A hidden history of romanticism and technology

Our 2023-2024 programme opens with a talk by Dr John Gardner of Anglia Ruskin University which highlights a little-known but intriguing link between literature and technology. 

 This talk is about the poet Percy Shelley’s attempt to build a steam ship to trade between Livorno and Marseilles in 1820. This was new technology. The first successful passenger steamship was Robert Fulton’s Clermont which sailed on the Hudson River in 1807.

In Britain this was followed by Henry Bell’s Comet of 1812.   It seems odd to think of a poet engaging in a cutting-edge engineering project. The whole notion of Romanticism seems to be against it.

As Phil Connell writes, ‘Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Shelley have typically been identified with an unambiguous hostility to industrial society and its intellectual apologists’ (Romanticism, Economics and the Question of Culture, 2005, vii). 

Nonetheless this was a period when there were fewer distinctions between the arts of Engineering and the Humanities. In this talk,  Dr Gardner will discuss these interactions at a time when amateur engineers, such as Shelley, felt that they could engage in the development of new Technology.

About the presenter

 John Gardner is Dean of the Doctoral School and Professor of English Literature at ARU. John’s training is in both engineering and literary studies having completed a fully indentured apprenticeship as a Fitter/Turner as well as degrees in the Humanities.

John has previously worked in the water, power and motorcycle industries and was a Commissioning Engineer at Sizewell B. John is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow on the project, ‘Turning the Screw: Engineering Romanticism’. You can learn more about this at the website www.engineeringromanticism.com

 About the event

 The talk will take place in the Pye Building at Cambridge Museum of Technology.  Entrance on the night is via the Museum’s Cheddars Lane gate.

Tickets for the talk are available on the door for £5 a head, £3 for students. Members and Volunteers of Cambridge Museum of Technology can attend for free. 

 About Cambridge Industrial Archaeology Group

Cambridge Industrial Archaeology group organises a programme of talks on industrial heritage at Cambridge Museum of Technology.  Talks usually take place at 7.30pm on the second Monday of each month. 

For further information about Cambridge Industrial Archaeology Group contact Robin Chandler.