Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, 1660-1886

I'm not necessarily aware of other histories constructed like this; letters, journalism, speeches, poems, songs, etc of an era, delineating a social experience. Perhaps it would entail a tremendous amount of work for little profit–Jennings barely inserts himself into the texts, though I wonder if he'd lived to complete Pandaemonium, he wouldn't have trimmed some fat or editorialized to a greater extent.

Nevertheless, Jennings makes some really fascinating juxtapositions, such as picking out the thread between burgeoning material sciences and the treatment of workers as objects or people like Coleridge or Wordsworth mourning what they know is to be lost in the gain of a relative few.

Pandaemonium was sometimes a slog; I was more more show more interested in labor conditions than I was every other entry dealing with some guy's hot air balloon travel or another guy's monkeying around with test tubes. I was disappointed to find that there wasn't much firsthand account of the psychological effect and existential torment of enclosure but that's on me; it's not like those people were publishing. More than anything else, Jennings' work tells you nothing's really new; you might as well be reading a book compiling the exhortation of STEM boosters and all the different ways they can talk themselves into believing exploitation and alienation of others is actually progress. show less

the quality varies massively because there are so many source extracts that vary in how they're written and what they say. some were a drag and hard to read (the early writing in particular is horrible because the language is archaic) some are really interesting documentary history. sometimes fragments could probably be interesting if given wider context. I'd have appreciated more editor interludes. personally i have trouble with descriptive writing so the significant amount which is pretty much just that was really hard for me. ultimately it's a really idiosyncratic book reflecting the editor's idiosyncratic views. if the concept sounds interesting you'll probably like at least parts of it but skipping boring stuff is probably a good show more idea

technically didn't finish this, but got half way and skipped around a bit. given it's a compilation of fragments i feel it's fair to review it/say i finished it without reading every word. maybe one day I'll come back to it show less