Signs of the Times and the Transition of Ages
In 1829 Thomas Carlyle wrote of the move to the Mechanical Age- why is it such a beautiful and evocative passage?
For our first piece this month I want to discuss one of my favourite passages of proto-Victorian literature. It was written by the Scottish Essayist Thomas Carlyle, and first appeared in the Edinburgh Review in June 1829 as part of an essay entitled Signs of the Times, which is essentially a antecedent of Carlyle’s later contributions on the “Condition of England” question, which so occupied writers later in the period concerned with the English working class in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. It runs as follows:
“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls his sail, and lays down his oar; and bids a strong, unwearied servant, on vaporous wings, bear him through the waters. Men have crossed oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-king has visited the fabulous East; and the genius of the Cape were there any Camoens now to sing it, has again been alarmed, and with far stranger thunders than Gamas. There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire-horse invoked in his stead. Nay, we have an artist that hatches chickens by steam; the very brood-hen is to be superseded! For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highways; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.”
It finds such favour with me for several reasons. The first is aesthetic. I find it to have a rhythmic beauty perfectly mirroring (perhaps somewhat ironically, though surely intentionally) the subject matter under discussion. It calls back to the classical era, to the reformation, to the scientific revolution, and to the ideological revolutions of the 18th century. It carries a peaceful nostalgia for days of artisanry and a direct link between people and the world they inhabit without intermediary devices, without slipping into Luddite-like reactionary ranting. And as a proud Mercian, I am bound to love the reference to the Birmingham Fire-king, Carlyle’s shorthand reference to steam mechanisation, and the inexorable spread of industrialisation.
While Carlyle writes with concern about the impact of industrialisation on the moral and physical health of both citizens and the nation, there is also a (somewhat grudging admiration for the wonders of the new age. The sailor is borne on a “strong, unwearied servant”, the horse replaced by a “fleet fire-horse”, and the range of tasks performed by devices stretches from the practical (“mincing our cabbages”) to the more inchoate (“casting us into magnetic sleep”). I do not believe that any of us in the modern world can truly appreciate how fantastical the Industrial revolution must have seemed to the folk who witnessed it reshaping their world and their lives.
If Carlyle seems to struggle somewhat to reconcile his fears for the future and his amazement at it, then we cannot blame him. It is easy to look back with hindsight and say that the Industrial Revolution was a positive thing, but for those looking down its barrel and seeing their bucolic and agrarian world slipping away in the fire and heat and steam of turning wheels and gasping, wheezing metal. There is a reason that authors veer always to the characterization of early machinery somewhat ironically as beasts. For those who lived through it, if beasts they were, then they must have seemed like deadly chthonic beasts, drawn from beneath the earth like Behemoth itself, cast in dead metal shells and belching smoke and steam like some ghastly Lernean Hydra, particularly given the not entirely edifying casualty rates of pre-health and safety legislation factories and workshops.
The passage captures a moment, the likes of which I am unconvinced mankind will ever see again. The Mechanical Age arrived from the depths with world-changing rattles and bangs, dark satanic mills rising from what had been pristine countryside without so much as a by-your-leave to those who lived there or had worked the land for generations. It blew the gentle inexorability of the agricultural revolutions out of the water, and left a legacy of urbanisation, industrialisation and globalisation in its wake. Later revolutions would not have so stark an impact. The atomic revolution arrived with two big bangs, and then rapidly became a part of life, something to be suspicious of in much the same way as the Industrial revolution had, but didn’t materially change the personal worlds of the vast majority of people in the same way. The transition to the information age by contrast came almost silently, slipping into our worlds and rapidly becoming part of our everyday lives, encouraged by increased general prosperity and access to goods.
The intangibility of the information age however renders it different. You could see the impact of industrialisation on the landscape, see the machine turning away in a manner that made it impossible to ignore, and comprehensible to minds that understood that it was simply doing the work that they had once done, albeit in a more efficient fashion. They may not have understood the ‘how’. But they understood the ‘what’. The information age is different. How many of us can truly say we understand what goes on in our telephones or computers when we make a call or send an email? In advanced programming, we barely even know the ‘what’ these days, and the idea that your average person could learn what makes our silent machines tick, or dismantle one and put it back together in a way that would make it work again is for the birds. And I’m not talking about twitter, though I might well be.
The revolution Carlyle described changed society in unimaginable ways. It’s effects would in large part lead twenty years later to the Revolutions of 1848, which shook the European monarchies and echoed around the world, and whilst these revolutions were largely put down by force of arms, the ideologies behind them were not so easily cowed and would make their changes incrementally over the next half century. We still stand at the start of the revolution that the information age has brought, and maybe in the long term it will prove to have similarly major effects, but that remains to be seen.
Carlyle was writing however before that change, an age of absolutism (which it has to be said Carlyle was not intrinsically opposed to) and imperialism, but he clearly saw it on the horizon. One of his major skills was in seeing social tensions and strains, and the concerns he would later refine considering the Condition of England question were not the only ones that perhaps find more modern echoes. The passage also contains previews of modern day concerns about how we live in harmony with nature. Which of us has not seen mountains being removed in the pursuit of mega-projects today? And which of us cannot agree with the idea that “we war with rude nature”, and whilst we may come away victorious, the ambiguities of despoliation may have more of an impact on our moral selves that we might like. Whilst the cause for concern may have changed from the primarily spiritual and purity considerations of the Victorian era, to the more rationally grounded concerns of the climate emergency and sustainability there is a remarkable redolence between the two.
