Literary Illumination

The Evolution of Artificial Light in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Richard Leahy

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786832702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts

Literary Illumination examines the relationship between literature and artificial illumination, demonstrating that developments of lighting technology during the nineteenth century definitively altered the treatment of light as symbol, metaphor and textual motif. Correspondingly, the book also engages with the changing nature of darkness, and how the influence of artificial light altered both public perceptions of, and behaviour within, darkness, as well as examining literary chiaroscuros. Within each of four main chapters dedicated to the analysis of a single dominant light source in the long nineteenth-century – firelight, candlelight, gaslight, and electric light – the author considers the phenomenological properties of the light sources, and where their presence would be felt most strongly in the nineteenth century, before collating a corpus of texts for each light source and environment.

1

FIRELIGHT

FIGURE 1 Engraving by George A. Elcock, ‘Ladies by the Fireside’, 1886.

1.1 Nineteenth-Century Firelight: Hearth, Home and Industry

Fire is arguably the most important facilitator of human progress in history. Evidence suggests that prehistoric methods used to produce fire varied around the globe, the earliest recorded and most primitive being the spark and tinder method, yet all came into being during roughly the same time period around 230,000 years ago.¹ Fire also played an important role in the development of visual art. Alongside its obvious uses as a light and heat source, as well as a cooking aid, its use in creating and shaping primitive pottery allowed for the storage of food, and also aided artistic expression in early ceramic arts. It gave life to early cave paintings, Zach Zorich establishing the use of fire in the caves of Lascaux:

Whatever tales may have been told inside Lascaux have been lost to history, but it is easy to imagine a person moving their fire-lit lamp along the walls as they unravelled a story step-by-step, using the darkness as a frame for the images inside a small circle of firelight.²

Fire was a narrative device, allowing stories to be told through its medium of concealment and revelation. Fire was invaluable to early human societies, its versatility endowing it with uses as an aid to survival, but also to early civilization. To use a rather reflective metaphor, fire was the spark that ignited human culture and creativity.

Arthur Zajonc proposes that fire has an intimate link with the evolution of the human mind. He writes that as he studied early firelight, ‘it seemed to [him] that the characteristics of a culture are mirrored in the image of light it has crafted’.³ He suggests that in early civilizations, their cultures of religion, art and scientific study were based around the fire they cultivated and inhabited. He emphasizes that by its light, the human eye could see in times when it could not have before; it was psychologically beneficial as it meant darkness was conquered and human life could expand into previously uncolonized times and spaces. Zajonc also saw fire’s multiplicity of symbolic meaning in these early fires. His reading of the myth of Prometheus suggests the dual nature of fire as a gift, but also a burden and potential danger: ‘The gift of fire and all it symbolises is invariably linked to the burden of care. Under human control, the fire of the gods burns as well as warms, blinds as well as illumines.’⁴ The myth of Prometheus suggests an ancient symbiotic link between mankind and fire, and provides one of the first examples of fire’s metaphoric associations. Carol Dougherty describes fire’s role in the Promethean myth as ‘a powerful symbol of divine presence, a source of both protection and devastation, the medium for contact communication with the gods’.⁵ She emphasizes fire’s role in ancient domestic spaces, and points to the goddess Hestia as an example of the worth placed in firelight by the Ancient Greeks. The word Hestia literally means ‘hearth’, and the goddess represented order in a domestic household, intimately tying the hearth with homeliness and family. Fire’s symbolic potency grew from its physical and phenomenological properties. The alchemical variability of fire allows it to be drawn as a motif for varying stages of growth and decay – birth, death and rebirth. It is, as it is in the Promethean myth, ‘the technology to provide warmth, light, and protection from enemies and the elements – and yet it also can be the source of its total destruction’.⁶

Fire’s prehistoric cultivation played an important role in developing and shaping humanity’s ultimately social destiny. A fire’s light and warmth extended living hours, and encouraged the formation of communities that shared the warmth and light of the flames. We can see a reflection of cave dwellers gathering around a blazing fire in the scene of early nineteenth-century hearth-lit home life; A. Roger Ekirch documents how:

Light’s principal value lay in expanding the borders of domestic space for work and sociability. During long winter evenings, the hearth furnished the greatest glow. Even in dwellings with more than a single room, it became the focus for evening life, combating the cold darkness with heat and light.⁷

It was particularly important in poorer households to whom the multiple attributes of a hearth fire – as light, as a source of heat and as an aid to cooking and household tasks – were invaluable economically and emotionally. Judith Flanders details how poorer homes were often warmer due to their smaller, more condensed size, lack of windows and the central hearth fire.⁸ Firelight conjured feelings of safety and togetherness; there was a psychological value to its attributes as well as its obvious domestic qualities.

