Humphrey Jennings was a 20th century filmmaker who died in 1950. For a period of thirteen years, from 1937, he had collected and collated writings from the 17th to the 19th century which informed the arrival of the industrial world. His collection was only published in 1985 through the assiduous work of his daughter, Mary-Lou Jennings, with the title Pandæmonium. The 1985 edition begins, appropriately, with a quotation from Paradise Lost, by John Milton:
There stood a Hill not far whose griesly top
Belch’d fire and rowling smoak; the rest entire
Shone with a glossie scurff, undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic Ore,
The work of Sulphur.
After Jennings’s untimely death in 1950, his friend Charles Madge worked with Mary-Lou Jennings to pull the twelve books of editorial collections and notes into a publishable shape. Quite what a task this was can be inferred from the length of time it took before Pandæmonium was eventually published in England by André Deutsch.
Jennings wasn’t an overtly political man but we can probably be safe to assume that he aligned himself with the views of the incoming Labour government of 1945 and the writings of fellow artists such as George Orwell. The work of Mass Observation also owed so much to him. He was, in other words, from an age our culture finds it virtually impossible to comprehend, a romantic rebel in the spirit of William Morris who found solace in the quasi-mythical notion of an English agrarian past where men and women took their place in nature and lived a simpler life of shared endeavours and pleasures.