SOURCE: “The Scientific Muse: The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin,” in Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, edited by L. J. Jordanova, Rutgers University Press, 1986, pp. 159-203.

[In the following essay, McNeil explores the historical and cultural background against which Darwin endeavored to combine science and poetry.]

The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a flourishing of provincial culture in Britain. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), who, amongst other things, was a medical writer and practitioner, a poet, an inventor, and a theorist of education and agriculture, was a central figure in this blossoming. He was a founder of some of the provincial societies which were generating this activity: the Botanical Society of Lichfield, the Derby Philosophical Society, and the Lunar Society of Birmingham.

The Lunar Society was particularly important and has been described as ‘the chief intellectual driving force behind the Industrial Revolution’ (King-Hele, 1977, 13). This was a circle of provincial men whose major interest was science, particularly as applied to industry. The group functioned between 1765 and 1791, but its most active phase was in the period 1781 to 1791. Besides Darwin, the best-known members of the group were: Matthew Boulton (1728-1809), the Birmingham manufacturer and James Watt's business partner; Thomas Day (1748-89), author of the children's classic The History of Sandford and Merton (1783-89), reformer and experimenter in Rousseauesque modes of education; Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817), reforming landlord in Ireland and designer of carriages and other mechanical inventions; Samuel Galton (1753-1832), manufacturer and scientific experimenter; James Keir (1735-1820), industrial chemist; Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), leader of the dissenting community, and an experimenting naturalist known for his work on air and phlogiston; James Watt (1736-1818), the steam engine inventor; Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95), the potter; John Whitehurst (1713-88), geologist and clock constructor; and William Withering (1741-99), a medical practitioner who was associated with the early medical use of digitalis.

The lively provincial culture of this period was outward looking, and Darwin's network extended beyond the Lunar Society. It included Joseph Banks (1743-1820), the botanist and President of the Royal Society; Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), experimenter in pneumatic medicine and chemistry; Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), the American statesman and man of science; and William Hutton (1726-97), the geologist. Like his more famous grandson Charles Darwin (1809-82), Erasmus theorized about the development of the natural world.

‘The first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded man’ (Logan, 1936, 12)—this was Coleridge's description of Darwin. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the work of this ‘literary character’ was his attempt to bring together science and poetry. In the Advertisement to The Botanic Garden (1791), he expressed his ambition to ‘inlist Imagination under the banner of Science; and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones which form the ratiocination of philosophy’.

This ambition to ‘inlist Imagination under the banner of Science’ characterized all of Darwin's poetry. His first major work was the lengthy didactic poem The Loves of the Plants (1789). This was followed by The Economy of Vegetation, a poetic exploration of the features of nature, which was published with a second edition of The Loves of the Plants in 1791. The two works comprised The Botanic Garden, which established Darwin as a popular poet of his day. This combined volume was also an unusual contribution to scientific knowledge in that its copious footnotes and additional notes were primarily designed to enhance the contemporary understanding of nature.

After the appearance of The Botanic Garden, Darwin published substantial treatises on educational, medical and agricultural theory: A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1793); Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (Part I, 1794, Parts I-III, 1796); Phytologia; or, The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1800). The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society was his final work, and it appeared posthumously in 1803. In The Temple, he returned to the poetic form, employing it to unveil the progressive operations of nature, from the beginning of microscopic life to society.

This essay explores the roots and character of Darwin's project of bringing together science and poetry. I will argue that Darwin's attempt to integrate the worlds of science and poetry was neither fortuitous nor eccentric. Hence, my first premise is that the Darwinian project was an historically significant one which deserves explanation. My second premise is that the Industrial Revolution was not only an economic and social transformation but also a cultural transformation and that this facet of the Revolution merits more consideration. I shall indicate how Erasmus Darwin's poetry embodied part of this cultural transformation. My examination of Darwin's ambition to bring together science and poetry begins by situating him in the eighteenth-century poetic debate concerning science. From there I shall move to a consideration of Darwin's own picture of industrialization, suggesting the social and political roots of his poetic presentation of science and technology. The third part of my analysis consists of an examination of how Darwin's poetic form complements his political perspective on science and technology. In particular, I consider his view of the imagination and his use of poetic devices. My overall aim will be to demonstrate how Darwin's poetry represents the cultural face of the economic, social and political transformation of the Industrial Revolution.

I

Erasmus Darwin has been described as ‘the first English poet to interpret modern science’ (Logan, 1936, 147). Darwin celebrated various scientific and technological accomplishments including Wedgwood's innovations in pottery production, Boulton's coining machinery, the engines of Newcomen, Savery, and Watt, Franklin's experiments on electricity, and Arkwright's transformation of cotton processing. Science and technology were the recurring themes of his poetry as he wrote of fire, steel, tools, steam engines, philosophical bellows, lightning rods and countless other similar topics. Despite claims concerning Darwin's vanguard position, his poetry can be considered as part of a poetic debate concerning science and technology which spanned the eighteenth century in Britain.

Not all the participants in this debate shared Darwin's enthusiasm for contemporary science and technology. A less favourable interpretation was taken earlier in the century by Henry Brooke (1703-83) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Brooke wrote in Universal Beauty (1735):

For deep, indeed, the eternal founder lies,
And high above his work the maker flies;
Yet infinite that work, beyond our soar;
Beyond what Clarkes can prove, or Newtons can explore.

(Brooke, 1778, 42, lines 319-22)

A similar scepticism about science pervaded Pope's Essay on Man (1733-4). Pope suggested that there were definite limits to what science could teach humanity about nature:

Superior beings, when of late they saw
A mortal Man unfold all Nature's law,
Admir'd such wisdom in an earthy shape,
And shew'd a Newton as would shew an Ape.

(Pope, 1753, Epistle II, lines 31-4)

While recognizing Newton's achievement, he felt strongly that this accomplishment was only remarkable within the boundaries of the human perspective of nature. For both Brooke and Pope the limitations of the human mind were concretely manifested in science.

However, eighteenth-century science (particularly Newtonianism) did receive a good deal of positive poetic attention (Nicolson, 1946). James Thomson (1700-48) offered one of the many poetic effusions over the accomplishments of science in The Seasons (revised edition, 1746):

Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds
Form, fronting on the sun, the showery prism;
And to the sage-instructed eye unfold
The various twine of light, by thee disclosed
From the white mingling maze.

(Thomson, 1901, 11, lines 208-12)

The chief distinction between the earlier, more negative approach to science (in the work of Brooke and Pope) and the enthusiasm for science expressed by poets such as Thomson and Mark Akenside (1721-70) resulted from two different estimations of the significance of the human perception of nature. For Brooke and Pope, science was restricted precisely because it was the tool of a finite creature, the human being. It was a limited tool employed to explore the infinite magnitude of God's creation, nature. For Akenside and Thomson, however, only the human comprehension of nature mattered. For them the accomplishments of Newton and other scientists should be celebrated as extensions of the human perspective of nature. Accordingly, Akenside contended that Newton's description of the rainbow actually intensified the human experience of this part of nature (Akenside, 1744, 50-1). Thomson's eulogy of Newton is noteworthy in this regard:

When Newton rose, our philosophic sun!

(‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’, line 90 in Thomson, 1901, 439)

For Thomson, Newton's role in natural philosophy was equivalent to that of the sun in vision. Emphasizing the intrinsic and exclusive importance of human awareness of nature, Thomson's metaphor created the impression that human knowledge was a sort of universe of its own with Newton at the centre.

A third poetic approach to science in the eighteenth century brought together the scepticism of the first wave and the sense of the primacy of the human mind that characterized the second variety. D. J. Greene has sketched the dynamics of this third poetic school as manifested in the attacks on Newtonianism by Christopher Smart (1722-71) and William Blake (1757-1827) (Greene, 1953). The necessary primacy of the human mind in any science was one of the central tenets of both Smart and Blake. This commitment is obvious in Blake's Vision of the Last Judgement:

The Last Judgement is an Overwhelming of Bad
Art & Science. Mental Things are alone Real;
what is call'd Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its
Dwelling Place; it is in Fallacy, & its
Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence
Out of Mind or Thought?

(For the year 1810, in Blake, 1972, 617)

Greene has shown that for both Smart and Blake the passivity of the mind in relation to the physical world, implicit in the Newtonian and Lockean dualistic and materialistic cosmology, was unacceptable. Locke (1632-1704) considered the mind to be a tabula rasa upon which sensations made their impressions. This was the primary source of ideas. In reworking Locke's analysis of mental operations, Berkeley (1685-1753) had insisted upon the impossibility of anything existing independently of perception. This led him to the radically sceptical position of denying the existence of all matter. Greene considers that these poets explored the central problem of Newtonianism, identified by Berkeley, of metaphysical pretensions which evaded the crucial issue of how one moves from individual sensations to objective statements regarding an external nature. As I have outlined above, the poetic effusions over Newtonianism (especially in the works of Thomson and Akenside) shared the presumption that there were no problems in this area.

The poetic accounts of science and technology took a fourth direction in the final decade of the eighteenth century. The optimism of Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824) and Erasmus Darwin regarding contemporary science and technology created an affinity between their work and that of Akenside and Thomson. Nevertheless, Knight and Darwin were sensitive to many of the issues raised by Smart and Blake. In The Progress of Civil Society (1796) Knight set the tone of his poem with his initial query about the key epistemological issue of the era:

Whether primordial motion sprang to life
From the wild war of elemental strife;
In central chains, the mass inert confined
And sublimated matter into mind?—
Or, whether one great all-pervading soul
Moves in each part, and animates the whole;
Unnumber'd worlds to one great centre draws:
And governs all by pre-establish'd laws?—

(Knight, 1796, 3)

He concluded that such questions were unanswerable and that his poem should deal with the accessible:

Let us less visionary themes pursue,
And try to show what mortal eyes may view.

(3)

Thus, this poem became a graphic display of the progress of human inventions:

Still one invention to another leads,
And art to art, in order slow, succeeds.

(50)

And,

          Thus more effective implements were found
To raise the building, and to till the ground
Labour by art was methodized and fed;
And man's domain over nature spread.

(51)

Knight implied that there was an organic relationship between men and their inventions in one section of the poem:

Each bright invention rear'd its infant head:
Science and art their various powers combined,
To polish, charm, and elevate mankind.

(82)

This image also recalls the image of nature as the child of God conveying both the organic and divine facets of human creativity in invention.

Although Knight's treatment of human progress as reflected in technology was close to Darwin's, there were crucial differences between the two poets. Darwin, unlike Knight, did not shy away from the epistemological problems which they both recognized as fundamental. For Darwin, the only method whereby human claims to knowledge of nature and natural laws could be validated must involve a monistic account of a common origin for nature and mind. The Creator had ‘stamped a certain similitude on the features of nature’, he claimed in Zoonomia, ‘that demonstrates to us, that the whole is one family of one parent. On this similitude is founded all rational analogy’ (Darwin, 1801, I, Preface). He thus pinned his hopes on the possibility that a science of life would overcome the epistemological problems regarded by Smart and Blake as the fundamental shortcomings of Newtonian natural philosophy.

Darwin's expectations for the unifying effect of a science of life were set out in the first lines of The Temple of Nature:

          By firm immutable immortal laws
Impress'd on Nature by the great first cause,
Say, Muse! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms and kindled into life;
How Love and Sympathy with potent charm
Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;
Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,
And bind Society in golden chains.

Darwin sought to provide a framework which would incorporate all social, intellectual, and moral developments into the operations of nature. ‘The laws of motion therefore are the laws of nature’, he observed in the first page of his medical treatise Zoonomia, before outlining those laws as they related to the human body and mind. The Temple of Nature sketched the progressive operations of these laws of motion, from the first appearance of primitive life to the most sophisticated technological and moral achievements of Darwin's society.

This project was unique. For Darwin the verification of the organic unity of mind and nature through a science of life offered the only possible solution to the epistemological dilemmas plaguing eighteenth-century natural philosophy and poetry. The reaction to Darwin's solution was typified by the Edinburgh Review's charge that one of his most serious errors in The Temple of Nature ‘arises from constantly blending and confounding together the two distinct sciences of matter and of mind’ (II, No. I July 1803, 449). The Newtonian version of Descartes's duality was too firmly entrenched to be shaken by Darwin's gropings towards a science of life.

The foregoing discussions show how distinctive Darwin's poetic handling of scientific and technological themes was. His juxtaposition of descriptions of inventions with poetic portraits of the vegetable world in The Loves of the Plants was not anomalous or bizarre. This striking move paralleled the life, experience, and happiness of plants with human life, experiences, and perpetuation through technology. For Darwin, the loves of plants and the achievements of eighteenth-century science and technology were two equally important aspects of the operations of nature.

II

The preceding section described Darwin's optimistic view of science and technology. This section will suggest that his perspective was rooted in his social and political position within the Industrial Revolution. Thus, to grasp the cultural and political significance of Darwin's view of science and technology, it is necessary to turn to his poetic portraits of production.

The excerpts from Darwin's lengthy poems which are most pleasing to the twentieth-century reader are those which describe mechanized production in the early Industrial Revolution:

—Quick wheels the wheel, the ponderous hammer falls,
Loud anvils ring amid the tumbling walls,
Strokes follow strokes, the sparkling ingot shines,
Flows the red flag, the lengthening bar refines;
Cold waves, immersed, the glowing mass congeal,
And turn to adamant the hissing steel.

(The Economy, Canto II, lines 187-92)

Other machines also captured his poetic imagination. This industrial muse sang of pumps, the printing press, Boulton's coining apparatus, and of the mechanical processing of cotton:

—First with nice eye emerging Naiads cull
From leathery pods the vegetable wool;
With wiry teeth revolving cards release
The tangled knots, and smooth the ravell'd fleece;
Next moves the iron-hand with fingers fine,
Combs the wide card, and forms the eternal line;
Slow, with soft lips, the Whirling Can acquires
The tender skeins, and wraps in rising spires;
With quicken'd pace successive rollers move,
Then fly the spokes, the rapid axles glow;—
And slowly circumvolves the labouring wheel below.

(The Loves, Canto II, lines 93-104)

The footnotes accompanying these lines describe cotton production in considerable detail. Darwin provides his readers with a vivid picture of the mechanical operations identified with the Industrial Revolution.

