Looking Up At The Falling Stars of 1866

1 | 01.06.2015 | MPhil Dissertation | Supervisor: Jim Secord

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Contents

This dissertation was written to fulfill the requirements for the MPhil in the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. It was supervised by Professor James A. Secord and submitted on 1 June 2015. This draft was last edited on 4 July 2015.

The author would like to thank Simon Schaffer, Josh Nall, Ankita Anirban and David Zagoury for their helpful comments, and Mark Hurn of the Institute of Astronomy Library for assistance tracking down Herschel’s meteor maps.

The text is set in the Yale Typeface. Footnotes are set in Gill Sans.

Introduction

The Victorian Sky At Night

The Prophecies

Interpreting the Shower of Sensations

Keeping Watch

Predicting the Future

Conclusion

Bibliography

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1

In the early morning hours of November 14th, 1866 observers from all walks of life—astronomers, paupers, clerks, and even Queen Victoria—gathered on rooftops and around windows to look up at the sky. “Half of London was awake till a late hour on Tuesday night,” reported The Morning Post.1 These everyday observers were awake due to the news that had been circulating in periodicals for weeks: astronomers were predicting an un-imaginable spectacle. On the foretold night the skies over the city were filled with stars. At 11pm, the stars began to fall. Observers started off counting them but by 1 a.m. they were falling so fast (two per second, see Figure 1) that even the finest began to lose track. The great November meteoric shower had returned.

This sensation was possible because, for the first time, as-tronomers had prophesied a meteoric shower’s arrival. Yet for Victorian observers the astronomers’ predictions were hopelessly entangled with a grim fact. If their divinations were correct, most would never live to see such a sight again, for the shower would not return for another 33 years. The Illustrated London News (ILN) consoled their readers that it would live on in their memo-ries: “Myriads…will look back to the great night of 1866, when the heavens were full of fiery shapes, and from around the Lion the mystic bolts shot fierce and fast, and a sense of something

1. “The Meteoric Shower,” The Morning Post, November 15, 1866.

Introduction

Once in a human generation, and thrice in a century—for in this matter man and the material universe seem strangely in accord—this earth has to encounter an immense cloud of stones revolving round the sun...—The Times, 15 November 1866

Rarely have the heavens had so many observers as during the early morning of yesterday.—The Standard, 15 November 1866

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preternatural silenced the least reverent into awe.”2

Despite the fact that on that cold November night the skies of England had perhaps more simultaneous observers than it ever had in the past, their experiences have not lived on in the history of astronomy. I argue that in order to understand the significance of the meteoric shower, we must view it from the ground up: from the perspective of everyday observers. 1866 was a special moment, when the forces of industrialized print put astronomical knowledge and predictions in the hands of the public, before the forces of industrialized illumination washed out the night skies in a sea of light. During the night of the meteor shower the distance between astronomers and the observing public was collapsed, and thus provides us with an excellent opportunity to study everyday observation. More than an accurate prediction diffused through the press was needed in order for this to happen. The

2. “Editorial,” Illustrated London News, November 17, 1866.

Figure 1 Rate of meteors observed at Greenwich (Source: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 27, 54)

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public needed to have a view of the night sky and to be encour-aged to look up. What follows is the story of observers working to find good views of the sky, looking up, and deriving both meaning and knowledge from their observational experiences. When we take these tales into account it is clear that astronomical predictions represented more than just the authority of astrono-mers, but rather came to embody the hopes and fears of Victorian England.

***What is everyday observation? This dissertation challenges

the orthodox distinction between scientific observation and un-scientific everyday experience. Focusing on scientific observation wrongly implies that scientists have a monopoly on turning expe-rience into knowledge. 3 I use the term “everyday observation” to refer to the ways that humans combine insights from their intu-itions and scientific knowledge to make sense of their experiences of natural phenomena. Everyday observation has a history. This paper is an attempt to sketch its contours. It requires moving beyond analyzing the construction of discursive categories like “scientists” and “the public” and instead examining how the en-vironment, sensory practices and external information are mixed together to produce knowledge. Although the sensory practices of everyday observation resemble those of its scientific cousin, this story is shaped by a different set of impersonal sociopoliti-cal forces such as urbanization, inequality, and the increasingly mediated experience of nature.

Everyday observation has been excluded from the history of nineteenth century astronomy. Scholars are now shifting this history away from stories of isolated observatories by recover-ing the dense networks that observatories were but one part of.4 Examining everyday observation contributes to this de-centering by showing that places like bridges and terraced houses were important observatories, too. Another reason for the exclusion of everyday observation is that historians have focused on how astronomers studied “barely visible” objects like nebulae and planets.5 These objects were invisible to the layperson; they could only be resolved with powerful instruments. Unsurprisingly, then, most accounts chronicle the adventures of wealthy gentle-men, giant telescopes and the machine-like observers at Green-wich.6 This essay brings everyday observation back in by focusing on the spectacularly visible phenomena of the meteoric shower. No expensive instruments were required to watch the meteors flying across the sky.

To make sense of this new host of observers I draw on recent popular science scholarship that shows how new genres of sci-ence writing and demonstration made scientific knowledge more

3. Daston and Lunbeck, Histories of Scientific Observation.

4. Aubin, Bigg, and Sibum, The Heavens on Earth.

5. Omar Nasim coinced “barely visible” to describe objects that are difficult to describe in words, e.g. nebulae. Nasim, Observing by Hand.

6. Schaffer, “Astronomers Mark Time”; Pang, Empire and the Sun; Herrmann and Krisciunas, The history of astronomy from Herschel to Hertzsprung; Ruskin, John Herschel’s Cape Voyage.

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accessible.7 Although the mass press plays a role in the story that follows, I challenge the diffusionist assumption that Victorians relied upon reading to learn about nature. Just as important as the availability of cheap printed knowledge was the availability of nature that they could poke, dissect, and observe. I attend to how printed scientific knowledge was used alongside nature itself to promote more active sensory engagement with the world, and take seriously how such sensory experiences can function as plea-surable “allurements” that tighten the bonds between observer, science and nature.8

It is not enough to assume that people could look up at the stars—we must study the details of their embodied sensory expe-riences.9 Following Chris Otter, I reconstruct “perceptual prac-tices” by attending to the material and technological networks observers were embedded in.10 This reveals several distinctly mid-Victorian ways of observing the heavens, ranging from com-paring meteors with railway maps to looking out the window of a terraced house. My work also extends Joy Parr’s efforts to analyze how technology changes the embodied relationships between humans and their environment by not taking the visibility of the stars for granted.11 The history of the night sky remains largely unwritten, despite its centrality to every astronomical narrative.12 I start that project by examining how gas lighting was chang-ing the way Victorians experienced the night—and the heavens. It shows that even though the night sky does, technically, exist everywhere, it is not accessible to all.