Fire was the example that all of the new forms of light which came into being in the nineteenth century had to better, and the basis of many of them too, Wolfgang Schivelbusch stating that ‘Fire is the origin of artificial light.’⁹ He posits that the torch, lamp and candle remain ‘clearly recognisable’ as descendants of a burning brand plucked from a hearth.¹⁰ As architecture changed and developed from being communal to more family based, the hearth remained a symbol of essential human togetherness. During medieval times, the hearth was often positioned in the centre of the room, as it was believed that this location would provide the room with the greatest warmth and the best spread of light – however, visibility was often impaired by the amount of smoke produced by the fire, and the spread of light was uneven and dim at best.¹¹ Around the seventeenth century, chimneys began to be constructed and put into use; another technology that became immeasurably important during the nineteenth century. Chimneys had a deep cultural resonance in this period – consider the figure of the chimney sweep, and how he became a symbol of the changing nature of childhood in Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, and William Blake’s ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The hearth’s centrality within the home and family life was deepened through this architectural innovation. Improvements in central heating and chimney technology meant that the fire was now more of a social hub; a place to see by its light yet also somewhere to be seen.

The hearth became the epicentre of domestic life. Cheaper and easier to maintain than individual light sources, the fire confined familial activities to one room; it was where people worked yet also where they entertained. However, perceptions of a fire’s flames were subtly altered according to social class and household. In his 1898 book The Englishman’s House: A Practical Guide for Selecting or Building a Home, C. J. Richardson describes the domestic appeal of the fireplace, as a place where ‘social mirth exults and glows before the blazing hearth’.¹² The fire was a gathering place in smaller cottages and houses, somewhere to swap tales yet also to contemplate. Mike Hepworth describes how:

The hearth, as the place where heat is generated before the invention of central heating, is closely associated with the heart as the organ which gives life and is traditionally regarded as the source of human emotion. To be welcomed at the hearth is to anticipate a closer and more intimate form of human relationship.¹³

Etymologically, the origins of the word ‘hearth’ are intimately tied to the Latin word for ‘focus’, which is used in English to mean the centre of attention.¹⁴ The hearth, and the fire within, became almost synonymous with the entire concept of home and domestic life. People could gather before the light of the fire to read, or recite copies of the latest literature. Paintings and pictures of nineteenth-century fireplaces commonly feature families or individuals surrounding the flames, where they read, work and relax.

Smaller houses, often country cottages or cellar dwellings in cities, would frequently only heat and light their kitchen. In these spaces, that Ekirch terms ‘the meanest hovels’, the fire would often be the sole source of light and heat.¹⁵ It made sense to those who lived in these smaller places to turn their kitchen into the crucible of social activity. It was a place where they could work, eat, cook and relax. The fire enabled the kitchen’s occupants to see by its light, and understand the processes behind cooking and preparing food; it was a companion as well as an aid – Cassell’s Book of the Household suggesting ‘What place is more cozy on a cold winter’s night than the kitchen fireside?’¹⁶ However, the proximity into which the fire brought members of the household often meant that many anxieties and tribulations were acted out upon the hearth. Emily Brontë’s firesides in the titular house of Wuthering Heights (1847) are suggestive of the mutable nature of fire-symbolism. At first, to Lockwood, the Heights ‘glowed delightfully in the radiance of an immense fire, compounded of coal, peat, and wood’, as he attains safety and warmth from the snowstorm in front of the hearth’s flames.¹⁷ Upon reading the older Catherine’s diary, Lockwood is presented with yet another example of fireside drama as Catherine and Heathcliff are banished from the ‘paradise on the hearth’ after angering Hindley.¹⁸ A similar, yet much exaggerated image of Catherine’s relationship with the hearth occurs as she dedicates herself to the sitting-room fire even after the chimney is damaged in a storm.¹⁹ Isabella’s disapproval of the much-changed Heights following her marriage to Heathcliff is also conveyed through the effects of the hearth light:

There was a great fire, and that was all the light in the huge apartment, whose floor had grown a uniform grey; and the once brilliant pewter dishes which used to attract my gaze when I was a girl partook of a similar obscurity, created by tarnish and dust.²⁰

