About

Writing the Industrial Revolution introduces some of the latest academic thinking on Britain’s Industrial Revolution and its cultural consequences.  

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ‘the progress of manufactures in Great Britain’ provoked ‘wonder and astonishment.’ A new kind of nation seemed to be emerging, one enriched by innovation, trade, and powerful machinery. Its changing landscapes, with their turnpikes, canals, and burgeoning ports and cities, reflected that new identity.  

The Industrial Revolution transformed the history of the world. The changes that eyewitnesses saw as the rise of ‘the manufacturing system’ pointed towards unprecedented wealth and progress. They also fostered an ever-expanding system of imperial exploitation, and the climate and environmental crises of the present day. 

Poets and novelists were anything but detached from this busy new age. They wrote about mines and steam power, canals and colonies, and assessed the human implications of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘the vast machines of Lancashire.’ Their views about this unprecedented ‘dominion over Nature gained’ (as William Wordsworth put it) were typically ambivalent. Literature offered sophisticated, urgent responses to the revolutionary innovations of the first industrial age.  

This website collects short essays on early industrial Britain by historians from many different fields. They focus mainly, although not exclusively, on the years between 1770 and 1830. That historical moment is both the ‘Romantic’ period of literary history, and the ‘classic’ period of early industrialism. The relationship between Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution is a longstanding topic of scholarly debate, but specialists in those two subjects have found it more difficult to exchange ideas in recent times. Through this site, we want to encourage new dialogue between studies of literature, economics, art and ideas in the years around 1800. 

In particular, we hope that the site will spark new thinking about the environmental dimensions and legacies of the Industrial Revolution. How can the history of the first fossil-fuelled society help us to envisage alternative environmental futures in our own century? During the revolution, landscapes around the globe were transformed in the pursuit of economic growth, as coal mining and trade in natural resources played critical, interlinked roles in Britain’s development. Recent research is bringing to light a diverse and contested culture of writing about environmental change in this period—a culture closely bound up with colonial concerns.  

As well as essays by academic historians, Writing the Industrial Revolution features contributions from experts who work with industrial heritage sites. This project was inspired by conferences hosted at Greenfield Valley Heritage Park and Ironbridge Gorge. Our understanding of the Industrial Revolution is rooted in particular landscapes like those. Collaboration between academic researchers and heritage professionals gives us new ways to investigate how the repercussions of these extraordinary few decades of British history continue to shape our world. 

The site is made possible by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It’s run by Jeremy Davies of the University of Leeds and Mary-Ann Constantine of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, with web development by Adam Greenough. We’d love to hear from other researchers who’d like to contribute an essay. 

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Further reading

• Alasdair Clayre, ed., Nature and Industrialization (Oxford University Press, 1977)
• Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford University Press, 2001)
• Jeremy Davies, ed., An Inventive Age: Writing of the Industrial Revolution, 1770–1830. Special issue of Studies in Romanticism 61, no. 2 (2022)
• Humphrey Jennings, Pandæmonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (Deutsch, 1985)
• Francis Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (Paladin, 1972)
• Jon Mee, Networks of Improvement (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
• Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1850 (Penguin, 2011)
• E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1968)
• Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future, 1730–1810 (Faber and Faber, 2002)
• Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Chatto and Windus, 1958)