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Sensations of a New Age 183 The increased visibility that modernity demanded was forwarded by improvements in lighting.By the mid-1800s inexpensive gas lighting was providing homes and streets with a never-before-seen level of illumination. Improvements in the manufacture of glass had already made for brighter interiors and allowed most of the work of the city to be undertaken behind closed doors rather than outside.Gas lighting would make it possible to extend working hours: regardless of the time of day work could go on.At the same time the visual activity of reading flourished with the improved availability of light in the after-work hours. Superior lighting not only enabled a greater practice of visual activities, it also made all activities more visible.The role of surveillance in maintaining order in public places after dark was therefore enhanced.Moreover,the increase in lighting—along with the spread of mirrors and the growing practice of having oneself photographed— heightened the consciousness of the visible body as compared to the felt body. Both gaslight and the railway,often compared in the nineteenth century,were seen as taking away individual autonomy and obliging all to be dependent on and interconnected through a dominating industrial system:“A gas work, like a railway, must be viewed as one entire and indivisible machine; the mains in one case being analogous to the rails in the other” (cited by Schivelbusch 1995: 29). To the networks of gas mains and rails could be added the modern water and sewer systems, to which all likewise would be connected. People might finally be regarded as individuals in modernity, but they could not stray far from the public utilities that allowed them to exercise a modern lifestyle. Even without walls, the modern city contained and constrained its inhabitants. The Electric Creed Near the end of the century a new source of power, one that would further increase dependence on and interconnection through industrial networks,began to transform the cityscape.This was electricity. One of the perceived advantages of electricity was that,as a clean form of energy,it promised to reduce the amount of smoke and soot in the atmosphere.These had added their own textures to modern urban life, shrouding the city and leaving its citizens, in Dickens’s words, “with smarting eyes and irritated lungs . . .blinking,wheezing,and choking”(1885:1). Not only the utilitarian value of electric power was appreciated, therefore, but also its hygienic value.“As gas superceded candles and oil, so, in turn, will it come to be superceded by a more sanitary electric illuminant”wrote one sanitary reformer with satisfaction in 1884 (Allan 1884: 67).Another great advantage of electrical energy was that it was much less likely to cause fires than traditional sources of light and power.With electric light many institutions,including museClassen_Text .indd 183 3/15/12 2:48 PM 184 chapter eight ums, which had been fearful of using gaslight due to the risk of fire, could finally keep their doors open after dark. Compared to the ease with which one could observe one’s surroundings in a street lit with electric lights, negotiating a gas-lit street seemed almost to be a matter of feeling one’s way in the dark: “In the middle of the night, we emerge into the brightest daylight. Shop and street signs can be recognised clearly from across the street.We can even see the features of people’s faces well from quite a distance.. . .As soon as we look away from the broad thoroughfare into one of the side streets,where a miserable dim gaslight is flickering,the eye-strain begins.Here darkness reigns supreme,or rather,a weak,reddish glow,that is hardly enough to prevent collisions in the entrances of houses” (cited by Schivelbusch 1995: 118). Beyond the actual transformations electricity occasioned within cities, industries ,and homes,was the influence it exercised on the public imagination.Already in the mid-1800s excitement about the new form of energy had penetrated the popular consciousness.This can be seen in the following lines on electricity (sandwiched in between articles on “The Profit of Raising Pork” and “A New Description of Bricks”) from a farming journal of 1852. It has now become very well known that the electric fluid pervades all nature, and that its properties are in many respects analagous to those of light and heat. It is probably identical also with the attraction of gravitation , and some have even...

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