A Soul Imparted to Brute Matter; or, the Secret Ministry of Steam

This chapter traces a surprising aestheticization of steam power from accounts of the second stationary engine in operation in Bengal through Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791) and eighteenth-century depictions of steam engines as living creatures to Wordsworth’s ambivalent celebrations of technology in “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” (1835) and The Excursion (1814). Along the way, I use Darwin’s poem to assist with an accessible but detailed description of the inner workings of Thomas Savery’s pump and Thomas Newcomen’s engine (a note sketches James Watt and Matthew Boulton’s improvements). Treating Wordsworth’s poetry before ending with a reading of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” the chapter concludes that Romantic, anti-utilitarian accounts of engines as spontaneous and self-impelling, as vital, in-spirited, or even human, involve a considerable amount of mystification, resisting but ultimately failing to confront the utilitarian “productivist” (Rabinbach) calculus according to which tools that elide living workers and transform sited, embedded labor into abstract, mobile, and placeless production promote the greater good, perpetuate improvement, and advance civilization.