic of the sublime to conjure up impressions of vast buildings and the hubris of their architects. Beckford was also a patron of Turner and Danby.
[4] Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 108.
[5] “And of the Wheels of Heaven. To turn the Mills day & night.”
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