***The dissertation is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1

describes long-term developments changing what it meant to stay up late, to read about science, and to participate in public life in 1866. Chapter 2 shows how the meteorological background of British meteoric scientists prompted them to encourage everyday observation by spreading news of their predictions through the press. Chapter 3 observes the practices of shower watchers to argue that their active engagement with their senses constitutes observation. Chapter 4 takes us on a night-walk around London to witness the difficulty of finding a safe and clear view of the night sky. Chapter 5 explores how embodied practices prompt-ed reflection about the wrenching changes sweeping Victorian England. I conclude by reflecting on the relationship between the night sky and the city.

7. Secord, Victorian Sensation; Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science Designing Nature for New Audiences; Fyfe and Lightman, Science in the Marketplace; Cantor, Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical.

8. It is important to note that this essay is not concerned with what Secord calls the “inclusionist aims of expert practi-tioners.” Secord, “Botany on a Plate.”

9. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night; Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant.

10. Otter, The Victorian Eye.

11. Parr, Sensing Changes.

12. For how night has been ignored by geographers, see Edensor, “The Gloomy City.”

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On the night of October 2nd, 1865 a hot air balloon glided through the crisp autumn air. In it were a bundle of meteoro-logical instruments and a man—busy reading measurements from his thermometers and barometers—named James Glaisher. Little was known about how high-altitude air currents changed at nighttime and Glaisher was keen to collect new facts. He was well known in Victorian England for looking up at the sky: he had written numerous articles for periodicals like the ILN about his efforts to observe the weather and luminous meteors.13 On that night, however, his observations were pointing in a different direction: down onto the illuminated streets of London. In an ILN article about the flight Glaisher exclaimed, “the intense bril-liancy of London this night would have rivalled the brilliancy of [a] telescopic view of brilliant clusters of stars.”14 The view down from Glaisher’s balloon reveals important processes playing out in 1866 Britain that were shaping how Victorians looked up at the sky.

The 1860s were a time when radical changes were reshaping the material fabric of London. The very fact that Glaisher’s work attracted public attention is evidence of the explosion of printed material available to Victorian readers. Starting in the early nine-teenth century, increasingly inexpensive books and periodicals put knowledge about the latest scientific and political debates in the hands of the public. These debates mattered to more peo-ple as it seemed increasingly likely that reform would expand the franchise to skilled working class men (this indeed occurred months later). Thanks to forces like increasing prosperity and the self-help movement, these laborers were “abandoning the vio-lence of earlier decades in favour of cultural alignment with the middle class.”15 The beautiful pages of the ILN attracted readers from across the social spectrum, and all were drawn to Glaisher’s account because it provided a birds-eye view of “improvements” that threatened to tear the city apart.16

13. The Glaisher literature focuses on ballooning: Tucker, “Voyages of Discovery on Oceans of Air”; Hunt, “James Glaisher FRS (1809-1903) Astronomer, Meteorologist and Pioneer of Weather Forecasting.”

14. James Glaisher, “A Night Balloon Ascent,” ILN, October 14, 1865.

15. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846-1886, 240–241.

16. Nead, Victorian Babylon.

Chapter 1The Victorian City At Night

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Starting in the 1820s, an increasing number of gaslights were deployed onto city streets and into people’s homes. From his balloon Glaisher commented on the illuminated thorough-fares: “Looking eastward, the whole lines of the Commercial and Whitechapel roads…were visible, and most brilliant and remark-able. We were at such a distance from the Commercial Road that it appeared like a line of brilliant fire.”17 The map drawn for his 1871 book Travels In The Air (Figure 2) shows the thorough-fares lit by two parallel rows of street lamps, while the rest of the city remains dark. Contrary to popular narratives of night being turned into day, there were still large swaths of darkness.18

To understand the significance of these changes it is import-ant to realize that for most of its history London was a dark city with no centralized public lighting system. It had no unified metropolitan police force and instead relied on night watchmen in each neighborhood. Londoners locked up after nightfall.19

By the 1860s, increasing amounts of light were making it possible for citizens to stay up later. As the Daily Telegraph wrote in an editorial on gaslight just a few days before the shower, “Late hours may or may not be bad; but in the London of the nineteenth century they happen to be inevitable.”20 More people ventured out to walk around the gas-lit thoroughfares. In-creasing light fuelled a spectre looming in the shadows: worker

17. Glaisher et al., Travels In The Air, 82.


19. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night.

20. “London, Saturday, November 10,” The Daily Telegraph, November 10, 1866.

Figure 2 London at night, looking south (Source: Glaisher et al., Travels In The Air, 80)

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exploitation. Gas-lit factories could run around the clock forcing workers to stay up late and shopkeepers needed their employees to tend to their gas-lit shops later to attract bourgeois shoppers. Reform efforts like The Early Closing Movement fought to limit shop opening times so that people could go home to their fami-lies. These changes made staying up late and moving around at night a topic of political and cultural contention. Yet an unex-amined consequence of the situation is that spending more time outside at night meant that people had more time to spend with the stars.

One essential prerequisite for observing the shower was that the stars be visible. In 1866 there was very little light pollution.

Figure 3 Star map of the London sky in mid-November (Source: Dunkin, The Midnight Sky, 82-83)

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Light pollution is caused when lamps intended to illuminate the ground emit stray rays of light that then make the sky bright-er.21 In twenty-first century London the light pollution is so bad that only a few stars are visible. The situation in the 1860s was very different. Street lights were not very bright due to both the lack of lamps on smaller streets and problems in the gas supply chain. The Daily Telegraph’s editorial complained that “Modern Babylon…is not a particularly well-lighted city after all.” Al-though the thoroughfares are brilliant, “a drive into the suburbs on a November evening is likely to suggest the idea of ‘a million additional lamps,’ by recalling the fact that they are dreadfully wanted.”22 In addition to being dim the lights that were on were often shielded to prevent public light from entering the private windows of middle class first floor bedrooms. 23 This shielding ensured that very little light polluted the skies.

The resulting dark skies were captured by the 1868 star maps of Greenwich astronomical assistant Edwin Dunkin (Figure 3). Dunkin reported that on a clear night hundreds of stars—down to fifth magnitude—were visible. Yet the stars were often hidden under a canopy of air pollution. One review of Dunkin’s maps quipped that: “The dense atmosphere of London…is a very unfavourable medium through which to contemplate the glory of the heavens.”24 In addition to London’s notorious fogs (most common in November), the chief problem was the smoke that poured forth from hundreds of thousands of chimneys each morning. John Ruskin described the way this light darkened the skies by saying that “the Empire of England, on which formerly the sun never set, has become one on which he never rises.”25 Yet fog and smoke were only problems when the air was still. On blustery nights, like that of the meteoric shower, the winds blew obscuring particles out to the eastern suburbs leaving behind a clear view of the stars.26

21. The term light pollution is from the twentieth century and is used here cautiously. As Thorsheim argues, what counts as pollution in one place and time might not be counted as such elsewhere. Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution.

