The richly varied lives of the Martin brothers reflected the many
upheavals of Britain in the age of Industrial Revolution. Low-born and
largely unschooled, they were part of a new generation of artists,
scientists and inventors who witnessed the creation of the modern world.
William, the eldest, was a cussedly eccentric inventor who couldn't look
at a piece of machinery without thinking about how to improve it;
Richard, a courageous soldier, fought in the Peninsular War and at
Waterloo; Jonathan, a hellfire preacher tormented by madness and touched
with a visionary genius reminiscent of William Blake, almost burned down
York Minster in 1829; while John, the youngest Martin, single-handedly
invented, mastered and exhausted an entire genre of painting, the
apocalyptic sublime, while playing host to the foremost writers,
scientists and thinkers of his day.
In The Prometheans Max Adams interweaves the fascinating story of these
maverick siblings with a magisterial and multi-faceted account of the
industrial, political and artistic ferment of early 19th-century
Britain. His narrative centres on a generation of inventors, artists and
radical intellectuals (including the chemist Humphry Davy, the engineer
George Stephenson, the social reformer Robert Owen and the poet Shelley)
who were seeking to liberate humanity from the tyranny of material
discomfort and political oppression. For Adams, the shared inspiration
that binds this generation together is the cult of Prometheus, the titan
of ancient Greek mythology who stole fire from Zeus to give to mortal
man, and who became a potent symbol of political and personal liberation
from the mid-18th century onwards.
Whether writing about Davy's invention of the miner's safety lamp, the
scandalous private life of the Prince Regent, the death of Shelley or
J.M.W. Turner's use of colour, Adams's narrative is pacy, characterful,
and rich in anecdote, quotation and memorable character sketch. Like
John Martin himself, he has created a sprawling and brightly coloured
canvas on an epic scale.
