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

Starting with the reasonable proposition that not all thinking men and women in nineteenth-century Britain went through their days grumbling about dark Satanic mills and infernal railways, Tamara Ketabgian’s The Lives of Machines offers a dense and scholarly “recuperative history of technoculture” that explores the ways in which the machine reshaped Victorian perceptions of the human (6). When eighteenth-century theorists put forward the notion that humans resembled machines, the machine they had in mind was the clock. The widespread introduction of steam power in the early nineteenth century transformed the machine, previously defined by its automatism and regularity, into something living. It could now be credited with possessing “vital, animal forces” and used as a metaphor for reconceptualizing human bodies as “organic machines” (51).

Ketabgian is especially interested in the ways in which two technologies—the factory and the stationary dual-acting steam engine—reshaped understandings of the human psyche, its desires, and its emotions. In the first few chapters, she turns to Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell to sketch out the different ways in which the “borders of humanness” were redrawn in the second quarter of the nineteenth century (43). It is not surprising that Martineau, a fierce defender of the new industrial order, believed that machines could act as prostheses that would “enable humans to become superhuman” by extending the individual’s—and particularly women’s—capacities (29). More unexpected, however, is the connection Ketabgian discovers between Martineau’s pro-machinery writings and her advocacy of mesmerism. According to Ketabgian, Martineau represents mesmerism as a mental prosthetic, or a “factory of the mind.” Mesmerized individuals (like workers in a factory) were subjected to and linked together by a network of forces that, once joined, could “perfect the self and its faculties” (43).

Dickens in Hard Times (1853–54) takes a dimmer view of new machines and the “mechanistic notion of interiority” they generated (70). Offering an interpretation of Hard Times that might strike some as counterintuitive, Ketabgian contends that the industrial world Dickens represents is not drained of affect but threatened by unpredictable eruptions of feeling. She teases out Dickens’s figuration of the steam engines that power Coketown’s factories as “melancholy mad elephants” and, in a fascinating digression, explores the violence and volatility associated in Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836) with Chunee, a London show elephant who inexplicably went on a rampage and killed a keeper (qtd. in Ketabgian 47). According to Dickens, Chunee’s outburst arose from his “automatic instinct” (63), which was dangerously concealed by his “machinelike regularity” (64). Thus, Ketabgian concludes, the comparison of engines to “melancholy mad elephants” is not an innocent example of Dickens’s fertile imagination at work. Rather, it is a calculated gesture through which the novelist transfers a fear of unpredictable violence to Coketown’s workers, whose seemingly docile and regular habits might, elephant-like, mask a brutality that could one day burst out.

Ketabgian’s reading of Mary Barton (1848) is less provocative, in part because it does not deviate from the dominant critical assumption that Gaskell’s first novel represents Manchester’s working classes in a sympathetic light. Since Mary Barton shows little interest in the factories where its characters labor, Ketabgian focuses on the workers’ “brutish and mechanical” appetites, which Gaskell, like most middle-class observers, attributed to their routinized mechanical work. Gaskell re-imagines that appetite as the basis for a new, industrial form of association, however. For evidence Ketabgian cites the tea party that opens the novel, where the Bartons create an enlarged sense of community by satisfying their guests’ “base, animal instinct of hunger.” This move allows Ketabgian to assert that in Mary Barton “mechanical instinct” knits people together (103). In this regard, Mary Barton resembles Martineau’s mesmerism, but unfortunately The Lives of Machines never develops that intriguing similarity.

The...