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Diana Lucas

Dr. Keirstead

ENGL 4340

24 April 2013

Victorian Technophobia in Ruskin and H.G. Wells

In the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain, many Victorians witnessed the

development of new technology at a faster rate than ever before. The Victorians often celebrated

this new technology, a result of the Industrial Revolution, since it connected distant places and

made some aspects of their lives easier. However, these recently developed forms of technology,

such as machines that replaced tasks formerly performed by skilled craftsmen, also created new

anxieties in the minds of the Victorians. The Victorian author John Ruskin expresses some of

these anxieties in his work The Stones of Venice. In one chapter of this book, “The Savageness of

Gothic Architecture”, Ruskin relates his fear that as a result of the Industrial Revolution and new

technology, humans are losing the intellectual and emotional characteristics that define them as

humans. He fears that the loss of these characteristics will eventually turn humans into mindless

automatons. Ruskin’s concerns were still prevalent in the late nineteenth century, when H.G.

Wells published his science fictions novels The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds;

works that illustrated an undesirable future for humanity. Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice

proposes that people in the Victorian era are starting to become mechanized through

industrialization; a fear that is later used to predict a dystopian future for Great Britain in H.G.

Wells’ novels The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, where humans have degenerated

into mechanized creatures and the end of mankind is eventually realized.

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Ruskin’s fears for Victorian society stemmed from the drastic changes that he observed

in Britain’s nineteenth-century working world; changes which chiefly resulted from the

Industrial Revolution and the rise in mass-produced goods made in factories. He noticed that

these differences from previous modes of labor were changing the minds of artists, craftsmen

and factory laborers. By the late nineteenth century, when Wells published novels that depicted

the potential future, Victorian society was concerned that some of the changes which Ruskin

worried would happen to working-class laborers had already been realized. Wells’ novels The

Time Machine and The War of the Worlds illustrate how British society’s ideas in the Late

Victorian period responded to Ruskin’s fears through the novels’ examples of intelligent beings

that are alienated from many of humanity’s defining characteristics.

In the chapter from The Stones of Venice titled “The Savageness of Gothic Architecture”,

Ruskin discusses his concerns that the Industrial Revolution in Victorian Britain has taken away

from artists and craftsmen. During the Victorian period, many art collectors started to become

interested in the execution of an artwork’s details rather than the work’s conceptual value. For

instance, the Redgraves, an important family of art collectors during the Victorian era, praised

the perfection of small details in artwork: “The Redgraves…believed that what had been lost in

terms of scope and poetic purpose was more than made up for ‘in care, in refinement of

execution, in attention to the completion of the parts and in the perfection of work as a whole.”

(Macleod 335). To Ruskin, the taste of these art collectors did not benefit the world or the artist.

Instead of valuing an artist’s work for its intellectual quality, Britain’s art world demanded

perfection from its artists: “But the modern English mind…intensely desires, in all things, the

utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature” (Ruskin 1345). The expectation

that all art must be perfect is incredibly limiting to an artist or craftsman, since it forces the artist

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to focus on the exactness of the work rather than expressing creativity through the process of

making a work of art.

Ruskin does not think that this demand for perfection is merely limiting; he feels that it is

also damaging to a person’s mind:

You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one…with

admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its

kind: but if you ask him to think about any of these forms…ten to one he

makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to the work as a thinking being.

But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine

before, an animated tool…You must either make a tool of the creature, or

a man of him. You cannot make both…If you will have that precision out

of them…you must unhumanize them (1346).

When artists put tons of energy in the precision of an artwork, they cannot focus on

implementing a conceptual statement into the piece. The attention span that it takes to make a

perfect work is too high for the artist to emphasize other artistic traits in that work, such as the

work’s emotional or spiritual meaning. Ruskin thinks that this focus on precision is especially

harmful because it forces artists to ignore their intellectual thinking so that they can concentrate

on the minute tasks of their work. When a person stops making creative choices, that person’s

mental capacities to make those kinds of choices deteriorate over time. In this system, the artist is

forced to perform the task of a machine: mindless precision. Eventually, the artist can no longer

think independently, a process that reduces the artist to a mechanized “creature” instead of an

intelligent person. Because intellectual activity is one of the definitional characteristics of

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humanity, when a person loses their intellectual capacity that person loses one of the most

treasured human qualities.

