One of the earliest patents for an automaton in Victorian America was for a steam-powered android, drawn as a caricature of a Black man. Most histories of the so-called Steam Man tend to treat this automaton in one of two ways: Historians of science have addressed the machine indirectly, drawing general connections between Victorian Black androids, white femininity, and imputed inferiority; literary and cultural studies have addressed the Steam Man directly as a product of Reconstruction-era white anxiety over free Black labor. In this chapter, we argue for a different way of understanding the Steam Man and other Victorian Black automata, one that sees them as concealing historical truths about the Black technological self in nineteenth-century America. We follow a counterhistory of the mechanics that underpinned Black automata and show that, although androids like the Steam Man portrayed Black people in pastoral, leisurely, and nontechnological roles, their reliance on blackface minstrelsy ultimately concealed the intimate relationships between Black Victorian Americans, contemporary technologies, and the self

Early detective fiction’s anxious obsession with constructing a respectable canonical lineage ensured that texts in the genre are typically both explicit and repetitive in their intertextual referencing, and early detective fiction stories tend to link themselves back to a fairly limited set of precursor texts and tropes. This chapter argues that the automaton became one of detective fiction’s central recurring symbols in the Victorian period, a contested figure lying at the heart of a struggle over the genre and the worldview that it contained.

This chapter examines the conscious automata theory as advanced by Thomas Huxley in his controversial essay “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” (1874), which posits that human consciousness is a mere byproduct of neural processes, not, as is widely thought, the initiator or controller of voluntary behavior. This chapter asks why a theory that denied the efficacy of consciousness strongly captured the Victorian cultural imagination, and considers the implications of the view for aesthetic production. It explores late nineteenth-century responses to conscious automatism in philosophy, psychology, literature, and popular culture, before looking more closely at the treatment of the ideas in Samuel Butler’s “Book of the Machines” and George Eliot’s “Shadows of the Coming Race,” alongside George Henry Lewes’s Physical Basis of Mind. The chapter argues that rather than diminishing consciousness, Huxley’s theory removes consciousness from science and hands it over to aesthetics and, especially, literary texts.

Since their inception in the middle of the twentieth century, digital technologies developed from big machines accessed only by small groups of scientists and corporative experts, to “personal” devices providing opportunities for interaction to large masses of users. As a wide range of hardware and software interfaces were introduced, the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) tackled the pragmatic and theoretical implications of this change. This chapter takes up the toolbox developed in this context to ask new kinds of questions about the history of automata in the nineteenth century. As automata were offered to public spectacle and, to some extent, consumption, commentators discussed the reactions of “users” and observers of these devices, creating a body of theoretical reflections that can be read as HCI ante litteram. By considering cultural texts and artifacts that contributed to debates about “human–automata interactions,” the chapter mobilizes later debates in HCI and artificial intelligence to reconsider the ways in which Victorians discussed and imagined how people react to automata exhibiting the appearance of intelligent behavior.

This chapter studies Richard Marsh’s unexplored fiction on criminal mesmerism (The House of Mystery, “A Psychological Experiment,” “How He Passed,” “The Woman with One Hand”) alongside The Beetle, to analyze how mesmerized subjects are portrayed as automatons, seemingly devoid of agency/power. Drawing on the complex material history of automaton-objects and nineteenth-century psychological theories of automatized human behavior, the figures of mesmerized automatons in the texts complicate the usual association of automatons with technophobic anxiety. They also complicate the fraught issue of criminal responsibility, projecting difficult questions of volition/power that inhabit the crimes/injustices committed, or enabled, through an automaton. The automaton-like humans fracture the established nineteenth-century connection between mesmerism and painlessness, underscoring the inner (moral) agony of the automata – who in these texts are usually class/gender outsiders. As such, Marsh’s texts on criminal mesmerism stage an ethical intervention by showcasing the automatized subjects’ pain as their protest against socioeconomic injustices.

Poetic, literary and philosophical dreams of automata in the ancient world tended to focus on humanoid or at least mammalian entities. Yet when automata are realised in practice, they are considerably different in quality.This chapter explores the gap between the automata of ancient fantasy and reality, in terms of their physical nature and the concepts and categories with which they were implicated (statues, slaves, theatre, the divine).  It asks how far the sense of wonder that is associated with automata changed over time and how far it (ever) depended on a naturalistic or realistic reproduction of the body, human or animal. I argue that although the earliest known automata seem to have made gestures towards naturalism, both in terms of movement and other activities (if not in how these effects were realised), interest rapidly moved towards mechanical wonder (as Hero of Alexandria suggests) and theatrical wonder rather than any kind of naturalistic wonder. Perversely, the more technically sophisticated ancient automata became, the less the interest in mimicking human or animal bodies. The explanation may be sought partly in the non-naturalistic nature of ancient mimesis and partly in the changing status and sophistication of ancient mechanics. As a result, the path from ancient automata to modern notions of the robot or android is not at all straightforward.

