British Beauty: The Importance of Perspective in Encountering England
Michael Lieser
Beaver Country Day School
Chestnut Hill, MA
2008 NEH Seminar for School Teachers
Interpretations of the Industrial revolution in Britain
Coming to England this summer gave me something different from what I expected. I
envisioned that studying Britain’s industrial revolution would involve a stark contrast between a
rural, pastoral existence and urban, industrial life. In place of that clear-cut dichotomy, I’ve
found an intriguing blurring of the lines distinguishing nature from industry. What I’ve seen here
has dismantled the simplistic preconceptions shaped by my sense of wilderness and civilization
in the U.S. Somewhere along the way, I realized I was bringing an American point of view to a
place where it didn’t apply. Here in the U.K., it seems there is little room for untouched
wilderness, except for locations geographically removed from the patterns of mainstream life like
what I found in Scotland’s western highlands—the island is too small and has been inhabited too
long to have wilderness of the North American scale. Consequently, my encounter with the U.K.
this summer has led me to see things from a different point of view. Considering the industrial
revolution in this setting is introducing me to the difference between thinking like an American
and thinking like a Brit. The beautiful, striking things I’ve seen here have underscored for me
the importance of perspective. Perhaps the cliché holds true: beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
not in the things themselves. In weighing the consequences of industrialization upon humans,
I’ve determined that recognition of beauty all depends on one’s way of seeing. Seeing beauty
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requires the right frame of mind, whether it’s in a quaint Chelsea garden, a windy Derbyshire
moor, or a dark Highland loch.
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For me, one of the most intriguing aspects of visiting old industrial locations is seeing
how mills and furnaces built near rivers to harness waterpower have been reabsorbed into a
seemingly pastoral landscape. In her introduction to The Age of Manufactures, Berg
acknowledges how these “long abandoned industrial sites have been made a part of the national
heritage, a new picturesque landscape, a postmodern comment on the pastoral picturesque scenes
of the eighteenth century” (2). The placement of these mills and furnaces in such a postmodern
pastoral scene endows them with a beauty usually not associated with the industrial revolution.
The lush, peaceful appearance of Coalbrookdale takes on a new aspect after the discovery that all
the trees near the river were harvested for charcoal when the furnaces were operational. The
contrast between the way things look now and the way they must have looked then highlights the
softening effect of time. The valley we walked through in the rain was a different place than the
one John Sell Cotman portrayed in Bedlam Furnace. That panting doesn’t just portray the
furnace itself, but presents its relation to its landscape. The prevailing darkness of the imagery
appears to emanate from blast furnace chimney and spreads from there to blur with the clouds
and the trees. The place we encountered on our walk subtly revealed its inherent resilience, the
power allowing it to get beyond the ugliness Cotman saw in it. Envisioning the red, glowing
furnaces of de Loutherbourg’s Coalbrookdale by Night takes imagination—though that town
may have been the birthplace of global warming, from the look of things, it’s now producing
more oxygen than carbon dioxide.
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It’s interesting to see how artists, people accustomed to creating beautiful objects,
responded to industry. If there is beauty in de Loutherbourg’s depiction of fire in the night, it is a
far different kind of beauty than the pastoral aesthetic. As artistic minds worked to process the
phenomenon of mechanization, they seemed to develop their understanding of industry by
situating it in relation to the natural world. The awesome power of the Coalbrookdale flames
closely resembles Joseph Wright’s paintings of Vesuvius, portrayals of a natural, not a humanmade edifice, but one that also contains molten material that erupts in the night with heat and
light. Although Wright may not have had Vulcan, the Roman god of volcanoes and metallurgy,
in mind when he painted Vesuvius, setting his painting beside de Loutherbourg’s calls to mind
that mythological blacksmith at work in his subterranean forge. Our visit to Newcastle provided
an interesting take on Vulcan and the monstrousness of industry: the Virgil inscription next to the
massive metal Cyclops statue near the rail station underscores the importance of industrial anvils
and furnaces smelting ore to the North of England. The passage ends “Here is Vulcan’s place . .
.,” a statement that curiously connects that underground god to the one-eyed Greek monster. In
considering how perspective is an integral part of recognizing beauty it seems important that the
figure represented in that striking modern sculpture has only one eye.