22. “London, Saturday, November 10,” The Daily Telegraph, November 10, 1866.

23. Otter, The Victorian Eye, 224.

24. “The Midnight Sky,” The Morning Post, January 28, 1870, sec. Literature.

25. John Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, 41.

26. Edwin Dunkin, “London Fogs,” ed. James Macauley, The Leisure Hour, no. 723 (November 4, 1865): 694–96.

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After the summer recess, the members of the Royal Astro-nomical Society reconvened in their meeting room in Somerset House on November 9th, 1866. The society’s President, Rev-erend Charles Pritchard, opened the meeting by reporting the unhappy news that no major astronomical discoveries had taken place since June. He consoled the gathered fellows: “But astrono-my [is] an accumulative science, and much valuable matter [has] doubtless been treasured up, to become available for future use.” He then “[called] the attention of the members to the expect-ed great shower of meteors on the 13th or 14th of the month.” Pritchard declared that: “If any man [goes] to bed on either of those nights he [is] not worthy to be called an astronomer.”27 Pritchard’s definitive statement might have come as a surprise to astronomers from the distant past, for meteors had only recently become objects of astronomical enquiry. This chapter uses the process of predicting the shower as a probe for understanding the state of meteoric science, and then explores how these predictions were communicated to the public.

27. “Royal Astronomical Society Meeting Minutes, November 9, 1866,” Astronomi-cal Register 4 (December 1866): 301–5.

Chapter 2The Prophecies

Figure 4 Somerset House (Source: “Rooms of the Royal Astronomical Society” [Photograph, n.d.], RAS MSS Add 93/130, Library of the Royal Astronomical Society)

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Taking the Meteor Out of Meteorology

The shower of 1866 was the first one where meteors were seen as astronomical—not meteorological—phenomena. The standard story of the switch goes like this. 28 Philosophers since Aristotle thought that meteors were caused by gases that rose from the earth into the atmosphere, where they ignited. These views went unquestioned until the late eighteenth century, when Edmond Halley proposed that meteors came from outer space after calculating a fireball’s altitude at 74 miles—far out-side the known limits of the atmosphere. Alexander von Hum-boldt observed the first great meteoric shower in recent times in November 1799. He noticed that the meteors appeared to be coming from a single place in the sky (the radiant point). When the spectacular November meteors returned in 1833 in America (Figure 5), Yale astronomer Denison Olmsted “crowd-sourced” observations to prove that at its peak the shower produced twen-ty meteors per second.29

It was historical research—not observation—that definitively took meteors out of meteorology. In 1863, Yale astronomer Hu-bert Anson Newton found that shower dates varied along with the sidereal year (not the tropical year that would have influenced atmospheric phenomena) by—as Pritchard described it—“search-ing ancient records.”30 Newton then predicted that a great shower would return in 1866. Once meteors were astronomical phe-nomena, existing theoretical tools simply needed to be applied: the clouds of rock the Earth flew through in November could be treated like another planet whose properties could be deduced. The 1860s saw a flurry of such research, culminating with yet another race between Le Verrier and John Couch Adams to calcu-late the orbit of a new planetary body.

28. For general meteor history see Hughes, “The History of Meteors and Meteor Showers.”

29. Littmann and Suomela, “Crowdsourcing, the Great Meteor Storm of 1833, and the Founding of Meteor Science”; For an American history of the Leonids see Littmann, The Heavens on Fire.

30. Charles Pritchard, “The Meteoric Shower of November 14, 1866,” ed. Norman Macleod, Good Words 8 (January 1867): 12; For Victorian astronomers, transforming historical accounts into “raw” data was an important part of making predictions. See Stanley, “Where Is That Moon, Anyway?” 77–88.

Figure 5 Woodcut of 1833 shower (Source: Boston Evening Transcript, 16 November 1833)

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This narrative of theoretical triumph overlooks the continued importance of observation in nineteenth century British meteoric science. Even after meteors were astronomical phenomena, its institutions still had more in common with meteorology than astronomy. As Katharine Anderson has described, Victorian meteorology was an inductive science.31 It was believed that un-derstanding the weather required collecting and coordinating ob-servations on a massive scale. Men like Glaisher organized large networks of instruments, telegraph cables, and people to send weather observations from distant locales to centers of calculation where forecasts could be generated. When attempts at forecasting the weather failed, the meteorologists collected even more data. Despite these tremendous Baconian efforts, the daily experience of British weather remained unpredictable.

In the first half of the nineteenth century meteors were effectively random, too. As in meteorology, meteoric scientists believed that the way forward was to collect facts in hopes of uncovering general laws. After the successful shower prediction, Glaisher became the public face of this effort. The Evening Stan-dard taught its readers the importance of seemingly aimless data collection:

Nothing can testify more strongly to the impor-tance of accumulating facts, even without any hypothesis or theory to group them around, than the present state of science with respect to mete-oric showers. When in 1835, Mr. Glaisher stood alone in his efforts at Greenwich, and almost without hope, and certainly without encourage-ment, began to record the positions and circum-stances of some of the solitary wanderers, there was no guiding plan…So the shooting stars were simply noted, and from the unsystematic records of years the idea was first evolved that these remarkable fugitive objects had particular direc-tions and came in groups from particular spaces of the sky…Thirty years since shooting-stars were a hopeless subject, today the result of thirty years’ perseverance give an unsurpassable en-couragement to all scientific investigators never to leave any branch of knowledge unattacked or unconquered.32

Glaisher did not stand alone for long. Efforts were undertaken to build networks of observers, this time by Oxford Professor Rev-erend Baden Powell and the British Association for the Advance-ment of Science’s (BA) Committee on Luminous Meteors.33 Pow-ell began compiling data from a network of observers in the late

31. Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 1.

32. “The November Star Shower,” London Evening Standard, November 16, 1866.

33. The history of the Luminous Meteors committee remains largely unwritten. See McBeath, “History of Meteor Observing Project,” February 1, 2011; McBeath, “History of Meteor Observing Project,” June 1, 2011.

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1840s. He furnished BA members with paper reporting forms and collected data from non-BA members by soliciting personal accounts and by scouring newspapers and historical records for meteor data. All observations were standardized and published in an annual catalogue. After Powell’s death in 1860, Glaisher and three astronomers (Alexander Herschel, Robert Greg, and Edward Brayley) continued the work. They found themselves buried in data. They plotted the catalogue’s observations on maps, where random meteors “accumulate from year to year until the observations appeal together to the eye,” revealing dozens of previously unknown radiant points (Figure 6). They wrote, “The number of radiant-points that yet remain to be determined appears to be strictly measured by the zeal of the observers.”34 34. Glaisher et al., “Report on Observations

of Luminous Meteors, 1863-64,” 1.

