And here let those
Who boast in mortal things, and wond’ring tell
Of Babel, and the works of Memphian Kings
Learn how their greatest Monuments of Fame,
And Strength and Art are easily out-done
By Spirits reprobate, and in an hour
What in an age they with incessant toil
And hands innumerable scarce perform.—Paradise Lost, John Milton
Humphrey Jennings, born in 1907 in Suffolk, earned a degree with first-class honors in English at Cambridge University and seemed set for an academic career. But he left academia to pursue painting, at which he was not especially successful. Eventually he drifted into a job with the General Post Office Film Unit, where he helped to make documentary films—and then became one of the very greatest directors of such films.
During World War II, he directed some of the most influential and inspirational films about English life in time of war, London Can Take It! (1940) and Listen to Britain (1942) figuring among the most highly regarded. The latter is an eighteen-minute cinematic poem in ever-shifting images and sounds—not a narrative, but a vibrant and memorable montage meant to portray the soul of a nation under siege and yet still recognizably itself. Like George Orwell, Jennings was a man of the Left who was also intensely patriotic, and Listen to Britain is a kind of cinematic realization of Orwell’s great long essay “The Lion and the Unicorn.”
After the war, he continued making documentaries, working largely overseas. In 1950, as he was planning to make a film in Greece, he fell while rock-climbing on the island of Poros and died. He was only 43.
From 1937 to the end of his life, Jennings also worked intermittently on a curious project that obsessed him: a kind of film to be made of words, a textual montage of responses to the Industrial Revolution as it unfolded, between 1660 and 1886. How did people in the middle of this technological transformation feel about it? Were they afraid? Excited? Anxious? For thirteen years, Jennings collected hundreds of quotations from British people responding to the technological transformation of their society.
He kept his quotations in large notebooks, eventually amassing a dozen of them. To the quotations he added brief commentary, ideas for further exploration, and ideas for images to juxtapose to the text. What the final form of this work would have been we can only guess. We know that he wanted to call it Pandaemonium, for the great citadel of the demons described in the first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
After his death, the notebooks went to his daughters, and one of them, Marie-Louise Jennings, never abandoned the idea of having the book published. Some decades later, she approached a friend of her father’s, Charles Madge, who had worked with him in the curious experiment in public sociology called Mass-Observation, and convinced him to edit the existing materials for publication. Madge selected around a third of the materials Jennings had collected, and created a thematic index to aid navigation for readers who did not have the inclination to read it from beginning to end or were confounded by its apparent lack of organization. Pandaemonium was thus published in 1985 and garnered some attention, but soon afterwards it was generally forgotten—though there have always been readers quick to proclaim it a neglected masterpiece. Many who had not previously heard of it became intrigued when director and producer Danny Boyle said that it was the “biggest single inspiration for the Olympics Opening Ceremony” that he designed in 2012: Pandaemonium, he said, is “brilliant, exciting and essential.”
The book had long been on my radar, pulsing dimly and irregularly at the edge of my mental screen, but I had never read it until quite recently. I finally got to it because of my manifest lack of resistance when confronted by beautiful books. Rather surprisingly, the Folio Society, famed for its beautifully typeset, bound, and printed editions of largely famous and beloved works, published in 2024 an edition of Pandaemonium—the text as established by Madge—accompanied by a series of images chosen (and chosen very well indeed) by Christopher Frayling. As soon as I saw the book advertised on their website I had to buy it. And now that I have read it, I am in full agreement with Boyle.
The principles of its organization are impossible to specify. I find myself wanting to speak in musical terms, but we don’t see anything here as rigorous as sonata form, with its invariant exposition-development-recapitulation sequence. The book is more like a vast tone poem, indeterminate in structure but not without order. It begins with Milton’s description of the devils’ construction of Pandaemonium; many pages later we have an excerpt from Thomas Gray’s Journal of a Tour of the Lakes (1778) in which the author visits an iron-forge on the River Kent: “I went on down to the forge & saw the daemons at work by the light of their own fires.” A different kind of connection is made when an 1824 letter of Thomas Carlyle’s about the iron and coal works in the Black Country of Wales is immediately followed by another Carlyle letter of the same year, written from London, “this enormous Babel of a place.” Those entries are numbers 164 and 165; in entry 170, a letter from Felix Mendelssohn, we are returned to London, and in 171 we return to the Black Country, in a passage from the 1883 autobiography of an engineer named James Nasmyth. Harmonies and dissonances, repetitions and contradictions and distorted echoes.
Though musical descriptions seem natural to me, Jennings himself, in a draft introduction to the book, speaks of the entries as “Images”— images used to “present the imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution. Neither the political history, nor the mechanical history, nor the social history, nor the economic history, but the imaginative history.” The passages chosen “are the record of mental events. Events of the heart”—and in this sense one can see the profound affinities between the order of Pandaemonium and the order of Jennings’s finest films. Soon after the book appeared, in 1985, Christopher Frayling (the chooser of the images for this edition) asked the director Lindsay Anderson to turn Pandaemonium into a film, but Anderson replied, “It is already a film.”
And while I have emphasized the fluidity and variety of the connections among the various “Images,” Jennings does take the liberty of dividing the whole great work into four parts:
PART ONE 1660–1729: Observations and Reports
PART TWO 1730–1790: Exploitation
PART THREE 1791–1850: Revolution
PART FOUR 1851–1886: Confusion
An interesting exercise, I find, is to compare the last selection of Part One with the first of Part Two, the last of Two with the first of Three, the last of Three with the first of Four. There are almost as many ways to connect the many dots of this book as there are readers.
But the fourfold division of Jennings’s “imaginative history” imposes the broad outline of a narrative: People observe certain technological novelties; engineers and businessmen exploit the new possibilities generated by those novelties; the acceleration of that exploitation eventually amounts to a revolution in living; and at the conclusion of that revolution, as people reflect on the chasm that separates their experience from that of their grandparents, everyone is confused, not knowing what to celebrate and what to lament.
The greatest of Victorian commentators on the human consequences of the Industrial Revolution is John Ruskin—one of the presiding figures of my own imagination, to whose work I have written a kind of introduction here—and among the most important passages in that fourth section, indeed in the whole book, is by him:
Here is one, for instance, lying at the base of all the rest—namely, what may be the real dignity of mechanical Art itself? I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into THAT! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile —a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh! What would the men who thought out this—who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfil this task to the utmost of their will—feel or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of water-colour, which I cannot manage, into an imperfect shadow of something else—mere failure in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them?
From puzzlement, from awe combined with horror, from confusion, Ruskin has distilled precisely the correct questions not just for the reader of Pandaemonium but also for those who might wish for a second volume to encompass the Digital Revolution through which we are living. That will be the subject of another post.