“We must understand industrialism as an emphatically human project—and we must recognize ourselves both in and as machines” (168). Tamara Ketabgian’s intelligent and searching book on the philosophical and cultural pervasiveness of the machine in nineteenth-century Britain diverges from accounts of the dehumanizing effects of machinery, which are so familiar from Ruskin and Marx, to suggest instead the prescient and powerful ways in which the Victorians were already imagining themselves as “cyborgs,” in Donna Haraway’s famous phrase. Her book is therefore an important one that, in her own words, “pursue[s] a different path, in texts whose language of mechanical impulse and feeling—of force, conflict, intensity, and repetition—has centrally shaped twentieth-century accounts of human character, instinct, and interiority” (165).

The Lives of Machines develops an idea of Victorian industrialism that up to now has perhaps been better understood by the proponents of “steampunk” than by literary or historical scholars. Ketabgian is especially interested in the idea of prosthesis and the idea of a hybrid collective of the kind described by more recent postmodern theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari but which she traces back to the early nineteenth century. She shows how, very early in the process of industrialization, writers started to figure the machine as an extension of the human body or, indeed, the human body as an extension of the machine. She gives wonderful examples, such as that of Harriet Martineau on a tour of a metal factory, noticing “what curious finger-ends they have—those women who chafe the precious metals into their last degree of polish! They are broad—the joint so flexible that it is bent considerably backwards when in use; the skin has a peculiar smoothness: more mechanical, we fancy, than vital” (36). The book is very good at showing how machines offered new and exciting, if sometimes disturbing, possibilities for representing the human body and mind and for imagining the human as part of a hybrid network of human and nonhuman agencies.

Ketabgian is also good on the rumbling, threatening affect generated by steam engines that were imagined by contemporaries not as monolithic or passive but rather as organisms “pent up” or “under pressure” that might unexpectedly “let off steam” or even explode. A reading of Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) reexamines in detail his metaphor of the “melancholy mad elephants” for the steam engines in that text. The mechanical engines in the factory are usually understood by critics of the novel to represent the opposite of “feeling” and “fancy.” Yet Ketabgian persuades us that ultimately in Hard Times Dickens “invite[s] us to reconsider the waning of affect that we often attribute to industrial culture” (49), showing us instead the ways in which it “locates the privileged capacity for feeling in unexpected places and surprisingly nonhuman processes” (70). Similarly, a suggestive chapter on hydraulics in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) shows us convincingly how in that novel, “humans [are] irrevocably joined to a network of hybrid natural and mechanical forces, feelings and relations” (145).

Another chapter, entitled “Brute Appetites: Labor and Leisure in Mary Barton and Early Victorian Manchester,” is perhaps less successful. It has very little to say about the particularity of Manchester as an industrial city in the early Victorian period, and the book generally is very hazy on the geographical specificities of the British industrial landscape in the nineteenth century. In a discussion of the ways in which contemporary conservative commentators suggested that brutally regulated factory labor led to bouts of wildly unregulated “bingeing” on the part of industrial workers, Ketabgian says that in Mary Barton (1848) Elizabeth Gaskell frequently “chastise[s]” the Barton family for their “extravagance” (100) and castigates the poor for “excessive, ‘improvident’ habits” (164). She seems entirely to miss the irony with which Gaskell is mimicking and critiquing these very commentators, Andrew Ure (1778–1857) among them, for their lack of human sympathy with the poor. In the end, Ketabgian underestimates the Christian message of the novel and therefore quite seriously misreads its affective strategies. This is an important misprision for the book as a whole. The Lives of Machines does little to address the underlying philosophical and religious questions raised by the scientific materialism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What does become of the clock without the clock maker? By keeping her focus so closely and rigidly on three canonical Victorian novels, Ketabgian never really gives herself the space to engage seriously with the full range of the scientific, religious, and metaphysical implications of the new machines.

The book’s urgent agenda (“we must”) creates a sense of importance for the argument that is probably justified. Yet the book might still have been strengthened by more careful reference to work that has gone before. Jay Clayton’s and Richard Menke’s work on Victorian technologies is mentioned, although not substantially discussed, and, although Simon Schaffer’s article on Babbage’s difference engine is cited, his very important book (with Simon Shapin), Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985) is not. Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social (2005), on actor network theory, is, oddly, never invoked. My own attempt to think through the importance of machines in and to the novels of this period, in Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (2004) is not mentioned and neither is work by Robert Fox, Lisa Gitelman, or Pamela Thurschwell. Ketabgian’s focus on the novel, which she never fully explains, works to exclude not only much work in the history of science (a problem for a project that is so necessarily interdisciplinary) but also recent work on Victorian poetry and physical science by Jason R. Rudy and Barri J. Gold.

This is a book that, like its subject, is sometimes brilliant and productive and sometimes labored and monotonous. Its prose can be repetitious, and its literary readings are sometimes a little “mechanical,” but it also frequently splutters into energetic life to suggest a daring and genuinely new way of reading Victorian texts. At its best, it is very good indeed at showing us the fluency with which Victorians spoke “the language of living mechanical force” (122).