Pandæmonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers

Pandæmonium is Humphrey Jennings’ “imaginative history” of the Industrial Revolution, built not from a single authorial argument but from a moving sequence of contemporaneous quotations he calls “Images.” Arranged chronologically from 1660 to 1886, the extracts form a continuous, film-like narrative of a nation passing from early scientific curiosity and experimental observation into exploitation, upheaval, and finally a late-Victorian sense of dizzying complexity and moral uncertainty.

Across diaries, sermons, scientific notes, letters, parliamentary records, journalism, autobiography, and literature, Jennings’ collage captures the revolution as lived experience: smoke and furnaces, enclosure and displacement, awe at invention, terror at machinery, class conflict and reform, the clash between animism and materialism, and the struggle to keep imagination alive in an increasingly automated world.

• Readers who want a vivid, primary-source-driven journey through the Industrial Revolution beyond standard political/economic history.
• Artists, writers, filmmakers, and designers interested in collage methods, montage thinking, and “image-sequence” storytelling.
• Students and general readers curious about how science, religion, labour, class, and imagination collided as modern Britain took shape.

Humphrey Jennings (1907–1950) was an English filmmaker, artist, and writer, educated at Cambridge and best known for his landmark wartime documentaries including Listen to Britain and Fires Were Started. He co-founded Mass Observation (1936) and worked with surrealist circles in 1930s London. Pandæmonium, assembled from his lifelong collecting of textual “images,” was published posthumously in edited form.