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The Evolution of Artificial Illumination in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Light, Dark, and the Spaces in Between

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The Evolution of Artificial Illumination in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Light, Dark, and the Spaces in Between The Evolution of Artificial Illumination in Nineteenth Century Literature: Light, Dark, and the Spaces in Between Item Type Thesis Authors Richard Leahy Citation Leahy, R. (2016). The Evolution of Artificial Light in Nineteenth Century Literature (Doctoral dissertation). University of Chester, United Kingdom. Publisher University of Chester Download date 11/10/2021 11:35:38 Item License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10034/621231 The Evolution of Artificial Illumination in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Light, Dark, and the Spaces In Between Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Chester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Richard Leahy 2016 Richard Leahy The Evolution of Artificial Light in Nineteenth Century Literature: Light, Dark, and the Spaces in Between This thesis concentrates on the role of artificial light in the society, culture, and literature of the nineteenth century. Technologies of illumination in this period had a great effect on how society operated and how people experienced space and reality. These effects will be studied through reference to contemporary sources, historical analysis, and literary analysis. Each chapter uses a distinct theoretical viewpoint, and maintains a focus on a particular author (where possible). In the first chapter, the role of firelight in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell is examined, using Gaston Bachelard’s ideas on fire and psychology. The second chapter focuses on the role of candlelight in the works of Wilkie Collins, using Jacques Lacan’s theories on the Gaze. Due to the density of metaphoric references to gaslight in his fiction, Émile Zola’s work is the focus of the third chapter, while Jean Baudrillard’s theories on the nature of modern reality inform the theoretical analysis. The fourth and final chapter examines electric light’s rise to prominence and the rapidly changing attitudes towards it. It was impossible to limit this chapter’s study to only one author, so instead attention is paid to how electric light transitions from a fantastical technology to something real; this is done through a close examination of the early Science Fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, before the study moves to examine the realism of E.M. Forster and Edith Wharton. The theoretical background of this chapter is informed by a combination of previously covered theory, with attention also paid to posthumanism. The thesis identifies a number of trends and developments in the relationship between light and literature. It notes how artificial light created a space symbolically independent of light and dark, as well as elaborating on each light source’s individual symbolism. It also documents the relationship between artificial light and the transition of society and culture into modernity; it outlines the development, and cultural acceptance, of the notion of a technologically connected society and consumerism. Perhaps most importantly, this study identifies a psychological connection between literature, light, and the individual, and examines the representation of such a concept in the symbolism and metaphor of artificial light. “Light is the first essential. Light stimulates, nourishes, preserves. You can no more do without it, Mr. Fairlie, than if you were a flower.” - Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White Contents: Introduction: Light, Dark and Shadow: The Nineteenth-Century Lightscape – p. 5. Chapter 1: Firelight 1.1 Nineteenth-Century Firelight: Hearth, Home, and Industry – p. 19. 1.2 Elizabeth Gaskell, Fire and Reverie: The Domestic and the Individual – p. 31. 1.3 Variable Flames in Urban Domesticity – p. 42. 1.4 Fire and Reverie in Industrial Desperation – p. 53. Chapter 2: Candlelight 2.1 A Brief History of Candlelight – p. 66. 2.2 Candle Theory and its Symbolic Use in Literature – p. 71. 2.3 A Case Study in Wilkie Collins’s Use of Candlelight – p. 88. Chapter 3: Gaslight 3.1 Gaslight in the Nineteenth Century – p. 117. 3.2 The Networked City: Gaslight on the Streets and Arcades – p. 133. 3.3 The Theatre: Gaslight’s Stage – p. 155. 3.4 The Department Store: Gaslight’s Dressing Room – p. 168. Chapter 4: Electric Light 4.1 Electric Light in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century – p. 181. 4.2 Jules Verne’s Prophetic Electric Light of the 1860s and 1870s – p. 195. 4.3 The Transient Light of H.G. Wells’s Fin-de-Siècle – p. 211. 