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  • The Cyclops in the Vale: Mythological and Fantastic Representations of Industry
  • Susan Egenolf (bio)

In August of 1776, the Pennsylvanian Quaker Jabez Maude Fisher toured the Western Midlands and likened a night scene at Coalbrookdale1 to an “immense Theatre,” “present[ing] all the horrors that Pandemonium could shew.”2 He compared the active furnaces and burning “Mountains of Ore” to “Etnas and Vesuvius’s [sic],” declaring the “Prospect [to be] awful and magnificent.”3 Fisher’s views had been constructed for him. The British Grand Tour at the end of the eighteenth century included travel to mills, furnaces, manufactories, and mines, where visitors were encouraged to enjoy the spectacle of industry. Between 1782 and 1792, the Quaker industrialist Richard Reynolds created Sabbath or Workmen’s Walks in the woods surrounding Coalbrookdale, complete with a viewing Rotunda and a Doric Temple for workers and visitors to admire scenic views of the industrial region and the Ironbridge Gorge.4 According to Stephen Daniels, “The rugged grandeur of the Severn gorge and the fiery nature of iron-making made Coalbrookdale a dramatic spectacle. … Those with a taste for the horrible could be winched down mine-shafts, taken into tar tunnels, or ride, helter-skelter, down inclined planes.”5 One contemporary tourist described herself as “completely satiated with subterranean scenery.”6 Not surprisingly, visitors expressing a general sense of awe when visiting the [End Page 53] region turned to the discourses of Milton, Virgil, and classical mythology. Perhaps, more surprising is the ease with which the rhetoric of natural history and technology meshed with mythology, and how the mythological was incorporated into the modernized practices of industry.

On 2 July 1767, Erasmus Darwin, medical doctor and naturalist, wrote to Josiah Wedgwood, Staffordshire potter and fellow Lunar Society member: “I have lately travel’d two-days journey into the bowels of the earth, with three most able philosophers, and have seen the Goddess of Minerals naked, as she lay in her inmost bowers, and have made such drawings and measurements of her Divinity-ship, as would much amuse.” Later that month, Darwin wrote to industrialist and Lunar Society member Matthew Boulton about his travels “into the Bowels of Old Mother Earth,” where he had “seen Wonders and learnt much curious Knowledge in the Regions of Darkness”; he also promised to use the materials gathered “to make innumerable Experiments on aqueous, sulphureous, metallic, and saline Vapours.”7 Jenny Uglow characterizes the Wedgwood letter as an instance of Darwin’s “tumbling style:” in his excitement he moves from “quasi-biblical cliché” to “semi-mystical classicism” to the “philosophical” (taking “drawings and measurement”).8 But I have found Darwin’s coupling of the mythological with the technical or scientific to be familiar practice in the writings of the period. Darwin depends upon familiar tropes, highlighted by Carolyn Merchant in the Death of Nature, that feminized the Earth as Mother goddess and provider and were exploited by Baconian descendants striving towards “domination and control of nature.”9 Rosalind Williams offers a revision of Merchant’s trailblazing work that sheds light upon the mindset of the Lunar men: “Early students of the earth may indeed have intended to follow a rational Baconian program, throwing out old myths and organic analogies in favor of direct observation and experiment,” and consulting “not books but the rocks themselves.” However, as Williams argues compellingly, “investigators went deeper and deeper below the surface of the earth, and as they went deeper they discovered a world far older and far stranger than Bacon or his immediate disciples ever imagined. Excavation sought a rational past and uncovered a quasi-mythological one.”10

Arthur Young used the sublime to mitigate a similar tension between natural beauty and technical progress during his 1776 visit: “Colebrook Dale itself is a very romantic spot,…Indeed too beautiful to be much in unison with that variety of horrors as art has spread at the bottom: the noise of the forges, mills, &c. with all their vast machinery, the flames bursting from the furnaces with the burning of the coal and the smoak of the lime kilns, are altogether sublime.”11 During a late-eighteenth-century visit, the artist Samuel Ireland, explicitly...

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