Sci-fi and satire: William Gifford on gaslight c. 1808

Written by Dr Roseanna Kettle, JRRI ECR Fellow 2024-25

As an Early Career Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute, my research into early experiences of light pollution in Britain circa 1750-1850 led me to examine texts from many different disciplines, including scientific tracts, political legislation, and tours of the industrialising landscape. One of the more surprising places I ended up finding useful material was in political satire. Heroic Epistle to Mr. Winsor, the Patentee of the Hydro-Carbonic Gas Lights (1808), an anonymous composition attributed to William Gifford, imaginatively responds to the installation of gas lighting in Pall Mall, London in 1807, the first example of outdoor coal gas lighting in the city. What piqued my interest was the way that Gifford’s satirical mode allows him to navigate between ridicule and more genuine anxiety or anticipation about the possibilities of gas lighting technology, without clearly signposting what’s sincere and what’s intended to be silly.

Risks & rewards

Gifford begins with a comic insight into his process of composition, with a sense of the material impact of Winsor’s gaslight technology, and its potential dangers:

my Laundress mistaking the end of the gas tube for a lamp wick, and officiously intending to snuff it with her scissars, cut my gas pipe in twain; by which means, my room (an attic) was filled with inflammable air, and I, my Laundress, and our cat, were almost suffocated; or (to use a more fashionable phrase) most infernally funked. 

Throughout Gifford’s text, it remains unclear whether he intends to satirise the use of coal gas, or whether to write in favour of it; episodes such as these where risks associated with gaslight including inflammation or asphyxiation are played off humorously often belittle the danger or attribute it to trivial human error rather than a systemic issue. 

The poem’s opening addresses the ‘HESPER of Science’, embodied as a ‘phosphoric light’, which will restore a Britain to a period of both figurative and literal enlightenment. The fantasy that follows focuses strongly on the idea of coal gas as a waste product which has gained an ameliorative new usage: in the same vein, Gifford imagines smoke transformed to ‘pure caloric’ (i.e. heat energy), ‘soot to aether’, and ‘coal to coke’. Formerly useless or even harmful substances may now yield ‘vital’ energies, imparting ‘carbonic health’ to ‘morbid lungs’; Gifford perceives them as not only useful but life-enriching and cleansing. This latter image derives from Winsor’s apparent claims that he has been cured of a ‘constitutional asthma’ by the inhalation of hydro-carbonic gas, and Gifford’s notes suggest that ‘any persons afflicted with disorders of the lungs … attend at his house, and try the remedy gratis’. 

This projected future of clean, reusable waste is quickly abandoned for the sheer spectacle that gas lighting offers: the brewery in Golden Lane that boasts London’s first gas lights blasts ‘phlogiston’ from its chimneys, to the delight of the ‘tippling crowds’ in the vicinity. Far from being an object of utility, the lights offer ‘nightly amusement’ to the patrons of nearby public houses. 

Science and satire

William Gifford is not primarily known as a scientific writer but instead as a political satirist, and this aspect certainly isn’t absent from this piece. The fact that Gifford’s text is bound together in a volume at the John Rylands Library with mock-epics from c. 1806-7 such as Torio-Whiggo-Machia, or the Battle of the Whigs and the Tories, suggests that this poem likewise functions as a satirical commentary. Gifford hopes that the ‘intellectual ray’ Winsor’s innovations might impart to the ‘walking Idiots’ that populate London’s streets, lending ‘bright ideas’ even to such leisurely stock characters as the ‘Bond-street loungers’. Gifford’s royalist positioning, as well as his disdain for international commerce and certain corrupt urban ‘types’, are characteristic of his liberal Tory stance. 

Gifford’s text is also, like many others interested in light technologies, propaganda for the fossil economy: coal gas’s ability to yield light helps justify further extraction of fossil fuels, and this is a natural resource Britain provides domestically, so there’s also a nationalistic element to this argument. Coal is ‘a treasure richer’ than the silver mined in the Americas, an asset to the economy that does not rely on international markets. Gifford also makes reference to ‘South-sea projects’ and ‘Misissipi (sic) schemes’, into which ‘subscribing dupes’ became embroiled, only to fall into financial ruin. He extends the contemporary industrial discourses to politics, likening ‘party heat’ to ‘coal-ignited smoke’, ‘patriot zeal’ to ‘caloric drawn from coke’, and the threat of invasion from Napoleonic France a mere ‘black bitumen boiling o’er’.

Science itself is not immune to Gifford’s satire. The Royal Institution, founded in 1799, falls prey to Gifford’s attacks due to its role as the site of popular spectacle. It’s also a surprisingly feminised space, open to ‘LADY LOUNGERS’ interested in viewing scientific demonstrations, attesting to the popularity of scientific lectures with women in this period – but also the enduring bigotry that women’s scientific participation faced. Laying their ‘shopping’ aside, these female spectators are exposed to a science that is described in particularly gross, “unladylike” terms – ‘foul experiments’, ‘filthy airs’, ‘fluids’ and ‘faeces’ seem to deliberately run counter to supposedly gentle feminine sensibilities. 

Bright futures?

Gifford’s forward projections for the possible benefits of gaslight alternate between scientific fact and scientific fiction. Having recognised that artificial light stimulates the growth of plants just as much as sunlight, Gifford pictures vegetable produce grown on an industrial scale; ‘groves of cresses’, ‘girkins’ that ‘rival cucumbers in size’, ‘thistles’, ‘forced’ into ‘artichokes’, and ‘Mustard unmade’ by the power of gaslight. This fantasy of prodigious greenery however emerges in a period of substantial industrial air pollution. Winsor’s gaslight dispels ‘impregnate clouds’ of smoke, which ‘Sully the Park, and darken all the STRAND’. 

Gifford’s poem is also a text of empire, and its imaginative boundaries venture far beyond Britain itself. ‘Beacons and telegraphs’ lit with gas might illumine Britain’s shores, but also range ‘Beyond the Tropics’, even to the ‘frigid zone’. For all its speculative imagery and enthusiasm for new technologies, this text remains socially conservative. Gifford’s final address, imagining the heroic Winsor immortalised as a star alongside the Georgium Sidus (the planet Uranus) discovered by William Herschel and named for the reigning King George III, ultimately forms a legitimisation of the British status quo.

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