Ruskin also recognizes that along with intellectual reasoning, imperfection is a key part

of the human identity: “…imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life”

(1352). In fact, imperfection is not only a part of being human; it is a characteristic that exists

throughout nature as well. The difference between perfection and imperfection serves as a barrier

between the mechanic and the natural. Since nothing in nature is completely perfect, what

happens when a person is expected to make perfect work? The person loses part of his or her

humanity, ultimately turning into a kind of machine: “All the energy of their spirits must be

given to make cogs and compasses of themselves…The eye of the soul must be bent upon the

finger point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it…and so soul and

sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last-a heap of sawdust…” (Ruskin

1346) Since imperfection is a part of the human condition, when a person is expected to be

perfect the person’s full potential is stifled. The “human touch”, or the little imperfections

humans make that make something more beautiful, is one of the most important definitions of

what separates man from machine. Therefore, crushing a person’s human qualities causes that

person to become mechanized.

The mechanization of the human through this process that occurs from the demand for

perfection was a problem faced by the factory worker as well as the artist. The factory worker

was forced to exemplify the same level of precision as the artist and then repeat this precision for

every single product made. Ruskin describes one scenario, the production of glass beads, which

depicts the hardships that the factory laborer faced because of the perfectionism expected from

them: “Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their

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manufacture…The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with

a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy…Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods or

fuse the fragments, have the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty…” (1349)

His description evokes the mechanic nature of the labor that these workers perform. The

vibration of the men’s hands reflects the vibrations that a machine makes when operating, and

their precise timing imitates the punctuality of the typical working machine. The laborers are not

given the chance to use their human aspects such as their reason, knowledge or creativity.

Instead, they are reduced to mechanic entities by repeating the same menial, precise motions day

after day. These concerns did not only apply to a few people; hundreds of thousands of British

citizens during the Victorian era worked in factories which forced them to undergo this process

(“Industrialism” 1581). This meant that a huge number of the British were being mechanized;

their humanity was slowly wearing away through the grind of industry. As a result of the

Industrial Revolution, the masses of Victorian Britain were slowly being turned into machine-

like creatures.

Ruskin thought that over time the system of industry and the mechanization of humanity

did not promise positive results. He warns the British people that the dangers of the current

industrial environment will hurt the nation: “It is verily this degradation of the operative into a

machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations

everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom or which they cannot

explain the nature to themselves” (Ruskin 1347). His biggest concern is that the factory laborers

would not be able to tolerate this mechanized way of life for long. Because the working class is

miserable, they will fight for freedom from their current situation; however, they do not even

know what they are fighting for, since the dehumanizing process of mechanization has made

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them lose the awareness of their former ideals. Ruskin suggests that the working class’s battle

will be self-destructive and futile since they do not have an agenda for their struggles.

The destruction of this battle will not only affect the mechanized laborers; it could

ultimately bring about the end of humanity. The people will fight back from their plight for a

while, but they cannot survive their mechanization for an extended period of time: “But to feel

their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an

unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism, numbered with its wheels, and

weighed with its hammer strokes-this nature bade not-this God blesses not-this humanity for no

long time is able to endure” (Ruskin 1348). The process of mechanization is counterproductive

to the growing process of a human’s natural life. Not only does this process separate humans

from their natural state of living; it eventually grinds the person down, taking away motivation,

intellectual activity and emotional acuity; it is a way in which humans were never meant to live.

On a mass scale, this phenomenon will wear away every human quality in the world and

ultimately destroy humanity. The human body may still exist, but according to Ruskin our bodies

are not what separate humans from machines: it is the human mind and soul that do. If the mind

and soul are ground away into dust, humanity has been eliminated. Ruskin thinks that the human

race has already started heading in this direction and therefore humanity eventually will erode

away into nonexistence.

Ruskin was not the only Victorian that feared for the future of the human race. After

Ruskin expressed his concerns about the technological world in The Stones of Venice during the

Early Victorian period, H.G. Wells started to publish novels in the Late Victorian period that

represented a completely new genre in the literary world: science fiction. Two of his novels, The

Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, also depicted a pessimistic future for the human race

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that is a result of dehumanization through technology. In The Time Machine, Wells “For the first

time in a work of fiction…provided an up-to-date, technologically and scientifically grounded

rationale for doing something that had hitherto been justified as occurring either by means of

magic or through some sort of dream vision” (Firchow 123). Through this work, Wells illustrated

the event of time travel as a “realistic” occurrence; something that could be achieved through

scientific experimentation. The Time Machine provides an example of the phenomenon in which

something considered impossible is made possible through the invention of new technology—a

phenomenon that Victorians continually witnessed through the results of the Industrial

Revolution. Because it was meant to reflect the real world instead of a fantastical one, the Time

Traveller’s journey in The Time Machine reveals Wells’ vision of Great Britain’s future. The

Time Machine’s depiction of future Britain reflects several of Ruskin’s worries, in particular

dehumanization through mechanization and its result, the eventual end of humanity.

