Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. With electricity resisting clear description, even by those such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell who knew it best, Pratt-Smith argues that electricity was both metaphorically suggestive and open to imaginative speculation. Her book engages with Victorian scientific texts, popular and specialist periodicals and the work of leading midcentury novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins. Examining the work of William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pratt-Smith explores how Victorian novelists attributed magical qualities to electricity, imbuing it with both the romance of the past and the thrill of the future. She concludes with a case study of Benjamin Lumley’s Another World, which presents an enticing fantasy of electricity’s potential based on contemporary developments. Ultimately, her book contends that writing and reading about electricity appropriated and expanded its imaginative scope, transformed its factual origins and applications and contravened the bounds of literary genres and disciplinary constraints.

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Excerpt from Electricity, the Science of the Nineteenth Century: A Sketch for General Readers Ing a keen desire for a closer and fuller acquaintance with the truths of which it gives an indica tion. Should this be the case in the present instance, the writer would be abundantly rewarded for what has been throughout a' labour of love. At any rate most persons will agree with her, that to have no knowledge whatever of the striking advances which are being made in all branches of physical science, and especially in those which fall within the scope of Electricity, ' is a considerable intellectual loss. It is even more than this, for there is no aid to faith in the Invisible greater than the pursuit of knowledge, which is forever obliged to penetrate beyond the apparent in order to keep in touch with the real. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.