There is a second kind of industrial poetry in The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature, praising the products of the new mechanical production and new factories. Wedgwood's pottery, Boulton's coin and medals, steel, and steam itself are celebrated by Darwin:

          Hail, adamantine steel! magnetic Lord!
King of the prow, the plowshare, and the sword!
True to the pole, by thee the pilot guides
His steady helm amid the struggling tides,
Braves with broad sail the immeasurable sea,
Cleaves the dark air and asks no star by Thee—

(The Economy, Canto II, lines 201-6)

The preceding selections are representative of Darwin's industrial poetry. They present certain features of industry: raw materials, the mechanical inventor or factory owner, machinery, and products. However, the labourer's role in the production process was totally ignored. Hence, except for the initial creativity of the inventor or the entrepreneur, Darwin conjured the image of purely mechanical industrial production.

A particularly striking example of this disembodied picture of industrial work is found in one of Darwin's descriptions of cotton processing:

So Arkwright taught from Cotton-pods to cull,
And stretch in lines the vegetable wool;
With teeth of steel its fibre-knots unfurl'd,
And with silver tissue clothed the world.

(The Temple, Canto IV, lines 261-4)

The verb ‘taught’ has no object here. Whom did Arkwright teach? This picture implies that those who learned from Arkwright were irrelevant to the process or that the knowledge which Arkwright conveyed was embodied in the machine itself which can ‘cull and stretch … the vegetable wool … [and] … its fibre-knots unfurl'd’. The manufacture of cotton and the great achievement of clothing the world were shown as the result of the interaction between the inventor and the machinery. The workers and the labour process which integrated work, raw materials, and the means of production are given no place in this sketch of the marvels of industrial production.

Darwin's salute to that bastion of freedom, the printing press, provides even starker evidence of his failure to acknowledge the labourer and the labour process in industry:

          enlighten'd realms possess
The learned labours of the immortal Press;
Nursed on whose lap the birth of science thrive,
And rising Arts the wrecks of Time survive.

(The Temple, Canto IV lines 269-72)

Here it is ‘the Press’ that ‘labours’ (my emphasis). Darwin had used a similar construction in The Loves of the Plants when, in reference to cotton processing, he wrote of ‘the labouring wheel’ (Canto II, line 104). Within his poetry, machinery completely usurps the role of living labour. For Darwin, it was the press and not those who operated it which guarded precious social liberties.

Darwin gave poetic expression in his silence to two features of the Lunar Society involvement with industrialization: the preoccupation of members with mechanical inventions, and their difficulties with living labour. He and the other members of the Lunar Society were prolific inventors and among the leaders in the mechanization of production in Britain (Schofield, 1963; King-Hele, 1977). So, it is necessary to turn to their interactions with the industrial labour forces.

Those members of the Lunar Society who were in direct contact with workers were repeatedly reminded of the ‘refractoriness’ of labour. Matthew Boulton was convinced that the quality and quantity of production could only be improved through large-scale machine production (Smiles, 1865, 173). Watt lamented ‘the incapacity and unsteadiness of his workmen’ (Smiles, 1865, 226, 251-3; Muirhead, 1859, 262-3). He complained in his letters to Boulton about this unreliable component within industry. Wedgwood shared these grievances. As Smiles put it, ‘he had considerable difficulty with these workmen, who were wedded to their own ways, and could scarcely be brought into conformity with their new master's modes of workmanship’ (Smiles, 1894, 42). The nineteenth-century philosopher of ‘self-help’ estimated that ‘the management and discipline of his workmen’ were Wedgwood's principal difficulties. The pottery industry remained one of hand manufacture well into the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in Wedgwood's resolve to ‘make such machines of Men as cannot err’ (McKendrick, 1961, 34), there is an indication of how machinery exercised its dominion over the labour process even in a non-mechanized factory.

Wedgwood confronted his labour force both ideologically and actively armed with Lunar Society visions of ‘industrial progress’. In 1783 while he was on a trip to London, a food riot broke out at Etruria. In response to the uprising, Wedgwood published An Address to the Young Inhabitants of the Pottery to convince the young members of the community of the error of their elders' ways. He described the transformation undergone by the community and concluded that ‘Industry has been the parent of this happy change’ (Wedgwood, 1783, 22). Thus, he did not handle this riot by addressing himself to the causes of discontent, fears of hunger and unemployment among the labour force. Rather, Wedgwood used the occasion to expound on the merits of industrialization. Like Darwin's, his vision of industrialization completely ignored the labourer's experience.

Darwin's poetry was thus strategically related to Lunar Society ideology and practice during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution. The Society's experience was indicative of how the worker ceased to be the centre of the productive process with the coming of large-scale industry. Marx analysed theoretically, as a stage in the development of capitalism, the displacement of the labourer within production which was recorded in Darwin's poetry:

The full development of capital, therefore, takes place—or capital has posited the mode of production corresponding to it—only when … the entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct skilfulness of the worker, but rather as the technological application of science. [It is,] hence, the tendency of capital to give production a scientific character; direct labour [is] reduced to a mere moment of this process.

(Marx, 1974, 699, [my emphasis, editor's interjections bracketed])

Darwin's poetry was not the only cultural expression of this fundamental shift occurring during the Industrial Revolution. Raymond Williams has traced how the very word ‘industry’ and its derivatives assumed new meanings during the last decade of the eighteenth century. He explains that, prior to this period, industry ‘was a name for a particular human attribute’ (my emphasis). In the 1790s, ‘it became a collective word for our manufacturing and productive institutions, and for their general activities’ (Williams, 1963, xiii, and 1983, 165-8). Williams also claims that it was in the nineteenth century that the adjective ‘industrious’ describing persons was supplemented by ‘industrial’ describing institutions. This is one in a conjunction of vocabulary changes which he sketches and which relate directly both to Darwin's industrial poetry and to the transformations involved in Britain's industrialization.

There are three facets of industry as described in Darwin's poetry: the intellectual achievement of the industrial designer, the operation of the machinery, and the product. The labour process and manual labour have been completely sifted out of his vision of work and production. On some occasions this is expressed in a glorified picture of the labour involved and the attribution of such labour to the inventor or the entrepreneur:

So with strong arm immortal Brindley leads
His long canals, and parts the velvet meads
Winding in lucid lines, the watery mass
Mines the firm rock, or loads the deep morass.

(The Economy of Vegetation, Canto III, lines 349-52)

It is important to note that it was not Brindley who ‘Mines the firm rock, or loads the deep morass’ and who did the physical labour involved in such a project. Moreover, phrases such as ‘parts the velvet meads’ and ‘winding in lucid lines, the watery mass’ obscure the hard physical labour involved in canal building. Similarly, in his description of pottery production, the labour is attributed to ‘Gnomes’ who magically perform the work required. This focuses attention on Wedgwood as the person who assembled these magical forces:

          Gnomes! as you now dissect with hammers fine
The granite-rock, the nodul'd flint calcine;
Grind with strong arm, the circling chertz betwixt,
Your pure Ka-o-lins and Pe-tun-tses mixt:
O'er each red saggars burning cave preside,
The keen-eyed Fire-Nymphs blazing by your side;
And pleased on wedgwood lay your partial smile,
A new Etruria decks Britannia's Isle.

