Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (review)

Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth- Century London, by Iwan Rhys Morus; pp. xiv + 324. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, $45.00, £32.50.

In 1837, a story entitled "The New Frankenstein" appeared in Fraser's Magazine. It concerned a German student who uses his skills in galvanism to produce living insects from volcanic rock, and who dreams that he meets the monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Discovering that the monster lacks a mind and is controlled by electricity, the student uses an electrical machine to endow it with the thoughts of European philosophers, but inadvertently drives it insane in the process. As Iwan Morus explains in Frankenstein's Children, this was a Tory satire on the highly controversial experiments of Andrew Crosse--an English electrician who, in 1836, claimed to have produced insect life by electrifying rocks--and a warning that using electricity to mimic life "was nothing more than a parody of nature" (141). Both Frankenstein and "The New Frankenstein" neatly illustrate one of the major claims of Morus's book: that for electrical practitioners in early-nineteenth-century London, experiments were hard to control, dangerous, and open to a wide variety of interpretations once they were taken from the laboratory into society. With this as a starting point, Frankenstein's Children aims to understand how electricity changed from being a capricious and socially dangerous fluid in the 1820s and 1830s to a tamed phenomenon that was "part of fully public, commercial life" by the 1840s (257). For Morus, the answers to this problem have less to do with the electrical theories of elite natural philosophers than with the complex strategies and resources used by inventors, showmen, and entrepreneurs to make their electrical inventions reliable and to secure commercial interest in their products. Accounts of early-nineteenth- century electricity are typically dry, internalist accounts of electrical concepts that pay little attention to the instruments and work that made such concepts possible. Morus's compelling social and cultural history, however, aims to redress this balance and offers a refreshingly new perspective which focuses strongly on the material artefacts and the labour processes that were crucial to the stabilisation and commodification of electrical power. He situates electricity firmly in the "World City" landscape of shows, consumerism, and politics, and thus takes the perspective of those whom he identifies as "most Victorians who took an interest in [electrical] matters"--people for whom electricity was less about forces, fields, and ethers than about the more visible and material products of electricity, including "spectacular shows of light and sparks," telegraphic messages, and electroplated cutlery (261).

The book comprises two sections. Section One, "The Places of Experiment," consists of five chapters which regard electricity as a species of performance and demonstrate that the meaning of electricity depended very much on where it was seen, how it was used, and who was interpreting it. The first two chapters offer a revealing and perhaps, to some, challenging contrast between the careers of the doyen of electrical science, Michael Faraday, and the electrician William Sturgeon. It reveals the strikingly different strategies and resources (both social and material) used to create different audiences for electricity. For Faraday, convincing his genteel Royal Institution audience that he had command over nature meant fashioning himself as a gentleman and divorcing his abstract theories about electricity from the unsavoury technical details of laboratory apparatus. By contrast, Sturgeon held that technical details of apparatus were constitutive of claims about electricity, and won authority and the confidence of his lower-middle-class audience by displaying a mastery and intimate knowledge of laboratory machines, which appealed to this audience more than abstract theories. Morus's emphasis on electricity as exhibition culminates in Chapter Three where he shows how much inventors and the making of electrical machines owed to the culture of exhibitions and to the emerging consumer...