Instead of exploring concerns in Earth’s future world like The Time Machine, The War of

the Worlds takes place in Victorian Britain. In this novel, Britain receives visitors from the

nearby planet Mars. These visitors have incredibly advanced technology, but they come to Earth

to destroy the planet rather than make it a better place. The Martians attack Britain using their

advanced technology in The War of the Worlds, a piece of fiction that “enacted the secret fears

and lack of confidence of the late Victorian bourgeois society” (Trushell 439). Clearly, Victorian

bourgeois society feared an attack from some kind of “alien” force, where the force could be

actual extraterrestrials or the mechanized laborers that were often considered from another world

by Victorian bourgeois society. Using the Martians as examples of mechanized intelligent

beings, in The War of the Worlds, Wells depicts several of the machine-like traits that Ruskin

feared would make their appearance in the dehumanized laborer. By doing so, The War of the

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Worlds reflects the anxiety that humanity may become as mechanical and unfeeling as the

Martians in future years.

The Time Machine begins in Wells’ present-day Britain, during which the boundaries

between man and machine are already starting to blur. In Chapter 1, the Time Traveller

introduces the possibility of time travel to a group of British scientists and important personages.

Most of these scientists are not given real names but are labeled by their occupations or

descriptions instead. For instance, the Time Traveller explains time travel and reveals his time

machine to the Medical Man, the Psychologist, the Provincial Mayor, the Very Young Man and

the narrator whose name is never spoken (Time Machine 10). The only person whose name is

mentioned is Filby, a man who is skeptical of the Time Traveller’s theories and refutes them by

using his common-sense knowledge about the world. Filby represents the nostalgia for a pre-

industrial society, which is most likely the reason why he is the only person in this chapter given

a name. The others, in contrast, have accepted and endorsed the new technology of the era: an

era in which they are defined by the job that they perform, rather than their traits as characters.

They function as individual parts of a large social machine rather than as individual people.

Because they are identified by what they do instead of who they are, the Time Traveller and his

friends have already allowed themselves to start becoming mechanized. They have started to

ignore a crucial part of their identities, partially fulfilling Ruskin’s fear that humans would start

to lose the traits that define them as humans. In The Time Machine, the mechanization of the

human race has already started, and it becomes more prevalent when the Time Traveller goes

into the future.

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When the Time Traveller first starts to travel far into the future, he snatches rapid

glimpses of what the British landscape will look like and how it is destined to develop. He later

reports to his friends what he sees during his journey through time:

I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapor, now brown, now green;

they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint

and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed-

melting and flowing under my eyes…What strange developments of humanity,

what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought, might not

appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and

fluctuated before my eyes! (Time Machine 25-26)

From his journey, the Time Traveller discovers that Britain’s landscape will become more

industrialized over time; people will take the rural landscape of Britain and turn it into a world

filled with fantastic buildings. In Britain’s future, Wells predicts that technology will move

forward, but this new technology will also take away from Britain’s natural environment. At

first, the Time Traveller gazes at these future developments with wonder and believes that new

technology continually improves the world that humans live in. However, when he finally stops

the time machine he discovers the results of long-term mechanization, realizing that these results

will degrade humanity to a further degree than ever before.

The human race is still present in the point in time that the Time Traveller arrives in

when he first stops the time machine. During this period in the future, there are two groups of

humans living in Britain: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi live a simple life above-ground,

and the Time Traveller describes them as “pretty little people that inspired confidence-a graceful

gentleness, a certain child-like ease” (Time Machine 32). The Time Traveller’s first impression

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of the Eloi is that they are a beautiful, idealist form of humanity, but he quickly discovers that

they are have lost many important human traits: “…they have grown weak from not having to

work or endure hardship, and since they had all the comforts of the good life provided for them,

they had lost the impetus to survive” (Semansky 1). The Time Traveller is disappointed by the

