Frankenstein in the automatic factory

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Notes on contributor

Russell Smith is a Lecturer in Modernist Literature and Literary Theory at the Australian National University. He has published widely on Samuel Beckett, including most recently in the Journal of Beckett Studies (2017), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (2017), and Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art (ibidem-Verlag, 2017). He was co-editor of Australian Humanities Review from 2008–2015 and has also written extensively on contemporary visual art. The organiser of the conference Frankenstein 2018: Two Hundred Years of Monsters at ANU in September 2018, he is currently working on a project titled Frankenstein and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Russell Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6650-0276

Notes

1 Two essays in this issue reflect these divergent readings: Julie Carlson (2019) explores the rich legacy of interpretations that find in the monster’s story a powerful articulation of disenfranchised subjects’ experiences of dehumanisation; Martin Willis (2019) explores the surprisingly broad range of metaphorical uses of the novel by scientists themselves to characterise their own activity.

2 It is worth noting that both interpretations were current in the immediate reception of the novel. The title of Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823 stage adaptation Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein announced its reading of the novel as a moral-theological fable on the danger of “playing God”, a reading Shelley reinforced in her Introduction to the 1831 revised edition, which cautions against the “human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the World” (Shelley 1994, 196). By the same token, as early as 1824, the parliamentarian George Canning would use an allusion to Frankenstein to argue against the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, claiming that “[t]o turn [the slave] loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passion, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance” (quoted in Baldick 1987, 60).

3 It is therefore not possible that, as Mary Fairclough speculates, Ure’s experiments “may have influenced Mary Shelley” (2017, 211); though if she heard about them, they may have influenced her revisions of the novel in 1831.

4 It is notable that the workshop and the factory are repeatedly presented in Discipline and Punish as key sites for the emerging disciplinary regime of panopticism (e.g. Foucault 1977, 141–143). David Harvey comments that Marx’s analysis of the factory system “almost certainly inspired Foucault’s various studies of spatially organised disciplinary apparatuses” (2010, 149). However, due to his hostility to Marxism and to accounts of modernity that give economic forces a fundamentally causal role, Foucault is careful to present the factory as one among many sites of disciplinary power rather than in any way inaugural or exemplary.

5 Although informed by historical detail, Nicols Fox’s (2002) discussion of Luddism reflects this tendency to read it simplistically as a defence of the human in the age of the machine.

6 Adrian Randall remarks that “more soldiers were committed to harrying the Luddites than were sent with Wellesley to engage the French in Spain” (2005, 398).

7 This event provides the backdrop for Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley (Brontë 2008).

8 See Ruston 2019 for an account of the special status of chemistry in early nineteenth-century science.

9 Here I should make it clear that my purpose is not to critique the ethics of Ure’s macabre experiment, or to dismiss it as pseudoscience: research into galvanism greatly expanded physiological knowledge and led to a wide range of therapeutic benefits.

10 Iwan Rhys Morus cites an American account of a similar experiment conducted in 1839 which borrows heavily from Ure’s wildly theatrical description, including the references to Fuseli and Kean, concluding “this kind of language was coming to be the standard lexicon of the electrical body” (2002, 99).

11 It is striking how Victor Frankenstein’s description of his own research resembles the phenomenon of a body stimulated into involuntary movement by an electrical current: “a resistless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits” (Shelley 1994, 36)

12 According to the OED, the word “organism” had been first used only a year previously, in 1834, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

13 See Marx’s perceptive commentary on this passage (1990, 544–545; see also Schaffer 1994, 222–223).

14 Gaskell (1833) documents in detail skeletal deformities observed among factory children, along with retarded growth due to limited exposure to sunlight, and premature puberty supposedly caused by excessive heat.

15 The invention of the self-acting mule is of great interest to labour historians as an example of technical innovation being prompted by industrial conflict (see Lazonick 1979; Bruland 1982). Marx goes so far as to claim “it would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt” (quoted in Bruland 1982, 96). Even so, as Lazonick argues, even after the invention of the self-acting mule, adult males continued to dominate mule-spinning, in part because patriarchal authority was seen as required to beat and intimidate the children who worked as piecers and menders, but their wages and their industrial militancy were significantly curtailed (1979, 236; Bruland 1982, 104).

16 Ure was not the only commentator to celebrate the powers of the Iron Man: E. J. Tufnell, a Factory Commissioner, wrote in 1834: “[t]he introduction of this invention will eventually give a death blow to the Spinners’ Union, the members of which will have to thank themselves alone, for the creation of this destined agent of their extinction” (quoted in Lazonick 1979, 232).

17 See Edwards 2001, 23. The frontispiece Ure commissioned for his Philosophy of Manufactures is illustrative in this regard, showing a vast grid of power-looms staffed by young women and supervised by a single top-hatted male technician; for a reproduction, see Edwards 2001, 29.