Collecting the Future, Imagining the Past:
Humphrey Jennings and Pandaemonium (1938-50)

Between 1938 and 1950, the Surrealist artist, Mass Observation Founder, and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings produced a scrapbook compilation of writings from 1660 to 1886 for what he called his “Pandaemonium” project. Jennings, one of the leading artists and interpreters of post-war Britain, is best known today for his patriotic war-time films, such as Listen to Britain (1942) and his final film, Family Portrait (1950), made shortly before his death in a mountain accident.

Never brought to completion during his lifetime, excerpts of “Pandaemonium” were published in 1938 in an issue of the London Bulletin edited by Jennings, but it was only finally published as a book in 1985, over thirty years after his death. (The filmmaker and director Danny Boyle, said he was inspired by images in Pandaemonium in telling a story about Britain’s place within the modern world for the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony).

In his “Pandaemonium” scrapbook of annotated writings, Jennings explored the way in which science and technology, through the Industrial Revolution, not only shaped the natural and industrial topography, but also informed ideas, language, perceptions, emotions and imagination of the inner landscape across a wide cross-section of British society.

This talk discusses the nature and significance of Pandaemonium as a source in the long history of the visualization of modernity. After considering new information about the background to the work, it will highlight its significance as one of the earliest histories to compose the historical narrative of modernization as a series of 'images' in popular historical imagination.

Image: Andre Deutsch detail from Coalbrookdale by Night by de Loutherbourg, 1801, oil on canvas, Science Museum, London / Bridgeman Images