In Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 1988), Christine MacLeod produced a lucid analysis of the evolving relationship between British patent law, technological innovation, and commercial development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her new book, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750–1914, carries this story further, both in historical time and in analytical depth, by exploring a hitherto poorly elucidated phenomenon: the emergence of the inventor as a heroic figure in the nineteenth century. MacLeod compellingly charts the rapid rise in the inventor's cultural prestige during this period and the equally swift decline in the inventor's status in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, MacLeod argues, the inventor was commonly viewed with suspicion, as a projector or monopolist whose inventions might deny honest laborers employment. However, the inventor's stock rose in the later eighteenth century, helped by writers such as Hume and Smith, the rise of utilitarianism, and the admittedly ambivalent effects of industrialization. The key figure here was James Watt, whose steam engine was threaded into emerging narratives that depicted British greatness in commercial rather than military terms. Watt's star really waxed after his death, culminating in the massive statue erected to him in Westminster Abbey in 1834. This statue serves as a point of departure for MacLeod, who describes it as “the harbinger of a new age; it was the cultural counterpart of the Reform Act of 1832” (1). Like the Reform Act, Watt symbolized the new order, and MacLeod notes how he served as a “rival figurehead” to Wellington (93). By midcentury, a “technological pantheon” was emerging, with Watt being joined by George and Robert Stephenson and Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. This was anything but a metropolitan process, however. Local heroes of invention became integral to the forging of local identities. For example, Samuel Crompton, who died in poverty after inventing the spinning mule, was commemorated in his native Bolton by a statue in 1862. This local appreciation for the inventor is a particularly convincing part of MacLeod's story.

Between 1880 and 1900, however, the inventor's cultural position was challenged by two kinds of figures: the scientist and what MacLeod terms the “heroic entrepreneur” (333). Inventors lacking either scientific brilliance or financial acumen were increasingly disparaged as a new stereotype of the slightly ridiculous, absentminded inventor developed. Smilesian eulogies to engineers appeared increasingly hackneyed, especially when compared to newly popular figures like the explorer. Meanwhile, Arnold Toynbee was lecturing on the “industrial revolution,” a historical phenomenon he viewed negatively. Figures like Watt were easily reappraised as the creators of an oppressive technological order.

MacLeod thus also offers an original perspective on the emergence of the idea of decline in British culture. Indeed, it is a great strength of Heroes of Invention that the history of the cultural conception of the inventor turns out to be the history of so many other things besides. The capacity of an individual to invent something, for example, was a key way in which ideas about the relative power of the autonomous self and what we would term “social context” were debated. This had very practical ramifications. For those opposed to the patent system, it was essentially a progressive culture, not an individual, that produced an invention. The cultural salience of invention thus generated a range of debates about selfhood and causation. Another facet of these debates was evident in a set of texts MacLeod examines that evoke another important contemporary concept, “technological determinism.” Numerous figures, including George Porter, Sir John Rennie, and the engineer and draftsman John Farey, argued that the steam engine was the basic causal agent of multiple nineteenth-century phenomena, from economic productivity to naval prowess and “civilization.”

It is in the charting of the broad emergence of such ideas, elaborated by a wide range of authors in different contexts, that MacLeod's book is most successful. With a book of such ambition and scope, there will inevitably be a few weaknesses. For this reviewer, MacLeod's treatment of the relationship between invention and liberalism felt rather undeveloped. MacLeod devotes time to the complicated discussions about the relationship between patenting and free trade and provides an interesting analysis of Hodgskin's political economy. However, J. S. Mill's opposition to the abolition of patenting, which he said “would enthrone free stealing under the prostituted name of free trade” (quoted on 265), suggests that the connections between liberalism and invention are by no means as straightforward as might first appear.

This kind of quibble only reflects the thought-provoking nature of the book. Heroes of Invention is not simply a book about invention and heroism but many other things besides: memory, identity, the historical consciousness, and that whole phase of British history we still refer to as the Industrial Revolution. MacLeod offers us a subtle, imaginative, and original analysis of the emergence of a whole style of historical thinking, one that viewed British progress in terms of its great inventors and their inventions rather than its monarchs or generals. For anyone interested not just in the role played by invention in modern British history but in the complex origins of British historical consciousness, this book will be required reading.