Eloi’s lack of interest and their weak nature. The Eloi represent one of Ruskin’s biggest concerns

about the future of humanity: they have lost their intellectual capacity and grown soft, unable to

handle life’s challenges. They have not been directly mechanized, but their lack of curiosity and

intelligence is a result of the new technology of the future that allowed them to live without

hardship or disease and did not foster their creativity. The Eloi most directly represent the fate of

Victorian Britain’s upper-class citizens in Wells’ vision of the future. Since technological

development made life more convenient for the upper-class Victorians who could afford newly

invented products, Wells predicted in The Time Machine that they would lose their ability to

work hard or come up with creative solutions as technology progressed in the future. Although

initially the Eloi appear to have no problems, the Time Traveller later discovers that the Eloi face

one particularly gruesome hardship that they do not fully understand: the way that the Morlocks

exploit the Eloi by using them as a source of food.

The Morlocks provide a sharp contrast to the Eloi in both their characteristics and their

lifestyle. They live in underground tunnels and their appearance and behavior is much more

sinister:

I lit a match, and looking down, I saw a small, white, moving creature, with large

bright eyes which regarded me steadfastly as it retreated. It made me shudder. It

was so like a human spider!...But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man

had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals…

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this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also

heir to all the ages (Time Machine 61-62).

The Time Traveller theorized that the underground tunnels that the Morlocks dwelled in were a

result of industry: over a long span of time industry moved underground and the industrial

laborers moved with it out of necessity. In fact, the Morlocks are the full realization of Ruskin’s

fears for the working class: they are dull, grotesque creatures whose only motivation is to

survive. They have lost all the intellectual, artistic, and empathetic traits that defined the human

of the past, and are now more machine that human. The Morlocks do not have any sense of

attachment to the Eloi: they view the Eloi as a commodity, breeding and slaughtering them like

they are animals. The Morlocks are one of the worst imaginable results of technology’s

mechanization of the human; they have turned the world into a brutal, dystopian environment

where the last traces of humanity are hunted down for sustenance.

After the Time Traveller discovers the horror of this dystopian world, he gets onto the

time machine to escape the Morlocks and accidentally travels even farther into the future. He

goes far enough into the earth’s future to witness the end of the world, making several stops

along the way. During each stop, the Time Traveller sees the world decaying further the farther

he travels into the future. When the Time Traveller reaches the end of his journey, Earth’s

surface appears to be utterly desolate. However, he does get a glance at the last living creature on

Earth before returning to the time period in which he belongs: “As I stood sick and confused I

saw again the moving thing upon the shoal…It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps,

or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering

blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about” (Time Machine 112). The Time Traveller is

terrified of this creature, and out of fear and horror he retreats back to his present time on the

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time machine. After his journey through time, the Time Traveller is sorely disappointed in what

the distant future holds for the world. Instead of the continuation of progress forming an eventual

utopia, humanity declines into mechanical, unfeeling creatures until it is nonexistent. The last

living creature represents the culmination of humankind’s decline:

Consciously, the Traveller does not perceive the ancestry of this

apocalyptic organism, but apparently the unconscious realization of its

true nature makes him flee the final wasteland. Not the oppressive

conditions, nor the extinction of Man, nor even the approaching oblivion

triggers his retreat; rather, he recoils from the knowledge, however

submerged, of what Man has become (Eisenstein 163).

At the end of The Time Machine, Ruskin’s fears have all been realized. Through the ever-

growing realm of industry, the humans in the novel become mechanized creatures that have lost

all intellect and sympathy. Eventually, the human race ends, and the last traces of it are contained

become contained in an ugly, simple creature that lives a purposeless life. In The Time Machine,

Wells uses Victorian Britain’s anxiety of the mechanized person to illustrate a dystopian future

for the world, the extinction of humanity and the deterioration of the Earth.

Wells provides another allegory for the future of humanity in his novel The War of the

Worlds. The invaders who seek to exploit Earth for its resources are the Martians, and these

Martians are examples of what humanity might turn into over time. Wells describes their

appearance as very strange and unpleasant-looking:

They were huge round bodies-or, rather heads…each body having in front

of it a face. This face had no nostrils…In a group round the mouth were

sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles…The bunches have since been

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named…the hands…The internal anatomy…was almost equally simple.

The greater part of the structure was the brain…They were heads-merely

heads (War 138).

