The Prometheans: John Martin and the Generation that Stole the Future
by Max Adams
Published by Quercus, 2009, 300 pp.
There are young radicals calling for the overthrow of the system; here is art and literature stirring up popular unrest, and incurring a culture war backlash; and bewildering advances in science and technology giving people unprecedented opportunities to trade, to connect, to share subversive ideas, and challenge the status quo – is this book about now? No, it has uncanny parallels to the fast changing social factors, the rise of the internet and social media, the de-stabilising of over-bearing governments, but this is the turn of the 19th century, not the 21st century.
Max Adams’ sparkling writing in The Prometheans charts the meteoric rise of a generation of British artists, scientists, poets, engineers and political radicals from the 1780s and 90s through to the late 1840s. There was such energy and revolutionary zeal in this group that even at the time they were labelled “Prometheans”, whose careers and ideas could have been modelled on the Greek legend of Prometheus who stole fire from heaven and brought it down to Earth. They too harnessed new power, in the form of machines and industries and means to move masses of people, both literally, with steam trains, but figuratively with art and ideas that promised power to working people, to the disenfranchised and poor. Revolution was in the air.
At one level this book is the life and times of an artist, John Martin, whose art became emblematic of the age: huge canvasses depicting scenes of doom and destruction, from biblical and classical themes (The Destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum, Belshazzar’s Feast, The Deluge) in which diminutive and terrified human figures are on the brink of being swept into oblivion by fire, flood or volcano, under brooding dark clouds from which his characteristic bolt of lightning flashes down. He invented and perfected this singular style, the “apocalyptic sublime”, a pinnacle of the artistic Romantic, which explored that tension between humanity’s control of Nature and ultimate helplessness in the face of natural disaster. Hubris and Nemesis. Humankind’s ingenuity and God’s judgement.
The story of the four Martin brothers from the Northeast of England is the thread that holds the book together: William was an inventor, Richard became a soldier, John the artist and Jonathan who was a preacher whose religious mania led him to arson and confinement in bedlam. Adams makes a strong case for William being the inventor of the miner’s safety lamp (credited to Humphry Davy), as well as designing the water and sanitation system for London which Joseph Bazalgette implemented later in the 19th century.
My lasting impressions of this magnificent, ambitious book are firstly, how on Earth did Great Britain avoid a revolution. Perhaps if Shelley, the firebrand natural leader of the young Prometheans, had lived longer; or if the Peterloo massacre had sparked a militant response? Adams goes a long way to show how close it came, yet also to explain how the conditions in England were not like France. Secondly, the networks of relationships and influences between artists, scientists, politicians, engineers during the period were so rich, and indeed there were no perceived barriers between these disciplines, such that brilliant inventive and expressive minds could go where their passions led them. And as they challenged every authority and strove to bring down fire from heaven to benefit the lower classes, they deserved the title of Prometheans and laid the foundations of the modern world.
Elsewhere
- Richard Girling “The Man Who Ate the Zoo: Frank Buckland, forgotten hero of natural history” – this is another tale of a 19th century pioneer and maverick. Buckland was a larger-than-life Victorian David Attenborough, with an energetic championing of natural history, fish-farming and a passion for feeding the world.
- Richard Holmes “The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science” [] – one of the best group biographies I have read. Much of Holmes’ book covers characters like Joseph Banks and William Herschel who preceded the events of The Prometheans, but there are overlaps with Humphrey Davy and the emergence of a generation of “young scientists” like Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin.
- Jenny Uglow “The Lunar Men: the friends who made the future” [Faber & Faber, 2002, paperback 588 pp.] – if anyone can better Holmes for a group biography, I think it is Jenny Uglow in The Lunar Men. In contrast to the Prometheans were never an organised group or society, the Lunar Society of Birmingham were a group of contemporaries would gather to dine and exchange ideas at full moon, when they could safely ride out and back in the moonlit evenings. Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly, James Watt and others, engineers, manufacturers, natural philosophers and intellectuals. Their innovations and energy set the scene for the explosion of modernity that lit up the “Midlands Enlightenment” in late 18th century England.
