42. One of Joseph Wright of Derby's ‘night pieces', The Iron Forge, casts the founder as a heroic and muscular figure, provider for his wife and children, an embodiment of the Victorian virtues of hard work and honest labour.
French historians have frequently proposed 1789, the year of the French Revolution, and 1793, the start of the Reign of Terror, as the end dates for the Age of Enlightenment. That intellectual revolution, from which emerged the ideas of Voltaire, Diderot, Locke, Newton and Rousseau, is said to have begun in 1637, when René Descartes (then happily enjoying the freedoms of life in the Dutch Republic) published his Discourse on the Method. If Descartes was the midwife of the Enlightenment, then its undertakers were his fellow Frenchmen Maximilien Robespierre and Napoleon Bonaparte. The Age of Enlightenment burned as brightly in Scotland and England as it did in France and the Netherlands, but the revolution that emerged in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century was very different from that which had erupted on the streets of Paris.
Until the middle of the eighteenth century the people of Europe mostly worked in agriculture and lived in the countryside. There were plenty of towns and cities, of course, but most people didn’t live in them. In Britain around 77 per cent of the population lived in the countryside; in France it was around 90 per cent.1 The outlier, once again, was the Dutch Republic, but even there only 39 per cent of the population lived urban lives at the end of the Golden Age.2
Despite the advent of global maritime trade during the Age of Discovery, and its extension and amplification in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the merchants of VOC and the East India Company, the fates of even the most advanced European societies still rested on the success or failure of the annual harvests. Across Europe the ownership of land remained the ultimate signifier of status, and wealth drawn from estates was more highly regarded than that derived from trade. The men who accumulated vast fortunes through slavery and sugar in the Americas, or cottons and silks in India, were pioneers in a new globalised economy, but those who could afford it, when they returned home, bought agricultural estates and built grand houses. New money was laundered into old money through neo-classical architecture and strategic marriages into the aristocracy.
Two revolutions – one gradual, the other more rapid – disrupted those ancient patterns. The first was a revolution in agriculture itself, the beginnings of which stretched back centuries. As farmers had learned to rotate crops, yields had slowly increased. Later, small farms were amalgamated into larger, more efficient estates. Then the selective breeding of animals, new types of plough and better transport infrastructure enabled farmers to increase production further.
The second, more famous revolution was the Industrial Revolution. It began in England around 1750, although it wasn’t described as a revolution in Britain until the 1840s, by which time it was half over. Why England and why the middle of the eighteenth century? Britain had some obvious advantages over her competitors. Beneath her soil lay vast stocks of coal and iron ore. Both England and Scotland had developed legal systems that privileged and protected property. The British coastline was studded with ports and intersected by navigable rivers. And by the mid-1700s local producers had enjoyed the benefits of wartime protectionist tariffs. However, many economists argue that what best explains the rise of British industry was the rise of British capitalism. Whatever the reasons for the advent of industrialisation, the aspect of the revolution that led to the most profound changes in the daily lives of millions was the emergence of new and disruptive technologies, the locus of which was the factory.
The word ‘factory’ had previously been used to describe the fortified trading posts that had been established in Africa and Asia by joint stock companies such as the VOC and the East India Company. In the latter half of the eighteenth century the word began to shrug off that earlier meaning and took on its modern one. When and where the first factory was established is another matter for debate, but there’s a strong case for suggesting that Cromford Mill, in the Derbyshire countryside, was the first modern factory. Built in the 1770s by the entrepreneur Richard Arkwright, it was designed around his greatest invention, the ‘water frame’, a system that used the power of flowing water to drive spinning machines, which in turn produced cotton thread and yarn. A single water wheel could power whole banks of machines. This meant that work previously done by small groups of pieceworkers in a domestic setting could be done in a factory at enormously higher levels of efficiency, productivity and profitability. Cromford Mill carried many of the hallmarks of the factory, including the extent to which the machinery set the pace, determining the meter of human activities, operating the first recognisable ‘factory system’. The workers in Arkwright’s factory – who included children – had been drawn to Cromford from miles around. Their ancestors had been agricultural workers whose lives ran according to patterns set by the seasons. Arkwright’s factory system demanded that they operate in shifts. The factory clock became a central feature of the lives of millions and part of a revolution in chronology and time-keeping that seeped into almost every aspect of life and commerce.
