Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Thought
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loginViewed at its culmination, the nineteenth century appeared incontestably to have been the most extra-ordinary epoch that had ever occurred. In it, as Alfred Russel Wallace insisted in The Wonderful Century. Its Successes and its Failures (1898), humankind had progressed as far as in the whole of preceding human history.1 Principally this was a function of science and technology. It was an age richer in inventions than any other: steam-power, railways, gas illumination, electricity, refrigeration, the telegraph, the internal combustion engine, the phonograph, vaccination, anaesthetics, photography, radiation—to name but a few. Comforts increasingly abounded, and those who could enjoy their benefits found their lives immeasurably enriched. The world shrank rapidly: travel and communication were vastly easier; telescopes reached out into the universe, while microscopes and scalpels divulged a new world within. Life-expectations were greatly extended. Perceptions were sharpened, and urbanity and sociability expanded. These changes were intimately bound up with the fact that Europeans, in particular, left the land in ever-greater numbers for the bright lights of ever-larger cities, where, if they were well off, their standard of living and life-chances advanced steadily, while if they were not, they might well decline. But for all classes the experience was astonishing, bewildering and provocative.
