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A Brief Overview
Enlightenment Ideas
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), sometimes called "Father of Modern Science,believed that natural philosophy (what we call science) could be applied to the solution of practical problems. For Bacon, the problem was this: how could humans enjoy perfect freedom if they had to constantly labor to supply the necessities of existence? His answer was clear -- machines. These labor saving devices would liberate humankind, they would save labor which then could be used elsewhere.
"Knowledge is power," said Bacon, and scientific knowledge reveals power over nature.
This vision was all-important. It was optimistic and progressive. Humans were going somewhere, their lives had direction.
Science made new conquests, especially in the fields of geology, biology, botany and organic chemistry. newest developments in the sciences were primarily in the physical and life sciences, all founded in the early part of the 19th century. Another way of looking at science in the 19th century is to say that whereas the 17th and 18th centuries were keen on investigating Nature from the standpoint of what was inorganic and heavenly, the 19th century discovered and took a lively interest in what was organic, vital and living.
Intellectual con
machine production, the factory system and the cash nexus profoundly altered the social structure of England. This revolution in industry -- the Industrial Revolution -- gave humankind a new conception of power in relation to the physical environment And with industrialization and the development of industrial capitalism, a whole new set of social, political, cultural and intellectual problems entered the European mind at all levels. No one was left untouched by this revolution in industry. Revolt both philosophical and political, against traditional systems of thought. This revolt had two faces -- one was Romantic and stressed the irrational and unreason, the other was rationalistic and stressed the human capacity of reason and rationality. The 18th century Age of Enlightenment was firmly entrenched in the capacities of Human Reason. But by the end of the century and into the early part of the 19th century, a reaction set in. Man was not a disembodied brain, a thinking machine, but an emotional and organic individual. The man of reason became the new man of feeling.
A Time of Invention
The first steamboat in Britain was Henry Bell's Comet on the Clyde in 1811. George Trevithick created the first steam locomotive in 1801. In 1813 George Stephenson created a better one. In 1812, the parish of St. Margaret's in Westminster was lit by gas - by the Gas, Light, & Coke Company. By 1815 there were 26 miles of gas mains in London. The factories in the Midlands were already lit by gas. The November 29, 1814 edition of The Times was the first newspaper issue printed on a steam press. Both Thomas Telford and John Loudon Macadam experimented with road improvements. Macadam's methods were first used on the Bristol roads when he was appointed surveyor-general in 1815. The technique involved raising and draining the road level and laying down layers of hard stones broken into very small pieces. George Stephenson built the first public railways in the 1820s. To learn more about transportation during the period go to http://www.literary-liaisons.com/article033.html
Workers Needed
As people were encouraged to consume as much as they could,both the cost of such consumption and the increasing need for production of goods brought about yet another social change:
small children working in factories for long days.
Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the world's population was rural. However, by mid-nineteenth century, half of the English people lived in cities, and by the end of the century, the same was true of other European countries.
Between 1800 and 1950 most large European cities exhibited spectacular growth. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were scarcely two dozen cities in Europe with a population of 100,000, but by 1900 there were more than 150 cities of this size.
Rise of Cities
The rise of great cities can be accounted for in various ways: First, industrialization called for the concentration of a work force; and indeed, the factories themselves were often located where coal or some other essential material was available, as the Ruhr in Germany and Lille in northern France. Second, the necessity for marketing finished goods created great urban centers where there was access to water or railways. Such was the case with Liverpool, Hamburg, Marseilles, and New York. And third, there was a natural tendency for established political centers such as London, Paris, and Berlin to become centers fort he banking and marketing functions of the new industrialism.
