I don’t generally expect to come across a book that talks about the works of Robert Lewis Stevenson, Jules Verne and William Morris on a science and technology website but oh the wonders of the internet! MIT historian Rosalind Williams writes about the three authors in her new book The Triumph of Human Empire: Verne, Morris, and Stevenson at the End of the World. The book examines their responses to technological and social change.
Stevenson, for example, apparently wrote a letter to Henry James in 1890 explaining that his disillusionment with technology and rapid change is what prompted him to go live in Samoa. This from a man who came from a family of civil engineers.
We think of our own times as being one of rapid change, but Verne lived through the introduction of trains, trams, the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, steamship, and commercial electricity.
Williams sets out to examine the literary works for insight into how people respond to rapid social change.
Doesn’t that sound like an interesting book?
Just a short one tonight. It’s one of those evenings in which my mind draws up blank and reading is so much more appealing than trying to write about reading.
The minds of those (unfortunately nearly all) men of the eighteenth and nineteenth century are simply extraordinary. When you think of the resources they had or more correctly, didn’t have, the things they discovered, invented and wrote are simply remarkable. It’s a period I would love to know more about, but where is the time?????
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Alex, it was such an age of discovery and big imagination, wasn’t it? Where is the time indeed. Perhaps I will manage to squeeze it onto my reading calendar, do a complete write up of it, and thus, spare you the time or get you so much more interested that you will have to read it 😉
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Apt and catchy… Enjoyed this post as one of my favourite from you in a while 🙂 … Hee hee hee. Heeeeello!
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su’eddie, thanks!
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Yes, it does sound good, sigh. And there I was, trying not to bring too many new books into the house! 😉 Funnily enough I’ve just been reading about neurasthenia, the 19th century forerunner of chronic fatigue, which was supposedly caused by too much exposure to the rapidly changing times. I tell you something: I do wish google and wordpress and all the others would stop changing dashboards and menus for the sake of it. That drives me a bit nuts! (but is not enough -yet! – to make me tired…).
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That sounds a fascinating book. All three writers come from the late 19th century when I guess technological change was continuing to accelerate. Morris responds by a return to crafts and a medieval socialist utopia (News From Nowhere), Verne is the prototype of the gung-ho “hard” SF writer. Stevenson is the most interesting- his remarkable writings that have their setting in the likes of Samoa, especially The Beach Of Falesa take a very clear and cold look at the modern world of imperialism and commercial exploitation. Falesa is in the vein of Heart Of Darkness and is certainly not an escape.
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Ian, doesn’t sound interesting? I don;t know anything about Morris. I am intrigued by what you say about The Beach of Falesa. I must figure out when I can make time to read this book.
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Litlove, I have given up trying to not bring new books into the house. It is a useless undertaking and I will one day die in a book avalanche. But what a way to go! Interesting reading about neurasthenia and its possible causes! You know what makes me tired? Every Windows and Word update they keep moving things around and hiding stuff that I use that used to be easy to get to and someone decides to make hard to find.
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Oooh – that does sound absolutely fascinating. To the wishlist it goes.
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Ana, now to find the time to read it!
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