This chapter starts by exploring the familiar scene at the end of Iliad 18, where the Homeric poet describes a sequence of artefacts that Hephaestus has manufactured: first the self-moving twenty golden tripods that he is in the process of completing, now fitting them out with ‘ears’, then the golden girls, automata, who are filled with ‘voice and strength’, then twenty self-blowing bellows that keep the fire strong, and finally Achilles’ wondrous shield, filled with individuals, animals and other elements that move, speak, sing and grow before our eyes for all (as the poet takes pains to remind us) that they are metal-forged. The Odyssey introduces another set of Hephaestus-forged animated metal goods, the guard dogs standing on the threshold of Alcinous and described in book 7.91–4. The second part of the chapter explores some of the vivified objects that populate archaic hexameter poetry, hybrids that stand at the interstices between the living and inanimate and among which the Hesiodic Pandora claims a place together with several other Hesiodic beings. The discussion’s second half focuses on the late archaic and early classical period, and on a number of figures that appear in Pindaric poetry.

This concluding epilogue consists of three diverse case studies which both sum up many of the main continuities and differences in the treatment of wonder in Greek literature and culture from Homer to the early Hellenistic period and simultaneously point towards some further directions for the study of wonder in antiquity and beyond.

This chapter focuses on the philosopher René Descartes. While Descartes is often seen as the initiator of modern habits of thinking – especially of the idea that the mind and body are distinct – here we view him as an outgrowth of Italian humanism. Descartes was educated by the Jesuits, at the time a new but influential religious order. From them, he imbibed Italian humanism’s respect for antiquity, its deep commitment to classical Latin, and most importantly its sometimes unarticulated through-line: that, to look at the world clearly, one needs to imagine oneself outside of it. But the Jesuits added something to Italian humanism: a deep respect for medieval Catholic theology, something that Descartes also took on board. His humanist education left him dissatisfied, however, laden with a feeling that it was not enough to establish a sure foundation on which could build a new way of looking at the natural world. Accordingly, he jettisoned the world of books, texts, and philology, grounding his perceptions of truth in the only thing about which he could be absolutely certain: that he existed. It is with Descartes that we can locate the beginnings of the modern separation of disciplines, as “natural philosophy” evolved into our modern natural sciences and separated itself from “philosophy” broadly conceived.

The idea of capacity is central to Godwin’s political theory. In spite of his assurance that equality is unrelated to physical or intellectual ability, Godwin makes individual and social liberty contingent upon the types of contributions one’s capacities allow. His political system inevitably produces exceptions (those who do not or cannot contribute to the general good) for which he needs to devise additional measures. People who lack the right kinds of mental and physical capacities prove to be an intractable difficulty. In his fiction, Godwin centralizes the idea that the mind should work in concert with the body, and sees incapacity in either of these as socially and personally problematic. We see this in his repeated use of automata, dolls, and characters who disengage from their bodies in various ways; and in his fictional use of rejuvenation and cure. Godwin speculates that when reason governs society, illness and incapacity will no longer be present. His attitude towards deformity is quite separate from his views on capacity. Deformity, in Godwin’s fiction, is usually a visual sign of an evil character, and he does not articulate the prodigious phase of disability.

This chapter contends that the Stuart court masque provided a scenic environment that was conducive to the display of the supernatural, the most famous example being the antimasque of witches in The Masque of Queens. Zukowska aims to prove that the masque’s basic magical prop, which served to bridge the gap between the metaphysical (the gods and abstractions revealed on stage) and the real (the king and courtiers watching the entertainment), was the masquer. Silent, passive, and styled to look like statues, masquers could only be activated by the king. The Stuart monarch would thus assume the role of a magician infusing life and motion into the inanimate, which was all the more miraculous as he did not even enter the stage. This chapter proposes the reading of the masquer as a mystical automaton, where the performing aristocrat is not only affected by magic but also acts as a tool of spreading it further to the entire court so as to deify it. Particular attention is paid to Campion’s The Lord Hay’s Masque, with its magic wand, charmed grove of dancing tress, and the overwhelming presence of musical magic, as well as Jonson’s magical globes with animated figures.