Pandaemonium Reviews

‘The most gorgeous, gorgeous thing…beautiful,’

1. Dominic Sandbrook

Opening with an excerpt from Milton’s Paradise Lost – the founding of Pandaemonium, the capital city of Hell – this is a social history unlike any other. Humphrey Jennings collects more than 370 texts, written between 1660 and 1886, to create a vivid ‘imaginative history’ of the Industrial Revolution. With a master film-maker’s eye, he cuts together poems and literary works, letters and diaries, scientific journals and eyewitness reports into a sweeping, cinematic narrative of the machine age. Jennings's vision weaves together the thrill of technological progress and its dehumanising consequences, from the development of steam traction and Darwin’s evolutionary insights to child labour in a Derbyshire silk mill and the excitement of a balloon flight over London. Pandaemonium gained fresh prominence in 2012 as the inspiration behind Danny Boyle’s astonishing Opening Ceremony for the London Olympics. Handsomely bound, the Folio Society edition contains more than 120 black & white and colour illustrations, selected by cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling, who contributes the introduction. Today, as artificial intelligence promises – and threatens – a new technological revolution, Pandaemonium stands not only as a singular artistic achievement but a book of great prescience and relevance.