Thursday, June 23, 2022
Evils of the Machine Age
G.M. Trevelyan, "Macaulay and the Sense of Optimism," in Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians: An Historic Revaluation of the Victorian Age (1949; rpt. London: Sylvan Press, 1950), pp. 46-52 (at 50-51):
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Macaulay was not wrong in thinking that the English were better off materially, and were certainly more humane than in the past. The facts that escaped his notice, and escaped the notice of most of his contemporaries, were other evils that the machine age had brought—the destruction of craftsmanship and the intelligent joy of man in his daily work, the ugliness and depressing aspect of the great new cities which were taking the place of farm, village and country town as the scene of ordinary human existence; the loss of rural tradition, which had been the real basis of our higher civilisation in England from the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare onwards.
