THE SUBLIME WAS CRUCIAL in giving balloon madness some cultural respectability. What was it and why did it matter? An idea with a long history, it had been refreshed in the mid eighteenth century and applied to a range of situations in which a viewing or feeling subject encountered something from which a powerful aesthetic charge resulted. This chapter explores how the sublime shaped thinking about balloons, how it paired and competed with ideas of the beautiful in the making of new aerial aesthetics, and how this reworking fits in to modern ideas about the aerial gaze.

As Michael R. Lynn notes by the title of his book, balloons themselves were described as ‘The Sublime Invention’, and ‘sublime’ is a regular fixture in accounts of aerial voyages. One example shows the frequency and typical variations of its use. When Richard Crosbie ascended from Dublin on 19 January 1785 to make the first successful ascent in Ireland, the sublime accompanied him: ‘Mr Crosbie himself assures us that his voyage throughout was perfectly smooth, tranquil and sublime’. What spectators felt was also sublime, with a theological colouring:

Boundlessness associated with the sublime meant its effects outlasted the event which gave rise to it. So sublime was Crosbie's achievement, according to this writer, that the grateful nation which held him in the highest esteem now would continue to look up to him in the future.

CROWDS HAVE ATTRACTED the interest of historians, sociologists, philosophers and psychoanalysts. British crowds in the second half of the eighteenth century get special attention from historians in relation to political unrest, and whether riots were a form of popular revolt against forms of power. What can this illuminate about crowds at balloon ascents? How did the massing of people into crowds help to shape and spread balloon madness?

Elias Canetti's landmark book Crowds and Power begins by cataloguing crowds: ‘we discover that there are: baiting crowds, flight crowds, prohibition crowds, reversal crowds, feast crowds, panic crowds, double crowds, invisible crowds, etc. (No lonely crowds!)’ Charles Tilly analyses what he calls Contentious Gatherings from 1758 to 1834 and also finds a rich vocabulary: they involve 2,500 distinct verbs, he says. ‘The category of verbs whose share increased by at least a third 1758–1820 were cheer, disperse, meet, petition and support’. Just for that movement of gathering which creates a crowd, Tilly supplies a long index of terms: abandon, abate, accompany, accost, advance, appear, approach, arrive, ascend … and that's just the As. The lexicon of crowds is complex.

The grammar of crowds is also complex, but it has a tendency to turn singular. Mark Harrison suggests that crowds fascinate us because many individuals seem to become one: ‘the sea of faces becomes, paradoxically, a single-headed entity. … reduced to a single, coherent, entity, they are presented, either by their spokespeople or outside commentators, as representatives of a single, coherent, belief.’ This unifying language can change fast: a crowd becomes a mob when it acts to offend. Some activities described as riots in this period were not necessarily violent; Tilly shows that food riots, for instance, were protests where fighting was uncommon. There were many shades of riotous behaviour in everyday life, and especially at elections; lobbing a brick or a stone was a common art. Violence at balloon launches usually had a trigger point, when an erstwhile peaceable and patient crowd grew restive, boiled over and attacked balloon, aeronaut and authorities – and each other.

IN 1786 JANE CAVE PUBLISHED a volume of poems. Literally provincial – she was from Brecon and the book was published in Bristol – many of the poems feature air as an imaginative medium. Balloons make an appearance:

The literature of balloons had a wide reach, encompassing many amateurs and anonymous writers. This chapter explores some of them.

Aerostation was incontestably a new science, yet the literature of aerostation draws deeply on old genres in its fashioning of imaginative possibilities. A rare surviving handbill from a provincial press, for instance, uses a fire balloon as a vehicle for a sermon. In prose, balloons had their own new genres, from the formal accounts of aerial voyages (in English, using French narratives as starting points) to the looser life-writing of aeronauts about experiences aloft. These accounts did empirical work and reflected upon imagination, especially through the sublime, but they were not leading influences on imaginative responses to balloons. Among letter writers there was a common fantasy of balloons shrinking distance between correspondents: ‘If air balloons were as common as Hackney coaches and as easily managed, you might call and spend an evening with me once a week, and I could do the same with you, but ‘til this new mode of travelling is more improved, we must be content to go on in the old way, and converse by paper.’ In different ways, different literary forms engaged with questions of distance raised by balloons.

The literature of balloons is extensive and my account of it is necessarily selective. One way to explore it is through genres, covering – appropriately – both high and low. In poetry, balloons appear in odes and acrostics and pretty much everything in between; they also run the gamut of seriousness, from attempts at epic to mock-epic and very light verse.

