A Romantic technologist and Britain's Little Black Boys

Wordsworth Circle, Wntr, 2002 by Tim Fulford

The newly invented Rumford chimney applied more of the work done by combustion to its social purpose, heating the room rather than the chimney and the sky above it, thereby cutting the soot deposited and saving the energies of climbing boys. If Rumford's chimneys were widely adopted, the technological innovation would be "of great relief to the poor" (Rumford II, 311), and climbing boys would no longer freeze in cellars because they could not afford fuel for a fire. Excited at his ability to master nature on behalf of humanity, Rumford called his fireplace-scheme "the sublime in science (qtd. Sparrow 169).

Romantics welcomed Rumford's science. In his political journal The Watchman, Coleridge made a poetic tribute to the Count. For Coleridge, Rumford was a hero of the kind he had been waiting for, one who seemed to show that scientific innovation could solve the injustices that Britain's reactionary politicians ignored. The American-born, Munich-dwelling scientist redeemed Englishness because he emancipated slaves--Britain's own black boys. To Coleridge, science, in Rumford's hands, made social benevolence work as never before. It could do what poets and journalists could only talk about--overturn the oppression of the commercial and manufacturing system that used slave labor at home and abroad. In Coleridge's prose, Rumford became a prototype of the scientist as Romantic hero. He would cleanse Britain of its pollution (physical and moral) by liberating its sooty slaves from their dark confinement. Rumford's chimneys put compassion into action: they helped draw off the guilty conscience of liberal Britons who we re frustrated by parliament's refusal to accept the common humanity of the black slaves who kept them warm and wealthy.

Ultimately, as we shall see, Blake, rather than Coleridge, was shrewdest about the implications of Rumford's technologized benevolence. Rumford had been welcomed by Britain's philanthropists not just because of his fireplaces. Nor was his work on caloric the original cause of his fame. In Munich, he had been experimenting with people, on a huge scale. His aim was nothing less than to rid Bavaria of poverty, and his methods were draconian. He had all Munich's beggars forced into a newly commissioned workhouse--a social institution already familiar in Britain. Yet it was not the institution but Rumford's methods that opened a bright new vision to London philanthropists, for Rumford put into operation a meticulously planned regime designed to replace the "bad" labor of the streets with "good" labor in the house of industry. This scheme sought to transform idle beggars and dissolute prostitutes into happy and willing weavers by reforming not just their work but also their minds.

To reform their minds, it was necessary to know them. Rumford had no doubt that he did. The poor would place their affections in the overseers of the workhouse, who must be "persons of gentle manners, humane dispositions" (Rumford V, 117). Despite his sympathy, Rumford's was not to be a house of love, but of "rewards and punishments," "the only means by which mankind can be controlled and directed" (Rumford V, 129). He based his practices on those of animal trainers. Watching men break horses "suggested . . . many ideas which I afterwards put in execution with great success, in reclaiming those abandoned and ferocious animals in human shape which I undertook to tame and render gentle and docile" (Rumford V, 128). Men were animals, or children, to be "controlled" by an artificial environment designed to make work attractive: