In 1785, Tiberius Cavallo reminded the readers of his History of Aerostation that the ambition to acquire the art of flying “has been the earnest desire, and exercised the genius, of mankind in every age.” On one level, balloon madness was a temporary phenomenon—attracting huge public interest for a couple of years—only to fizzle out as aeronauts failed to realize the much-hyped potential of aerostatic innovation. But on the other hand, it was an extraordinary breakthrough: realizing long-held but unfulfilled dreams, opening up new possibilities, and overturning so many earthbound certainties.
The history of balloon mania left a visible and tangible impact on contemporary art, literature, and fashion, but it is only comparatively recently that the phenomenon has attracted attention from anyone except historians of aeronautical innovation or aerial warfare. Brant's approach is not to provide a straightforward history of balloon mania or the evolution of the balloon but to recreate the “imaginative possibilities” that were raised by the business of aerostation. Balloon flights, as she notes, led easily to flights of imagination. Balloons offered comic potential—particularly in the form of visual satire; they disrupted the traditional norms of orderly behavior, but they could also be turned to provide “ideological ballast”: “sensible, stable and reputable behaviors were imaged through balloons too” (11). Balloons provoked the imagination, wonder, and passion of romanticism, but they were described and discussed through the language of reason and the inherited tropes and genres of classical literature characteristic of the European Enlightenment. Balloons are easily seen as harbingers of modernity, but they were also inheritors of much older traditions of magic and supernatural power.
Rather than providing a linear history, this is a book made up of fourteen shorter thematic essays, drawing on a rich archive of diaries, newspaper accounts, plays, poems, satirical prints, and other ephemera that the fashionable frenzy produced. Much of this material was collected by Sarah Banks, despite her brother, Sir Joseph's, skepticism regarding the value to science of aeronautical adventures. The first four chapters address the question of what balloon madness was, how it was manifested at the level of both the collective and the individual, how it differed from place to place, and the behavior of the crowds whose excited interest (and the spectator fees that they paid) sustained the temporary phenomenon. The ten chapters that follow hinge around the contrast between the levity of fashion, modernity, and imagination and the gravity of the balloon's implications for ideas of heroism and kingship, for nation states and aerial warfare.
The passion for aerostation, as Brant shows, was one that spread across Great Britain and Ireland and as far north as Aberdeen. Although dominated by celebrity aeronauts such as Vincenzo Lunardi and Jean-Pierre Blanchard, who carefully curated their reputation in the press, aerostatic adventures were also the province of gentlemen such as William Windham, whose diary provides a tellingly self-reflective account of his motivations and apprehensions; men of science; and the opportunistic adventurers, of whom Banks was so suspicious. The mania for balloons is easy to explain: their novelty, the risk of danger, the new possibilities that they seemed to open up. But they were also resisted: aeronauts were suspected of fraud and imposing on the public. Many “flights” failed with nothing to show, and some even ended in death, and the spectacle of a balloon ascent drew the laborers away from their work and generated potentially riotous crowds where pickpocketing was rife. Small wonder then that “enlightened” monarchs such as Catherine the Great or Frederick II forbad the practice in their territories.
Contemporary satire emphasized balloons as vehicles of folly; they mapped on to the satirical tradition of the bubble, and its associations of speculation, uncertainty, and instability; and they embodied the empty rhetoric or afflatus of politicians. With their inevitably propensity to rise (as well as the appeal of balloonists such as Lunardi to the ladies) they lent themselves easily to innuendo while their very fashionability became a metaphor for the bubble of fashion itself. But balloons could also be the vehicle for more serious sentiment, and contemporary accounts were given an epic dimension through allusions to Homer and Milton while aeronauts were imagined in the company of archangels and emperors or were ranked with the gods. As Brant notes, “It was obvious to many that balloons could lead to secular appropriation of a symbolic realm previously held by God” (192). The elevated language of the sublime by which aeronautical flights were described added further gravitas and respectability to the discourse around balloons.
In more practical terms balloons posed a challenge to nationalist sensibilities: the peak of balloon madness came at a point when Britain was still bruised from the humiliation of the loss of America. The fact that the balloon was the invention of the Montgolfier brothers and that the most successful aeronauts were French was sufficient to arouse hostility and national affiliations were frequently vociferously expressed in the balloons’ decorations. But aerial flight raised new questions—could the regions of the air belong to any one nation?—and, in the prelapsarian innocence of the 1780s before revolution swept away all old certainties of the ancien régime, they seemed to represent the great potential for mankind's common endeavors, undivided by national rivalries. Such irenic possibilities were never realized of course; moreover, aerial flight—as contemporaries recognized—had the potential to change the rules of engagement for nation states and warfare. Conventional borders and fortifications would be rendered redundant by airborne fleets (the language of aerostatics always borrowed from the navy).
This is a book rich in detail, and the mania for balloons that gripped the nation from 1783 to 1786 is securely tethered to the social, cultural, and political context. But context is not everything: following Rita Felski, Brant looks for the lines of affect and affection in understanding how we connect with the texts and objects of the past. This is not simply a survey of the phenomenon of the balloon but, as Brant brings to the fore in her final chapter, a meditation upon what balloons continue to mean for us in the present.
