Introduction: Romantic Studies and the "Shorter Industrial Revolution"

Introduction:Romantic Studies and the "Shorter Industrial Revolution" Jeremy Davies (bio) The essays published here make case that romantic literary studies has much to learn from recent scholarship in economic history. historiography of late eighteenth early ninteenth centuries offers new ways understand connections between Romantic cultural formations on one hand, other, fundamental changes Britain's social demographic conditions, its technological development, colonial, mercantile, ecological relations. Most all, these propose a made newly responsive concerns might have at heart kind ecocriticism. collection's title is eighth book Excursion (1814), dominated by reflections rise manufacturing system: An inventive AgeHas wrought, if not with speed magic, yetTo most strange issues. I lived markA unforeseen Creation riseFrom out labours peaceful Land,Wielding her potent Enginery frameAnd produce, appetite as keenAs War, which rests night or day,Industrious destroy!1 epithet Wanderer (who speaks lines) chooses for age first recall heroic myth Romantic-period industrial [End Page 187] development accomplishment few great inventors.2 His second sentence describes something different: an emergent "Creation" generated without conscious purpose interactions "labours" smaller ends view. appetites urge those labors are handled ambivalence. Are they contrary only obverse warlike impulses? Notwithstanding long decades war France, Wanderer's invocation "a Land" evidently sincere account nation's supposed inward character. assertion Britain redirected violent energies technologies toward flourishing lightly made, his extended meditation system goes show. But meditation's pessimistic side least equally forceful. Above denounces night-labor child labor mills: compulsion itself "rests day / Industrious," thereby hauntingly resembles acts it had promised alternative. Wordsworth's "inventive Age" implies more than epoch mechanical ingenuity. poetry typically uses "inventive" cognates senses creative playful contrivance, "old Poets" twentieth River Duddon sonnet when, previous Excursion, merry clergyman deflects personal questions humour" (Book 7, line 101). In "Stanzas written my Pocket copy Castle Indolence," Coleridge gift "inventions rare" amuse entertain.3 himself employed word Religious Musings almost technical term fine arts such when arise course society's progress: all th' arts, nurs'd soulTo forms beauty, sensual wantsUnsensualiz'd mind.4 this usage, arts" groundwork spirit's highest aspirations. Excursion's reference thus suggest both preponderance barren calculation means redemption mere instrumentalism. It designates various kinds creativity imaginative possibility could be either liberated confounded others. Wordsworth explained note describing characteristics he felt "compelled" "dwell upon baneful 188] effects arising ill-regulated excessive application powers . admirable themselves" (314). treatment "manufacturing industry," while certainly conservative orientation, was no simply rejectionist. Perhaps notable context, intensity perceived novel, strange, hardly less magical. Responses transformation British writing often involved complexities signaled phrase, comparable sense wonder sublimity. "Nothing seems too bold...