Urban Growth
Rapid growth of the cities was not an unmixed blessing. The factory towns of England tended to become rookeries of jerry-built tenements, while the mining towns became long monotonous rows of companybuilt cottages, furnishing minimal shelter and little more. The bad living conditions in the towns can be traced to lack of good brick, the absence of building codes, and the lack of machinery for public sanitation. But, it must be added, they were also due to the factory owners' tendency to regard laborers as commodities and not as a group of human beings. In addition to a new factory-owning bourgeoisie, the Industrial Revolution created a new working class. The new class of industrial workers included all the men, women, and children laboring in the textile mills, pottery works, and mines. Often skilled artisans found themselves degraded to routine process laborers as machines began to mass produce the products formerly made by hand. Generally speaking, wages were low, hours were long, and working conditions unpleasant and dangerous. The industrial workers had helped to pass the Reform Bill of 1832, but they had not been enfranchised by it.
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein & Technology
Biography (1797-1851)
Born August 30, 1797 to political radicals William Godwin and Mary Wollestonecraft. Parents believed in communal property, the ideals of the French Revolution, free love, and they were against marriage. Mary Wollestonecraft was considered revolutionary because her work exposed the status of women as second-class citizens in the world, and complained about the injustices of the political system and of marriage. She was also considered scandalous because of several fairly public love affairs. But Mary and William married 5 months before their only daughter was born. Mary Wollestonecraft died ten days later from an infection caused by birth complications. Her daughter was named Mary for her. Her mother died in childbirth.
Mary was brought up in a very intellectually stimulating, though not particularly warm, environment. She was left to educate herself amongst her father's intellectual circle, was, from her youth, educated to become a literary figure.
She published her first poem at the age of ten
Biography (continued)
In June 1814 at 16 she and Percy Shelley, 22, a poet and a disciple of her fathers, eloped to Europe together taking her stepsister with them, and leaving behind his young daughter, his very pregnant wife (with whom he had also eloped when she was 16) and her very angry father. The three of them traveled around Europe before returning to London. Mary gave birth several months later to a premature daughter who dies. At the time of writing Frankenstein in 1816, the couple had moved to the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They had an infant son, William, who lived a few more years. The group, plus Byrons personal doctor, Polidori, set up a ghost story writing game. Mary Shelley is all of 19.
Frankenstein: Production
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus was born out of a series of conversations she had during the summer of 1816 with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori. In introduction to 1831 edition, Shelley cites conversations between P. Shelley and Byron about Erasmus Darwin ("they talked about the experiments of Dr. Darwin") and Luigi Galvani ("perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things") as sources for her own idea of a reanimated human ("perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth").
When asked to explain why he has created a monstrous life form (one that would eventually destroy him), Shelley's Victor Frankenstein offers an explanation based on the concept of "species." "A new species would bless me as its creator," he says to Captain Walton in the opening pages of the novel. Shelley clearly sees this attempt to create life as connected to the creation of a species. Of course, Victor does not really create a new species at all; he creates a hybrid, a human being composed of the parts of other humans and other animals, since some of his raw materials come from the "slaughterhouse."
Frankenstein
Shelley's creature presumably lacks a soul, at least in the minds of most of her 1818 readers. But when Victor considers the "race of demons" that might populate the world if he goes through with his plan to create a female companion for the "wretch," he clearly places monster reproductive biology at the center of his own anxieties. These anxieties however, point to wider issues and questions about the problem of speciation in the Romantic era. Of course, Victor Frankenstein's creature does not bless him "as its creator." In fact, the wretch turns on the creator and destroys him--as well as everyone he loves--not because the monster is inherently evil, but because the "monster" never receives love from his creator, or even a name. The human creator Victor never shows sufficient concern for the life he has made, much less for other human (or animate) lives around him.
Shelley's argument points toward respect for life--all life--as a crucial aspect of Romantic natural history.
We often forget how recently humans have understood the basics of their own biological origins. Well into the nineteenth century, confusion abounded about the connection between human reproductiuon and other forms of animal reproduction, as well as the roles played by both parents in the origins of new individuals.
Since Gregor Mendel's genetic research was not available to the scientific community until around 1900, even Charles Darwin had to admit only the fuzziest sense of how acquired characteristics might be passed on from parent to offspring.