One of the things that would later come to dominate much of Carlyle’s thinking with the rise of the Chartist movement, about which he would later publish a pamphlet, was social inequality. The next paragraph of Signs of the Times is another one that is difficult to read in the modern era without a knowing and sad nod:
“What wonderful accessions have thus been made, and are still making, to the physical power of mankind; how much better fed, clothed, lodged and, in all outward respects, accommodated men now are, or might be, by a given quantity of labour, is a grateful reflection which forces itself on every one. What changes, too, this addition of power is introducing into the Social System; how wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor, will be a question for Political Economists, and a much more complex and important one than any they have yet engaged with.”
The concentration of wealth in limited numbers of hands is still one that often dominates discourse, and political economists have still not fully reckoned with how this weirds social relationships and societies as old structures are fought over in pursuit of their alteration, maintenance or destruction. Carlyle was clearly correct when he identified this as a more complex and important question that the ones they were accustomed to dealing with. Even the incremental development of almost two hundred intervening years, along with all their attendant change have not proven possible to resolve it.
In line with much of Carlyle’s thinking the essay as a whole is strong on the virtue of physical labour (he would in fact later call this the “Chivalry of labour”), an idea which would later flourish into the concept of muscular christianity that would so come to dominate particularly British public schools of the time. The spiritual morality and the physical body, closely linked, each radiating from the person as a sign of the other. It is here perhaps that we find the biggest contrast between the transition to the Mechanical Age and the transition away from it into the Information Age. The remainder of Carlyle’s essay, and much of his following philosophy concerns the impact of mechanisation on this virtue. For someone who so staunchly believed in this link, the industrial revolution must have seemed terrifying indeed. In the modern world the idea of the virtue of labour is less prevalent (save perhaps in those who look at sweatshops and the like and pontificate that it is better to work for a pittance than not to work for nothing). These days, prestige tends to generally come from intellectualism, rather than physical acts.
The idea of labour being spiritually virtuous has, other than perhaps in conservative cultural groups, been gradually eroded in the intervening two centuries. Quite why is for another time, though I would wildly speculate that a large part of this is from general global moves away from dominant government by physical force to more consent-based governance. Add into that increased literacy and social mobility, and the fact that it was increasingly easier (though no doubt still difficult) to move up the ladder by intellectual means than by physical ones, and you have a move in the direction of the modern world.
The information revolution, unlike the industrial one, was not so much about physical labour, but intellectual labour. It’s in the name really. Whilst it has revolutionised production chains and the like too, this is largely by way of command and control, as opposed to physical changes. The machines most factories use to produce their goods are in principle little different than they were one hundred years ago, though their motive force may have changed from steam to electricity, but instead of being operated by a man, they are operated by a computer. The biggest changes wrought by the information age have come however not inside production but in our everyday lives. The advent of the internet particularly has made information more accessible to anyone with access, and increasingly that’s most people. Those who try to regulate the flow of this information have discovered how difficult this can be.
There is another historical echo here between Carlyle’s time and our own. Twenty years after he wrote the passage in question, as previously discussed, Europe was shaken by the failed revolutions of 1848. More or less the same length of time after the internet reached mainstream adoption (albeit in a nascent form), the Arab world was shaken by the Arab Spring, another series of (ultimately failed) revolutions driven by the changes wrought by the Internet age. Similar to the events of 1848, despite their prima facie failure, the echoes of those uprisings continue to ring, and we may not yet have seen the end of their effects. Whilst I would generally disagree with the sort of simplistic cyclical theories of history (of which, incidentally, Carlyle was a major proponent) it’s difficult not to note the similarities.
The information revolution has also brought with it concerns about public morality, though with the link between physical strength and virtue being broken these have reverted to being the same old slightly reactionary concerns about change that have been perpetuated through history, unfortunately it has to be said, often by the old against the young. The distaste for the new was probably best summed up with (as with so many other things) by the late great Douglas Adams:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things
In the third point, Adams sums up nicely the spiritual thrust of Carlyle’s arguments. The Mechanical Age is against the natural order of things. It is not merely inorganic, not just the “Steel” Age- it is somehow alien. “Nay” he declaims, “we have an artist that hatches chickens by steam; the very brood-hen is to be superseded!” What could be more unnatural than the very usurping of the act of genesis? As an act of immorality (such as the spiritually concerned) would see it, I think it’s difficult to see anything comparatively emergent from the Information Revolution. The moral fear is as intangible as the substance of the thing.
Soo might we be able to retool Carlyle’s prose for the transition from the Mechanical Age to the Information Age? To say farewell from the cohesive world, to the incoherent one? We might at least try:
“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, Moral, or Mechanical Age, but, an all around Information Age. It is the Age of Ideas, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided freedoms, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting everything to everything else. Nothing is now done directly, or by solely human direction; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, a programmed force is prepared to take over. Our old modes of thought are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the studious mind is cast aside, to make room for a hundred angry voices. The book remains dusty and dry on the shelf, whilst the glass that holds all knowledge is casually scrutinised. The voice of the expert, the noisemaker, the politician is drowned out by the cacophonous howls of the masses. No more do people cross oceans to seek knowledge and enlightenment, the world is brought to our doorsteps by the contrivances of a tiny artificial area of a greater world. Every Machine is driven not by command of man directly, but by intermediary machines, in pursuit of greater efficiencies, and lesser costs. Where once our minds were the sole locus of existence, we stand on the precipice of birthing other minds to do our thinking for us. No information is beyond the reach of any man, either practical or theoretical, and no corner of the cosmos or nature evades attention. And still, we remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highways; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our endless knowledge, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.”
A poor effort perhaps, the language too suitable for the age of steel over that of silicon, but maybe that was inevitable. The transition between these ages is a different thing in the modern world as we have explored. Perhaps at some point there will be another seismic shift worthy of Carlyle like prose, but I cannot see it. When it does, perhaps we can reconvene our little group.
Apologies for the delay on this one I’ve been moving house, moving jobs, being in a show, and all manner of other things. Normal service will be resumed.