Abstract
This chapter examines the fires of volcanoes and industrial factories. It surveys some of the earliest literary responses to industrialization, from anonymous poems on industrial cities and technologies published in popular literary magazines to works by well-known authors such as William Cowper, Anna Seward, Lord Byron, Robert Southey, and John Ruskin. These writers employ similar language and imagery in linking the hellish flames of industrial furnaces to the geophysical force of volcanic eruptions. These eruptions were at the center of geological theories of Earth in prominent writings by Georges-Louis Leclerc, le comte de Buffon, James Hutton, Erasmus Darwin, and others. The conflation of human and geological phenomena presents Britons as geophysical agents in a new industrial epoch.
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