ABSTRACT
Little is known of Henry Brown, other than that he styled himself ‘A mechanic’, lived in London, humbly dedicated his polemical satire, The Mechanic’s Saturday Night (1830) to the Tory leader of the opposition. Brown declared that mechanization had degraded every working man to a ‘state of complete slavery’, yet he believed passionately in a future when ‘an educated and a moral people’ would rise to their ‘proper station in society.’ Brown’s Sabbath-day venturers seem imbued with the elevating power of ‘converse with all nobler things’. Brown’s figuring of human potential is on a Blakean scale––from brutalized, brutish oblivion to the ‘heaven-built form’ of the meditative sublime. This chapter gives extracts of the Sunday Night and Sunday: A Poem, in Three Cantos.