THE IDEA OF THE PARACHUTE is conventionally attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, who in 1485 sketched a pyramid-shaped canopy attached to a wooden frame, with a pole from the apex and cords from the corners to which a person could hang on. Its purpose was to enable anyone to let themselves down from a height without danger; its particular application would be to persons escaping from buildings on fire. But Leonardo's design stayed unpublished until the end of the nineteenth century, and although some early experiments by Joseph Montgolfier made use of the idea of using resistance to slow descent in air in ways common both to balloons and parachutes, the development of parachutes as separate entities proceeded slowly. There were successful tests at Avignon, it was said, using first a sheep, then a condemned prisoner.

Inspiration – and explanation – came from the umbrella, commonly in use as a protector against rain. In October 1784, Thomas Martyn published a design for a globe balloon that explicitly included an ‘Umbrella to afford easy descent’ should the balloon burst. It was dismissed by Blanchard, who said Martyn was welcome to take what little credit there was in such a useless device. Despite this fart in Martyn's general direction, Blanchard was himself experimenting with designs of ribs attached to a silk canopy, and by June 1785 he was making test drops above his Aerostatic Academy in Vauxhall. One was to have starred a sheep – but just as the balloon launched, a lady tripped over the cords which connected sheep and parachute to the balloon, which shot off and burst.

WHY DID PEOPLE talk of ‘balloon madness’? What did they mean by it? The language around balloons after 1783 indicated their effect was startling. ‘Balloon madness’, a phrase widely used in the first two years of aerostation, has simple and deep meanings. Superficially, ‘madness’ refers to an abnormal, unstable cultural phenomenon, like the use of the word ‘craze’ in the twentieth century to describe mass enthusiasm for something. Close to ‘craziness’, the term ‘craze’ signals that a significant number of people is affected, and lightly pathologises their obsessiveness in terms of mental disorder. Madness and craziness involve disturbing ways of behaving. In the 1780s, this language of disturbance had resonances that came from deep-running ideas. ‘Balloon madness’ drew on at least four currents of thought that flowed together in intricate ways from medicine, politics, religion and fashion; each had a way of explaining how ideas caught on and spread. The force of the term ‘balloon madness’ in the 1780s came from a confluence that held an easy position in everyday language but was all the more powerful for being continuously fed by explanations also themselves evolving. ‘Madness’ seems obvious, and we still use it obviously to describe what we disagree with. What it meant in the 1780s also had a hinterland of ideas not all familiar to us now.

The pathology of madness had a large literature in the late eighteenth century. As Enlightenment medicine moved on from old models of imbalance of humours accounting for illness, it kept a sense of aggression as relevant. So do we: wounds can still be described as angry. A key term, ‘rage’, described how epidemics spread. In 1782 the sentimental novelist Henry Mackenzie wrote to the economist Adam Smith hoping he had escaped ‘the Influenza, which has raged in London and now begins to rage here’. Disease raged through bodies: in 1784 a treatise on farriery discussed the staggers ‘that rage so furious and fatal among Horses at this present Time’.

FRENCH INTELLECTUALS have continued to be fascinated by air and to write about the history of aerial culture and the culture of aerial history. Some Enlightenment rationalists mocked this affinity as typical of an airy nation: in Britain, ‘airy’ becomes ‘airy-fairy’ very readily. That expression, meaning insubstantial, superficial, impractical and foolishly idealistic, carries fears about effeminacy and witchcraft, yet its lightness gestures to a good-humoured enchantment with air too. The British are a nation enthusiastically engaged with air now: seafarers and shopkeepers have become frequent flyers. The French remain the boldest explorers of the aesthetics of air, though artists, photographers and architects worldwide have played with air to see in it new things, subtle forces, expansive and shaped freedoms. Balloons still cross our imagination in particular and colourful ways. Among these are many instances which contain traces of meaning carried over from the eighteenth century, airborne ghosts which help explain why we still love balloons. The aesthetic work balloons do for us has adapted to meet modern ends, made possible by long memories that reach back to the beginnings of balloons in the late eighteenth century. Air has a culture rich, various and persistent.

We know balloons best as toys, little airy spheres that have shed the apparatus to carry humans aloft, except in spirit. They're affordable and disposable – too much so, since cast-away balloons contribute significantly to marine litter. Filled with human breath or by the simplest pumps, they eliminate all dangers other than the way they make us jump when they burst loudly; they expire by withering away, as if naturally. Toy balloons came about because new materials enabled cheap, safe mass production. Rubber balloons, first devised by Michael Faraday in 1824, were sold as toys in 1825; vulcanised rubber balloons, the prototype of toy balloons, were manufactured by a London company in 1847.

