The "Balloonomania": Science and Spectacle in 1780s England

Abstract

This essay explores the ballooning craze in Britain in the 1780s as an expression of the energies and anxieties that characterized Britain's consumer revolution. Ballooning was a subject of endless commentary, but critics' mixed responses to its enormous popularity epitomized the tensions between the century's dominant narratives of progress and decline. For some, ballooning was a promising example of the pursuit of knowledge; for others, it was symptomatic of the effeminacy of a modern commercial society. The lesson enforced by "the balloonomania," as Horace Walpole called it, was that in a modern commercial society, it was often too hard to maintain these distinctions. This ambivalence reverberated throughout a subtler set of categorical confusions that manifested themselves in a nervous awareness of the often threatening proximity of intellectual seriousness and personal frivolity, scientific pursuits and fashionable distractions.