Sunlight as work in British Romanticism: Poetry, science, and theories of spontaneous production

By 1866 it was possible for Chambers's Journal to inform its readers that "all the labour done under the sun is really done by it." Work, far from a uniquely human activity, was merely one aspect of a productive energy circulating throughout nature, emblematized by sunlight. This dissertation traces analogies between work and natural force in the poetry and science of the British Romantic era, focusing in particular on the emergence of the idea that all work (intellectual and physical) is done by the sun.;The boundary between work and natural activity was already a blurry one in the late eighteenth century. The conflict between a bourgeois ethic of work and an ideal of spontaneity was often resolved, for instance in William Cowper's poem The Task (1785), through the claim that human life ought to follow nature's example of "ceaseless action." The word "energy," implying spontaneous productivity, began to displace older terms of praise (like "diligence") that implied deliberate effort.;Late eighteenth-century philosophy and poetry frequently represent human creative "energy" as descending from the sun. In the early nineteenth century this naturalistic solar imagery was reshaped by skepticism linked to political reaction. Although the sun remained an important figure for creative power, it was increasingly--for instance in the later poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Humphry Davy--a sun hidden from view and known only through its effects. The scientific idea that sunlight invests the world with life and consciousness nonetheless continued to shape Romantic theories of artistic creation, particularly Percy Shelley's theory of poetry in the "Defence of Poetry" (1821).;In the 1820s the existing connection between sunlight and creative power was expanded to include physical motive power. The arguments used to defend this claim drew on the discourse of engineering mechanics, but were also modeled on Romantic arguments that had described the sun as the source of terrestrial life and consciousness. The enthusiastic popular reception of the first law of thermodynamics (1857-1868) hinged, in turn, on the way it seemed to ratify this assumption--that all work, intellectual and physical, could be traced to the sun.