(The Economy, Canto II, lines 297-304)

In his last poetic work, The Temple of Nature, Darwin's separation of mental and manual labour and his celebration of the former are most obvious. In his presentation of Arkwright's accomplishments quoted previously (p. 173) Darwin used a pedagogical verb, thereby emphasizing that the ideas and knowledge of inventors and entrepreneurs, rather than the physical labour of workers, were the important factors transforming the contemporary environment.

Darwin's poetic works praised his heroes of the industrial era: entrepreneurs, inventors, and scientists. These were the men whose ideas, rather than whose physical labour, propelled large-scale manufacture. He employed several devices which further aggrandize their achievements. He juxtaposed mythological heroes and gods with contemporary scientists and industrialists, which creates the impression that the latter are the modern equivalent to the former. He associated these modern heroes with futuristic visions of technological triumphs and attributed magical powers to them:

So savery guided his explosive steam
In iron cells to raise the balanced beam;
The Giant-form its ponderous mass uprears,
Descending nods and seems to shake the spheres.

(The Temple, Canto IV, lines 249-52)

Darwin's heroes of the modern world include Watt, Boulton, Priestley, Arkwright, Newcomen, Franklin, Wedgwood, and Brindley. Their stature was highlighted by his references to ‘immortal Brindley’, or ‘immortal Franklin’. He conjured images of men with Faustian powers over nature.

This respect, verging on reverence, for the industrial innovators and men of science of his day did not manifest itself only in his poetry. Darwin was doubly fascinated by machines and mechanical genius. He kept abreast of the mechanical innovations of his day to such an extent that he could write to Boulton about the many improvements that had been made in Arkwright's machinery, confidently asserting ‘all which I am master of, and could make more improvements myself’ (King-Hele, 1981, 141).

Darwin captured the increasing separation of mental from manual labour which Marx regarded as the foundation of large-scale industry:

The separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labour, embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with these three forces, constitute the power of the ‘master’.

(Marx, 1976, 548-9)

Darwin's poetry highlighted the achievements of science, and celebrated the powers of scientists, industrialists, and machines over nature. But, as Marx demonstrated, these powers implied new power over labourers.

While Darwin acknowledged the technical domination of nature realized by industrialists, he was largely silent about their social domination over their workers. While describing the mode of production, he neglected the social relations of industrialization. This becomes obvious when his pictures of industry are contrasted with other contemporary judgments. About the same time that Darwin offered his poetic description of the mechanical processes of Arkwright which ‘with silver tissue clothed the world’, Sir Thomas Bernard (1750-1818), a contemporary philanthropist, presented a very different, albeit paternalistic, perspective on cotton manufacture:

Our national individual increases of wealth, from the manufacture of cotton, has been attended with so much injury to the health and morals of the poor, and is so utterly destructive of that which constitutes the essential and fundamental virtue of the female character; that if I am not permitted to suggest a doubt, whether it would not have been better for us that cotton mills had never been erected in this island, I may at least express an anxious wish, that such regulations may be adopted and enforced, as shall diminish, if not entirely remove, the injurious and pernicious effects, which must otherwise attend them.

(Bernard, 1805, II, 362, his emphasis)

In his Political Register, the champion of political reform, William Cobbett (1762-1835), alluded to similar unpleasant features of this industry:

Some of these lords of the loom have in their employ thousands of miserable creatures. In the cotton-spinning works, these creatures are kept, fourteen hours in each day, locked up, summer and winter, in a heat from eighty to eighty-four degrees. The rules which they are subjected to are such as no negroes were even subject to.

(Cobbett, 1824, 458, his emphasis)

For Cobbett, domination of nature went hand in hand with domination of labourers. Looking at cotton manufacture from the perspective of labourers, his picture of this mechanized industry was altogether less glowing than Darwin's.

Darwin's focus was on technological innovations as individual achievements. His acknowledgment of only the mental component involved in inventions caused him to view technological triumphs as the product of a specific mind or genius rather than of a social process. However, the history of eighteenth-century technology shows that seldom was any innovation the exclusive creation of an isolated individual (Marx, 1976, 493; Fitton and Wadsworth, 1958, 76). Furthermore, the realization of inventions required skilled craftsmanship, as Marx recognized:

the inventions of Vaucanson, Arkwright, Watt and others could be put into practice only because each inventor found a considerable number of skilled mechanical workers available, placed at their disposal by the period of manufacture.

(Marx, 1976, 503)

At least three members of the Lunar Society and heroes of Darwin's poetry—Wedgwood, Boulton, and Watt—were dependent on craftsmen. Indeed, Watt had originally been a craftsman himself. Nevertheless, Darwin conveyed no sense of this dimension of technological history, because he took for granted that the impetus for innovation came exclusively from mental labour.

Darwin's demarcation of the spheres of mental and manual labour reflected the very character of the Lunar Society. The group was a loosely bound conglomerate of men of ideas. For the most part, they concentrated on generating ideas which were executed by others. Darwin, for example, had local carriage-makers build the vehicles which he designed. Likewise, Wedgwood conceived of the scheme of making copies of the Portland vase, and his labourers realized his ambition.

The first section of this article situated Darwin within the poetic debate concerning science and technology in eighteenth-century Britain. I then considered the social and political roots of Darwin's optimism concerning science and technology. This industrial muse sang of the machines, the products, and the entrepreneurs and scientists of the new era. Although mechanization was slow and piecemeal, the production process shifted from one which was labour-orientated to one which was machine-orientated. I have shown how Darwin's poetry captures this transformation both in what it celebrates and in its silences. He also presented poetically the growing division between mental and manual labour realized with industrialization. His view of technological production was part of a new and powerful industrial image of society and culture.

III

Watching the dawn of industrialization in Britain, Erasmus Darwin sang of a new humanity which could re-create both itself and its world. Hence, he expressed the specific experience of the industrial bourgeoisie as the universal expansion of human powers. The imagination was the crucial instrument which Darwin invoked in his project. In addition, his use of certain devices—particularly personification and the pathetic fallacy—was strategic to his poetic vision. Thus, I shall now turn to the poetic modes employed by Darwin in his celebration of science and technology.

In the Preface to The Temple of Nature, Darwin simply stated his aim as ‘to amuse by bringing distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature’. It is significant that he addressed his poem to his readers' imagination, the faculty which intrigued investigators of human nature at this time. Furthermore, he labelled his task as the production of ‘the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature’, thereby invoking the visual emphasis that predominated in his poetic work. Ernest L. Tuveson has described the centrality of the conception of imagination in eighteenth-century British thought. He traced the development of an interpretation of the relationship between God and humanity in which nature became the mediator and imagination the faculty which facilitates salvation (1960). The contributions of Hobbes, Locke, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson to this tradition are highlighted in Tuveson's account. Even from the perspective of a less explicitly religious framework, imagination tended to be regarded by most eighteenth-century philosophers as a bridging mechanism. It was seen as a mediator between human sensory faculties and intellectual and higher faculties. Alexander Gerard (1728-95) was one of the many exponents of this view: ‘those internal senses from which taste is formed, are commonly referred to the imagination, which is considered as holding a middle rank between the bodily senses, and the rational and moral faculties’ (Gerard, 1780, 143). Mark Akenside took a similar stand in ‘The Design’ of The Pleasures of Imagination: ‘There are certain powers in human nature which seem to hold a middle place between the organs of bodily sense, and the faculties of moral perception: they have been called by a very general name, the Powers of Imagination’ (1744, 5).

