In the first great age of the substitution of machine for human 
toil Carlyle and the Pre-Raphaelites promulgated the doctrine of 
Work  as a mystical social communion, and millionaires like 
Ruskin and Morris toiled like navvies for aesthetic reasons. Marx 
was an impressionable recipient of these doctrines. Most 
bizarre of all the reversals in the great Victorian age of 
mechanization and high moral tone is the counter-strategy of 
Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, whose nonsense has proved 
exceedingly durable. While the Lord Cardigans were taking their 
blood baths in the Valley of Death, Gilbert and Sullivan were 
announcing that the boundary break had been passed.