Imagining Italy and the Italians in the "age of machinery" : spectres of industrial modernity in the Italianate visions of John Ruskin & D.H. Lawrence

Abstract

The period 1780-1830 was one of profound upheaval and transition within English society. During these years the scale of the technical developments brought on by the Industrial Revolution transformed life to an unparalleled degree such that the critic and historian Thomas Carlyle, whose quotation features above, felt moved to define the times in which he lived as the "Age of Machinery". And whilst technical developments and innovations were at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution and the main propellants of change, the ramifications of these changes were no less significantly felt at the levels of the social, political and cultural too. In this direction, most noteworthy were the social changes to occur from around 1730 and that led to a systematic decline in upper class power, both economically and symbolically, vis-à-vis the ascending upper-fraction of the urban bourgeoisie.