By addressing his poetry to the imagination Darwin also seemed to recognize the mediating potential of this faculty. His Advertisement to The Botanic Garden suggested his endorsement of such a role for the imagination:

The general design of the following sheets is to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science; and to lend her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter, ones which form the ratiocination of philosophy. While their particular design is to induce the ingenious to cultivate the knowledge of botany, by introducing them to the vestibule of that delightful science, and recommending to their attention the immortal works of the celebrated Swedish Naturalist, Linnaeus.

The familiar eighteenth-century instrumentalist view of the imagination as a vehicle to a higher state is secularized here. The imagination is invoked as mediating between sensual poetic images and ‘the ratiocination of philosophy’. In this scheme, science replaces God as the telos of human struggle. The phrase ‘immortal works’ plays on the eighteenth-century religious tradition described by Tuveson while locating its dynamics in a new, entirely human setting.

Darwin's poetry appealed not just to a mediating but also to a visually orientated imagination. In the Proem of The Loves of the Plants, he beckoned his readers: ‘Lo, here a camera obscura is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas, and magnified into apparent life!’ He then explained that he had tried to restore plants to their original animality in his poem with portraits, ‘Which thou may'st contemplate as diverse little pictures suspended over the chimney of a Lady's dressing-room’. This poem was presented as a series of portraits of plants. The Preface to The Temple of Nature indicated a similar intention to bring before the imagination ‘images of the operations of nature’. The content of these works realized their author's intention. Thus, after his invitation to ‘walk and view the wonders of my inchanted garden’, Darwin led his readers through his poetic garden of portraits of various plants in The Loves of the Plants. Similarly, in The Temple of Nature, he provided his readers with a panorama of nature. Nature, as a visible goddess, appears in the successive settings of the production of life, the reproduction of life, and the moral sphere. He characterized his own poetry as ‘pure description’ (The Loves, 40).

This poetic practice was reinforced by theory. In the first Interlude of The Loves of the Plants, Darwin argued that poetry should use few words denoting abstract ideas: ‘And as our ideas derive from visible objects of our other senses, the words expressive of these ideas belonging to vision make up the principal part of poetic language. That is the Poet writes principally to the eye, the Prose-writer uses more abstracted terms.’ He contended that personification and allegory were eminently suitable poetic devices because of their ability to appeal to the visual sense. In the second Interlude of this poem he extended his analysis, explaining that the simile ‘should have so much sublimity, beauty, or novelty, as to interest the reader; and should be expressed in picturesque language, so as to bring the scenery before the eye’. In the third Interlude, he expounded on the similarities between the sister arts of painting and poetry. The poet should provide pictures of the operations of both nature and human nature. The artist and the poet should both busy themselves ‘making sentiments and passions visible … this is done in both arts by describing or portraying the effects or changes, which those sentiments or passions produce upon the body’. Thus, Darwin endorsed the long-standing ‘ut pictura poesis’ tradition which extolled the similarities between painting and poetry (Cohen, 1964; Hagstrum, 1958; Praz, 1970; Spacks, 1967; Graham, 1973). This concern with the visual dominated not only Darwin's poetic theory, but also his epistemology. His definition of ideas in The Temple of Nature indicated that he regarded them as the product of the interaction between the visual and tactile senses as the ‘successive trains of the motions, or changes of figure, of the extremities of the nerves of one or more senses’ (Canto III, fn. 398). He gave ideas a physiological definition as provoking a visible change in body figure. This notion of ideas was captured poetically:

          As the pure language of sight commands
The clear ideas furnished by the hands.

(Canto III, lines 163-4)

Hence, his entire epistemology was founded on a visual framework.

Darwin's interest in vision, was rooted in his own physiological work. He devoted a large section of Zoonomia, his medical treatise, to a detailed explanation of vision, and he considered various problems of visual distortion and illusion. His son, Dr Robert Darwin, had investigated the degree of pleasure and pain experienced by the eye when exposed to various stimuli, and the son's treatise on this topic was included in Zoonomia. Erasmus Darwin pursued this investigation with speculations about the possibility of ‘luminous music’ drawing on Newton's ideas of the spectrum of colours.

The background to this emphasis on the visual sense is important. Newton's Opticks (1704) had launched the physiological investigation of vision and the exploration of the problems of vision, light, and colour which came to preoccupy many eighteenth-century minds. Thus, Darwin participated in the scientific investigation of vision by natural philosophers which began with the Opticks and Berkeley's Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709). This scientific response to the Opticks was accompanied by a poetic response to which Darwin also contributed and which Marjorie Nicolson has explored in Newton Demands the Muse (1946).

The visual sense was also central to eighteenth-century speculations about ideas and knowledge. This development stemmed from Locke's highly visual epistemology. He described the process whereby the mind acquired simple ideas in An Essay Concerning the Human Understanding (1690):

Whatsoever is so constituted in nature, as to be able, by affecting our senses, to cause any perception in the mind, doth thereby produce in the understanding a simple idea; which, whatever be the external cause of it, when it comes to be taken notice of by our discerning faculty, it is by the mind looked on and considered there, to be a real positive idea in the understanding.

(Locke, 1706, 73)

Locke's use of a verb of vision was in line with his general interpretation of the mind as a ‘mental eye’. Joseph Addison (1672-1719) used Locke's notion of visual ideas to posit a visually stimulated imagination. In his influential essay in the Spectator in 1712 (entitled ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’), Addison established the basis for the subsequent exploration of this faculty with his claim that all the pleasures of the imagination ‘arise originally from sight’ (Addison, 1854, 270).

The poetry of Enlightenment Britain reflected the Lockean and Addisonian emphasis on the visual sense. Darwin joined Thomson, Collins, Gray, Smart, and Cowper in this tradition. Thomson, the most renowned nature poet of eighteenth-century Britain, specialized, like Darwin, in the production of panoramas of the operations of nature. Thomson's most famous work, The Seasons, can be ‘taken from the beginning to be a triumph of vision in the literal sense’ (Spacks, 1967, 46).

The push towards visually orientated poetry came from several directions. Painting exerted considerable influence on English poetry during this period (Hagstrum, 1958). On a more theoretical level, this trend was reinforced by specific aesthetic concepts, particularly the vogue for the ‘picturesque’ (the fashion for objects ‘which please from some quality capable of being illustrated in painting’) (Gilpin, 1792, 3; Hipple, 1957). Finally, the various styles of gardening were indicative of the attention given to visual experience during the century. Fashions in gardening, in turn, often influenced the nature poetry of the era (Paulson, 1971). Darwin had his own botanic garden in Lichfield which provided part of the inspiration for his poetic Botanic Garden. In his last, uncompleted letter, written on the day he died, to Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Darwin compared his garden to that of William Shenstone (1714-63), a minor eighteenth-century poet who created picturesque gardens (King-Hele, 1981, 338-9). For many of the nature poets of his century, the poet's verbal tour of nature offered visual sensations comparable to those experienced in a stroll through an English garden.

