ABSTRACT
The title of Henry Morley’s leader, published on 31 January 1857, plays with the idea of the prosthesis, the joining of humans and machines, that, as Tamara Ketabgian, Erin O’Connor, Herbert Sussman, and others have shown, became an issue of increasing concern during the industrial transformations of the early to mid-nineteenth century.1 But rather than imagining a Victorian version of the cyborg, Morley is concerned here with improvements in mechanization and their positive effect upon the livelihood of workers. He argues that far from displacing labourers and driving them to the workhouse, the introduction of machinery in British manufacture works ‘for the elevation of their class’2: it has led to an increase in skilled labour, higher wages, and the establishment of wider and more durable markets through the cheapening of commodities-all as a result of the reduced costs of production associated with mechanization: ‘While articles are by their costliness especially confined to the use of the rich, the market for them is uncertain, because it is affected by the freaks of fashion. When the demand for them passes from a higher to a lower class of consumers, the use of them is established on a wider and a firmer ground.’3 Thus he concludes that ‘the tendency of machinery is not to convert poor men into machines, but that [sic] the steam-engine is in fact their steady helper, tending to no end so much as the making of them men indeed.’4 For Morley, in this essay at least, the humanmachine relation is not just benign, but beneficial, supplementing or extending the skills of workers to increase national productivity for the good of all.