Figure 6 Top: Blank map distributed to observers by Herschel (Source: Alexander Herschel and R. P. Greg, British Association Charts for Facilitating the Observations of Luminous Meteors [London: British Association, 1865]). Bottom: Zoomed in region of a map plotting all November meteors (arrows) from the BA catalogue showing a radiant point (the ellipse) in Musca (Source: Alexander Herschel and R. P. Greg, Atlas of Charts of the Meteor Tracks Contained in the British Association Catalogue of Observations of Luminous Meteors Extending Over The Years From 1845 to 1866 [British Association, 1867])

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Newton’s papers predicting the forthcoming shower made their way into the hands of British scientists through the annual report of the Committee. The Committee began preparing for the 1866 shower years in advance with the goal of “organizing a competent staff of observers” whose new observations could “remov[e] doubt from this province of astronomy” and more precisely characterize the radiant point of the shower.35 Herschel prepared a special set of large blank star maps especially for re-cording meteor trajectories.

This particularly meteorological British network mobilized and on the watch for meteors helped to define observation—not theoretical prediction—as the activity at the heart of scientific progress. The meteorological heritage of British meteoric science is critical for making sense of the way astronomers encouraged readers to observe the event. Anderson has described how meteo-rologists ran into trouble when trying to establish their authority because they “couldn’t decisively separate scientific observation of the weather from unscientific experience of the weather.”36 In me-teoric science this was not a problem. Since fireballs and meteors are rare phenomena, scientists had always relied on collecting data from public reports.37 This meant that meteoric astronomers had fewer reservations about encouraging the public to observe the shower. The next section describes how news of the predicted shower traveled from astronomers through the press and into reading communities.

How Word Spread

Announcements of the impending meteor shower began circulating in most British newspapers several weeks in advance of the spectacle. These announcements were usually brief, citing the date and crediting the prediction to “Professor Newton of Yale.” As the event approached, newspapers printed letters to the editor encouraging readers to observe the event. The network of observers played a crucial role in writing these letters. Herschel wrote a letter describing the shower to the President of the RAS, who in turn circulated it to each fellow of the society, who in turn wrote letters to the editors of their local papers containing an-nouncements of the impending shower. The text of the letter was reprinted in full by several newspapers and at least six fellows of the RAS wrote letters to the editors of their local papers encour-aging their neighbors to keep watch the nights of the twelfth and thirteenth.

At the heart of the announcements was the predicted date of the shower. Unlike comet prediction which only needed to say

35. Glaisher et al., “Report on Observations of Luminous Meteors, 1864-65,” 57–59.

36. Anderson, Predicting the Weather, 4.

37. Although less essential to their work meteorologists did this too, see Dry, “Safety Networks.”

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that a comet was coming back in a particular time of year because the event took place over the course of weeks, the meteor shower required more precise temporal predictions because it only lasted for a few hours. Despite the fact that afterwards the event was hailed as a successful prediction, press announcements expressed uncertainty about the exact timing of the spectacle. One typical text said that “meteorologists are anxiously looking forward to the 12th of the month for the verification of [Newton’s] calcula-tions” and that those who stay up “may perhaps, ‘weather per-mitting,’ see a display which is not likely to be repeated during the remainder of this century. If…the illumination does not ‘come off’ on that night, it is generally believed that it will on the following one.” 38 Herschel’s reprinted letter noted that Newton predicted that the event would peak over the Western Atlantic and thus might not even be visible from England. 39

As the event got closer, coverage increased in length. Articles frequently outlined the history of the meteor shower stretching back to 902 AD, emphasizing that the prediction was not based just on abstract calculations but on the observations of trust-worthy gentlemen of science like Herschel and Humboldt. In or-der to demonstrate that the shower did not pose a threat, articles cited the fact that “a few collections in a few small rooms contain all the harvest of the heavens” as evidence that meteors rarely hit the earth.40

The announcements attempted to transmit the latest scientif-ic explanation for meteor showers, yet lacked sensory detail. Not a single announcement was illustrated and readers were given little idea what they would see, other than comparisons with fireworks, such as the one made by James Moden, FRAS: “we may expect to see something in the heavens by far superior to the feu d’artifice we have just witnessed in commemoration of Guy Fawkes.”41 One letter to the editor highlights one reason why me-teors didn’t need to be described: “We have all of us, in surveying the starry arch…seen those meteors…suddenly dart athwart the azure vault.” The challenge faced by astronomers was that, “the cursory spectator regards them indiscriminately as a kind of aerial ignusfatui floating about at random and falling down the ethereal steep by the mere sport of accident.”42 Thus explanations focused on creating abstract mental model of the earth flying through a cloud of small planetary bodies once a year.

Attempts to explain how the meteor shower was part of a divinely ordered cosmos were absent from the press. This was a major change from a century before. In the public conversa-tion about the expected return of the Comet Halley in 1758, the question “to what End the Almighty has appointed those wondrous Bodies” was just as important as the question of what

38. “Literature, Science and Art,” Oxford University and City Herald, October 20, 1866.

39. William Southern, “Letter to the Editor: The November Meteors,” Leamington Spa Courier, November 10, 1866.

40. “London, Thursday, November 15,” The Times, November 15, 1866.

41. James Moden, “Letter to the Editor: Shooting Stars,” Gloucester Journal, November 10, 1866.

42. Minimus, “Letter to the Editor: The Great November Star Shower,” North Devon Journal, November 1, 1866.

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comets were made of.43 One of the main reasons that word spread then was that religious writers used the occasion to claim that God was punishing England for its sins and needed to repent. In 1866, the situation had changed tremendously. Word spread mainly through secular newspapers and the only religious mes-sages were affirmations of the wonders of God’s creation.

These announcements had the difficult task of convincing the reader to stay up late. The Brighton Gazette quipped: “Persons who are accustomed to keep late hours and intend to reform had better defer turning over the new leaf until the 13th or 14th.”44 The most powerful appeal to stay up to watch arose from the astronomers’ second prediction: that such a spectacular shower would not return until the end of the century. As we will see in Chapter 5 this once-in-a-lifetime dimension of the experience was central to most observers.

By all accounts, word of the shower spread to many potential observers throughout the British Isles. As one man put it, “This grand celestial display had indeed been duly announced...it was as confidently advertized by Astronomers as an announcement of fireworks at the Crystal Palace, or the arrival of an express train.”45

***In the nineteenth century, astronomy was at the top of the

hierarchy of knowledge. A large part of that authority came from the inaccessibility of its methods of prediction, which required telescopes and mathematics.46 At first glance it seems that when meteors became astronomical phenomena, it would have become increasingly difficult for people to feel connected to the science. This chapter has shown how the science’s meteorological origins challenge these notions. The meteoric shower became one of the first great events of public astronomy precisely because, like the weather, meteor showers remained as accessible to everyday observation as ever.

43. Waff, “Comet Halley’s First Expected Return - English Apprehensions 1755-58,” 2.

44. “The Forthcoming November Star Showers,” Brighton Gazette, November 8, 1866.

