Coal and Related Technologies

• Matt Ridley on the crucial importance of coal to the Industrial Revolution
• Samuel Smiles on James Watt and the Steam Engine
• Steam Engines (homepage)
• Railways (homepage)
• Steam-Powered Ships (homepage)

Coal, Coal Mining, and Social and Political History

• Child Workers in a Coal Mine (from G. W. M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London)
• At Work Underground — The Life of British Coal Miner (Paxman)
• A Horribly Dangerous Job — Disaster and Death in Coal Mines (Paxman)
• Pit-Ponies in Coal Mines
• Testimony Gathered by Ashley's Mines Commission
• Raphael Samuel on the many forms of industrialized labor
• The development of steampowered ships and the effect on Liverpool
• G. Blake Walker and Margery May’s “A Peep into the Coal Country (1888)
• Jevons on England’s Limited Supply of Coal (1865)

Public Health and Environment

• King Coal — Industrial and Domestic Air Pollution and the Reaction against it
• Old King Coal and the Fog Demon by John Tenniel

Coal, Coal Mining, Industrial Uses of Coal, and the Arts

• Coal Mine after an Explosion by Sir Frank Brangwyn
• The Coal District by Matthew Ridley
• Bedlam Furnace, Coalbrookdale
• Britannia at Barnsley (editorial cartoon about a coal mine disaster)
• “Th’ pit . . . have cost . . . hundreds and hundreds o’ men’s lives” (Dickens’s Hard Times

Book Reviews

• Power Bought at a Terrible Price: Jeremy Paxman’s Black Gold and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s Extraction Technologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion

Last modified 24 November 2021