Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Richard Holmes

guns or the ‘re-iterated percussion’ of mill wheels.

      Some of this is weakened by Mason’s orotund pseudo-sublime manner, by which he attempts to give ballooning a kind of contemplative gravity, the exact opposite of Hood’s mad ‘levity’. But there are many fine existential passages: on the sense of extreme solitude and silence in ‘the immense vacuity’; on the sublime appearance of cloudscapes and the ‘Prussian blue’ zenith at high altitudes; and on the uneasy feeling of ‘intruding’ on God’s territory, ‘the especial domains of the Almighty’.³² Above all, he attempts to evoke the strange and beautiful other world of the kingdom of the air:

       Above and all around him extends a firmament dyed in purple of the intensest hue, and from the apparent regularity of the horizontal plane on which its rests, bearing the resemblance of a large inverted bowl of dark blue porcelain, standing upon a rich mosaic floor or tessellated pavement. In the zenith of this mighty hemisphere – floating in solitary magnificence – unconnected with the material world by any visible tie – alone – and to all appearances motionless, hangs the buoyant mass by which he is upheld … ³³

      Throughout such passages there is a curious mixture of scientific terminology – horizontal plane, zenith, buoyant mass – with the rhetoric of Victorian poetry and sublimity; even on occasion of Victorian prayers or hymns. This seems to reflect a philosophical, or even theological, problem later expressed by many Victorian balloonists. To what extent is the upper sky, where Prussian blue deepens into black, ‘the space beyond the limits of our atmosphere’,³⁴ a scientific zone or a celestial one, or both? What unknown powers or energies lurk in the terrific ‘black and fathomless abyss’ – an abyss paradoxically overhead? What monsters or deities does the upper deep contain?^fn14

      To give his book further weight, Mason added six other appendices to later additions. Appendix B consisted of a short biography of Charles Green, with accounts of an earlier test flight made with Green from Vauxhall to Chelmsford on 4 October 1836, and of Green’s part in the fatal Cocking parachute experiment of 1838, in which the over-confident inventor Robert Cocking leapt to his untimely death above the Thames Estuary, and almost killed his pilot Green into the bargain. Appendix C was an alphabetical checklist of all known European aeronauts between 1783 and 1836, with longer individual notes on the early pioneering figures like Blanchard, Lunardi, Sadler, Gay-Lussac and Garnerin. Appendix D, ‘On the Mechanical Direction of the Balloon’, investigated the old question of navigating a balloon. Appendix E considered Green’s use of the guide rope and other ‘equilibrium’ devices. Appendix F reflected on the limitations of bird flight (but with special praise for the gliding capacities of the South American condor ‘above the lofty peaks of the Andes’). And Appendix G indulgently reprinted further verses in praise of the Nassau flight.

      Thanks to Green, ballooning had once again caught the imagination of writers, but its significance was interpreted in increasingly various ways. In 1837 Thomas Carlyle used the image of balloons in his introductory chapter, ‘The Paper Age’, in The French Revolution, to express the political risks and hopes of the time: ‘Beautiful invention, mounting heavenward – so beautifully, so unguidably! Emblem of our Age, of Hope itself.’

      In 1838 John Poole (who had once seen Sophie Blanchard fall to her death in Paris) gave a more satirical but shrewdly perceptive account of a flight with Green at night over the East End of London. It seems to him very different from Paris, with its boulevards, parks and cafés. The sinister, garish lights of gin ‘palaces’, taverns, apothecaries and brothels – alternately twinkling ‘blue, green, purple and crimson’ – are used to explore the notion of the hidden city of poverty, sickness and crime. On landing near Hackney Marshes, the balloon is surrounded by a threatening mob, which has pursued it all the way ‘from Stepney, Limehouse and Poplar’. Prophetically, it was as if the balloon had trespassed into an African jungle, and stirred up an unfriendly horde of howling ‘natives’. Assaulted by ‘their yells, their savage imprecations, curses both loud and deep, their threats to destroy the balloon’, Poole, Green and his burly crew just manage to pack their equipment onto a cart, and beat a strategic retreat to the local Eagle and Child public house. Here they hole up until one in the morning, when it is safe to slip back through the silent streets to the West End and ‘civilization’.³⁶

      In his poem ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842), with its own visions of social disturbance and upheaval, the thirty-three-year-old Alfred Tennyson imagined the aeronauts not merely as romantic adventurers, but also as busy commercial traders. They descend in flocks through the evening skies, to settle upon distant marketplaces around the globe. They are part Homeric travellers in the tradition of Jason and the Argonauts; but also partly hungry commercial travellers, with just a hint of a cloud of locusts descending upon an innocent land at dusk:

       For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

       Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be;

       Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

       Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales …

      The poem was originally drafted in 1835. But Tennyson also foresaw, like Franklin before him and H.G. Wells afterwards, balloons producing the terror of aerial warfare:

       Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew

       From the nation’s aerial navies, grappling in the central blue. ³⁷

      Charles Green had established himself as much more than a balloon showman, or the publicity agent of the Vauxhall Gardens. He had resurrected the old dream of ballooning, but adapted it to the coming Victorian age. Bronze medals were even cast in his honour.

      In his Preface to the second edition of Aeronautica, Mason suggested that Green’s ambitions were turning towards an Atlantic crossing. Green apparently took a quite nonchalant view of the huge distances and meteorological challenges this would involve: ‘In his view, the Atlantic is no more than a simple canal: three days might suffice to effect a passage. The very circumference of the globe is not beyond the scope of his expectations: in fifteen days and fifteen nights, transported by the trade winds, he does not despair to accomplish in his progress the great circle of the earth itself. Who can now fix a limit to his career?’³⁸

      This was heady talk, and made good journalistic copy. But Mason was not a successful balloon pilot himself, merely a successful balloon passenger, and had perhaps had his head turned by all the excitement and publicity. In the same Preface he cheerfully advocated the use of a trailing guide rope ‘above fifteen thousand feet in length’. He saw no problem in this monster appendage dragging across ‘trees, houses, rivers, mountains, valleys, precipices and plains’ with what he described as ‘equal security and indifference’.³⁹

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      Two years after the publication of Aeronautica, in 1840, Green issued his own proposals to fly the Atlantic. He claimed to have identified a prevailing west-to-east wind current in the upper atmosphere, which meant that he would start the crossing from America. ‘Under whatever circumstances I made my ascent, however contrary the direction of the wind below, I uniformly found that at a certain elevation, varying occasionally but always within 10,000 feet of the earth, a current from west to east, or rather from the north of west, invariably prevailed.’

      He also explained that a two-thousand-foot guide rope, fitted with canvas sea drags and copper floats, would be enough to stabilise an eighty-thousand-cubic-foot balloon and keep it airborne, without expending additional ballast, for ‘a period of three months’. He said he was only awaiting a generous sponsor to undertake the trans-Atlantic flight immediately.⁴⁰ In the end, the astute Green could find no financial backer, refused to depart without one, and the Atlantic attempt was never made.