"Melancholy Mad Elephants": Affect and the Animal Machine in Hard Times

Three years after the publication of Hard Times (1854), a parody appeared, claiming to correct the "striking want of poetical justice" shown in the original's conclusion ("Hard Times Refinished" 309). Hard Times culminates with the hapless fall of its working- class hero into a mineshaft. "Hard Times Refinished," however, ends with a huge industrial accident, in which mill owner Mr. Bounderby falls prey to his own factory machines. Pursued by a maddened dog and an "infuriated multitude," both seeking to avenge a variety of crimes, Bounderby flees to his factory. But once inside, he must still confront the threatening and unpredictable rage of the mob beyond, displaced now onto the vengeful figure of an animal machine:

The melancholy-mad elephants occupied a good deal of room [...] [T]he building that contained them seemed insufficient space for them to wheeze and squeeze, to groan and moan, and mutter and splutter in. It required the greatest precaution, on the part of Mr. Bounderby, to step over the foaming cylinders, exhausted receivers, cranks, levers, and what not.... Bounderby fell back. Into what? Into the clutches of the melancholy-mad elephants. The fly-wheel caught him. Whirr! Burr! Whiz! Fiz! Round and round he went! He was a self-made man, but he had not made himself of sufficiently strong materials to resist the influence of the melancholy-mad elephants. (312-13)

Dickens's narrative, of course, ends quite differently, leaving us with images of obedient and long-suffering engines, animals, and workers. Yet for all of its hyperbole, "Hard Times Refinished" exploits tensions familiar to readers of the original text. The engines treated above as so many murderous, moaning beasts draw on an excess of feeling that also suffuses Dickens's own animal machines, the melancholy mad elephants of his original industrial jungle.

This fusion of engines and elephants harbored threatening connotations, particularly in a period that was actively reconceiving the human mind, body, and emotions according to both animal and mechanical models. Imagined as an exotic hybrid of beast and machine, the elephant—arguably more than any other animal— signaled a profound cultural ambivalence about the relation between animals, engines, and affect in the decades preceding Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Through the sheer range of its symbolic implications, this creature condensed a remarkably diverse blend of ideas about industrial labor, colonial power, mechanical behavior, and impenetrable forms of psychology.

To this day, most studies of Victorian industrial literature have followed F. R. Leavis in supporting a pronounced antagonism between machinery and the forms of psychic depth that constitute the novel's "Great Tradition." Such studies tend to dismiss the emotional aspects of machine culture either as a state of alienation that is at best transitional (in the Marxist scheme) or as a wholesale destruction of feeling in which affect and psychology simply cannot be theorized. ¹ Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines (1992) does discuss the machine as a figure for life, nature, and subjectivity, but largely restricts its focus to questions of embodiment in American naturalist fiction. Similarly, recent work by Mary Poovey and Catherine Gallagher explores the machine as a metaphor for Victorian-era society and social relations, but does not extensively consider its role in shaping modern notions of emotion and psychology. The critical reception of Hard Times has developed in a similar vein, treating this work as a tragic narrative which pits humans against machines and which mourns the resulting loss of psychic complexity among Coketown's industrial subjects. In the cultural history offered here, I argue for a more porous and productive relation between human nature, industrial technology, and that most contested of topics—emotion.

If, for most literary critics, the machine in Hard Times embodies soulless rationalism and deadening regularity, it also serves as a figure of paradox, representing powerfully charged forms of affect, irrationality, and irregularity. Indeed, Hard Times infuses the most docile and automatic acts...