Dark Enlightenment

One of the underrated pleasures of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is how gory it is. Even when the plot is becalmed by long digressions on cetacean taxonomy, one is rarely more than a few pages from a detailed description of either a whale or a whaler's demise. There were many gruesome ways to die on a nineteenth-century whaling voyage, and Melville cataloged them all with enthusiasm. "For God's sake," he exhorted his readers, "be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it."¹

Jeremy Zallen's American Lucifers is an ambitious, enthralling history of how Americans and others produced and consumed those lamps and candles in the century before electricity. Viscerally imagined and exhaustively researched, American Lucifers combines environmental history, energy history, the history of labor, and the history of capitalism to trace the routes and processes by which lamps, oils, candles, and matches were made. It might best be described as a commodity history in which the commodity is light. But it illuminates a host of other topics, many of them dark.

For while light would appear the most immaterial of commodities, Zallen's book is relentlessly physical. It begins with the New England whalemen who chased whales across the planet for the fat stored in their bodies, then boiled that blubber into oil for lamps and candles, the first illuminants produced at industrial scales. Zallen's account of the whale fishery is no less gory than Melville's, though knowing it is nonfiction dilutes the reader's pleasure—and that is only his first chapter. He goes on to map the production of camphene and kerosene, lard lights made from hog fat, gaslight made from coal gas, and phosphorus "lucifer" matches. Each new development in the industrial production of artificial light seems to have been more dangerous and punishing to its workers than the last. Zallen chronicles the violence with such thoroughness that whaling comes to seem the safest job available in the industries of light. In the pages of American Lucifers, working people are burned alive by camphene lamps, burned alive by kerosene lamps, burned alive in mining accidents and tenement fires. Others are buried in cave-ins, drowned at sea, or suffocated by methane gas. Still others are shot, whipped to death, hanged on the gallows, or run through with cutlasses. Some fall to their deaths; some leap to their deaths to end their torture. And these are only the quick ends. Many, many more suffer the slower violence of simply being worked to death in North Carolina turpentine camps, Manchester match factories, Jamaican sugar plantations, or Peruvian guano islands—Zallen's research, and the carnage it reveals, are both impressively transnational.

The gore is not the whole point, but it is not beside the point. "As Melville knew," Zallen writes, "the history of light was a tale of violence and labor, blood and sweat" (p. 8). Manufacturing light on an industrial scale was, he shows, an ugly, dangerous, and often cruel process. Zallen wants his readers to witness that cruelty and that ugliness. This is emphatically not an optimistic story of technological progress, of light-bringing inventors or entrepreneurs. His focus at all times is on the laborers who did the work—actually, it is not even on the laborers but on their labor itself, and on the bodies ground up in the process.

Like Melville's famous chapter on the whiteness of the whale, American Lucifers is drawn to all the ways that light could bring darkness. The whale oil streetlights that first burned all night in eighteenth-century London did not decrease crime but actually increased it; at least, the number of men and women sent to the gallows for petty thefts and pickpocketing increased greatly. The so-called "safety lamps" used in nineteenth-century coal mines did not make miners any safer; they only let...