consciousness, as he declared on the last page of the Wake . He 
knew that he had solved the dilemma of Western individual man 
faced with the collective or tribal consequences of first his 
Gutenberg, and next his Marconi, technologies. Pope had seen 
the tribal consciousness latent in the new mass culture of the 
book-trade. Language and the arts would cease to be prime 
agents of critical perception and become mere packaging 
devices for releasing a spate of verbal commodities. Blake and 
the Romantics and the Victorians alike became obsessed with 
the actualization of Pope’s vision in the new organization of an 
industrial economy embedded in a self-regulating system of 
land, labor, and capital. The Newtonian laws of mechanics, 
latent in Gutenberg typography, were translated by Adam 
Smith to govern the laws of production and consumption. In 
accordance with Pope’s prediction of automatic trance or 
“robo-centrism,” Smith declared that the mechanical laws of