Such a curious overlap of nature and industry complicates the binary conventionally used
to separate the two and evokes a much more complex notion of beauty. The beauty conceived by
the Romantic poets’ vision of the pastoral is much simpler in comparison. The contrast William
Blake achieved by balancing his Songs of Innocence with Songs of Experience hints at the
complexity of this vision, the inevitable movement from a simple understanding of the human
relation with the natural landscape to something more difficult and harder to comprehend.
Blake’s lamb and tiger, the animal representatives of innocence and experience, respectively,
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reflect that movement. The question posed in “The Lamb”—“little lamb, who made thee?”—is
easy to answer: God. Similarly the verse of the poem has a simple rhythm that verges on childish
singsong. “The Tyger,” however, introduces new, challenging considerations. Unlike the lamb,
the tiger comes across as a formidable and marvelous creature; to address its darkness and
potential for brutality, the poem presents its creation as a kind of industrial manufacture. “Tyger,
tyger burning bright / In the forests of the night / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy
fearful symmetry?” is far less of a pat question than the one asked of the lamb and it contains
considerably more fear and wonder. The “art” that twist[s] the sinews of thy heart” gestures
toward the craft of making such an animal, a process that is difficult to conceive because of the
malice hinted at in the animal’s destructive potential. The hammer and anvil used in tiger
manufacture evoke a far different process that the creation of a lamb inhabiting a setting “By the
stream and o’er the mead.” Asking the tiger “In what furnace was thy brain?” assumes that its
cranial organ is the product of a blast furnace like the ones at Coalbrookdale; the poem’s narrator
simply wants to discover which furnace would be capable of making a tiger brain and not just pig
iron. I’m intrigued by the way the challenge of coming to terms with Blake’s tiger speaks to the
industrial age.
In my encounter with the industrial revolution, I found myself less interested in
manufacturing processes and economic statistics than in the consequences of industrialization
and their impact on human life. The corresponding forces of capitalism and commercialization
did a lot to shape our modern world. Though London wasn’t strictly an industrial city, its
eminence in the U.K. made it a setting that projected the shift industry imposed on humanity.
Despite the view of the city as a symbol of progress and the refinement of civilization, not all of
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what clustered in this urban center was polished and cultured. In Southey’s Colloquies, Thomas
More gestures toward the degeneration enabled by the city:
London is the heart of your commercial system, but it is also the hot-bed of
corruption. It is at once the centre of wealth and the sink of misery; the seat of
intellect and empire and yet a wilderness wherein they, who live like wild beasts
upon their fellow creatures, find prey and cover.
In this description of the setting, the city effectively becomes a jungle, the province of wild
beasts. Here again, I found a curious crossing over of the natural world into industrialized
society. While there may be beauty in the achievements of London as a city, Southey presents a
different perspective on urbanization; there’s a potential for savagery in that place, something
brutal and ugly lurking within. In the way Blake includes “London” with “The Tyger” in Songs
of Experience he seems to be of a similar mind.
In “London,” Blake provides a bleak portrait of the capitalist urban center. The poem’s
narrator registers the prevalence of human hardship in that setting: “[I] mark in every face I meet
/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” The “mind forg’d manacles” heard in the voices of the
oppressed acknowledge the kind of slavery enabled by the city. That these manacles are “mind
forg’d” indicates the role of humans in creating and sustaining such oppressive constraints.
Unlike literal shackles, these manacles are manufactured by human consciousness. The irony in
this kind of slavery is the role the slaves play in maintaining their own captivity. The manacles
were initially conceived by those who originated and implemented the force of modern urban
capitalism, but the perpetuation of that slavery depends upon the forging of manacles in the
minds of the individuals wearing them. These people’s submission, their willful acceptance of
such limitations, is perhaps the most unfortunate consequence of industrialization. The
limitations imposed on their view of the world robbed their lives of vitality and meaning. In the
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Hammonds’ distinction of new industrial workers from handicraftsmen, they address the ugliness
resulting from such a limited perspective:
[T]hey worked among ugly things, in ugly factories or ugly mines, for though an
engine or a wheel may have a noble beauty and design, the beauty is obscured for
those who are tending to one small part of it and doing nothing else. (39)
The psychological losses that accompany new urban life are the cause of this ugliness, the
inability to recognize beauty. These people’s way of seeing, their way of living, is what makes
their lives ugly. The ugliness isn’t inherent to the things themselves—the engine and the
wheel—but is the result of focusing on such a small part of them that individuals are unable to
see the whole. Applying the Hammonds’ notion of ugliness to Blake’s vision of London makes
us aware of the inhibitions forced on modern humanity by exterior forces beyond their control.
