You are invited to the launch event of the TransPennine Romantic Research Connection at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library on 26th April 2022.

The event will begin with refreshments (4:30-5:00pm) in the Rylands café space. Professor Jon Mee (University of York) will then present a paper titled, “All that the most romantic imagination could previously have conceived”: Writing an Industrial Revolution 1795 to 1835. This paper looks at three attempts to write a history of the 'Industrial revolution' before the idea was in circulation: John Aikin's Description of the Country round Manchester (1795), John Kennedy's Observations (1815), and Baines's History of the Cotton Manufacture (1835).

Some may question, what could be less romantic than the industrial revolution? Aren’t those dark satanic mills in Manchester precisely what romanticism was writing against? But many of those writing at the time about the rapid transformation going on around Manchester thought that they were witnessing something sublime, not least in its challenge to received forms of description and comprehension. Edward Baines, by this stage committed to an idea of limitless growth powered by a techno-deterministic spirit of the age, thought his History described phenomena that were 'almost romantic,' quoting Erasmus Darwin into the bargain.

Perhaps we too should think of the plenitudinous imagination associated with the period's poets and imaginative writers as part of the same idea of limitless growth, rather than its antithesis, a visionary romanticism that played its own part in hastening ecological disaster?

This event is generously supported by the British Association for Romantic Studies.

For event enquires, you can contact us by email at jrl.events@manchester.ac.uk or telephone on 0161 306 0555.

Image credit: Edward Baines's, History of the Cotton Manufacture (1835). Wikimedia commons.

TransPennine Romantic Research Connection Launch