The third chapter utilizes soldiers’ writings to indicate that, contrary to the developers’ view of the gas mask as a life-saving device, combatants were more frequently frightened of both the appearance of the gas mask on others and the physical feeling of the mask against their own skin. While German tacticians hoped to craft chemically resistant soldiers through gas mask training, these newly envisioned “chemical subjects” continued to ruminate on the many ways in which masks could malfunction. Sitting in the trenches, soldiers largely feared both the uncoordinated and creeping nature of gas and the smothering feeling of their affixed gas mask. By examining the sensorial and metaphorical language in a wide array of soldier diaries, trench journals, and troop reports, this chapter seeks to construct the emotive experience of German World War I soldiers as they came to recognize their precarious role in a modern world now seemingly steeped in gas.

Hearing without seeing, or without seeing well, was one of the defining experiences of the preindustrial night. This chapter seeks to capture something of this experience. It follows darkness as it fell, from sunset to bedtime, beginning with an attempt to “listen around,” or to reconstruct the aural texture of the everynight. While hearing was much more important than during the day for information and orientation, it could not compensate for the loss of vision. The deep darkness of the early modern city undermined people’s sense of control, aggravating fears of very real nocturnal dangers. Discussion accompanies people as they were readying themselves to sleep and shows that even at home, fears and real dangers could shake people’s security and disturb their peace. But while nocturnal threats, fears, and nuisances seem universal, their effect was highly differential, since it depended on the means one could use to cope with them. My second argument is therefore that sleep did not necessarily emancipate people from diurnal social hierarchies and material conditions. They remained unequal even in their beds.

This final chapter addresses the concreteness of fictional experiences on which Brontë’s, Trollope’s, and Thackeray’s various uses of the novel depend. I examine nineteenth-century medical responses to Coleridge’s paracosmic play, in particular their cautions against imagined environments as precursors to hallucination, and the continuity of this discourse with more general anxieties about fictional or poetic experience; for instance, George Henry Lewes singled out Dickens as an author who shared his pseudo-hallucinations through novels. This view of novel-reading as imaginative sensory participation has since been overshadowed by the cinematic and the digital, but represents an important precedent for the everyday presence of non-material things and spaces. In a reading of Little Dorrit, where multiple characters form their unrealised hopes and plans into fantasised environments, I argue that play, hallucination, and fiction provided nineteenth-century critics with tools to conceptualise a phenomenology of the virtual, or even its reparative value.