“A common sheet of paper is enough for love, but a foolscap extra can alone contain a railroad and my ecstasies,” wrote the actress Fanny Kemble after a preview of the Liverpool to Manchester railway in 1830. Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as seen by Contemporary Observers (Papermac, £10, lSBN 0 333 63837 9) is a fascinating collection of dispatches from the front line of that most radical of uprisings – the Industrial Revolution. Put together by the late Humphrey Jennings, here are contemporary accounts by scientists, such as Michael Faraday, and poets, of the changes that the revolution wrought – from the iron horse to poverty in London and contraception.
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