jacey | Book Log 33/2015 - Humphrey Jennings: Pandaemonium 1660

The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers
A collection of contemporary texts on the progress of the industrial revolution from 1660 to 1866, well chosen and arranged in chronologigal order. It includes poetry, diary extracts and contemporary writings and gives an excellent flavour of the changes taking place. It provides a continuous narrative of the industrial revolution, but told from many different viewpoints, a narrative of ideas and emotions, not merely of hard facts and mechanical innovations. The pieces illuminate the industrial revolution as straightforward text books cannot.

Humphrey Jennings was a documentary film maker who died in 1950 with this work incomplete, but with a huge selection of writings and notes from which it has been assembled by Charles Madge. True to Jennings original intention this collection of writings is a visual piece. From a personal research point of view, it provides an insight into the period I'm writing about, from descriptions of London, scientific treatises, newspaper articles, letters, extracts, pamphlets, diaries and poems. It includes writings of Lord Byron, William Cobbett, William Blake, Jeremy Bentham, James Watt, Vincent Lunardi, Tom Paine, Elizabeth Fry, Dorothy Wordswirth, Tom Poole, Michael Faraday and many, many more. Highly recommended.