The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the late eighteenth century and spread through Europe and North America. Coal, factories, canals, railways, and mechanised production changed air quality, working lives, cities, and rural landscapes. It created unprecedented wealth alongside pollution and social dislocation.

Industrial change lies behind Blake's dark satanic mills, Wordsworth's defence of rural imagination, and later Victorian urban poetry. It created the central modern poetic contrast between machine and meadow, factory smoke and pastoral memory, progress and spiritual loss.