"Power is a new preoccupation, in a sense a new idea, in science.
The Industrial Revolution,
the English revolution, turned out to be the great discoverer of power. Sources of energy
were sought in nature: wind, sun,. water, steam, coal. And the question suddently came up:
Whey are they all one? What relation exists between them?"
J Bronowski
Coalbrookdale Iron Works, Shropshire, 1801
At the beginning of 1812 Britain's twenty-year war
with France was
approaching its climax. A few weeks later, Wellington, advancing from
his base in Portugal, defeated the French at Salamanca, occupied
Madrid, and drove out Napoleon's brother Joseph, so-called King of
Spain. But Napoleon himself had already crossed the Russian frontier,
and was marching on Moscow at the head of an army of more than half a
million men. And it was Napoleon's commercial tactics that had driven
the United States and Britain into a short and futile war a week before
this momentous invasion of Russia had begun.
At home, the mind of the old king George III had finally
broken down
after the death of his favourite daughter, and his eldest son George, a
fifty-year-old rake, had become Prince Regent, the Trinny' of his boon
companions. Then, four days after Browning's birth, the Prime Minister,
Spencer Perceval, was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons by
a crazy assassin with a grievance. There were plenty of others with
grievances. The distresses caused by the war, high prices and economic
change led to riots; the reactionary Tory government replied by adding
'frame-breaking' to its long list of capital offences, and in 1812
sixteen of these breakers of new-fangled wooden machines were executed.
Napoleon's occupation of Moscow was followed by fire
and his
compulsory, disastrous retreat through the snows and frosts of the late
autumn of 1812; by his defeat at Leipzig in the following year, his
abdication and exile to Elba, his escape, the Hundred Days and final
defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815, a date that Browning, who forgot
nothing, always professed he could not remember. Yet he was only three
years old at the time. Britain, exhausted, impoverished, yet immensely
enriched by the acquisition of a new Empire, emerged from the long
struggle the greatest power in the world. So powerful not only because
of its territorial expansion, but also because it led the way in the
Industrial Revolution.
Even before the beginning of the war in 1793 there
had been many
inventions, particularly in the textile industry, that had begun the
transformation of the old domestic system, that of spinning and weaving
in the home, into a system of machines assembled in factories driven by
water power, but now James Watt's invention of a steam engine that
would turn a wheel led to the concentration of industry in factories on
the coalfields of the north. The independent worker had become a wage-
earner, forbidden to combine with others to better his condition, and
at the mercy of his employer. Robert Browning may be said to have come
in with the age of steam, factory, railway and gas — in 1813 Waterloo
Bridge, only a few miles from his home, was lighted by gas. It was an
exciting, though for some people unhappy, age in which to be born, a
period of distress and savage repression by a government frightened by
memories of the French Revolution, a repression that lasted until the
victory of the Whigs in 1830 and passing of the Reform Bill after two
years of struggle.
Several children of genius to be born were at the beginning
of the
Regency decade. The poet Robert Brownings was born on 7th May 1812.
Charles Dickens was exactly three months older, Thackeray a few months
older still, and Tennyson and Darwin were children of 1809. Elizabeth
Barrett, destined to become Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was a girl of
six when her future husband was born. There had been a comparable
genesis of genius in the 177os with the appearance of the leaders of
the Romantic Movement: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott and Landor
were all men of about forty in 1812, as were the painters Constable and
Turner. Twenty years later came the second generation of Romantic poets
: in 1812 Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold, the
twenty-year-old Shelley had just been sent down from Oxford for his
pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism, and the seventeen-year-old Keats
was a surgeon's apprentice on the northern outskirts of London.
Carlyle, the same age as Keats, was training for the ministry at
Edinburgh University. All of these literary giants had something to
say about the speed of social change as Britain adapted to the new age
of scientific materialism.