Over time, the Martians have lost almost all of the extraneous parts of their bodies-they have

become little more than heads, most of which is filled with their brains. Because the Martians are

mostly brain, the only unique trait that they exhibit is intelligence. However, the fact that their

bodies are merely containers for their brains is the reason why the Martians look so ugly. They

are ugly because they have lost all their capacity for emotion and creativity: they can think but

they cannot feel. Wells depicts them as merciless killers bent on using whatever resources they

can acquire, with no regard for the damage that they cause. They may be far more intelligent that

humans, but they are “…intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic…” (War 3) The Martians

have lost all their emotional capacity because they are only concerned with intelligence and

survival. Because the people of Victorian Britain were so focused on science and intellect, many

people were anxious that because of technology humans would lose their sympathies and

emotions. This potential loss of emotion was also one of Ruskin’s concerns for laborers forced to

continually repeat the same mechanized tasks that he expressed in The Stones of Venice. Through

the Martians, Wells depicts a species in which Ruskin’s concern has come to fruition. Since the

Martians represent the possible future of the human races, they illustrate what might happen to

humanity if it loses some of its most important qualities: sympathy and emotion.

The Martians have been mechanized not only because they have lost their emotions; they

rely on machines to do most of their work for them. Since their bodies are physically limited, the

Martians use some of these machines as if they are extensions of their bodies. Outside of their

high intelligence, the machines are the most important source of the Martians’ power. These

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machines give the Martians their mobility, their safety and their means for survival. Several of

the Martian machines, such as the Heat-Ray, also have an incredible capacity for destruction:

“Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out

from it. Forthwith flashes of actual flame…sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if

some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were

suddenly and momentarily turned to fire” (War 25). The Heat-Ray lets the Martians kill people

quickly and with little effort on their part. Also, the Martians use their Heat-Rays frequently

because they do not care how much of the Earth they destroy as long as they are able to acquire

the resources that they need for their machine-like bodies to function properly. The Martians’

ability to wreak mass destruction is one of the main reasons why they are so ruthless. Since they

have the means to destroy Earth, they will do so if this destruction allows them to meet their

needs. The power of the Martians’ mechanic weapons such as the Heat-Ray serves as a warning

to the people of Victorian Britain. If they allow the invention of mechanic weapons to go too far,

and if they lose the emotional capacity to use mechanic weapons responsibly, the consequences

would be dire. In a broader context, this warning is an example of the way in which the

mechanization of human beings may ultimately bring about humanity’s annihilation.

The Martians are not only harmful in themselves; their attack on Britain has an extremely

negative influence on the ideas of some Victorians. Since they are faced with the threat of

annihilation, some of the Victorians in The War of the Worlds choose to think solely in terms of

the survival of the human race no matter what the cost. One such person in the novel, the

artilleryman, describes his vision of a future where humans can survive the Martians’ attack:

“We have to invent a sort of life where men can live and breed…And we form a band—able-

bodied, clean-minded men…We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless

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and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to

die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race” (War 174). In the artilleryman’s

plan for the future, humans are still alive, but like the Martians they have lost their capacity for

sympathy and compassion. Instead of caring for others and realizing the value of all humans,

these people would allow those that could slow them down to be killed. In this vision of the

future, humanity physically exists, but since strength and intelligence have a far greater worth

than human emotion, people would gradually start to lose their emotional capacity. In a way, the

human race would be annihilated since it would lose so many qualities that define humanity.

Since the Martians symbolize dehumanization, their attack shows what could happen to

humanity if people who have been mechanized take over: Ruskin’s fears that humanity will be

destroyed will be realized.

In Victorian Britain, new inventions and technological breakthroughs gave people hope,

but these developments also created new anxieties about the nation’s future, as well as the future

of all humanity. Scholars such as John Ruskin were worried that the new industrial technology

would keep people from exercising their minds. If humans were not given the opportunity to use

their intellect, eventually they would be unable to think for themselves. H.G. Wells depicted

Ruskin’s concern in The Time Machine through the Eloi and the Morlocks, which symbolize the

future of the state of humans. Ruskin also feared that industrialization would have an

emotionally damaging impact on humanity; a fear depicted in the ruthlessness of the Martians in

The War of the Worlds, another one of H.G. Wells’ novels. Victorian Britain’s anxieties

pertaining to technology and its effect on humanity’s future had not been faced by any previous

generation, but they influenced Victorian culture more and more throughout the progression of

the nineteenth century. Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and

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The War of the Worlds reveal to society that humanity should find its value in its characteristics

that are separate from the technological world.

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