A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

The solitude in these blissful surroundings is balm to my soul... My
whole being is filled with a marvellous gaiety, like sweet spring
mornings...
When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me, when the
sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable depths of my forest at
noon, and only single rays steal into the inner sanctuary, when I lie in
the tall grass beside a rushing brook, and become aware of the
remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground,
with all their peculiarities, when I feel the teeming of a minute world
amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of
worm and insect closer to my heart and can sense the presence of the
Almighty, who in a state of continuous bliss bears and sustains us -
then, my friend, when it grows light before my eyes and the world
around me and the sky above come to rest wholly within my soul like
a beloved, I am filled often with yearning, and thinking that if I could
only express it all on paper, everything that is housed so richly and
warmly within me, so that it might be the mirror of my soul as my soul
is the mirror of Infinite God... ah, my dear friend, but I am ruined by it,
I succumb to its magnificence.
This interminable sentence, with its failure to reach a proper conclusion, nevertheless conveys a
sense of floating in blissful ecstasy. It is almost like a radio set that has tuned in to some frequency
whose existence we never even suspected.
But the new awareness brings its own problems, for Werther, like Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling,
suffers from ‘too keen a sensibility’, and it brings him to suicide. This was the dilemma of the
romantics. Should they try to pursue these new sensations to their limits, and risk insanity, or would
it be more sensible to try to come down to earth and get on with the practical business of living?
The new sensibility had turned the artist into a social misfit, an ‘outsider’ who seemed doomed to
peer at life through a keyhole. He was, in a word later coined by Karl Marx, ‘alienated’ from his
society.
While Defoe, Richardson, Rousseau and Goethe were creating their inner revolution, another kind
of revolution was transforming their society.
Because the English had kept out of the Thirty Years War, England in 1700 was already more
prosperous than France or Germany, and farmers and businessmen began to concentrate on more
efficient ways of production. In 1733 came an invention that revolutionised weaving more than
anything since the invention of the flat frame in the fourteenth century: the fly shuttle. On the old
loom, two men had to stand on either side to toss the shuttle back and forth. A weaver named John
Kay invented a method that would send the shuttle - on small wheels - flying back and forth under
blows from wooden hammers. It increased the speed of weaving, but it robbed the two men of their
job. Kay became intensely unpopular in Colchester, where he introduced the fly shuttle, and had to
move to Leeds. There his fly shuttle was eagerly adopted, but the manufacturers refused to pay him
for its use and forced him into expensive litigation that ruined him. In his native town of Bury, his
house was wrecked by a mob; he moved to Manchester and was forced to escape hidden in a wool