The legacy of Locke and Addison combined two strains: the identification of the visual sense with the faculty of reason (with knowledge and ‘clear ideas’) and the association of that sense with the faculty of imagination. Samuel Johnson (1709-84) captured these two kinds of vision in his dictionary of 1755. The entry for Imagination offered four definitions: two pertaining to the physical sensation and perception involved in vision, and two alluding to the imaginative experience denoted by the term.

Darwin was very much influenced by these developments. He drew on the dual affinities of the visual sense with reason and with imagination. His confidence that he could ‘Inlist Imagination under the banner of Science’ through his highly visual poetry was based on his recognition of the visual orientation of eighteenth-century natural philosophy. Furthermore, Darwin's strategy was instrumentalist not only in relation to the faculty of the imagination, but also in relation to the visual sense itself. He tried to use this sense to reorientate his readership towards the aims of his peers in the industrial Midlands, in particular towards the pursuit of science. Joseph Wright brought similar ambitions to the visual arts (Klingender, 1975, 43-64). The realization of the goals of eighteenth-century men of science and industry of understanding the natural world and of employing that knowledge within industry was transcribed into a poetic project by Darwin.

This project was undermined by the emergence of critiques of Enlightenment presumptions. There was a growing awareness of the limitations of the faculty of reason (Jones, 1961; Petit, 1963). Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) and his followers had argued that human behaviour was determined by the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. For them, pleasure and pain were crucial aids for functioning with a limited reason in the universe. M. H. Abrams (1971) has shown that the century witnessed progressive moves towards the conception of a truly creative imagination.

The increasing awareness of the expansive powers of the imagination demanded a recognition of that faculty's involvement with all senses or even its potential to carry human beings beyond the limitations of their senses. In this light, the exclusive reliance on appeals to the visual sense came to be regarded as a weakness rather than as a strength in poetry. Edmund Burke (1729-97) claimed as early as 1757: ‘Indeed, so little does poetry depend for its effect on the power of raising sensible images, that I am convinced it would lose a very considerable part of its energy if this were the necessary result of all description’ (Burke' 1803, 195). Late in the eighteenth century, Archibald Alison (1757-1839) compared the powers of the poet and of the painter from a similar vantage point: ‘The Painter addresses himself to the Eye. The Poet speaks to the Imagination. The Painter can represent no other qualities of Nature, but those which we can discern by means of the sense of sight. The poet can blend with those all the qualities which we perceive by means of our other senses’ (Alison, 1790, 91). Both Burke and Alison were moving away from Addison's conception of the imagination as an exclusively visually orientated faculty.

On the basis of this broadening of the dimensions of the imagination, many of Darwin's critics found his preoccupation with visual images the most unsatisfactory feature of his poetry. The Edinburgh Review deplored this aspect of his work, explaining that ‘it is surely a very unjust limitation of the natural range of poetry, to consider it as solely or ultimately employed in the production of such picturesque effects’ (II, No. IV, July 1803, 502). Working within the Addisonian interpretation of the imagination, Darwin had restricted the appeal of his poetry to the visual sense.

The natural philosophy of Darwin's century also came under attack for its preoccupation with visual images. The first lines of Coleridge's critique of David Hartley's (1705-57) theory exemplify this:

Of Hartley's hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This, with all other similar attempts to render that an object of sight which has no relation to sight, has already been sufficiently exposed.

(Coleridge, 1817, I, 106)

Hartley's work had been one of the most important influences on Darwin's theorizing about the natural world. Thus, Coleridge's criticism undermined one of the lynchpins of Darwin's natural philosophy. Burke and Alison had challenged the association of the imagination and poetry with the visual sense. Coleridge aimed his assault from the other direction, criticizing natural philosophy which was supported by a Lockean epistemology that regarded the mind as an ‘internal eye’.

The full implications of the Lockean-Addisonian tradition for eighteenth-century science and imagination were explored by William Blake, who also did some of the engravings for the illustrations of Darwin's books (Keynes, 1971, 59-61). Blake regarded Newton as the dominant figure of the century, and he recognized the particular potency of ‘the picture-language quality of Newton's system’ (Ault, 1974, 50). For him it was precisely its visual orientation which made Newton's cosmology equally appealing to the faculties of reason and imagination. Newton's system played on the duality of the visual, its inroads to reason and imagination.

Blake's explorations of the visual stood in direct opposition to Darwin's poetic project. The basis of this opposition is described in the following account of this facet of Blake's work:

Because Newton's system and Descartes' before him, submerged such powerful metaphors of vision under a logically consistent structure of reality, it is no accident that Blake, looking at them as a ‘visionary’ could appreciate the threat these powerful images posed to the human imagination. It was incumbent on him, then to appropriate many details from these systems and transform these supposedly ‘visualizable’ concepts into images in his poetry to operate symbolically, drawing their critical aspect from their oblique reference to scientific doctrines and their positive aspects from their independent operation in the poetry as metaphor.

(Ault, 1974, 50)

Blake was determined to rescue the imagination, which he felt had been threatened by Newtonianism. Hence, he stood steadfast against an instrumentalist view (such as Darwin's) of that faculty. To this end, he inverted the tradition of the visual orientation which dominated Darwin's poetry. While Darwin used the visual sense as a vehicle for scientific knowledge, Blake gave the visual image an independent status. He set about his task of liberating the imagination from the fetters of Newtonianism by freeing the metaphor of vision from its mediating role within eighteenth-century poetry and natural philosophy (Beer, 1969, esp. 260-3). Blake thereby imbibed the century's emphasis on vision, criticized it (as it was expressed in the Newtonian cosmology), and transformed it in his own use of ‘perspective’ and optical analogies:

          The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its
Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro' Eternity
Has pass'd that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind
His path, into a globe itself unfolding like a sun,
Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,
While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth
Or like a human form, a friend (with) whom he liv'd benevolent.

(‘Milton: A Poem in 2 Books’ (written and etched 1804-8), pt 15, lines 21-7, in Blake, 1972, 497)

The intimate relationship between the intellectual forces of the Enlightenment and the social dynamics of industrialization were manifest in the tensions between Blake's and Darwin's poetic projects. While these poets took opposing stands on such issues as the role of imagination and of reason, they both recognized that the British natural philosophy of the eighteenth century went hand in hand with a complementary set of social and literary conventions and values. For both, industrialization marked the culmination of the development of these forces.

Their disagreement was based on a difference in both social and literary perspective. Darwin was riding high on the triumphs of the industrial and scientific bourgeoisie. Buoyed by their success, he offered the century's most confident poetic testimony to their values: science as the avowed goal of poetry, exclusive reliance on the visual sense and an instrumentalist use of the imagination. For Blake, the impoverishment of the lower orders and the impoverishment of the imagination were part of the same process (Larrissey, 1982, esp. 103). In identifying with this segment of society, he saw the need to wage battle on their behalf against the entire heritage of the Enlightenment. Hence, Blake's mythical struggle against ‘Urizen’ was an effort to guarantee that Darwin's goal of enlisting ‘the imagination under the banner of science’ would not be realized. Urizen represented reason. As a tyrannical figure who threatened to dominate and destroy the universe, Urizen symbolized Blake's fears about the increasing reverence for reason in his period.