As readers of his poem, we gain awareness of the darkness and dense misery accompanying the
movement from innocence to experience, the movement from humanity’s pastoral, Edenic
beginnings to its concentration in modern urban centers.
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It was getting late on the Sunday evening when I made it out of the Chelsea flat where I’d
spent the day watching movies and lazing around the greenhouse and the garden. When I finally
got myself together to go find Blake’s grave, I was surprised to discover that it was in East
London two blocks away from where I’d been out to a Hackney nightclub and afterparty a couple
weeks before. Although I never made it to his grave because the cemetery gate was locked—his
name not even one of the ones advertised on the stone pillars in the literary company of Daniel
Defoe and Thomas Hardy—my incomplete search left me musing on what he would make of the
London I was in now. My experience in that neighborhood around the Old Street tube stop
distinguished it from the quaint charm of Chelsea’s embankment, parks, and gardens. It was
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clearly more commercial and less picturesque, but perhaps it only seemed rougher and more
savage because my night at the Hoxton Pony, the club where a gin and tonic cost ten pounds,
ended with the theft of my date’s purse from the dark corner no more than 20 feet from where we
were on the dance floor. Though my time in London left me with an impression of its unique
urban beauty, a product of the expansive range of opportunities it has to offer, the neighborhood
surrounding Blake’s remains showed me how the city has a somewhat monstrous side as well.
In his vision of how London didn’t necessarily match common perceptions of civilization
and progress, Blake anticipates Marlow’s observation about the city that he uses to begin his
narrative in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “This also has been one of the dark places of the earth”
(9). That statement begins his narrative on the Thames which indicates that the darkness of the
book’s title isn’t to be found in the depths of the Belgian Congo, where Georgian Imperialists
might expect to find it, but in the city purporting itself to be the center of civilized culture, the
source of light for the British empire. Southey, Blake, and Conrad all acknowledge the darkness
and savagery of that ostensibly civilized place.
The notion of progress accompanying the industrial revolution gets complicated by
considering how industry affected perceptions of civilization. Although some considered the
proliferation of material luxuries afforded by the processes of manufacturing a marked
improvement in the quality of life, the effects on the lives of the laborers didn’t always include
such comfort and refinement. Often these laborers lived their lives in patterns that didn’t permit
them the finery of civilization; the ones who didn’t live amid the cultural urbanity of London had
fewer alternatives for the manacles that imposed upon their lives. In Industry and Empire, Eric
Hobsbawm quotes Alexis de Tocqueville on the consequences of industrialization in Manchester:
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“civilized man is turned back almost into a savage” (65). Hobsbawm goes on to liken that
industrial city to Dickens’ Coketown. He describes
the steely unplanned concentration of those who built them on utility and financial
profit, which Charles Dickens caught in his famous description of ‘Coketown’ and
which built endless rows of houses and warehouses, cobbled streets and canals,
but neither fountains nor public squares, promenades or trees, nor sometimes even
churches. . . . The city destroyed society. . . . The city was a volcano, to whose
rumblings the rich and powerful listened with fear, and whose eruptions they
dreaded. But for its poor inhabitants was not merely a standing reminder of their
exclusion from human society. It was a stony desert, which they had to make
habitable by their own efforts. (65).
The desert these laborers operate in leaves them with little of redeeming merit in their lives. In
Hobsbawm’s account, Manchester, like Coketown, is a place so intently structured on production
and hard practicality, what Hard Times’ narrator would call fact, that there isn’t space for the
other parts of life. The design of this gray, bleak existence facilitates movement back and forth
between home and work without any distractions of leisure or fun. Those things don’t exist in
this space. The Hammonds seem to have such barren culture in mind in the way they address the
role of setting in cementing the ugliness of laborers lives:
The towns were as ugly as their industries, with an ugliness in both cases that was
a symptom of work and life in which men and women could find no happiness or
self-expression; the brand of a race disinherited of its share of the arts and beauty
in the world. (40)
Here is a portrait of a setting without the possibility of achieving a perspective that allows
beauty. Such places condemned the lives of their inhabitants.