The house is completely changed after she returns following her and Heathcliff’s elopement, and the hearth is the scene of a row between herself, Hareton and Joseph in the ‘dingy, untidy hole’. The light of the fire, which usually creates a sense of homeliness, traps Isabella within the aura of the dishevelled Heights. Firelight creates atmospheres of both gentility and hostility, and represents many different states of conflict. The hearth, quite literally when considering its etymology, was a focal point, one that both attracted the gaze of its onlookers, while also enveloping them in an aura of light and warmth. Schivelbusch laments the loss of such a unifying aspect of domestic life, as technological inventions such as the television (and later personal electronic devices), ousted the fireplace from its role as focal point during the twentieth century: ‘When the household lost its hearth fire … it lost what since time immemorial had been the focus of its life.’²¹

By virtue of hearth fire being uncontained, at least in comparison to more isolated sources like candles or oil-lamps, it had the propensity to be unlawful and often unpredictable. Ekirch comments on the open fire’s potential to spark and flare into its surroundings, highlighting the danger of using such a volatile phenomenon in the enclosed spaces of the home.²² Fire was an essential aid to life in most homes regardless of class, which also meant that different domestic spaces were subject to damaged property, as well as ill-health: The Essex Standard documents the damage caused by an ill-attended fireplace at the royal property of Sandringham House. The house was preparing for a visit from Prince Albert when an upstairs fireplace caused a ‘disastrous fire’ to break out in the upper part of the house, causing what was estimated to be between £10,000 and £15,000 worth of damage.²³

Perceptions of firelight differed depending on an individual’s relationship with lighting, tending to and experiencing the light of the fire. In smaller, lower-class houses, the responsibility for lighting and tending the fire often fell to a member of the family, however, in the larger gentry houses, it was the servants’ responsibility to tend the fires of the house. Regardless of the class of the domestic space, there was always a great sense of value placed in a well-cared-for hearth fire. Eugene Gardner, in Home Interiors (1878), insisted upon the importance of a fireplace in the face of developing central heating technologies: the fireplace was an ‘essential … without which no house is complete’. He acknowledged the importance of heating the home, but emphasized the need for a fire for its psychological benefits: ‘[B]uild upon an ample hearth a glowing fire of hickory-wood, and in the presence of that genial blaze … will congregate all that is good and kind and lovely of the household.’²⁴ The domestic guidebooks of Mrs Beeton document a similar dynamic in the relationship between servants and firelight in the middle-class home. Her approach to fire lighting is much more prosaic than that of Cassell’s cosy fireside. She reinforces the duty of the servant to tend the fires, a process that should not be a concern of the family of the house:

The evening duties of a lady’s-maid are pretty nearly a repetition of those of the morning. She is in attendance when her mistress retires; she assists her to undress if required, brushes her hair, and renders such other assistance as is demanded; removes all slops; takes care that the fire, if any, is safe, before she retires to rest herself.²⁵

Care of the fireplaces was both a servant’s first and last task of the day. Jenni Calder comments on the hierarchy of servant life in tending the fires: ‘Those barely on the middle-class rung would have a skivvy whose main task this would be. [It was] the most menial of duties, and reserved for the lowest of the low in the servant hierarchy.’²⁶ Much of the time this would be a female servant: Sally Mitchell details the average morning of maid Hannah Cullwick: ‘On a typical day, she cleaned the stove flues, started the coal fire, scrubbed the front stoop, black-leaded the fire grates, cleaned the sitting room, set the dining room table, and finally cooked breakfast – all before 8 a.m.’²⁷ Women had a complex relationship with fire during the nineteenth century, as it was expected of them to cultivate an atmosphere of warmth and homeliness through their care of the fire. Indeed, a woman’s care of fire began to relate to contemporary ideals of women’s virtue and identity. Maids of gentry houses who tended the fires were often the lowest of the servants, working in cellar kitchens with ‘inadequate lighting and a general aspect of gloom’ and would have perceived the fire completely differently from their masters who lounged in the warm glow of the flames.²⁸ Fire, a symbol of safety and warmth, was also a danger to these women. James L. Volo documents this: ‘For women, childbirth remained the greatest danger in their lives, yet, barring complications, the second leading cause of death among women remained death from fire.’²⁹ The understanding of fire as both a destructive and binding power within the home led to it being used as a symbol of destruction and renewal, especially in terms of class boundaries.

Gaston Bachelard and the symbolism of firelight

Gaston Bachelard identifies the poetic qualities of fire in his ambitious work The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938). The scientist-turned-philosopher was concerned with what he called the ‘poetics’ of the alchemical element; he sought to explain how and why fire was such a useful tool for linguistic exposition and modes of expression.

Bachelard calls fire a ‘privileged phenomenon which can explain anything’.³⁰ What Bachelard intimates is fire’s potential to be used as an agent to explain things both ‘intimate and universal’.³¹ The reason Bachelard suggests fire as a universal metaphor is through its variability in reality: a fire can exist as embers, or as an al...