Atmospheric Late Romanticism: Babbage, Marx, Ruskin

Abstract

One way of describing late Romanticism involves looking at how Romanticism ended. Here, I examine a cluster of epistemological breaks that occurred at the end of the 1830s, and which concerned computers, communism and climate change. As three things that have happened to us but not to the Romantics, these can be recognised as determinate indications of our defining post-Romanticism. I show how ideas, tropes and figures of atmospheric Romanticism were repurposed and transformed in each of these three cases to inspire radically different currents of thought. With Charles Babbage, atmosphere became a computational platform for moral theology; with Karl Marx, it became an epistemological material of social revolution; and with John Ruskin, it became a global infrastructure of scientific self-knowledge. In each case, the break paradoxically involved a formalisation of a Romantic principle: that a description of an atmosphere is also a self-description.

Change time: Timing and placing late Romanticism

“…One aspect noted by all critics who study late Romanticism, even if they do not yet consistently deploy that term, is that it has been underexamined. “In comparison with such well‐established parallels as late modernism and late capitalism,” as Thomas Ford notes, “late Romanticism has been […] a rather underdeveloped category of cultural history.” (2021 , pp. 187–188) Such declarations of scholarly insufficiency amount to a standard opening gesture: given the difficulty of securely dating or locating the transition of Romanticism into late Romanticism, one way of fixing the latter is to approach it through the scant scholarly interest which it has heretofore attracted; its marginality, then, is oddly constitutive.…”

“…The poetical deaths on which the transition of high to late Romanticism is mythologised to turn are just one set among many indices which have been proposed. Other dates proliferate; so much so that every year between 1815 and 1848 has been in contention—“1824, 1825, 1830, 1832, 1837, or […] an earlier or later year” (Ford, 2021, p. 187)—for its symbolisation of some portentous national or international event: the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the opening of the first fully steam‐operated English railway in 1825, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the passing of the Reform Act in 1832, the crash of 1837, and so on. Much like the thanatographic history of Romanticism written through the deaths of its poetical exponents, each of these suggested years attempts at reducing an accelerating series of social, cultural and political changes to a watershed moment so as to gain purchase on the “fundamental component of the episteme” of late Romanticism, which “is the discourse of change itself.” (Esterhammer, 2020, p. 26) Each date does so by stabilising change through an organic and generational definition of historicity, marshalling alleged breakpoints to install a tri‐ or biphasic paradigm that is modelled on the life of the individual, passing through an early stage of youthful enthusiasm, thence moving into mature self‐possession, and finally winding down to melancholy retrospection (McMullan, 2007, p. 138).…”

Air and atmosphere studies: Enlightenment, phenomenology and ecocriticism

“…Key Romantic aesthetic traditions -Ossian's Celtic culture (Kaminski-Jones, 2021), Gilpin's picturesque (Lafford, 2021)-are re-read through their mists and fogs, showing the medico-environmental attitudes that dominated the culture. The contribution of air and atmosphere to ideas of freedom, history and modernity is considered in essays focusing on the philosophy of Wollstonecraft, and Marx, Babbage and Ruskin (Boyson, 2021;Ford, 2021).…”