ABSTRACT
Re-examining the reading by Defoe in light of this additional information, it is apparent that although Defoe itemised what may now seem negative aspects of industrialisation, this was not his main focus. He wanted to tell his readers how the transformations wrought by industrialisation brought many benefits for the population. For Defoe and his political allies, this ‘state of the nation’ type report was as much a matter of political argument as dispassionate documentary. Defoe saw industry as ‘the bounty of nature in this otherwise frightful country’. We can understand this when told that he disliked barren landscapes such as highlands and moorlands, which did not support human habitation. Here ‘the wise hand of providence’ gave mineral wealth and the population had a duty to exploit those resources and create a busy civilisation from an unproductive, and therefore visually unattractive, hilly countryside. There was a clear link between the perceived visual attractiveness of the environment and Defoe’s advocacy of particular social and economic values. Perhaps surprisingly for present-day
thinking, Defoe thought that hillsides thickly covered with industrial activity were ‘the most agreeable sight that I ever saw’ shining white in the sunshine. The new urban landscape encroaching ever further into the dales and moorlands of the Pennine hills reminded him favourably of city streets in London. Quite astonishingly, he even used his visual aesthetic of industry and business to justify evidence of water pollution:
Defoe, therefore, seemed to think that as human industry, itself a social good and bringer of material prosperity, produced these waste products, they in turn must have an intrinsic goodness that they imparted on the surrounding fields through which the streams flowed. Defoe’s logic employed metonymy (see Chapter 2), in which a physical part of the industrial process assumed the beneficial physical qualities of industrial activity and actively imparted material prosperity on to anything with which it came into contact.
