Machines
- LAST REVIEWED: 02 March 2011
- LAST MODIFIED: 02 March 2011
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0075
- LAST REVIEWED: 02 March 2011
- LAST MODIFIED: 02 March 2011
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0075
Introduction
Essayist Thomas Carlyle famously described the Victorian period as the Age of Machinery. This phrase captures the growing prominence of power machinery in 19th-century Britain, both as a symbol of modernity and as a formative social, political, and economic influence. While many of these machines (such as the steam engine) were pioneered earlier in the 18th century, the Victorians significantly updated and popularized them in systems of manufacture, transportation, and communication that were unprecedented in scale and complexity. Replacing human and animal power with steam and electricity, these devices spurred contentious debate on their effects on labor relations, human psychology, the social world, and the natural landscape. Machines also realized a complex relation to Victorian literary culture and aesthetics, attracting and repelling many period writers, artists, and critics. This entry, therefore, focuses on the machine in 19th-century history and literature, both as a material reality and a topic of literary representation. It restricts its emphasis to power machines, defined as complex devices that perform work or transmit force through various specialized parts and functions.
General Overviews
These overviews of Victorian machinery are divided into two categories: historical approaches, which treat the machine’s technical, social, and economic development; and literary approaches, which explore its cultural influence and its shifting role in period literature, art, and language.
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- Empire
- Actresses
- Adventure Literature
- Aestheticism
- Affect
- Allen, Grant
- Arnold, Matthew
- Arts and Crafts Movement
- Atheism and Secularization
- Australia
- Autobiography
- Barnes, William
- Barrett Browning, Elizabeth
- Blind, Mathilde
- Book Arts in the Victorian Era
- Boucicault, Dion
- Braddon, Mary Elizabeth
- Britain in Latin America
- Brontë, Anne
- Brontë, Charlotte
- Brontë, Emily
- Broughton, Rhoda
- Browning, Robert
- Burton, Richard Francis
- Butler, Samuel
- Caird, Mona
- Caribbean/West Indies
- Carlyle, Thomas
- Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism
- Chartism
- Childhood in Victorian Literature
- Children's Literature
- Christian Church, The
- City, The
- Class
- Classical Antiquity
- Clough, Arthur Hugh
- Cobbe, Frances Power
- Collins, Wilkie
- Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur
- Conrad, Joseph
- Contagion
- Copyright
- Corelli, Marie
- Crime and Punishment
- Crimean War, The
- Culture, Visual
- Dandy, The
- Darwinism
- Death
- Decadence
- Dickens, Charles
- Dictionaries
- Disraeli, Benjamin
- Domesticity
- Dowson, Ernest
- Du Maurier, George
- Ecology in Victorian Literature
- Education
- Eliot, George
- Emigration and Nineteenth-Century British Colonial Settler...
- Epic Tradition, The
- Eugene Lee-Hamilton
- Evangelicalism
- Fairy Tales and Folklore
- Feminism
- Fiction, Detective
- Fiction, Sensation
- Field, Michael
- Fin de Siècle
- FitzGerald, Edward
- Flora Annie Steel
- Food and Drink
- France
- Gardens
- Gaskell, Elizabeth
- Gender
- Geology
- Gosse, Edmund
- Great Exhibition, The, 1851
- Haggard, H. Rider
- Hardy, Thomas
- Historical Novel, The
- Homosexuality
- Hopkins, Gerard Manley
- Illustration
- Ireland
- James, Henry
- Journalism
- Keble, John
- Kingsley, Charles
- Kipling, Rudyard
- Lang, Andrew
- Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
- Lear, Edward
- Lee, Vernon
- Levy, Amy
- Life Writing
- Literacy
- Livingstone, David
- Macaulay, Thomas Babington
- Machines
- Maritime
- Marryat, Florence
- Martineau, Harriet
- Masculinity
- Material Culture
- Mayhew, Henry and the Mayhew Brothers
- Medicine
- Melodrama
- Meredith, George
- Mill, John Stuart
- Missions and the British and Irish Churches: 1701–c.1900
- Mobility
- Monologue, Dramatic
- Morris, William
- Museums
- Myth and Victorian Literature
- National Identity
- Neo-Victorianism
- New Woman, The
- Newgate Novel, The
- Newman, John Henry
- Oliphant, Margaret
- Orientalism
- Ouida
- Owen, Richard (Victorian Naturalist)
- Oxford Movement, The
- Pantomime
- Pastoral in Victorian Literature
- Pater, Walter Horatio
- Periodical Press, The
- Photography
- Pinero, Arthur Wing
- Psychology
- Publishing
- Race
- Raphaelitism, Pre-
- Reade, Charles
- Reading Practices
- Realism
- Reynolds, G. W. M.
- Rhymers' Club
- Robins, Elizabeth
- Rossetti, Christina
- Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
- Ruskin, John
- Rutherford, Mark (William Hale White)
- Rymer, James Malcolm
- Satire
- Schreiner, Olive
- Science
- Science Fiction
- Scotland and Scottish Literature
- Seacole, Mary
- Sentimentality
- Serialization
- Sexual Reproduction
- Sexual Violence
- Sexuality
- Silver Fork Novel (Fashionable Novel)
- Sincerity
- Slavery and Antislavery
- Slum Fiction
- Slumming
- Socialism and Labor
- Social-Problem Novel
- Sonnet
- Stephen, Leslie
- Stevenson, Robert Louis
- Stoker, Bram
- Supernatural, The
- Swinburne, A.C.
- Symonds, John Addington
- Technologies of Publishing
- Technology
- Tennyson, Alfred
- Thackeray, William Makepeace
- The Body
- The Ghost Story
- Thomson, James (B.V.)
- Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth
- Travel Writing
- Trollope, Anthony
- Trollope, Frances
- Tyndall, John
- Unitarianism
- Verse, Devotional
- Victorian Literature and Translation
- Ward, Mary
- Webster, Julia Augusta
- Wells, H. G.
- Whiteness in Victorian Literature
- Wilde, Oscar
- Women's Education
- Wood, Ellen (Mrs. Henry Wood)
- Work, The Gospel of
- Writing Practices
- Yonge, Charlotte
- Zangwill, Israel