6 - Satires

Summary

‘for even when reason and science make the greatest strides, folly profits by it to extend her domain.’

Comte de Ségur, Memoirs

MUCH OF BALLOON MADNESS was joyous and excited. But there was also resistance and opposition. Aerostation seemed to move fast in its developments; in the first years, comments on voyages note record-breaking achievements in distance, height and time which raised expectations for other flights. Many satirists concentrated on ineptitude in particular failures; some cast doubt on the whole enterprise of aerial endeavour. The old trope of bubble connected folly and politics, and balloons drew satirists in flocks. Attacks were often personally directed. Thus The Lunardiad, or, The Folly and Madness of the Age (1784):

Vain, idle Folks, but born to gape and stare,

To view a Monkey – mounting into Air.

And when the Thing descends to Earth again,

You meet the Creature – with the Hero's Strain,

Men give him Cheers, Belles dress for him their Charms,

And in a Furor snatch him to their Arms.

England, alas! thou'rt Folly's foremost Heir

To waste thy Time on Fiddlers, Fools, and Air.

Balloons as a form of folly feature in another print of 1784 – The downfall of taste & genius or the world as it goes – that satirised topical amusements in popular culture, including mountebanks, performing animals and freaks.2 Vehicles of folly in themselves, balloons revealed the folly in people too, in unchecked ambition, deviant escape from norms, loose behaviour, upside-down values, greed, fraud, appetite, gullibility and credulity. This chapter explores that world in relation to the rage for balloons – a world not simply of scandal, politics or fashion but the intersection of all three. It was possible to be famous for being famous – and fatuous. What historians call the public sphere included in 1783 much personal life aired through personalities and sexual affairs, especially those conducted publicly by the aristocracy. The fashionable world was also a political world; balloons contributed to fashionable politics.