In addition, "monsters" and "freaks of nature" posed serious problems for any religious belief or scientific theory that demanded rigid consistency on the part of the natural system.The appearance of humans with confusing racial characteristics, much less conjoined twins or other developmental anomalies, caused fear and anxiety about the "souls" or the "purpose" of such beings.
Few people wanted to believe that humans came into existence in the same way as chickens or lizards; even fewer wanted to admit that the process of "soul-making" was partly "genetic."
continued
As a result, strange theories abounded: "freaks" were seen as divine punishment for the sins of the fathers (or mothers); the mother's (or father's) state of mind at the moment of conception was said to determine the sex or the personality of the child; mysterious "liquors" were described mixing in mysterious ways with a human egg, human homunculi (fully formed sperm creatures), or combinations of matter and "spirit" to produce a new human animal.
Romanticism
The word conveys notions of sentiment and sentimentality, a visionary or idealistic lack of reality. It connotes fantasy and fiction. It has been associated with different times and with distant place. Historians and critics as well as European historians have been quarreling over the meaning of the word Romanticism for decades The expression Romantic gained currency during its own time, roughly 1780-1850. However, even within its own period of existence, few Romantics would have agreed on a general meaning. Romanticism appeared in conflict with the Enlightenment. It reflected a crisis in Enlightenment thought itself, a crisis which shook the comfortable 18th century philosophe out of his intellectual singlemindedness. The Romantics were conscious of their unique destiny. In fact, it was self-consciousness which appears as one of the keys elements of Romanticism itself.
Romanticism (con)
One of the fundamentals of Romanticism is the belief in the natural goodness of man, the idea that man in a state of nature would behave well but is hindered by civilization (Rousseau -- "man is born free and everywhere he is in chains").
The "savage" is noble, childhood is good and the emotions inspired by both beliefs causes the heart to soar. On the contrary, urban life and the commitment to "getting and spending," generates a fear and distrust of the world.
If man is inherently sinful, reason must restrain his passions, but if he is naturally good, then in an appropriate environment, his emotions can be trusted (Blake -- "bathe in the waters of life"). The idea of man's natural goodness and the stress on emotion also contributed the belief that what is special in a man is to be valued over what is representative (the latter oftentimes connected with the conventions imposed on man by "civilized society."
Romanticism
the Romantics yearned to reclaim human freedom. Habits, values, rules and standards imposed by a civilization grounded in reason and reason only had to be abandoned. Whereas the philosophes saw man in common, that is, as creatures endowed with Reason, the Romantics saw diversity and uniqueness. That is, those traits which set one man apart from another, and traits which set one nation apart from another Impt to remember that the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, thus adding entirely new social concerns. The old order -- politics and the economy -- seemed to be falling apart and for many Romantics, this raised the threat of moral disaster as well. Men and women faced the need to build new systems of discipline and order, or, at the very least, they had to reshape older systems.
References
Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods. (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998), 26274. Berlanstein, Leonard R. The Industrial Revolution and Work in 19th Century Europe. New York, 1992. Briggs, Asa. The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867. New York, 1959. Caldwell, Janis McLarren. "Sympathy and Science in Frankenstein." In The Ethics in Literature, eds. Dale, Henry. The Industrial Revolution. New York, 1992. Hughes, Kristin. Everyday Life in Regency and Victorian England, 1998.
Mellor, Anne K. "Possessing nature: the female in Frankenstein. Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988
Prickett, Stephen, ed. The Romantics: Context of English Literature. Holmes & Meier Pub 1981. Rauch, Alan. The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein. Studies in Romantic Literature, 34:3 (Summer 1995): 227-53. Stearns, Peter N. Interpreting the Industrial Revolution. Washington, 1991. Swisher, Clarice. Victorian England, Turning Points in History. Greenhaven Press, 2000