From Robert Southey to William Morris, British social critics in the Romantic tradition consistently stigmatized industry as a threat to aesthetic or humanistic -culture.- Joseph Bizup argues that early Victorian advocates of industry sought to resist the power inherent in this opposition by portraying automatic manufacture itself as a cultural force or agent. He traces the contours of this new proindustrial rhetoric as it coalesced in two mutually reinforcing discourses: the contentious debate over the factory system and its social consequences that raged throughout the 1830s and 1840s,...
From Robert Southey to William Morris, British social critics in the Romantic tradition consistently stigmatized industry as a threat to aesthetic ...
