key note here is one of bathos. Balloon science is all gas, self-inflation, and altogether much ado about nothing. The tone is similar to that of Dickens’s celebrated satire on the newly formed British Association for the Advancement of Science, which he memorably attacked under the mocking title of ‘The Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything’ (1837).
Later, as editor of the weekly journal Household Words (1850–59), Dickens recognised the drama and popularity of balloons, and commissioned several articles on the subject. These included some short pieces of straight reportage, such as ‘Over the Water’, ‘A Royal Balloon’ and ‘A Royal Pilot-Balloon’.4 But by far the longest was a well-researched but inescapably comic treatment of the entire history of aerostation, dwelling in loving detail on its most satisfactory catastrophes. It was simply entitled ‘Ballooning’.
The piece seems to have been triggered by the extraordinary gallery of aerostats on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Whether Dickens regarded these as an expression of imperial hubris, or simply as a display of scientific absurdity, he deliberately commissioned a hostile feature. His chosen reporter for the task was Richard Hengist Horne, a literary adventurer and poet who had travelled in Mexico and Canada, and would soon emigrate to Australia. Although he had once been the schoolfellow of John Keats, Horne’s aeronautical credentials were not evident. His previous works included a verse drama, Prometheus the Firebringer, and he had had a long, passionate friendship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But his droll essay clearly met with Dickens’s editorial approval, as it ran to sixteen columns and was given the lead in Household Words No. 33 on Saturday, 25 October 1851.
Horne kicked off with the deadpan observation that travelling through ‘the sublime highways of the air’ was not entirely natural. Man was never intended to be ‘lord of the clouds’. The urge to fly might have existed from ‘time immemorial’, yet among balloonists it seemed to take on a morally questionable form. ‘Eccentric ambition, daring, vanity, and the love of excitement and novelty’ inspired them quite as much as ‘the love of science and of making new discoveries’.
Horne then embarked on a relentlessly mocking history of man’s disastrous attempts to become airborne: ‘We do not allude to the Icarus of old, or any fabulous or remote aspirants, but to modern times.’ These attempts included ‘a flying monk of Malmesbury’ who became ‘impudent and jocose’ on the subject of tail-feathers; a flapping French marquis who crash-landed in the Seine and broke his leg against ‘one of the floating machines of the Parisian laundresses’; and a citizen of thirteenth-century Bologna who was persecuted by the Inquisition because he failed to drown when his flying machine landed in the river Reno, thus of course inadvertently proving he was a witch.
After summarising the various adventures of Charles Green, Horne turned to the fantastical collection of balloons on display in the Aeronautical Hall of the Great Exhibition. He enumerates them without comment: ‘One has the appearance of a huge Dutch vegetable marrow … another a silver fish with revolving fins … a huge inflated bonnet … a large firework case … the skeleton of some fabulous bird’. Dickens had clearly given Horne carte blanche, and the article continued in this supercilious vein to the end.5
Why should Dickens have felt so hostile towards ballooning? He was always ready to poke fun at scientific pretentions, but his mockery seemed to go deeper than this. It is clear that he despised balloons as a form of mass entertainment. He felt that they exploited both the credulity of the public and the courage of the balloon ‘artist’. But he may also have feared them at some less conscious level. A clue appears in an extraordinary essay he wrote on the subject of ‘Nightmares’. Here he makes a strange and startling comparison between the expectant crowd at a Vauxhall balloon launch and the similarly expectant spectators at a public hanging outside a London prison.
This intimate essay, which Dickens nevertheless published in Household Words, opens with the author lying awake in the dark, insomniac, unable to settle his thoughts, and besieged by obsessive and even perverse images. He tries to distract himself:
The balloon ascents of this last season. They will do to think about, while I lie awake, as well as anything else. I must hold them tight though, for I feel them sliding away, and in their stead are the Mannings, husband and wife, hanging on the top of Horse-monger Lane Jail. In connexion with which dismal spectacle, I recall this curious fantasy of the mind. That, having beheld that execution, and having left those two forms dangling on the top of the entrance gateway – the man’s, a limp, loose suit of clothes as if the man had gone out of them; the woman’s, a fine shape, so elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, that it was quite unchanged in its trim appearance as it slowly swung from side to side – I never could, by my uttermost efforts, for some weeks, present the outside of that prison to myself (which the terrible impression I had received continually obliged me to do) without presenting it with the two figures still hanging in the morning air …
Here the essay breaks off in horror. Then Dickens tries again with balloons:
The balloon ascents of last season. Let me reckon them up. There were the horse, the bull, the parachute, – and the tumbler hanging on – chiefly by his toes, I believe – below the car. Very wrong, indeed, and decidedly to be stopped. But, in connexion with these and similar dangerous exhibitions, it strikes me that that portion of the public whom they entertain, is unjustly reproached. Their pleasure is in the difficulty overcome. They are a public of great faith, and are quite confident that the gentleman will not fall off the horse, or the lady off the bull or out of the parachute, and that the tumbler has a firm hold with his toes. They do not go to see the adventurer vanquished, but triumphant. 6
For Dickens, the balloon basket and the public scaffold seemed intimately, even vertiginously, linked. They both hold out the idea of humiliation, exposure and death: the horrific promise of a fatal fall. The novelty ascents arranged by Green and others – the man on a horse, the woman on a bull (surely a Dickens invention?) – make this even worse by trivialising the terror. Worst of all is the lone ‘tumbler’, hanging over the abyss ‘chiefly by his toes’.
And here perhaps lies a possible explanation. It is with this solitary acrobat, totally exposed above the crowd, that Dickens the solitary writer surely identifies. Both ballooning and writing are ‘dangerous exhibitions’. The writer, like the balloonist, hopes to be ‘triumphant’ in front of his audience, the ‘public of great faith’. But he – or she – may fail, ‘vanquished’ despite all their skill, and drop to their long death as from a scaffold. Ballooning haunted Dickens because it reminded him of the permanent, secret terror of successful writing, the ultimate exposure of the popular entertainer, and the public fall from grace.
It is no coincidence that Dickens also slipped a balloon, almost unnoticed, into the famous, grim opening of Bleak House (1853). He wrote: ‘Fog in the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights … Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners … Chance people on the bridges peering over the parapets, into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in misty clouds.’ Here the balloon has become again an image of helplessness and doom. The very word ‘hanging’ has an uneasy echo of Dickens’ scaffold nightmare.
3
But usually the Victorian balloon had far more progressive associations. Scientific ascents also took place from Vauxhall Gardens, manned by serious gentlemen in top hats, prepared to observe and measure and speculate.
The use of the aerial panorama was even encouraged as a tool of sociological investigation. By studying the city from above, with the objective ‘angel’s eye’, it was possible to reveal much about its social structure, its balance of commercial and private dwellings, and especially (as both Poole and Mayhew had remarked) its savage contrasts of rich and poor. One indirect result of this was the famous ‘poverty maps’ compiled by the philanthropist Charles Booth in the 1880s.
These, with their colour codings and careful urban annotations, adapted the balloon overview as a technical device for compiling and storing new kinds of information.