Skip to main content
  • Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

    Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture


Cultural histories of nineteenth-century Britain have studied the important physical and psychological transformations caused by the industrialization of light. Gaslight, though discovered prior to the nineteenth century, became aligned with the era’s narratives of national and industrial progress, an arc that, one might argue, culminated in the growing popularity of electric light at the end of the century. Yet, despite these new technologies of ‘artificial light’, ‘natural’ wood and coal fires remained popular in British culture. This issue explores fire as a visual and narrative technology in art, literature, and public displays by examining the ways in which fire evoked competing symbolic values, such as primitivism and modernity, vitality and destruction, intimacy and spectacle. The reading order mixes articles and shorter pieces together to demonstrate the continuities of fire across various sites, including: the domestic fireside, the tallow candle, theatrical conflagrations, Turner’s fires, subterranean fire, solar fire, fireworks, funeral pyres, and a coal-ship fire.

Cover image: Unknown artist, The Tooley Street Fire, 1861, oil on canvas. © London Fire Brigade/Mary Evans.

Articles


Introduction: Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Introduction: Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Anne Sullivan and Kate Flint

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Animating Flames: Recovering Fire-Gazing as a Moving-Image Technology

Animating Flames: Recovering Fire-Gazing as a Moving-Image Technology

Anne Sullivan

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Tallow Candles and Meaty Air in Bleak House

Tallow Candles and Meaty Air in Bleak House

Anna Henchman

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Fire on Stage

Nicholas Daly

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Power, Creativity, and Destruction in Turner's Fires

Power, Creativity, and Destruction in Turner's Fires

Leo Costello

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Visions of Volcanoes

Visions of Volcanoes

David M. Pyle

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Dirty Fires: Cosmic Pollution and the Solar Storm of 1859

Dirty Fires: Cosmic Pollution and the Solar Storm of 1859

Kate Neilsen

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Fireworks

Fireworks

Kate Flint

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Victorian Imag(in)ing of the Pagan Pyre: Frank Dicksee's Funeral of a Viking

Victorian Imag(in)ing of the Pagan Pyre: Frank Dicksee's Funeral of a Viking

Nancy Rose Marshall

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

While the World Burns: Joseph Conrad and the Delayed Decoding of Catastrophe

While the World Burns: Joseph Conrad and the Delayed Decoding of Catastrophe

Jesse Oak Taylor

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Afterword


Fire

Fire

Isobel Armstrong

2017-12-01 Issue 25 • 2017 • Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture