The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature & Culture (review)

Tamara Ketabgian sets out in The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature & Culture to highlight the tension that Victorians felt about the increasing industrialization they were watching blossom before their eyes. Ketabgian examines five specific facets of Victorian life in order to open the discussion of industrial imagery and how that imagery exposes anxiety within middle-class Victorian society. The five areas she examines through the lens of industrialism's impact are posthumanist concerns, definitions of humanity, changing class structure, the psyche, and middle-class recreation. Ketabgian sets up her exploration of the apprehension and excitement that Victorians reveal through their fiction and nonfiction by navigating the industrial imagery in novels that do not concentrate on industrial settings or plotlines. She shows how that imagery speaks to the Victorian mindset.

Each chapter comes with its own literature review of writers of the mid-nineteenth century. The writers run the gamut from philosophers, doctors, scientists, and economists, to writers of fiction. By incorporating so many different voices from such varied backgrounds, Ketabgian weaves a rich and complex vision of industrial imagery in Victorian literature and is able to show the interplay between nonfiction, fiction, and the apprehensive optimism with which Victorians regarded their rapidly changing world. The book is deceptively compact and presents an in-depth study bolstered by solid research and a fascinating perspective.

The first chapter, "Human Parts and Prosthetic Networks," is an absolutely fascinating discussion of Victorian reactions to industrialization through the lens of posthumanism. The tension in the chapter is created by positing the pro-industry rhetoric of Charles Babbage's Economy of Machinery and Manufactures and Harriet Martineau's essays from Household Words against Karl Marx's anti-industry Capital. The nonfiction authors lay out a socio-political groundwork through which Ketabgian is able to address Victorian concerns surrounding the disabled (soldiers returning from battle), job loss (especially in the unskilled or low-skilled sectors), women's rights, and whether society can survive industrialization. She does this through an examination of Samuel Butler's novel Erewhon in which pro-machine and pro-human sides face off.

The second chapter, "Melancholy Mad Elephants," looks at how Victorian writers struggled to understand what it meant to be human in an increasingly industrialized world. Given the huge strides made in medicine, philosophy, and psychology in the nineteenth century, many were trying to comprehend the differences between humans, animals, and machines. Early nineteenth-century medical language likening the human body's functions to steam engines slowly gave way to more complex examinations of systems. At the heart of the chapter is Ketabgian's examination of Charles Dickens's Hard Times supplemented by the works of physicians George Man Burrows and Charles Bell who were interested in melancholia and the rages that manifest from melancholia. Dickens's metaphor of the elephant as machine allows Ketabgian to bring in questions of England's expanding empire in uncivilized and unknown Asia as a counterpoint to its domestic industrialization.

Chapter three, "Brute Appetites," marks a turn in the book. We see, through Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, an attempt to find redemption in the industrialized world as workers attempt to reconnect to one another through consumption. Consumption, of course, also illustrates changing class structures and the changing roles of men and women. While at first seemingly excessive and animalist, Ketabgian reads Gaskell as refiguring consumption as a luxury possible only through the industrialized workplace that allows for greater access. Through Gaskell's nuanced exploration of longing, loss, and human appetites, Gaskell creates women who are earning enough money to actually provide for themselves, something that many in the Victorian era would have found uncomfortable if not outright vulgar. Using James Phillip Kay and Peter Gaskell as counterbalances to Mary Barton, Ketabgian allows for examination into class anxieties that Victorians were experiencing as money dynamics shifted due to industry. Working class drunkenness, sexual license, and violence...