¹ Discussions of the manner in which technology affects human behaviour abound in most books that deal with culture past and present. H. J. Muller's The Children of Frankenstein, Indiana University Press, 1970 and René Dubos's So Human An Animal, London, Rupert Hart-Davies, 1970 are particularly useful.

² The atomic bomb is a modern example. The scientific knowledge of the possibility of atomic power did not automatically lead to its utilization as it involved several moral and political questions. For a popular account of the issue, see Robert Jungk's Brighter Than A Thousand Suns, London, Gollancz & Hart-Davies, 1958.

³ "Good literature re-creates the immediacy of life—that life was and is all these things, all these different orders of things all at once. It embodies the sense of human life developing in a historical and moral context. It re-creates the pressure of value-laden life so that—to the extent of the writer's gifts and art—we know better what it must have meant to live and make decisions in that time and place…" Richard Hoggart, Speaking to Each Other, Vol. 2 Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, pp. 20-21.

⁴ Cf. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, London, Macmillan, 1925; and D.S.L. Cardwell, Technology, Science and History, London, Heinemann, 1972.

⁵ It is interesting to note that the first English use of the word "technology" in its present sense took place in 1615-Oxford English Dictionary.

⁶ "The core of Bacon's work was not science, but the social relations of science. He was virtually the first, and a very great, writer on this subject". J. G. Crowther, The Social Relations of Science, London, Cresset Press, 1967, p. 260.

⁷ Cf. "Although full of Utopian science, The New Atlantis is not an imaginative effort to see how science might affect and change society." Richard Gerber, Utopian Fantasy, London, McGraw-Hill, 1973, p. 51.

⁸ "The founders of that Academy, such as John Wallis, the mathematician, and Robert Boyle, the chemist and physicist, acknowledged Bacon as the originator of their plan, and Bishop Sprat, its historian, wrote, ‘This foundation of the Royal Society… was a work well becoming the largeness of his wit to devise.' Joseph Glanvill says in the Dedication to his Scepsis Scientifica, 1665, ‘Solomon's House in The New Atlantis was a prophetic scheme of the Royal Society'." A. B. Gough, "Introduction" to The New Atlantis, London, Oxford University Press, 1924, p. xlii.

⁹ The term is Basil Willey's. Cf. The Seventeenth Century Background, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962, p. 37.

¹⁰ Op. cit. p. 35.

¹¹ C. Milton Millhauser, " ‘Dr. Newton & Mr. Hyde'; Scientists in Fiction From Swift to Stevenson," Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 28, No. 3, December 1973, pp. 287-304.

¹² But see George Orwell's "Policies as Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" in Inside the Whale and Other Essays, Harmondsworth, Pen guin, 1962, esp. pp. 125-127.

¹³ Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Book 2, Ch. 7, Harmondsworth, Pen guin, 1967, p. 176.

¹⁴ Cf. Charles Peak, "The Coherence of Gulliver's Travels" in Swift, ed. C. J. Rawson, London, Sphere Books, 1971, esp. pp. 180-181.

¹⁵ Marjorie Nicolson has ably demonstrated how closely Swift was satirizing the projects of the Royal Society, See her Science and Imagination, Ithica, N. Y., Cornell University Press, 1956, esp. pp. 135-152.

¹⁶ Op. cit., Book 3, Ch. 4, pp. 221-222.

¹⁷ Op. cit., Book 3, Ch. 5, pp. 223-224.

¹⁸ Cf. "The literature of the nineteenth century, especially its English poetic literature, is a witness to the discord between the aesthetic institutions of mankind and the mechanism of science…, the literary romantic movement… refused to be confined within the materialistic concepts of the orthodox scientific theory." Whitehead, op. cit. pp. 88-89.

¹⁹ Cf. R. E. Dowse and D. J. Palmer, "Introduction" to Frankenstein, London, Dent, 1970, p. vi.

²⁰ "The arguments of the monster and the action of the narrative suggest far more concretely and powerfully that the evil resides not so much in the creation of the monster-which is where the modern popularized myth of Frankenstein places the blame—but in Frankenstein's failure to take the responsibility for what he has created." George Levine, "Frankenstein and the Tradition of Realism" in Novel, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1973, pp. 14-30.

²¹ Op. cit. p. 100.

²² Most non-fiction writers who examine the issue agree on this as, for example, H. J. Muller, op. cit., and Dennis Garbor, Inventing the Future, London, Secker & Warburg, 1963.

²³ Levine. Op. cit.

²⁴ Op. cit. p. 236.

²⁵ The wide influence of this novel has been noted, among others, by Brian Aldiss, in his chapter on Mary Shelley in Billion Year Spree, London, Weiden feld & Nicolson, 1973, pp. 7-39.

²⁶ Wylie Sypher, Literature and Technology: The Alien Vision, New York, Random House, 1968, p. 8. Sypher's emphasis is on the "implications of technism" while this study focuses on the response to technology by selected writers.

²⁷ Charles Dickens, Hard Times, London, Dent, 1966, Book 1, Ch. 2, p. 2.

²⁸ Hard Times, op. cit.

²⁹ "In Hard Times Dickens dramatizes in strikingly symbolic terms the opposition between a soul-destroying relation to a utilitarian, industrial civilization (in which everything is weighed, measured, has its price, and in which emotion is banished), and the reciprocal interchange of love." J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels, Bloomington, Indiana Uni versity Press, 1969, p. 226.

³⁰ Cf. Lewis Mumford's analysis of Coketown in The Story of Utopia, New York, Peter Smith, 1941, pp. 211-221.

³¹ Hard Times, op. cit.

³² Dickens dedicated Hard Times to Thomas Carlyle who was strongly opposed to the dehumanizing tendencies of industrialization. Michael Goldberg, in Carlyle & Dickens, Atlanta, University of Georgia Press, 1972, gives an incisive account of Carlyle's influence on Dickens.

There can be no doubt that the industrial result of town growth, with towns becoming ugly, dirty, unsanitary, oppressive to the individuals, filled Dickens with horror. Cf. the urban degradation of London in, for example, Little Dorrit.

³³ One of the greatest proponents of social evolution was Herbert Spencer, who had a wide following in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cf. Herbert Spencer, On Social Evolution, ed. J. D. Y. Peel, University of Chicago, 1972, and Herbert Spencer, Structure, Function and Evolution, ed. Stanislav Andrevski, London, Michael Joseph, 1971.

³⁴ "The progressive attitude only becomes really powerful and realistic with the emergence of a new view which sees progress not only as a moral postulate, but as a historical reality derived from an observation of facts… Such an adequate background for Utopian humanism was provided by the theory of evolution." Richard Gerber, op. cit. p. 8.

³⁵ "His attempt to apply the idea of Darwinian evolution to the machines, and to extend the relevance of the survival of the fittest from the biological to the mechanical, reflects not merely the influence of Darwin's theory, but a widespread fear about the nature of progress in mid-nineteenth century industrial society." Peter Mudford, "Introduction to Erewhon, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970, p. 14.

³⁶ Op. cit., Ch. 23, p. 199.

³⁷ In recent times Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (1964) has re iterated this fear very powerfully in non-fictional terms.

³⁸ Much of what follows has been discussed in different terms by Robert Conquest in his seminal essay "Science Fiction and Literature" in The Critical Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4, (1963), pp. 355-367.

³⁹ Cf. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, London, Chatto & Windus, 1957, esp. Ch. 1.