ABSTRACT
New contraptions and technological objects fascinated writers and their audiences in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Victorians adored mechanical inventions – except when they abhorred them. For Carlyle, mechanical ingenuity is not just the keynote of the era but an index to its besetting flaws and vices, its lazy turn to expedients for avoiding intellectual and moral labor, not just reducing physical drudgery. Many Victorian critical animadversions on the machine tackle machinery in general, whereas much of the fascination and wonder at technology tends to focus on specific things. A final section collects brief accounts of a variety of technologies that promised sustenance, recreation, beauty, productivity or violent imperial conquest. Even amid the cruelties and injustices engendered by making matchsticks or weapons for wholesale murder in the colonies, writing about technological objects can offer glimpses of a world transformed, a world advancing thanks to human ingenuity and craft.
