Networks of Improvement : Literature, Bodies, and Machines in the Industrial Revolution

**A new literary-cultural history of the Industrial Revolution in Britain from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.** Working against the stubbornly persistent image of “dark satanic mills,” in many ways so characteristic of literary Romanticism, Jon Mee provides a fresh, revisionary account of the Industrial Revolution as a story of unintended consequences. In __Networks of Improvement__, Mee reads a wide range of texts—economic, medical, and more conventionally “literary”—with a focus on their circulation through networks and institutions. Mee shows how a project of enlightened liberal reform articulated in Britain’s emerging manufacturing towns led to unexpectedly coercive forms of machine productivity, a pattern that might be seen repeating in the digital technologies of our own time. Instead of treating the Industrial Revolution as Romanticism’s “other,” Mee shows how writing, practices, and institutions emanating from these industrial towns developed a new kind of knowledge economy, one where local literary and philosophical societies served as important transmission hubs for the circulation of knowledge. Contents 5 Introduction 7 [ Part One ] Networks and Institutions 19 1. Power, Knowledge, and Literature 19 2. The Collision of Mind with Mind Manchester and Newcastle, 1781– 1823 47 3. Improvement Redux Liverpool, Leeds, and Sheffield, 1812– 32 73 [ Part Two ] Bodies and Machines 105 4. Three Physicians around Manchester 105 5. Hannah Greg’s Domestic Mission 133 6. An Inventive Age 155 7. Lives, Damned Lives, and Statistics 177 Acknowledgments 201 Abbreviations 205 Notes 207 Bibliography 255 Index 283