43. Richard Arkwright's Cromford Mill by his friend Joseph Wright of Derby. Cromford was the world's first fully fledged factory and Arkwright one of the great pioneers of the Industrial Revolution.
Arkwright was so proud of his factory that he had his friend paint it. In Joseph Arkwright’s Mill, View of Cromford near Matlock (1783), the artist Joseph Wright of Derby set the mill in a bucolic landscape; the only human figure is a man leading a horse and cart down a track. There is no hint of the clanking of machinery or the sheer relentless energy of the factory behind. Paintings of this sort were a form of industrial landscape painting in which factories and mills were dissolved into rustic landscapes or hazy sunsets, as if they were accepted features of the agrarian past, rather than harbingers of a new era that profoundly threatened the existing order.
If Wright of Derby felt the need to understate the impact that Cromford had had on the surrounding countryside, it may have been in reaction to growing disquiet over the effects of industry on the rural landscape. Such opposition, much of it marshalled around the emerging idea of the picturesque, was already vocal by the 1780s, and only intensified in the decades that followed. In his 1794 Essay on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful, the prominent landowner and essayist Sir Uvedale Price condemned the mills around Cromford and Matlock as intrusions into picturesque nature: ‘When I consider the striking natural beauties of such a river as that at Matlock, and the effect of the seven-storey buildings that have been raised there, and on other beautiful streams, for cotton manufactories, I am inclined to think that nothing can equal them for the purpose of disbeautifying an enchanting piece of scenery.’3
Joseph Wright of Derby had witnessed the rise of industry in the English Midlands. He counted among his friends not just businessmen and industrialists but also scientists and thinkers – Enlightenment men committed to the principles of rational inquiry and empirical experimentation. What fascinated Wright was not just the vigour and inventiveness of industry but the science that lay behind it. It was when seeking to depict the drama of Enlightenment science that Wright created his greatest work.
In An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), a travelling scientific demonstrator (one of a type then referred to as ‘natural philosophers’) has placed a white cockatoo in a glass bell jar and begun to pump out the air. The bird, trapped in the vacuum and deprived of oxygen, is on the verge of suffocation. His audience, made up of various members of a well-off middle-class family in whose home the demonstration is taking place, respond with a mixture of fascination and horror. Their faces are illuminated by the light of a single candle.
44. Joseph Wright of Derby's most famous painting has a well-to-do family captivated by a dramatic display of the power of nature and the new sciences, brought into their home by a travelling scientist.
Air pumps were not a new technology in the 1760s, but public demonstrations of the power of the vacuum had become infamous for both their theatricality and their cruelty. Wright’s atmospheric painting captures both aspects, for while the cockatoo suffers at the bottom of the glass jar, the scientist, dressed in a scarlet robe and staring out at the viewer, has his hand poised on the valve at the top of the jar, able at any moment to save the bird by allowing air to rush back in and revive the poor creature. In strict accordance with prevailing views on the inner nature of the genders, Wright has his male spectators gaze at this dubious experiment with expressions of intent but detached curiosity. The two female spectators, the daughters of the household, are shown standing beside their father, overcome by feminine emotion. Their distress at the suffering of the cockatoo – quite possibly the family pet – is palpable.
In An Experiment on a Bird and A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, Wright showed how the new sciences were being brought into the homes of the expanding middle classes, ‘new learning’ becoming not just theatre but almost a religion, with the literal power over life itself. But in An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump Wright also perfectly captures the accompanying sense that the new sciences, like the industrial machines housed in those dark satanic mills, were simultaneously regarded as disconcerting forces that challenged the natural order. From the gloom and the tension of Wright’s paintings comes the growing sense that progress was uncontrollable and its effects unpredictable, that the wonders of the new age involved a certain loss of innocence.