Europe: A History (139 page)

Steam-power and machines, however, could not be put into widespread use unless coal—the most efficient fuel for raising steam—could be mined on a much expanded scale. This was achieved through a number of innovations, including underground pumps, Humphry Davy’s safety lamp (1816), and the use of gunpowder for blasting. Machines, equally, which had to be made of hardened steel, could not be built in quantity unless the production of iron and steel could be expanded. This was achieved through a series of improvements, including those
introduced at the Carron ironworks in Scotland (1760) and Henry Cort’s patents for the puddling and rolling of steel (1783–4).

The concentration of industrial workers under one roof, in a ‘factory’, long preceded the arrival of power-driven machinery. (‘Factory’ is a shortened form of ‘manufactory’, meaning ‘production by hand’.) Silk factories, carpet factories, and porcelain factories had been common enough throughout the eighteenth century. But the installation of heavy plant, requiring constant servicing and regular supplies of fuel and raw materials, turned factory organization from an option into a necessity. The sight of the ‘dark satanic mills’—vast, gaunt structures the size of a royal palace, set incongruously beside some little stream whose water they consumed, and belching forth pungent black smoke from a chimney the size of Trajan’s Column—came first to the textile settlements of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The appearance of factories caused the sudden growth of new urban centres. The archetype lay in Manchester, capital of Lancashire’s cotton industry. The first British Census of 1801 showed that Manchester had grown tenfold in a quarter of a century, from the proportions of a single parish to a town of 75,275 registered citizens. If population was drawn to new factory towns, it is also true that factories were drawn to the few large centres of existing population. Cities such as London or Paris, with a large pool of artisans and paupers, were attractive targets for employers seeking labour.

Inland communications were crucial; they had to be rendered as cheap and as effective as maritime trade. Huge loads of coal, iron, and other commodities such as cotton, wool, or clay needed to be moved from mines and ports to the factory. Manufactured goods needed to be delivered to distant markets. River, road, and rail transport were all involved. Once again, the greatest incentives arose in Britain. In 1760 the Duke of Bridgewater’s engineer, James Brindley (1716–72), improved the scope of earlier canals by building a marvellous waterway that crossed Lancashire’s River Irwell on the Barton Aqueduct (1760). In 1804, at
Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick (1771–1833) coaxed a high-pressure steam locomotive into pulling coal wagons along a short railway. It proved more expensive than horses. In 1815 J. L. McAdam (1756–1836) gave his name (universally misspelled) to a system of road construction using a chipped-stone base and a tar surface.

Nothing could happen without money. Immense amounts of money were needed from investors willing to take immense risks to make immense but uncertain gains. Such money could only be forthcoming in countries where other forms of pre-industrial enterprise had accumulated a ready store of venture capital.

Demographic factors were also critical. It is not hard to understand the workings of the demographic motor where the processes of the Industrial Revolution generated an increase in population, and an increasing population encouraged the processes of the Industrial Revolution. The difficulty is to see how the motor was initially primed and fired. Certainly, in France, there was a long period of demographic impotence, where
la grande nation
of Europe, twenty million strong, proved incapable of increasing the population levels of the last three centuries. Great Britain, in contrast, enjoyed many advantages: prosperous farmers, mobile labourers, skilled artisans, ready supplies of coal and iron, an extensive network of trade, small internal distances, commercial entrepreneurs, a rising population, and political stability. It was decades before anyone else could begin to compete (see Appendix III, p. 1294).

Collectivism—the conviction that society as a whole may have rights and interests—was not well articulated in this period. It ran contrary to the individualism which had been strongly emphasized since the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. But it was an important development. It was implicit both in the idea of the modern state, which stressed the commonality of all its subjects, and in the discussions of the physiocrats and economists about the workings of the socio-political organism. It was explicit in Rousseau’s concept of the general will, and was a cardinal principle with the utilitarians. It may well have been encouraged by the mobs and crowds in Europe’s growing cities, by the sight of industrial workers pouring through the factory gates. At any rate, the power of the collective, whether ruly or unruly, could impress the imagination not just of philosophers but of generals, rabble-rousers, and poets.

Romanticism thrived on the growing tensions. After the initial inroads in Germany, the next generation was swelled by poets and publicists in England— notably by the trio of young Lakeland poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), and Robert Southey (1774–1843), and by the astonishing William Blake (1757–1827), poet, engraver, illustrator. German Romanticism was still productive. Goethe’s friend, Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), published his historical dramas
Wallenstein
(1799),
Maria Stuart
(1800), and
Wilhelm Tell
(1804) at a time when Goethe had moved off in another direction. But by the time that Wordsworth climbed the cliffs at Tintern in 1798, it was the English Romantics who were taking the lead. Europe was already plunged into the horrors of war and revolution. Mankind seemed to be irrational
to the point of self-destruction. The world was ever more incomprehensible. The untrammelled rule of logic and reason had come to an end:

Ah! Well a day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the albatross
Around my neck was hung.
⁷

* * *

Oh rose, Thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
Hath found out Thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Doth Thy life destroy.
⁸

Here, if ever, were Freudian verses almost a hundred years before Freud,
[FREUOE]

Defiant young rebels were staking out the frontiers of Romanticism still further. In 1797 in Germany, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis, 1772–1801) composed the mystical
Hymnen an die Nacht
, in which, like Dante for Beatrice, he sublimated his passion for a long-lost love. In 1799 Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), younger brother of the translator of Shakespeare, Dante, and Calderon, wrote the scandalous novel
Lucinde
which suggested that love of beauty should be the supreme ideal. In France, François-René Chateaubriand (1768–1843) published the
Essai sur les revolutions
(1797) and his
Génie du Christianisme
(1801) in the teeth of contemporary conventions. In 1812 in England, the outrageous Lord George Byron (1788–1824) published
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, which was to launch a Europe-wide cult.

Important, too, were the salons and centres which propagated the new ideas. The Jena circle of the Schlegel brothers was influential in Germany. But pride of place must go to Germaine Necker (Mme de Staël, 1766–1817), daughter of Louis XVI’s chief minister and one of the most effective purveyors of romantic ideas. An author in her own right, Mme de Staël held court, first on the Rue du Bac in Paris and then in exile, to all the literati of the day. Her novel
Delphine
(1803) had feminist leanings;
Corinne
(1807) was a manifesto of passion;
De l’Allemagne
(1810) was a tract that made the world of German Romanticism accessible to France.

Reason was not tamed, however, until the philosophers themselves turned against it. Vico’s earlier divergences from the Enlightenment were pursued in the unlikely setting of East Prussia. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), undoubtedly a giant among philosophers, bridged the gap between Reason and Romanticism. A pietist, a bachelor, and a creature of pedantic routine, he was peculiarly insulated from the stirring events of his lifetime. He never once left the environs of his native Königsberg, and made himself all the more inaccessible by writing dense, contorted, professorial prose. (‘Coleridge’s Kantian phase’, writes one commentator, ‘did not improve his verse.’
⁹
) None the less, Kant’s three Critiques
presented a body of ideas to which almost all subsequent philosophers claim to be indebted.