After reading the Hammonds’ indictment of industrial towns, what I found in the sites of
the old mills we visited was surprisingly picturesque. It was intriguing to discover the amount of
desirable real estate in these riverside hamlets. The government intervention that led to the
renovation and sale of homes in Coalbrookdale as well as the transformation of mills into luxury
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condos in Cressbrook and Calver suggests that these locations have commercial appeal. In these
places, the ugliness of industry had only a temporary grasp on the landscape. Once industry
exhausted the surrounding resources or was outmoded by changing technology and vacated these
settings, people began to recognize a beauty in them, but not exactly the beauty of untouched
nature. This transition from the raw industrial prominence to subdued historical charm
underscores how beauty and ugliness aren’t inherent to a setting, but instead depend on
perspective, the lens through which a place is viewed.
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Our efforts to view the industrial revolution through the lens of the laborers allows us to
take on their perspective; envisioning their relationship with the world around them shows us
how forces of technology and industry can be scary and threatening. While the limitations
imposed by Blake’s manacles probably didn’t permit individuals a full recognition of their
situation, stepping into the perspective of these “enslaved” laborers and trying to see the world as
they saw it highlights the monstrous effect of these forces on their lives. These monsters didn’t
originate independent of humanity, but instead are the byproducts of human progress.
In looking for the monsters of the industrial revolution, I’ve found the darkness in the
shadow of the grand edifice of mechanization and civilization to be the most likely place for
them to exist. These forces leading human life into modernity didn’t remove them from
existence; they were still about, but just in more discreet places. The coexistence of refinement
and barbarity indicates a kind of duality that marks modern human life. In The Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson creates a split character to explore that
territory. Jekyll’s status as an upstanding civic figure aligns him with the norms of Victorian
propriety, but Hyde’s transgressions undermine those norms. Stevenson set his novel in London,
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a fitting place for exploring the coupling of civility and vice. Hyde’s presence in the shadows of
the city indicates that parts of it may still be among the dark places of the world. Despite
Stevenson’s final choice of setting, he encountered the figures inspiring his novel through the
Edinburgh lore of his childhood. The legends of Thomas Weir and Deacon Brodie, ostensibly
upstanding Edinburgh citizens who secretly conducted themselves with such criminal deviance
that they were both executed when their crimes were discovered, befit a predominantly dark city
of gray brick. Its narrow streets and closes intensify that sense of darkness, such as West Bow,
which winds downhill from the Royal Mile to the Grassmarket, from the high culture of the city
to down to the pubs and one time brothels, as well as the site of the former gallows. The two
different sides of the city found on opposite ends of that street make it seem only appropriate that
Weir once lived there.
When I visited Edinburgh this summer, the city’s narrow streets and sudden changes in
weather reinforced the haunting legends that inspired Stevenson. Taking the tour of Mary King’s
Close, a part of the old city made into a network of subterranean tunnels by the construction of
the Royal Exchange over top of it imbued my perception of the city’s history with darkness.
However, hiking up Holyrood’s craggy hills after a morning downpour gave way to sunny skies
presented a wholly different view of the city, something akin to what Thomas Hearne portrayed
in Edinburgh Castle from Arthur’s Seat. Though that image depicts characteristic Scottish
variation in the color of the sky, there is a good deal of light coming through the high, wispy
clouds and shining on the city. There may be dark, shadowy places down between the buildings,
but this vantage has removed us from them. For me, those contrasting visions of Edinburgh
speak not only to the coexistence of Jekylls and Hydes, but more broadly to the way perception
of beauty and ugliness, darkness and light depends wholly on one’s perspective. In weighing the
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consequences of the industrial revolution on human life, it seems important to keep this notion of
perspective in mind. The developments that led society in the direction of our modern world are
too complex to be seen as only positive or negative, as strictly the advancement or corruption of
humanity. What matters is finding a balanced perspective to account responsibly for different
points of view.
Paintings Discussed
John Sell Cotman, Bedlam Furnace
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Philip de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale at Night
Joseph Wright, An Eruption of Vesuvius as seen from Portici
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Joseph Wright, An Eruption of Vesuvius, with a view over the Island in the Bay of Naples
Thomas Hearne, Edinburgh Castle from Arthur’s Seat
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William Blake, “The Lamb”
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William Blake, “The Tyger”
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William Blake, “London”
Works Cited
Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures 1700-1820. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Blake, William. Songs of Experience. New York: Dover, 1794.
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence. New York: Dover, 1789.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Hammond, J.L. and Barbara. The Town Labourer: The New Civilization 1760-1832, New
York: Harper & Row, 1970. First published by Longmans, Green and Company,
London, 1917.
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Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution. New York: The
New Press, 1999.
Southey, Robert. Sir Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society.
1829.