John Martin, Milton & and the Industrial Revolution
For the poet Robert Southey, one of the wonders of the British Industrial Age, the Caledonian Canal, was strongly reminiscent of the scenes in John Martin’s pictures of both coalmines and Satan’s Hell in Paradise Lost. And in fact sometimes there is very little difference between Martin’s painting of engineering works and the fires of Hell since, to use Klingender’s words “John Martin gave Hell the imagery of industry” while “contemporary illustrators gave industry the image of Hell.”[1] Inspired by the anti-Newtonian Blake, Martin smelted the ore of Milton’s imagery into the pictorial language of the Industrial Revolution. So, “a bridge of length prodigious” built by Sin and Death in Paradise Lost was turned into a causeway within a tunnel, no accident as Brunel was driving the Thames Tunnel at that very time. The public were first admitted to it on 27th February 1827, the year that Martin’s Paradise Lost was published, and this might explain why Martin exchanged Milton’s structure for a contemporary one.[2] Such famous engineering achievements as the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the Menai Bridge in their early as well as final stages may owe something to Martin’s designs. As an apocalyptic painter with an engineering bent, Martin was rather spoilt for choice; he could pick from the infernal architecture of Hell’s builder Mulciber whose crew built the Palace of Pandemonium in “Paradise Lost”; or he could take inspiration from the large institutions of the Liverpool and Manchester Railways whose station facades appear in such overwrought inventions as Belshazzar’s Feast, or The Great Day of his Wrath (above), which according to Martin’s son was inspired by a journey through the Black Country in the dead of night as well as remembrance of a passage in the Book of Revelations.[3]
[1] Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 109. Recently, in his Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013) the cultural historian Jonathan Crary suggestively made the link between Wright’s depiction of Arkwright’s cotton mill and capitalism’s 24/7 society.
[2] “Paradise Lost,” Book X; Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 106.
[3] Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 116: “The glow of the furnaces, the red blaze of light, together with the liquid fire, seemed to his mind truly sublime and awful.”
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