The View from Above: Satiric Distance and the Advent of Ballooning in Britain

Focusing on The Devil in an Air Balloon (1784) and Thomas Hood's "Ode to Mr. Graham" (1825), this essay argues that ballooning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not just an object of satire but also a technique for it, a means to assess the world from a hitherto never-experienced perspective. The view from above could take a fuller measure of societal corruption and reframe it within a wider context. Ultimately, this paper corrects the assumption that the view from above was necessarily an epistemology of domination, revealing a broader variety of aesthetic and ideological purposes.