4.4 Electric Light 1900-1914: Realisation and Realism – p. 228. Summary and Conclusions – p. 246. Bibliography – p. 254. Light, Dark and Shadow: The Nineteenth-Century Lightscape Light, by its very nature, is oppositional. Its binary relationship with darkness has led to light emerging as one side of a symbolic structure that has become representative of other similarly positive and negative dichotomies. Western culture and literature has been dominated by the white and black dualism of light and dark for a very long time. Consider the depiction of light and darkness in the Bible’s depiction of Creation. God, in the Book of Genesis, creates light, and emphasises the human relationship with it: ‘And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from darkness’.1 Light is clearly contrasted to darkness, as it is set up as a positive symbol; it is ‘good.’ It is knowledge, power, and understanding ‘separated’ from darkness’s negative obscurity. As Michael Ferber establishes in A Dictionary of Literary Symbols: ‘Light and Darkness are probably the most fundamental and inescapable terms, used literally or metaphorically, in the description of anything in life or literature.’2 Through further biblical examples, and references to Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Beowulf and certain Greek myth, he elaborates on the role of light and darkness in literature: ‘Light is traditionally linked with goodness, life, knowledge, truth, fame, and hope, darkness with evil, death, ignorance, falsehood, oblivion and despair.’3 Artificial light sits awkwardly in between these states, and in nineteenth-century literature, reflected something more complex than just dichotomous opposites. At the start of the nineteenth century, the symbolic relationship between light and dark was still primarily binary. Lord Byron writes of fear of the absence of light in his 1816 poem, ‘Darkness,’ a poem that was published just prior to the boom in artificial light that emerged later in the century. It imagines the ‘dread’ and ‘desolation’ of a world without day: Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light.4 1 The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Genesis 1.3-1.4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) P. 11. 2 Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) p. 112. 3 Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, p. 112. 4 Lord Byron, ‘Darkness’ in The Works of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1833) ll. 6-9, p. 284. 5 The people Byron describes become aware of their desolation in the dark of eternal night. Their prayers for light are ‘selfish’ – the desire they have for light causes them to forget their passions and yearn for any kind of light. Byron writes of a dark apocalyptic wasteland where: The palaces of crowded kings – the huts, the habitations of all things which dwell, were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed, And men were gather’d round their blazing homes To look once more into each other’s face.5 Fire, a man-made source of light, binds the people of Byron’s poem. Artificial light, unlike the absent sun, can be controlled and provide illumination, hope and life in the desperation of Byron’s wasteland. It unites people, and dissolves difference, as both palaces and huts are burned in an intense desire for light amongst the darkness. Byron presents this type of artificial light as having its own symbolic potency; it has distinct psychological, social and cultural effects. This thesis will explore these associated concepts in a wide range of literature, with particular focus on the value of different types of artificial light that became available during the period. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka describes what she terms ‘The Primeval Dialectic of Life’, in the relationship between light and dark: When we refer in any way to light and/or darkness, their essential conjunction is necessarily surmised – conjunction and opposition. This very opposition indicates a primal relationship: darkness without reference to light would have no degree in quality, no pitch, no intensity; in fact, it would have no qualitative endowment at all. This amounts to saying that there would be no meaning of ‘darkness.’ And the same holds for light.6 Tymieniecka suggests that the dialectic of light and dark permeates life itself, and influences consciousness and individual psychology and ideology. This is important as it establishes a distinct link between human, mind, and light. There is something satisfying about the binary dualism of light and dark metaphor; it is a clear and attractive prospect to narrative and symbolic satisfaction – it is either one or the other. Greg Lynall argues that ‘in the eighteenth-century there is a shorthand of referential meanings’ used by poets and writers to refer to light in a way that suggests ‘light [as] 5 Lord Byron, ‘Darkness’, ll. 11-15. 6 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘Light and Darkness: The Primeval Dialectic of Life’ in Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, Volume XXXVIII, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992) p. vii. 6 representing rationality, knowledge, understanding’.7 Yet artificial light, by its very nature, troubles such cadential metaphoric resolution, and begins to suggest states between rigid structures of light as positive and darkness as negative.
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