Tamara Ketabgian. The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-472-07140-1. Price: US$80.00

We have never been human. Or at least, not recently. Tamara Ketabgian’s The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture is a wonderful explication of the nineteenth-century origins of all the weird contradictions our figures of speech twist into as they concern the mechanical. We do not want to function like robots, but we do want to work like well-oiled machines; we do not want to glide through our days on automatic pilot, but we do wish our efforts were characterized by engineered precision; our feelings ought not to be mechanical, but we are expected to regulate them. That is, we want to be the right kind of machine functioning in just the right way. In this, we are, as always, the other Victorians, except that the Victorians seem to have had a more complex understanding of the ways in which we humans are deeply mechanical, hydraulic and manageable, and the ways in which machines are deeply emotive, animal, and unpredictable. If we give up the binary, perhaps more beloved to postmodern subjects than to our Victorian forebears, of deep humans and soul-less machines, Ketabgian amply and subtly demonstrates, we find in the cyborg of the nineteenth century nothing less (or more) than ourselves. In the factory humans and machines were, of course, joined in the most intimate ways and the machine deeply affected the human mechanism, changing its very substance or mode of operation (including the fact that we see it as, in part, a mechanism). Nineteenth-century language is already post-human, and the possibilities for porous human/non-human boundaries abound. “Subjectivity becomes for Marx,” Ketabgian strikingly argues, “a collection of prosthetic forces rather than a fixed material entity” (28). Ketabgian expands this argument about non-individuated subjects to writers who seem far less likely to consider such possibilities than Marx: Harriet Martineau and other spiritualists, for example, used industrial metaphors to examine the bounds of the individual and the possibilities of spiritual fusion: “It is by joining with other forces and systems that we may perfect the self and its faculties,” their thinking suggests (43). The liberal individual of the nineteenth century—a subject who increasingly seems like one option among many in the period—is joined, literally, to a host of forces, prostheses, and possibilities in Ketabgian’s riveting readings of the lives of machines, other apparently non-sentient beings, and the human/non-human networks of nineteenth-century cyborgs. For writers like Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, this fusion of human and machine is, at one level, a matter of horror: in Hard Times (1854) and “Signs of the Times” (1829) these writers famously abhor the loss of humanity that factory work seems to cause. But in Ketabgian’s counterintuitive and deft readings, both writers raise a host of questions about humanity and machinery. Carlyle famously grouses that “Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand.” Ketabgian comments: “Although this claim first seems to lament a waning of affect, it ultimately does not portray the erasure of feeling so much as the presence of different and more mechanical forms of feeling” (52). In the first third of the century the question becomes, what part of the human being is mechanical in some nearly literal way. The early physiologic psychologists—Marshall Hall, Thomas Laycock, and William Benjamin Carpenter—studied reflexes, using mechanical analogies for activity that occurred “independently of mind and will” (53). This mechanistic idea of a crucial aspect of human behavior is related to the sense, in Dickens’s writings on machines and elephants (and on machines as elephants), that the interiority of the human and the animal, like …