While Darwin employed an eighteenth-century view of a mediating imagination, he had a more innovative relationship to the forms of nature poetry characteristic of that century. The introduction of a poetic account of the struggle for existence constitutes his most important contribution to this literary form. He did have one predecessor in this new direction for nature poetry. In 1796, Richard Payne Knight published this poetic sketch of the struggle for existence within the animal kingdom:

Progressive numbers without end increase,
While nature gives them safety, food, and ease;
Whence, through the whole the balance to sustain,
And in proportion'd bounds each race restrain,
Each stands opposed to some destructive power,
By nature form'd to slaughter and devour;
And still, as each in greater numbers breeds,
More foes it finds, and more devourers feeds.

(Knight, 1796, 27)

Darwin extended the view of this struggle to include humanity:

          So human progenies, if unrestrain'd;
By climate friended, and by food sustain'd
O'er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong [sic], and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war and pestilence, disease, and death
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth.

(The Temple, Canto IV, lines 369-74)

For both Darwin and Knight the interaction between human beings and their natural environment as portrayed in the ‘climate and civilization’ poems was specified into the biological struggle for survival. Darwin incorporated ‘war’, ‘pestilence’, and ‘disease’ into this framework as the most prominent natural forces operating within the human environment. He does not discriminate between social and natural forces: ‘war’, ‘pestilence’, and ‘disease’ are all portrayed as natural. Nevertheless, they are personified, conveying the impression that nature is purposeful. In addition, the pathetic fallacy is used in reference to climate, suggesting that the sort of relationship that exists between the individual and the climate is equivalent to one of friendship. The total effect of the passage is a blurring of the boundaries between the human and the natural.

Darwin's poetry on this theme of the struggle for existence echoed the ideas popularized by T. R. Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). In that essay, Malthus argued that ‘A man … if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society does not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature's mighty feet there is no vacant cover for him’ (Malthus, 1803, 531). Just as some environmental poets of late eighteenth-century Britain envisaged social and moral characteristics as natural, Malthus regarded the political and economic forces operating in industrializing Britain as natural. Unemployment and starvation were the equivalents in Malthus's vision to ‘war’, ‘pestilence’, and ‘disease’ in Darwin's poetic descriptions. They were regarded as sets of natural forces.

A closer appraisal of the preceding quotation from Malthus reveals how he played on the merger of social, moral, and natural categories. He begins with a description of a social situation—that of a man unable to get subsistence from his parents and unable to find work. He then interjects a moral evaluation of that social situation: this man has no right to food, or to a place in his society. Finally, Malthus reinforces this moral evaluation by presenting it as nature's judgment on this individual's condition. The personification of ‘nature’ in the last sentence is the final ingredient in the subtle play on the categories of the social, moral, and natural. This personification parallels Darwin's use, as noted previously, of personification and the pathetic fallacy in a similar way.

Malthus and Darwin, through their play on the categories of the social, moral, and natural, lent legitimacy to the poverty and suffering of the lower orders during the early stages of industrialization in Britain. So, for example, it has been suggested that there were ‘ideological advantages’ in Malthus's appeal to an ‘authoritarian nature’, rather than to an ‘authoritarian ruling class’ (Copley, 1982, 160-2). This is not to say that they set such legitimization as their goal. Malthus's Essay was intended as a protest against the concept of perfectibility as espoused by Condorcet (1743-94) and Godwin (1756-1836)—a protest against their view that humanity was automatically progressing by virtue of the growth of scientific knowledge (Young, 1969; Flew, 1970; Passmore, 1970). Darwin, on the other hand, was preoccupied with the benefits of industrialization. His commitment to it as a progressive agent was so total and his identification with those gaining most in its wake was so unquestioned that he presumed that the destructive forces which he saw operating about him originated in nature rather than in his industrializing society.

William Blake, a contemporary of Malthus and Darwin, was not of the same opinion. He satirized Malthusian attitudes:

Compell the poor to live upon a Crust of bread, by soft mild arts.
Smile when they frown, frown when they smile; & when a man looks pale
With labour & abstinence, say he looks healthy & happy;
And when his children sicken, let them die; there are enough
Born, even too many, & our Earth will be overrun
Without these arts.

(‘The Four Zoas’, written and revised 1795-1804, ‘Night the Seventh’, lines 17-22, in Blake, 1972, 23)

Blake's use of the imperative—‘Compell’, ‘Smile’, ‘let die’—and his recurrent references to ‘arts’, convey his belief that the problems observed by Malthus were matters of social responsibility. The so-called natural forces of unemployment and hunger (discussed in Malthus's Essay) and disease (described in the quotation from The Temple) are portrayed vividly and personally. In fact, these lines have been considered as directly referring to Pitt's Malthusian policies (Erdman, 1977, 366-7). Blake, like Darwin and Malthus, also played on the merger of moral, social, and natural categories. However, he reversed the tendency inherent in the ideas of Malthus and Darwin. Rather than projecting the social problems of industrializing Britain onto nature, Blake telescoped these problems onto the individual conscience. For him, there were no abstract natural forces controlling society; there were only concrete, tragic social problems created by callousness and irresponsibility.

On a more general level, the development of the nature poetry of eighteenth-century Britain revealed the growing intimacy of the relationship between humanity and nature. Pope's Essay on Man (1733-4) was a forceful statement concerning the human position within the total framework of nature, in ‘The Great Chain of Being’ (Lovejoy, 1961). However, Pope's nature poetry (The Pastorals and Windsor Forest) indicates that his main interest was in a schema of human location within nature. From this perspective, Thomson's Seasons (first completed version 1730) represented a new direction for nature poetry. Its main concern and presumption was that each individual's relationship with nature was vital. For Thomson, nature was the primary focus of human life and of poetry: ‘I know no subject more elevating, more amusing, more ready to evoke the poetical enthusiasm, the poetical reflection and the moral sentiment, than the works of Nature’ (Preface to the second edition of ‘Winter’ in Thomson, 1901, 240). He regarded all aspects of human life, from the intellectual and artistic spheres to the moral, as directly affected by this fundamental relationship to nature. In a later work, The Castle of Indolence (1748), he explicitly sketched a picture of nature as created for humanity. Patricia Meyer Spacks has shown that Thomson used ‘description of nature as a method for approaching discussion of man’ (Spacks, 1967, 23).

This intimate relationship between humanity and nature was intensified and personalized towards the end of the century, particularly in the writings of William Cowper (1731-1800). In Cowper's poetry the generalized relationship between humanity and nature found in Thomson's or Akenside's work was transformed into the very personal interactions between individuals and nature. In Retirement (1782), for example, he described an individual who seeks ‘the refuge of some rural shade’ where

He may possess the joys he thinks he sees,
Lay his old age upon the lap of ease,
Improve the remnant of his wasted span;
And having liv'd a trifler, die a man.

(Cowper, 1782, 259)

Rather ironically, only by retreating from society to nature can the individual be restored and ‘die a man’.

The most concrete expression of the projection of human characteristics onto nature was the dominance of certain poetic devices. The most frequently used devices in the British poetry of this period were personification and the pathetic fallacy (the ‘attribution of human feeling to the natural world’). Josephine Miles and Earl Wasserman have produced detailed studies of the use of the pathetic fallacy and personification respectively (Miles, 1965; Wasserman, 1950). Both give well-documented accounts of the various functions of the two devices, and of the context which made them particularly suitable techniques. However, neither Miles nor Wasserman discussed in any detail the implications of the widespread use of these devices during the eighteenth century for the humanity/nature relationship.

Erasmus Darwin's friend and fellow-member of the Lunar Society, Joseph Priestley, described some of these implications in his account of the suitability of the device of personification:

As the sentiments and actions of our fellow-creatures are more interesting to us than anything belonging to inanimate nature, or the actions of brute animals, a much greater variety of sensations and ideas must have been excited by them and consequently adhere to them by the principles of association. Hence it is of prodigious advantage in treating of inanimate things, or merely of brute animals, to introduce frequent allusions to human actions and sentiments, where any resemblance will make it natural. This converts everything we treat of into thinking and acting beings. We see life, sense, intelligence everywhere.

(Priestley, 1777, 247, my emphasis)

Priestley's is a telling account of the appeal of the poetic devices of personification and pathetic fallacy. The desire to convert ‘everything we treat of into thinking and acting beings’ assumes the legitimacy of such a transformation. Moreover, this desire is distinguished from primitive anthropomorphism by the fact that it involved a conscious attempt to read human characteristics into nature.

Priestley's literary strategy paralleled other Lunar Society activities. Situated on the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution, the members of the society increasingly intervened in the natural world through science and technology. The growth of their economic and social powers during industrialization increased their confidence that the natural world was not a foreign realm but an appropriate sphere for human activities. Accustomed as he was to this form of intervention in the natural world, Priestley had no reservations in advocating an equivalent metaphorical intervention. The increasing dominion over the natural world realized by the Lunar Society found its literary expression in Priestley's advocacy of, and Darwin's use of, the pathetic fallacy and personification.

Given their situation at the leading edge of industrialization, Darwin and Priestley found the human dominion in the world unproblematic. Again, it must be emphasized that it was the unique situation of their class which fostered this presumption. Their literary strategy complemented their ambitions for science and industry. Thus, Priestley had no reservations about advocating the projection of human features onto nature through the use of the pathetic fallacy and personification. Likewise, Darwin depended on these devices and described a natural world which assumed human traits in all his poetic works.

If there was a general movement in eighteenth-century English poetry towards the merging of the categories of the human, the natural, and the divine, Erasmus Darwin's poetry represents the culmination of this movement. He used both personification and the pathetic fallacy frequently:

New woods aspiring clothe their hills with green,
Smooth slope the lawns, the grey rock peeps between;
Relenting Nature gives her hand to Taste,
And Health and Beauty crown the laughing waste.

(The Economy, Canto III, lines 197-200)

Nature, in all its forms and manifestations, behaved very humanly in Darwin's poetry. Nature was also portrayed as a goddess in both of his poetic books:

—Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same.

(The Economy, Canto IV, lines 377-80)

Despite the fact that many contemporary literary critics were sceptical about the use of machinery in poetry, he seemed convinced that it was appropriate to use it in his panoramas of nature and human nature. The attribution of divine characteristics further aggrandized nature and humanity.

Darwin's use of the pathetic fallacy, personification, and machinery can be seen as the continuation of the general tendency to coalesce humanity, nature, and God in the poetry of his era. However, his use of an industrial metaphor to describe the operations of nature was a unique contribution to this trend:

          In earth, sea, air, around, below, above,
Life's subtle woof in Nature's loom is wove,
Points glued to points in living line extend,
Touch'd by some goad approach the binding end.

(The Temple, Canto I, lines 251-4)

Hence, he explicitly described nature as a machine and life as the product of an industrial process. The use of this industrial metaphor reveals the vantage point of Darwin's poetic studies of nature. Enlightenment natural philosophy and industrial processes were brought together through the metaphor of the machine, the loom. Priestley had observed that, in looking at nature, it was appropriate that human beings should project their characteristics onto nature so that ‘We see life, sense, intelligence everywhere’. For Darwin, ‘life, sense, intelligence’ were quintessentially embodied in the industrial machine. This identification was by no means fortuitous. It related directly to his affiliation with the industrialists of the Midlands and to his allegiance to mechanical innovators such as Arkwright, Watt, and Boulton. Thus, Darwin's vision of nature and his peculiar expression of the coalescing of divine and natural powers in industrialization were directly influenced by his social setting.

The social roots of this vision become more obvious when Darwin's use of the metaphor of weaving is contrasted with that of William Blake. Writing a few years later, Blake drew on similar associations in constructing his metaphor: the mechanistic natural philosophy spearheaded by Locke and Newton, and mechanized industrial processes. Like Darwin, Blake depicted the meshing of industrial production and natural philosophy:

I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
Wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which
Wheel within Wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony & peace,

(‘Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion’, written and etched 1804-20, Plate 15, lines 14-20 in Blake, 1972, 636)

Darwin, excited by the God-like powers involved in industrial production, used the loom as an analogue for God's functioning within nature. His perspective was that of the inventors of, and controllers of, the machinery of production, Blake's perspective was that of labourers within ‘cruel works’. From this vantage point, appalled by the destructive consequences of industrialization, he used the same metaphor to condemn the philosophy which fostered industrialization and concomitantly, he felt, social tyranny.

CONCLUSION

This essay has examined Erasmus Darwin's attempt to bring together science and poetry. The first part of the analysis situated Darwin within the eighteenth-century poetic debate concerning science in Britain. His contribution to this debate can be characterized as an optimism about science and technology pinned to his hopes of establishing a science of life. Section II identified the roots of Darwin's optimism in the political and social experience of the Lunar Society during the Industrial Revolution. His industrial technological poetry represented the cultural face of the industrial transformation experienced in Britain at this time. His focus on machinery rather than living labour and on mental rather than manual labour were cultural expressions of crucial political and economic shifts in production and work during the Industrial Revolution. Finally, the third segment of the analysis described Darwin's view of the imagination and use of poetic devices. His instrumentalist use of the imagination, his visually orientated poetry, his employment of the poetic devices of personification and pathetic fallacy and of industrial metaphor, complemented the position of the Lunar Society during the early stages of British industrialization. Here Darwin's poetry contrasted sharply with that of William Blake. Viewing the Industrial Revolution from an opposite vantage point, Blake, unlike Darwin, wrote from the perspective of those for whom industrialization meant less not greater power.

Works Cited

For Darwin's biography, see King-Hele, 1977. For a description of the activities and concerns of the Lunar Society, see Schofield, 1963. Reviews of the political significance of much of the literature of Darwin's period can be found in Williams, 1963, and Butler, 1981. For a fuller account of Darwin's ideas in their historical context, see McNeil, 1986.

Abrams, M. H. (1971), The Mirror and the Lamp(first published 1953).

Addison, J. (1854), ‘On Pleasures of the Imagination’, inThe Spectator with a Biographical and Critical Preface and Explanatory Notes, vol. 3, 269–303.

Akenside, M. (1744), The Pleasures of Imagination. A Poem in Three Books.

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