Literary Illumination: The Evolution of Artificial Light in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Richard Leahy (review)

The nineteenth century is often characterized as a period of proliferating technological inventions that catalyzed remarkable cultural transformations, including the railway, telegraphy, photography, and gaslight. The latter became a powerful icon for nineteenth-century modernity as gaslit street lights, shop windows, and theatres extended consumer and entertainment culture beyond the confines of daylight. Richard Leahy's Literary Illumination: The Evolution of Artificial Light in Nineteenth-Century Literature argues that nineteenth-century innovations in artificial illumination altered previously "oppositional" or "binary" symbolic boundaries between light and dark literary imagery (1). Instead, nineteenth-century British, French, and American literary representations of artificial light offered varying and sometimes contradictory symbolic meanings that alternated alongside "transnational" (4) advancements to lighting technologies and shifting perceptions of artificial light. New forms of artificial illumination facilitated degrees of meaning between "dichotomous opposites" (1), including enlightenment and the unknown, domestic and industrial spheres, and individuality and mass culture.

Literary Illumination is organized into four chapters—firelight, candlelight, gaslight, and electric light—that primarily focus on the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, Émile Zola, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edith Wharton. Together, these chapters track a thematic arc from relatively individualized firelight to more industrialized, networked forms of light. Leahy shares this trajectory with cultural historians of artificial illumination, notably Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Christopher Otter. Leahy builds on their work and on that of other scholars, including Gaston Bachelard, Jane Brox, Roger A. Ekirch, and Lynda Nead, foregrounding literary symbolism and generic innovations made possible through changes in artificial light. Leahy agrees with Otter that the adoption of nineteenth-century lighting innovations was neither linear nor uniform, and begins his study by highlighting the "evolutionary discourse" (3) surrounding artificial light. Consequently, Leahy calls to mind both the material adaptations in lighting technologies as well as implicit positive associations with technological progress. As Leahy notes, "[h]umanity's relationship with nature, and the previously authoritative light of the sun in day, evolved in this period, as technology began to forge a path into the future" (3).

The first two chapters demonstrate that firesides and candles belong to a complicated web of literary symbolic meaning rather than solely evoking sentiment. The first chapter analyzes firelight imagery across Elizabeth Gaskell's novels and asserts that firelight retains its associations with domestic hearths, reverie, and community while also fuelling the industrial "foundry furnace" (47). In the second chapter, Leahy profiles the candle as both symbol and narrative device in sensation and detective fiction by Collins, Poe, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Candlelight's mobility enabled detectives to navigate dark corridors, eventually illuminating secrets or murky motives, but Leahy also notes the psychological effects of becoming unwittingly captured within the candle's gradated sphere of illumination. Lacan's theory of the gaze informs Leahy's assertion that candles allow figures both to see and be seen, and that rather than simply dispelling darkness and the uncanny, "[c]andlelight contains its subject within a controlled field of vision" (74). Candles heighten the relationship between illumination and the unknown in Gothic plots for Leahy because the constrained illumination of a single flame enhances the genre's characteristic claustrophobia. This chapter helpfully connects surveillance, a term scholars more frequently pair with gaslight and electric light, to nineteenth-century portrayals of candlelight. While the candle would become outmoded by gaslight, Leahy suggests that writers "in the age of gas," such as Collins, can conjure "certain atmospheres" and blur temporalities through symbolism associated with each form of artificial light (60).

The latter half of Literary Illumination examines contradictions that accreted around industrialized gaslight and electric light, which were sometimes perceived positively as representations of collective membership in shared networks but also portrayed negatively as symbols of alienated labour and mass culture. Following the analysis of Nead and others, Leahy argues that gaslight created "a new third space and time: not quite day, yet not at all night...