7 - Literature

Summary

‘From Chloe's Hand, Launched forth in Fields of Air, Swift as the Bolt of Heaven I took my Flight, Child of the Wind, I flutter'd here and there

Till Clouds obscur'd me from the Gazer's Sight.’

From a poem attached to the unmanned balloon launched by

Robert Kingscote in Gloucestershire on 15 September 1784.

IN 1786 JANE CAVE PUBLISHED a volume of poems. Literally provincial – she was from Brecon and the book was published in Bristol – many of the poems feature air as an imaginative medium. Balloons make an appearance:

We in these aether castles ride

With all the equipage of pride,

And in imagination rise,

Superior monarchs of the skies.

The literature of balloons had a wide reach, encompassing many amateurs and anonymous writers. This chapter explores some of them.

Aerostation was incontestably a new science, yet the literature of aerostation draws deeply on old genres in its fashioning of imaginative possibilities. A rare surviving handbill from a provincial press, for instance, uses a fire balloon as a vehicle for a sermon. In prose, balloons had their own new genres, from the formal accounts of aerial voyages (in English, using French narratives as starting points) to the looser life-writing of aeronauts about experiences aloft. These accounts did empirical work and reflected upon imagination, especially through the sublime, but they were not leading influences on imaginative responses to balloons. Among letter writers there was a common fantasy of balloons shrinking distance between correspondents: ‘If air balloons were as common as Hackney coaches and as easily managed, you might call and spend an evening with me once a week, and I could do the same with you, but ‘til this new mode of travelling is more improved, we must be content to go on in the old way, and converse by paper.’ In different ways, different literary forms engaged with questions of distance raised by balloons.

The literature of balloons is extensive and my account of it is necessarily selective. One way to explore it is through genres, covering – appropriately – both high and low. In poetry, balloons appear in odes and acrostics and pretty much everything in between; they also run the gamut of seriousness, from attempts at epic to mock-epic and very light verse.