The Coal District. 6 x 9 inches. Drawn by E. J. Gregory (1850–1909). Drawn by Mathew White Ridley (1837–1888). Engraver unknown. The Graphic (18 February 1871): 142 — front page of individual issue). Click on image to enlarge it.
Note that Ridley depicts the coal wagons drawn up a steep hill by a rope attached to a steam-engine, which is outside the picture. It’s not clear if these wagons move on rails, the kind of technology that developed immediately before the invention of the locomotive and railways. Interestingly, this earlier technology still functioned in 1871, decades after steam-driven railways.
Ridley was primarily a landscape painter, presenting in this image a hard-hitting piece of industrialized scenery. The meeting of a courting couple in the foreground parodies the liaisons of bucolic lovers meeting in the idyllic fields of contemporary landscape painting; the background of smoke-stacks and flames further subverts the notion of the English Eden by showing it as a scrubby, heavily polluted Hell. Van Gogh was impressed by the documentary honesty of Ridley’s designs, reflecting their influence in his picturing of the Dutch peasantry.
Related material — Sitemap (homepages) for the following topics
- Rural Beauty, Urban Beast, and Some Responses to Industrialism
- Pillars of Flame and Smoke at Ironbridge
- Anna Seward and Erasmus Darwin: Two Poets Confront the Industrial Revolution
- Benjamin Disraeli’s criticism of industrialization in Sybil
- Lymington Iron Works, on the Tyne
Image scan and text by Simon Cooke. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. — George P. Landow]
Last modified 2 September 2018