Workers in the Infernal Foundry — Léon Benett, The Begum's Fortune 1879
Long iron poles wielded by straining laborers catch the eye first — workers heaving in coordinated desperation against the blazing maw of an industrial furnace. Pulling back, the scene resolves into a chaotic foundry floor engulfed in smoke and flame, cranes looming overhead, crowds surging in the background. This is the nightmarish Stahlstadt — the City of Steel — from Jules Verne's dystopian novel, rendered in Léon Benett's precise engraving style, capturing industrial labor as both spectacle and horror.
The vision of industrial hell — massed workers toiling in smoke and fire beneath iron machinery — is genuinely ambitious, evoking Verne's prophetic dystopia of militarized industry. The scale and atmosphere punch above the restraint of Victorian engraving conventions.
“BARBANT”