45. Crampton, Falling Stars, 3.

46. Schaffer, “Comets and the World’s End.”

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When the evening of November 13th arrived, “the whole sky was clear of cloud, and transparent even into the depths of the pure vast eternity of boundless space.”47 Pritchard wrote: “The late hours of the evening of Tuesday the thirteenth of Novem-ber…were such as an astronomer longs, but often longs in vain, to see.”48 This chapter recreates the sights that filled the starry skies that dark night. Even though the meteoric shower had all the trimmings of a Victorian spectacle—bright lights, gazers, applause—analyzing the active sensory practices contained in published accounts shows how observers of all stripes turned their sensations into knowledge. This chapter explores a practice at the heart of everyday observation: combining insights from ex-isting mental models and new scientific information to interpret incoming sensations.

Observers made sense of what they experienced by relating it to sensations they were familiar with. The brilliant sight of the falling stars drew comparisons with the dynamic technological world of the 1860s. One of the most frequent comparisons made was between meteors and rockets.49 Rockets were a familiar part of London nights: there were fireworks nearly every summer night at the Cremorne pleasure gardens and every fifth of No-vember for Guy Fawkes Night. The shooting stars left “trains” in their wake, and one man wrote in his account of the sight: “The sky at one time seemed literally scored by these luminous tracks, which intersected the heavens like the corresponding ‘lines’ in a railway map.”50 Oxford geologist John Phillips compared the brightness with planets and gas street lamps: “The globe was seen...very many times brighter and larger than Mars…looming larger and immeasurably brighter than the Oxford Commis-sioners’ street lamp, at a distance of eighty yards.”51 Lamps were often used to compare the brightness of objects in the days before accurate light-measuring instruments.52

One of the most intense observational practices was counting. One lay observer writing in Leisure Hour provides a vivid account


48. Charles Pritchard, “The Meteoric Shower of November 14, 1866,” ed. Norman Macleod, Good Words 8 (January 1867): 12

49. Early pyrotechnics were actually designed to look like meteors. Werrett, Fireworks, 23–25.

50. “The Man About Town,” Sporting Gazette, Limited, November 17, 1866.

51. John Phillips, “Meteoric Shower,” The Athenaeum, no. 2038 (November 17, 1866): 644–45.


Chapter 3Interpreting the Shower of Sensations

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of the difficult process of counting the meteors:By eighteen minutes past one o’clock, the 207 had become 1000; by five minutes to two, a second thousand had been counted. Then the enumeration was given up. At times, indeed, it had been very difficult, and, for a while, even impossible to preserve accuracy…there was not even a second given for repose…it was scarcely…possible to pronounce the numbers fast enough, when addition was had recourse to, and they ran thus: 70,72, 76, 81 …no single person could count them all.53

This process of counting was described in many accounts of the shower. While most observers started out just by counting, after watching the skies they noticed other patterns: “The least discerning could see that there was some sort of method in their madness, by far the greater number moving from the eastern towards the western quarter of the heavens.” The author com-bined this perception of meteors radiating from a point with “the testimony of astronomers to establish that all the wayward crew had come from that quarter of the firmament, of which the background was formed by the constellation Leo.” 54 Observing allowed people to gain an intuitive understanding of the radiant point. In fact, this was one of the only kinds of observation that astronomers themselves undertook during the shower because the meteors were moving too fast to do much else.

Attending to the radiant point gave observers a sense of the importance of specific locations in the night sky, especially the constellation Leo. The observer writes that he learned the names of the zodiac constellations in school but couldn’t identify them in the sky. The shower enabled observers to relate these signs to sensations: “Amid the other pressing engagements of life, not many have found time to keep up any close intimacy with the constellation Leo, though all will be glad to renew at least tempo-rary acquaintance with it, in this, the season of its triumph.” 55

Observers compared what they saw to their mental models of how nature works. The astronomical explanations of the show-er distributed through the press often lacked sensory details, creating abstract mental models of what was going to happen. For some, like the educated observers at Cambridge, this theo-retical picture was enough to cause excitement: “The beautiful sight we saw on Wednesday morning…becomes infinitely more beautiful and more wonderful when we remember that not one of those bodies is moving at random,” but rather they’re orbiting “in strict conformity with Newton’s great law of gravitation.”56 Yet those unversed in natural philosophy had to rely on their own

53. James Macauley, ed., “The November Meteors,” The Leisure Hour, no. 787 (January 25, 1867): 60.



56. “Cambridgeshire,” Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, November 17, 1866.

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mental models to give them predictions about how the celes-tial event (the Earth flying through a cloud of rocks in space) would manifest itself to their senses. They developed—on their own—hypotheses about what would be seen, heard, and smelled. Accounts of the shower are filled with examples of the ways in which the phenomena defied these expectations.

Nearly every editorial commented on the silence of the mete-ors. The Daily Telegraph was so struck that it expressed skepticism about the astronomers’ claim that the meteors could be in the atmosphere:

What was strangest, perhaps, about the spectacle was its silence; one half expected that such a feu de joie among the worlds, would be accompanied by distant rumbling noises, echoes of the hiss-ing speed which ignited the meteors, whispers in rolling thunder of their birth and dissolution. But [the meteors] which displayed their lovely vagaries, did it in solemn silence. That lent a peculiar character to the sight, and made it harder to believe, what astronomers tell us, that all the meteors were within our own atmosphere, and owed their appearance to that very fact.57

The editorial in The Morning Star wrote that since many observ-ers knew that meteors were hitting the atmosphere, “Emily may have listened for the passing ‘whirr’ and Charles sniffed for the sulphurous odour of the descending ball.” They continue by com-menting on their discipline: “It is matter for wonder that under such circumstances amateur observers had sufficient calmness and concentration to watch particularly the colour of the light exhibited by certain of the aerolites.”58

57. “London, Thursday, November 15,” The Daily Telegraph, November 15, 1866.

58. “London, Thursday, November 15,” The Morning Star, November 15, 1866.

Figure 7 Drawing of meteors emerging from the radiant point in Leo (Source: Dunkin, The Midnight Sky, 290)

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The willingness of these editorials to use their mental models to question the verdicts of the astronomical philosophers gives us insight into the faith they had in their own senses. Mental models are a large part of what Anderson refers to as “folk knowledge.” They were a well known pest to meteorologists, who found it difficult to consolidate the authority of their “scientific knowl-edge” when people preferred their intuitions to the scientists’ often inaccurate forecasts. Yet implying that mental models were dialectically opposed to scientific knowledge—as the folk label suggests—ignores the important process described here: the mix-ing of scientific insight into these sensory models.

This evidence shows that the experience of watching the meteoric shower was not one of terror or dumbfounded awe. Rather, the observers were thoughtful ones, who worked to understand the relationship between their sensory experience and the philosophers’ physical explanation. This process of active en-gagement with the senses to create knowledge about the natural world has a name: observation.

