Opening with an excerpt from Milton’s Paradise Lost – the founding of Pandaemonium, the capital city of Hell – this is a social history unlike any other. Humphrey Jennings collects more than 370 texts, written between 1660 and 1886, to create a vivid ‘imaginative history’ of the Industrial Revolution. With a master film-maker’s eye, he cuts together poems and literary works, letters and diaries, scientific journals and eyewitness reports into a sweeping, cinematic narrative of the machine age. Jennings's vision weaves together the thrill of technological progress and its dehumanising consequences, from the development of steam traction and Darwin’s evolutionary insights to child labour in a Derbyshire silk mill and the excitement of a balloon flight over London.