SOURCE: “Industrialisation, Poetry, and Aesthetics,” in Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age, Manchester University Press, 1987, pp. 31-58.

In the following essay, McNeil contends that as Darwin celebrated the industrial and scientific advances of the late eighteenth century, he also expressed in his poetry an overall sense of optimism regarding the power and possibilities of all of humanity.

In both the pregnancy of the mythical image and the clarity of the scientific formula, the everlastingness of the factual is confirmed and mere existence pure and simple expressed as the meaning which it forbids.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.¹

Watching the dawn of industrialisation in Britain Erasmus Darwin sang of a new humanity which could recreate both itself and its world; he expressed the specific experience of the industrial bourgeoisie as a universal expansion of human powers. The last chapter [in Under the Banner of...