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The previous chapter examined how sensations were interpret-ed by observers. It was a disembodied account: it assumed that perfect sense-data entered the Mind of the observers. One of the only newspapers illustrations of the shower resembles what one might imagine such a star-gazing experience to be like (Figure 8). The woodcut from the Penny Illustrated Paper shows a group of well-dressed observers perched atop a hill in Greenwich Park. However, the image is not only plagiarized (a copy of an 1858 ILN illustration showing Comet Donati), the scene it depicts was impossible: Greenwich Park was closed at night.59 The imaginary scene raises an important question: how did Victorians actually watch the meteoric shower?

59. “Donati’s Comet,” Illustrated London News, September 25, 1858.

Chapter 4Keeping Watch

As the evening of Tuesday came down over London, sharp, cold, and windy, anxious eyes were eagerly scanning those squares and pentagons of sky visible from lane, or court-yard, or thorough-fare.—The Morning Star, 15 November 1866

Figure 8 “The Meteor-Shower, As Seen From Greenwich Park” (Source: “The Meteor Shower,” Penny Illustrated Paper, November 24, 1866)

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The truth is that finding a place with a clear (and safe) view of the meteor shower was difficult. The view of the sky from London was constrained by buildings, the streets plagued by crime and the air freezing to the bone…but keen observers didn’t let that stop them. They ventured to city squares, climbed roof-tops, and watched from windows.

This chapter aims to capture how the changing material fabric of Victorian life affected observers’ capacity to stargaze. It extends work by geographers of science interested in how “scien-tific practices and procedures operate in different ways in differ-ent places.”60 Rather than focusing on how the physical spaces of London’s major scientific institutions affected scientific research (as Bernard Lightman has done) this chapter argues that place mattered because the night sky was more accessible in some plac-es than others.61 What follows is a night walk through the Royal, rooftop and window observatories of London, with a few excur-sions by train.62 In each place it explores how observers navigated their environment to get a good view.

60. Withers and Livingstone, “Thinking Geographically About Nineteenth Century Science.”

61. Lightman, “Refashioning the Spaces of London Science.”

62. Many of the best surviving accounts of what the city was like after dark life was like come from the genre of writing known as “night-walking,” popularized by the journalistic writings of men like Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens. For two of Dickens’s most famous pieces see Dickens, “The Streets—Night”; Dickens, “Night Walks.”

Figure 9 Overview map of night walk in this chapter (Source: J. H. Colton, “London, England,” Political Map, 1865)

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1. The Observing Machine at Greenwich

Our night walk through Victorian London begins with the astronomers at “their old watch-tower in Greenwich Park.”63 Glaisher organized a crack squad of eight observers. They secured a complete view of the sky by standing on an elevated platform atop a hill. Each watched a portion of the sky. The most import-ant factor in making a complete observation was the number of observers. On that front, Dunkin described Greenwich as the gold standard: “At [Greenwich], nearly nine thousand were counted; and it is supposed that at least another thousand may have escaped the attention of the eight observers employed.”64 Thus even the best team of observers couldn’t provide a com-plete observational record of the night’s spectacle. Each observ-er’s counts were compiled to plot the rate of meteors changed throughout the night (Figure 1). Measuring devices were also used to plot position of meteors on Herschel’s star maps.

After the shower was over, the Observatory’s strategy for finding the radiant point involved plotting the fleeting meteor trains on Herschel’s blank January star chart. The individual star trails were extended backwards where they overlapped in a small region: the radiant point. The final maps were reproduced in the

63. “London, Thursday, November 15,” The Standard, November 15, 1866.

64. Dunkin, The Midnight Sky, 295.

Figure 10 Map of meteor paths ob-served at Greenwich (Source: MNRAS, vol. 27, 55)

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Monthly Notices of the RAS (MNRAS) as negatives, turning the white background into a black one that looked like the dark night sky (Figure 10), taming the randomness of the meteors’ trajec-tory into an orderly image of rocks flying from a single point in space.

Although these practices agree with conventional visions of astronomical observation, the observers at Greenwich were anomalies. They were some of the only people in London watch-ing safely from a hill. To see how the rest of London observed the shower we must depart Greenwich, venturing across the Thames by rowboat and walking to the area between the two lines of brilliant fire reported by Glaisher: Whitechapel Road and Com-mercial Road.

2. Skyless Canyons in the East End

We start standing on the pavement of Commercial Road. The wide thoroughfare afforded some of the widest fields of view of any piece of land in London. Its gaslights were dim by today’s standards. As we shall see in a later account they provided “counter-illumination”: rivaling the brightness of starlight. How-ever, they were still bright enough to make it difficult to develop excellent night vision.

To step off the thoroughfares of Whitechapel, with their two long rows of gas lights stretching into the distance, was to step into darkness. Although it was common for only major

Figure 11 “Whitechapel - A Shady Place” (Source Doré, London, a Pilgrimage, 146)

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thoroughfares to be well-lit in London, what made Whitechapel so different were the canyons of buildings that blocked out the sun during the day and the stars at night. Whitechapel was a very shady place (Figure 11). Just as drawings of the upper-classes at night feature the stars, it was conventional for Victorian imagery of the slum to depict the streets as being in an eternal state of darkness.

It was a neighborhood like this that Bell’s Life in London referred to in its report of the shower: “The poor shivering wretches who crouch about the streets during the hours of darkness forgot for a brief space their misery while gazing upon this display of the handiwork and glory of the Divine Creator.”65 Unfortunately, this passage—which relies on a caricature of the poor—is one of the only surviving texts that mentions how they experienced the shower. The poor were the most likely to spend the night outside due to the harsh realities of Victorian London. Yet the aphorism that the poor slept beneath the stars (Figure 12) is inaccurate: architectural constraints made viewing the stars difficult.

As we walk around London’s dark streets we will often look up and pay attention to the amount of sky that is visible. This quantity varied tremendously in Victorian London and depended mainly upon the width of the street and the height of the build-ings. As the housing reform movements gained momentum in the 1880s, the canyons of buildings in slums like Whitechapel gained attention because they limited the amount of sunlight visible on the street below, cause health problems. 66 For our purposes, however, narrow streets present another concern: they made it nearly impossible to see the night sky. To help visualize this problem I have mapped the amount of sky visible using a color-coding scheme similar to Booth’s social map of London (Figure 13).

To see these canyons we turn north onto York Street and turn left into the block’s network of dark alleyways. When nightwalk-ers like Gustave Doré ventured to a place like this they did so in the company of police officers. The houses were two to three stories tall, and were incredibly overcrowded. Most families in

65. “The Meteoric Showers,” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, November 17, 1866.

66. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow.

