Reactions to economic change are most revealing when a society first experiences its effects. In Britain, the development of capital and industry reached a noticeable scale for the first time in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Most of the people who recorded their views about the changes that were taking place were those most closely involved, and, not surprisingly, they were generally enthusiastic and only rarely mentioned their misgivings about the negative effects. Scientists like Joseph Priestley, political economists like Adam Smith and entrepreneurs like Matthew Boulton, James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood shared the view that progress was a beneficial process that would continue indefinitely.

However, such people formed only a very small part of the middle and upper classes of eighteenth- century Britain, and their point of view was distinctly radical. There is also evidence of strong contrary views. Thus Dr Johnson, recognising that men were no longer savages, acknowledged that progress had occurred in the past, but believed mankind had already reached its most advanced state and saw no place for further progress in the present or the future.

Nevertheless, Dr Johnson, and others who shared his view, showed much curiosity about the changes taking place around them, about the new factories and about the men who ran them. The main industrial districts of the late eighteenth century -Birmingham, Manchester, the Coalbrookdale iron works and the Staffordshire potteries - were visited regularly by travellers, regarded as being among the greatest sights in the land and frequently depicted by artists.

We are still in the middle of the Industrial Revolution.  It has made our world richer, smaller, and our world is everybody's world.

From its earliest beginnings, when it was still dependent on water power, the Industrial Revolution was cruel to those whose lives and livelihood it overturned. Yet it became in time a social revolution and established that social equality, the equality of rights, above all intellectual equality, on which we depend. The Renaissance established the dignity of man. The Industrial Revolution established the unity of nature.

That was done by scientists and romantic poets who saw that the wind and the sea and the stream and the steam and the coal are all created by the heat of the sun, and that heat itself is a form of energy, driving human progress.  It was such men who made nature romantic; the Romantic Movement in poetry came step by step with them. We see it in poets like Goethe (who was also a scientist) and in musicians like Beethoven. We see it first of all in Wordsworth: the sight of nature as a new quickening of the spirit because the unity in it was immediate to the heart and mind.