Fire ignited paradoxical and competing values in nineteenth-century Britain: primitivism and modernity, vitality and destruction, intimacy and spectacle. The introduction of ‘artificial’ gas flames and electric light rendered the incendiary element more mutable still, construed as an agent of industrial progress or, alternatively, as an extension of the ‘hearth and home’ that apparently resisted an increasingly technologized era. Despite the material displacement of ‘natural’ firelight as the primary source of warmth and illumination in public and private spaces, fire continued to feature prominently in British imaginations. As a Romantic metaphor for reverie or as a means for projecting moving images from the magic lantern, fire was a shared substance and energy across literature, art, public displays, and proto-cinematic entertainments. This issue of
A few touchstones from the history of artificial light help to contextualize how and why fire — in its multiple forms — was perceived in such contradictory terms. The industrialization of light in nineteenth-century Britain facilitated remarkable cultural transformations as gas and electricity began to supersede more traditional forms of firelight.
The material and ideological processes of industrializing firelight suggested to some that Britain had finally mastered the ancient element of fire, yet — and this is of special interest to the articles collected in this issue — reliance on outmoded technologies of heat and light continued throughout the nineteenth century. Candles, wood, oil, coal, and other fuels continued to burn alongside gaslight and later coexisted with electricity.
This issue of
The articles that follow are arranged in broadly chronological order. All the same, there is considerable overlap in terms of the time frames through which different fiery phenomena are treated. This illustrates well the continuities in the multifarious ways in which fire — natural and contrived, controlled and dangerous, beneficial and destructive — was construed over the nineteenth century. We have also mixed up longer and shorter pieces with the aim of making the dialogue between the contributions as lively as possible.
In Anne Sullivan’s article, the domestic fireside is a site of reverie. Drawing on Michael Faraday’s lectures on
Anna Henchman’s piece looks at burning in a less palatable light. She addresses the meaty, greasy air in
Nicholas Daly’s article on fire in the Victorian theatre returns us in some respects to the pleasurable: the representation of fire on stage became increasingly spectacular during the century. Sometimes very simple technologically, other incendiary displays not only drew from scientific developments, but — so startling were they in the interruption that they caused — had the effect of making the spectator recognize, and appreciate, the artifice that they were witnessing. At the same time, this ‘theatre of attractions’ had its dangerous side since almost every theatre seems to have caught fire — even to have burned down — at some point.
Unintended conflagrations also featured in J. M. W. Turner’s paintings, most famously, of course, in his depictions of the burning of the Palace of Westminster. This, as Leo Costello shows, helped to consolidate his reputation as a painter of destruction. Yet, as he goes on to argue, fire in Turner partook in a dual role, also increasingly carrying the connotations of domesticity and comfort. Throughout the painter’s career, however — indeed, from his early works onwards — fire played a political role, and, Costello maintains, Turner was continually interrogating its relationship with an age of mass politics.
Volcanic fiery eruptions were familiar nineteenth-century figures for political uprisings and revolutionary energies, but rather than explore their metaphorical resonances, David Pyle writes about the developing understanding of volcanic processes that unfolded during the nineteenth century. The backdrop to these scientific discussions was the frequent and dramatic eruption of Vesuvius, which meant that representations of this volcano were often seen by Victorian spectators. Yet, if Vesuvius served the first half of the period as a ‘model’ volcano — its most famous eruption being that which buried Pompeii in
Kate Neilsen’s piece addresses the implications of a different kind of naturally occurring fiery event — the first solar flare ever observed from earth, in 1859. The resulting solar storm remains the strongest weather event ever recorded by humans as taking place in space, causing spectacular displays of the aurora borealis, and creating electrical surges that caused telegraph machines to catch fire. Beautiful and threatening in its results, this display stimulated much debate about the nature of the sun, which tied in directly to contemporary debates about thermodynamics. In what ways, it was asked, could the sun’s fieriness disrupt human activity — not through becoming feebler, as some argued, but by sending hot jets towards the earth?
Solar fires and erupting volcanoes are uncontrollable fiery spectacles. By contrast, the firework displays that were features of commemorations and pleasure gardens in Victorian Britain were highly choreographed events, and their representation in the illustrated press was frequently quite stylized. Kate Flint shows that, ostensibly, James McNeill Whistler’s 1875 painting
Nancy Rose Marshall also examines visual representations of human-made fires; in her case, funeral pyres, as they figured in Victorian imagery of Druid and Viking cultures. Yet, as she shows, this interest in funereal flames was not purely one of historical fascination, but was closely linked to the emergent cremation movement. Marshall takes this further, to explore how the Victorian fascination with pagan fire (and with contemporary bodies consigned to the flames) was also concerned with the nature of bodies and matter, the potential — or lack of it — for resurrection of a burnt body, and the invisibility and formlessness of the soul. The very visibility, yet constant mutability, of flame, and the concomitant embrace of an aesthetics of dissolving form in its representation, means that painterly style can be understood as a means of understanding spirituality. These speculations also return the reader of this issue to Sullivan’s opening article. If one can project one’s imaginings onto domestic flames, so painted ones may also serve as a site for conjecture.
Jesse Oak Taylor presents a haunting analysis of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’, an 1898 short story about a coal ship that catches fire, a local disaster that registers on a global scale in the Anthropocene. When the captain decides to ignore the coal fire smouldering below decks in the cargo hold, life on board ship proceeds almost ‘as normal’ despite the threat of imminent catastrophe. Taylor draws analogies between the crew’s ‘cognitive imperviousness’ to disaster and our present moment, in which we continue to burn fossil fuels despite alarming evidence that this action continues to precipitate global warming.
In conclusion, Isobel Armstrong’s afterword, ‘Fire’, both ties together all the pieces, offering reflections about the particular angles that they present on this element, and provides some further provocative thinking about perception and phenomenology. Armstrong engages with the historical and theoretical contexts of this collection by turning to Michael Faraday — a figure who appears in Anna Henchman’s, David Pyle’s, and Anne Sullivan’s articles — and Gaston Bachelard. Placing the articles in conversation with Faraday’s admiration of the candle flame and Bachelard’s attention to the creative and destructive properties of fire, Armstrong contends that this issue offers the ‘beginnings of a coherent poetics of fire for the Victorian period’. We share her ambitions for the work that these articles may perform as they examine the illuminating, spectacular, and catastrophic technologies of fire.
For a cultural history of the industrialization of light in the nineteenth century, see Christopher Otter,
Terence Rees,
Christopher Otter similarly resists characterizing the history of artificial light as an inevitable trajectory from fire to electric light. For a discussion of how the term ‘electric light’ often served as an umbrella for multiple forms of light, such as arc light and incandescent light, see
Lynda Nead, ‘The Tiger in the Smoke: The Visuality of Post-War British Fog’, Visual Ecologies Workshop, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, 11 May 2017, lecture notes. Just after the writing of this introduction, Nead’s monograph,
This issue complements John Durham Peters’s meditations on fire’s relationship to media theory — and to the history of human civilization more broadly — in
We owe a special debt of thanks to Carolyn Burdett, who worked tirelessly with us during every step of this issue’s proposal and publication, to