Figure 12 “Asleep Under The Stars” (Source: Doré, London, a Pilgrimage, 179)

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Whitechapel shared a single room.67 The environment creat-ed intense sensory deprivation. The alleyways were only a few meters wide (Figure 14, bottom) and only about 30 degrees of sky was visible overhead (slightly wider than the width of your hand from pinky to thumb, outstretched at arms length). The alleys’ poor air circulation made it easier for sky-blocking smoke to get stuck. It was in conditions like this that the poorest London residents (~15% of the population) lived.68

Residents in neighborhoods like Whitechapel had some of the worst access to the night sky in England. Alan Chapman has described how the Victorian working classes couldn’t participate in astronomy because they didn’t have things like celestial globes and telescopes. Yet this study points out that many lacked even the most basic requirement: a view of the sky. Very few mete-ors would have been visible darting overhead from the slits of

67. Wohl, The Eternal Slum, 21–24.

68. Muthesius, The English Terraced House, 45.

Figure 13 The Whitechapel neighbor-hood. Top: Ordinance Survey map, surveyed between 1868 and 1873 (Source: Ordinance Survey, “Surrey III,” 1880). Middle: Booth survey map, from the 1880s (Source: Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, vol. 1 [London, 1889]). Bottom: Map showing amount of sky visible from the street (Source: Ordinance Survey map used as base, painting by author)

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Whitechapel’s alleys. This environmental inequality is an import-ant dimension in the history of everyday observation. Without access to the sensory experience of the stars, the astronomical knowledge became disembodied and less meaningful. As Otter poignantly states, “Society remained, and remains, divided along sensory lines.”69

With these environmental factors in mind it is now possible to begin to understand what the experience of the shower would have been like for hundreds of thousands of impoverished East End residents. Although poverty limited access to astronomers’ predictions, dismissing their ability to participate in astronomy is a mistake. Since word travels fast in tightly-packed quarters it would have been much easier for someone who noticed the shower to start a sensation. Once residents caught wind of the spectacle, the search for better views began. As The Daily Tele-graph reported: “Great numbers of people were abroad in the streets looking for the phenomenon.”70 The absence of public parks in this part of the city means that they flocked to their roof-tops, wide thoroughfares like Commercial Road, and to the south and west in search of open spaces.

69. Otter, The Victorian Eye, 260.

70. “Appearance of Meteors,” The Daily Telegraph, November 14, 1866.

Figure 14 Sections of street types in Whitechapel (Source: drawings by author)

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3. A Walk Through The City

We next head southwest from Whitechapel towards the Thames. Newspapers reported that bridges were filled with observers. Though bridges were well-illuminated with gaslights they afforded an unobstructed view of the sky. The nearest bridge to East End was the London Bridge. Looking west along the north bank of the Thames is the first sign that of the construction work ripping apart the fabric of central London: the shoreline was being cleared to make way for the Embankment.

As we continue west we see large swaths of stars above the huge swaths of The City demolished to make way for other “improvements.” Block after block of working class residents received eviction notices to make way for new train lines and public works projects. The City was a ghost town by night.71 As we walk through the streets we can visually track our progress by watching as the movement of the gas lamps placed at the every corner. Looking up the stars appear to move, too, but this is an optical illusion caused by the movement of the buildings in front of the stationary firmament. With the empty headquarters of the RAS at Somerset House to our left and the slums of Lincoln’s Inn fields to our right, we begin to see the tower of Trafalgar Square in the distance.

A crowd of persons gathered in the grand open space to watch the meteor shower. It was a natural place to gather. Most green spaces in the city were owned by private citizens and inac-cessible to a wanderer. Even those that were open to the public during the day locked up after sunset due to London’s norm of “dawn to dusk” policies. Trafalgar Square was anomalous because it was open at night and also because frequent police patrols made it safe. The clear views of the skies afforded by the open space were so good that it had long been the site of meteor obser-vations. Thomas Crumplen frequently abandoned his post at the Euston Road Observatory to make observations here, sometimes staying til 2:30am. The 1864 BA Meteor Catalogue contains reports from ten of Crumplen’s stakeouts.72

On the west side of Trafalgar Square the narrow streets re-mained busy into the night. Traffic made looking up dangerous. The Morning Star reported that omnibus drivers were so busy looking up that they “imperiled the lives of elderly gentlemen who, even in crossing the street, threw a glance in the same direc-tion.”73 Thoroughfares were filled with coaches and omnibuses carrying those of means to and from their evening engagements at parlors, dining rooms, and especially theatres.

71. Wohl, The Eternal Slum, 26–35.

72. Glaisher et al., “Report on Observations of Luminous Meteors, 1863-64.”


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4. Balcony Parties in West End

London’s fashionable circles were no strangers to staying up late. During the social season of the warm summer months, one observer described the typical socialite as a “weary traveller from garden party, to tea, to dinner, to conversazione, and rout, and ball—who has no rest from sunset to sunrise, and is then due in the park in the morning.”74 In the cold out of season months, many aristocratic families had abandoned their London flats and returned to their country estates. For those that remained the pleasure gardens were shut and the main occasion for venturing out into the night was going to a show.

The most fashionable event in London society the night of the 13th was the debut of American comedian Artemus Ward at the Egyptian Hall in wealthy Piccadilly. These Londoners would have read about the show (advertised on the front page of all of the major papers) at the same time as they read about the upcom-ing shower, and The morning after the show read about it right alongside meteor observations.75 The Evening Standard reported: “Artemus dropped his jokes faster than the meteors of last night succeeded each other in the sky.”76 The Morning Star mocked the tendency of fashionable Londoners to move seamlessly from one event to another: “Future history may safely chronicle the fact that about five minutes after Mr. Artemus Ward had finished his lecture on the Mormons…a very brilliant shooting star passed across the heavens…The youthful enthusiasm of this aerolite, however, probably defeated its own end; most amateur spectators having agreed to begin their first watch at twelve o’clock.”77 This joke suggests that the fashionable observers were excited about the shower but treated it just like another event on their social agenda. After their theatre show they climbed aboard their coach and headed back to the drawing rooms of their terraced houses in the West End.

The terraced house is one of the main characters of our story. The idea for packing together a dozen flats on a single street, with nearly identical façades repeating over and over again arose in Georgian London. Originally these buildings were stitched together to collectively form a façade that resembled that of a palace (Figure 15). The idea spread and by the 1860s over 90% of houses in London were terraced.78 Developers built entire neighborhoods at once on huge tracts of property they acquired

74. Doré and Jerrold, London, a Pilgrimage, 174.

75. “Advertisement: ARTEMUS WARD—EGYPTIAN HALL—TUESDAY, Nov. 13,” Pall Mall Gazette, November 12, 1866, sec. Advertisements.

76. “Artemus Ward,” London Evening Standard, November 14, 1866.


78. Muthesius, The English Terraced House.

Figure 15 Bedford Square elevation drawing showing its resemblance to a palace facade (Source: Muthesius, The English Terraced House, 2)

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from aristocratic landowners via “three lives” leases that lasted 99 years (this was one of the reasons that the period of the meteoric shower was said to have coincided with the length of a gener-ation).79 Terraced houses were built with varying sizes so that there was a house suited for each social class.

