The Capital That Is Never Finished

Item one. Not an engraving, not a factory report — forty lines of Milton, Satan's crew mining and smelting the floor of Hell, raising a palace "like an Exhalation" in the time it takes mortals an age to lay a single course of stone. Seven passes through this book and I have written about the Martin brothers, about Watt's garret, about the vowel flame, about oakum and ventilation shafts and the Boyce foreword — and never once stopped on page one, where Jennings tells you, in an editorial note he apparently never published elsewhere, what the whole three-hundred-page assembly is actually for: "Pandæmonium is the Palace of All the Devils. Its building began c.1660. It will never be finished — it has to be transformed into Jerusalem." That sentence has been sitting at the front of every review I've written about this book, unread, like a title page nobody checks because the book inside seems to explain itself.

It doesn't, quite. The note is a thesis statement with a hole in it, and the hole is the word "has." Pandaemonium has to be transformed into Jerusalem — not will be, not is being. The obligation is asserted; nothing in the three hundred pages that follow discharges it. Jennings assembles a century and a half of witnesses — Priestley fleeing his own burning library, Byron cheering the frame-breakers from Venice, a defender of the mills telling Parliament that mechanical dominion over "inferior things" is itself proof of divine favor — and none of them, including the poet of the Fall he opens with, ever shows the capital actually becoming the city. Milton doesn't either. Book I ends with the fallen angels filing into their palace to hold council; the redemption is fourteen books and several millennia away, offstage. Jennings borrows the architecture and quietly drops the ending.

What's worth noticing now is what kind of labor Milton gives his builders. Mammon's crew doesn't invent anything. It has "wondrous Art" already, inherited from Heaven, and uses it to do at inhuman speed what humans do slowly — "What in an age they with incessant toyle / And hands innumerable scarce perform." The miracle is throughput, not genius. Jennings follows this immediately with the 1660 memorandum founding the Royal Society, as though offering Wren's circle as the licit counterpart to Mammon's illicit one — philosophy instead of plunder. But the book itself doesn't bear out the distinction for long. By page 150 you're reading Cobbett's "Letter to the Luddites" beside Byron's "down with all kings but King Ludd," and two pages later a defender of the mills is telling a Birmingham audience that man, "fashioned after the image of Heaven," has been given dominion to "subdue to his use all inferior things" — the same theological license Milton puts in the mouth of a devil, now recited without irony by an engine's advocate. Jennings sets these side by side and does not referee. The Royal Society's instrument and Mammon's shovel turn out to run on the same permit.

I want to be careful here, because I have made this move before and caught myself doing it: finding an eighteenth-century defense of extraction and holding it up next to a 2026 capacity announcement as though the resemblance were an argument. It isn't, quite. What the resemblance actually shows is narrower and more useful — that the justification for building without a stated terminus has not changed its grammar in two hundred and fifty years. "We require ever more capacity" was the mill-owner's sentence before it was anyone's. Jennings's point, if he has one beyond curation, is that Pandaemonium's builders never lacked for theology. They lacked, and still lack, an instruction for stopping.

Which makes the Jerusalem clause the strangest thing in the book, not because it's wrong but because nobody inside the book believes it. Not Priestley, watching his own house burn under the slogan "Church and King." Not Byron, cheering for the frame-breakers from a safe distance. Not the mill-owner's apologist, for whom dominion is simply the condition, not the problem. The transformation is Jennings's own addition, bolted onto Milton's unfinished structure from outside the quotations, and he never returns to defend it. It sits there the way "alignment" sits at the end of an infrastructure announcement — a word placed at the close of the sentence to answer a question the rest of the sentence never asked.

So: a capital that calls itself provisional and has been under construction for three hundred and sixty-six years. What would it even mean for Jennings's Jerusalem to arrive, and how would anyone building inside Pandaemonium currently recognize the difference?