4 - Science and technology

Summary

Despite the contemporary enthusiasm for sanitary reform, few Victorians wrote poems about drains. One exception was Kipling, who gave his poem the daringly unpromising title 'Municipal'. The speaker is a district commissioner who, when menaced by a stampeding elephant, took refuge in a blocked-up outfall wearing regulation 'snowy garments':

You may hold with surface-drainage, and the sun-for-garbage cure,

Till you've been a periwinkle shrinking coyly up a sewer.

The experience has made him 'believe in well-flushed culverts' and, as a result, the death-rate in his district has gone down. Kipling's vision of empire extended to the infrastructure of railways, riverboats, bridges and sewage systems. In his prose and poetry, his fascination with technology and its consequences shows up in unexpected places, foreign, imperial and domestic. On his visit to Brazil in 1927, he sent rapturous dispatches to the ultra-conservative (and often xenophobic) Morning Post praising the mountain railways, the giant hydroelectric installations, and the laboratory where snakes and spiders were milked for their venom. ‘“They” ’ heads towards the mystical and redemptive, but it starts by evoking the joys of motoring through rural England, and does not stint on technical details: ‘I was on the point of reversing and working my way back on the second speed.’