Pandaemonium 1660-1886: the coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers

This is the masterwork of an extraordinary man who was denied wide recognition by a tragically early death.

It is a history of how the human imagination produced and experienced the Industrial Revolution, which unfolds through a collection of texts.

Jennings called the texts 'images': the story is being shown rather than told. He found them in the works of men as famous as Milton, Pepys and Carlyle, and also in the writings of factory workers and farm labourers, and of scientists, inventors, journalists, amateurs of geology, dukes, actresses, quakers.... At one end of the spectrum they give us the intoxication of discovery and achievement; at the other end, the ugly consequences of the orientation towards materialism which took place as a result of discovery and achievement. There is a glorious variety of subject and tone, but all the texts have two things in common: they are relevant to Jennings's themes, and even when a writer's purpose was prosaic he happened at that moment to be taken beyond himself into an intensity of expression more like that of poetry than of prose.

In Humphrey Jennings's own words: "There are at least three different ways in which you may tackle this book. First, you may read it straight. through from the beginning as a continuous narrative or film on the Industrial Revolution. Second, you may open it where you will, choose one or a group of passages and study in them details of events, persons and thoughts as one studies the material and architecture of a poem. Third way, you begin with the index-look up a subject or idea, and follow references, skipping over gaps of years to pursue its development. For this third way, Charles Madge (following Jennings's intention) has compiled a special index entitled 'Theme Sequences'.