BALLOON NEWS SPREAD fast around Britain. Newspapers printed detailed accounts, local and international, so that readers in notionally provincial towns were often as well-informed as those in London. Some magazines too had national distribution, and private letters carried by an efficient postal system told of sightings and ascents. The balloon-mad read and talked avidly of aerostation in their area and worldwide. Benedict Anderson's classic work on the communication of ideas puts newspapers as a pillar of imagined communities, connecting people through common readership. That model holds good for balloon news though with a question of tone. Eighteenth-century newspapers, like newspapers now, combined apparently dispassionate reporting with commentary or tone that angled the subject in positive or negative ways. Many newspapers published accounts sent by witnesses with explicit views; many also printed balloon materials – advertisements, poems, periodical-style pieces, some serious, some humorous – that both reflected and created a composite tone about balloons. Newspapers expressed pride, civic and national; they also poured scorn. Their volatile views on balloons embraced scepticism, enthusiasm and contempt; like crowds at balloon launches, their mood could suddenly turn hostile. So although they are an index of public opinion, they were not always in sympathy with the balloon madness of other actors, including their contributors and readers.

Enthusiasm for balloons created activity all round Britain. Some of it was independent of events in London, though metropolitan ascents were widely reported and made aeronauts known in provincial places. Lunardi, for instance, started in London and then toured north, taking in York, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow. But he did not bring balloon madness to a new audience: Edinburgh had had its own inventor, and York had aeronauts who came flushed from success in Norwich and Bristol. The wildfire spread of balloon madness had hotspots other than London. Liverpool in the northwest of England, York in the north-east, Norwich in the east and Bristol in the west were centres of trade that looked outward to the world.

IN NOVEMBER 1784 three plays were reviewed by The Universal Magazine. One, Frederick Pilon's Aerostation, explicitly jokey about balloons, had a cast of characters with European interests. A second, John O'Keeffe's Fontainbleau, included a comic character called Colonel Epaulette, a French fan of England who came on stage humming ‘Britannia rules the waves’. The third, a farce by Thomas Linley called The Spanish Rivals, included a Cumberland boy speaking in broad dialect who had been taken prisoner at the siege of Gibraltar and thereafter kept in Spain. In each of these plays people crossed national borders and still kept local identities. Comedy staged inter-nationalism while recognising national characters and conflicts. Comedy also questioned simplistic ideas of British national character:

The self-styled Lounger who penned this portrait is thinking humorously about patriotism. Just as balloons were both serious and comic, national character was solid enough to survive ironies – or, looking the other way round, national character was solidified by irony. (The British are still inclined to be defined through their sense of humour.) Satirical prints showed that people were perfectly used to reading a language of exaggeration in which truth could be found. Truth might even be easier to recognise when it was dressed in exaggeration. But for all the playfulness about national character, in 1783 and the years immediately following there was a seriousness in discussions about the state of the nation that reflected deep uncertainties and worry about Britain's prospects.

MUCH OF BALLOON MADNESS was joyous and excited. But there was also resistance and opposition. Aerostation seemed to move fast in its developments; in the first years, comments on voyages note record-breaking achievements in distance, height and time which raised expectations for other flights. Many satirists concentrated on ineptitude in particular failures; some cast doubt on the whole enterprise of aerial endeavour. The old trope of bubble connected folly and politics, and balloons drew satirists in flocks. Attacks were often personally directed. Thus The Lunardiad, or, The Folly and Madness of the Age (1784):

Balloons as a form of folly feature in another print of 1784 – The downfall of taste & genius or the world as it goes – that satirised topical amusements in popular culture, including mountebanks, performing animals and freaks.2 Vehicles of folly in themselves, balloons revealed the folly in people too, in unchecked ambition, deviant escape from norms, loose behaviour, upside-down values, greed, fraud, appetite, gullibility and credulity. This chapter explores that world in relation to the rage for balloons – a world not simply of scandal, politics or fashion but the intersection of all three. It was possible to be famous for being famous – and fatuous. What historians call the public sphere included in 1783 much personal life aired through personalities and sexual affairs, especially those conducted publicly by the aristocracy. The fashionable world was also a political world; balloons contributed to fashionable politics.