One of the earliest building regulations in London stipulated “the building line,” dictating that all buildings must be in a row. This ensured that the “squares and pentagons” of night sky in much of London were bounded by well-defined lines, especially on terraced streets where the same façade repeated for an entire block.

Although the streets were quite wide the amount of sky vis-ible from the street was still poor, since most houses in Mayfair and Marylebone were four or five story terraces. Yet residents here had viewing options that those in less affluent areas did not. The West End was filled with private gardens and squares from which it was possible to view the meteors (depending on whether they were able to open the locked gates and gain access at night). Yet on the cold winter night it is unlikely that these Londoners would have dared venture so far into the freezing night when there was another way to increase their field of view: balconies.

As we walk through the streets we see the sight reported by the Morning Star: “Pretty little parties of amateur star gazers [occupying] pretty little suburban balconies.” 80 The facades of houses in the West End featured several kinds of balconies. The most frequent variety was affixed to the first floor, right out-side the drawing room. This was the site of polite post-dinner conversation. Astronomy had long been a subject of such polite conversation, and children were often encouraged to memorize astronomical names and facts specifically to deploy them at just the right conversational moment.81

Although many Londoners experienced the view from their private property, they were not necessarily experiencing it alone. They were packed so tightly together next to their neighbors that even these seemingly private viewing practices created a collective experience, as the Morning Star reported: “When these more bril-liant meteors first gleamed along the darkness there was many an exclamation of wonder and delight to be heard in the usually dull and lonely terraces where the star-gazers were clustered; but after a while the meteors became too frequent to be followed each by its own note of admiration.”82 The fashionable classes’ experience of the shower was thus a typical night, filled with social events. Next we will escape from the balconies and climb north to up to one of the most ideal observing sites in London.

79. Ibid., 21.


81. Taylor, “Mogg’s Celestial Sphere (1813).”


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5. Danger on Primrose Hill

Pulling oneself away from Marylebone’s pleasantries into the cold night required serious dedication. This section shows that far from being the family friendly affair pictured in Figure 8, go-ing to a park to watch the meteoric shower could be dangerous. Established as the first public park in England in 1842, Primrose Hill was one of the only green spaces open to the public. It has a clear view of London to the south. Several letters to the editors were published with accounts from Primrose Hill and a lengthy account was published in Leisure Hour by an anonymous writer.

The author heeded the predictions of the astronomers re-ligiously, which is to say that he started his observation on the night of the 12th and not the 13th. En route to the park on that first, cloudy night, he asked a passing police officer if it was safe to be on the hill after dark. He replied: “Safe enough…There are two watchmen who patrol the hill from ten in the evening til six in the morning.” He pressed on. The few men who gathered on Primrose Hill in hopes of a peek of the meteors through the clouds had little else to do but to observe their surroundings. He wrote, “It would occupy too much space to tell of the incidents of that first night’s watching.” At one point in the middle of the night they heard “the sound of the springing of a rattle” on the edge of the park and watched as the police with their lanterns in hand scrambled down the hill to chase after the mysterious an-tagonist (he later learned it had been attempted robbery, and that the culprit had escaped the police). The author returned the next night to find a crowd of 150 people that “had already become so critical on the subject of meteors that they thought it the correct etiquette to let the common herd go past with but faint recogni-tion, while the largest and brightest were welcomed with loud applause.” The crowd had an unobstructed view of the sky that was “far from the street lamps, which made a provoking counter illumination, and elevated above the smoke of the city.”

Two observers in the crowd had come fully outfitted: Crum-plen abandoned his usual observation sites and decided to make the climb up Primrose Hill with a friend, a hand-held telescope, and Herschel’s unwieldy star maps. Standing amongst the crowd they plotted the meteors on the maps, found the radiant point, and later mailed their observations to both Herschel and The Standard.

Primrose Hill, situated amongst the wealthiest neighbor-hoods in England, was far from removed from the ceaseless industrial churnings of the city. Even the most posh park in the city was the site of crime and danger. Yet even when not physical-ly assaulting the body industry was assaulting the ears. The Times remarked: “As to the sounds commonly heard on these occasions

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[i.e. meteor showers]—the explosions, the hissings, and the rum-blings—we cannot speak, for the wind was high, and it must be remembered that the stillness ascribed by poets to the night has utterly left this isle, for hardly is there a spot where it is not possi-bly any hour of the night to hear several mail or luggage trains.”83 Such sounds shattered the silence of Primrose Hill, for just to its east lay train tracks emanating from Euston Station.

6. Night Travelling (Via Euston Station)

Few enterprises in Victorian England were as associated with night as the tireless efforts of the post office. A letter from Lon-don to Derby enclosed in an envelope sporting a penny stamp dropped in a mail slot during the afternoon would have been car-ried to the central post office in the City for sorting by evening, hauled by horse to Euston Station, transferred onto a mail train, whisked north (skirting Primrose Hill) to Birmingham, and then loaded onto the Derby-bound train driven by Joseph Grich.

“For the last twenty years I have been much used to night travelling,” wrote the veteran engine-driver in a letter to a Bir-mingham newspaper, “but in the whole of my experience I was never out on such a night as the one in question.”84 Something about night travelling had long called travellers’ attention to the stars. It was during a nocturnal journey by carriage that William Herschel taught Caroline about the constellations. He would sometimes even fall off of his horse because he had been star-ing at the stars.85 As our earlier walk through the busy streets of central London attests the drivers of omnibuses were looking up while they were driving. In the 1860s the perceptual practice of night travelling was undergoing a revolution, powered by the railways (Figure 16).

83. “London, Thursday, November 15,” The Times, November 15, 1866.

84. Joseph Grich, “Letter to the Editor: The Meteors of 1866,” Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, November 17, 1866.

85. Holmes, The Age of Wonder.

Figure 16 Mail train (Source: ILN, 6 January 1849, 9)

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When Grich’s train left Birmingham at 11:19 pm, the sky was clear. Then the train sped into a heavy rain storm. Grich wrote, “It was raining very hard, and we were in almost total darkness. This lasted for about two miles, when all at once we found ourselves travelling again in the clear starlight.” The con-ductor gazed up at the still night sky. Then the train was sudden-ly plunged into a heavy hailstorm. As rapidly as the storm started, the train sped out of the maelstrom and back into the starlight, where Grich found himself surrounded by a storm of a different kind: “I then first perceived some of the stars shoot across the horizon. They rapidly increased in number as we got nearer to Derby, until at last the whole heavens had the appearance of a splendid display of fireworks. Such a night I have never before witnessed.”86 This movement into and out of the storm was only possible thanks to the speed of the railway. Though the land-scape and clouds moved rapidly by, creating what Schivelbusch has called panoramic perception, the stars on the heavenly vault stayed steady in their places.87 Yet viewing the stars was only possible because the conductor was in the darkened cockpit of the train. The rest of the cabins, where post office workers sorted letters into sacks, were well lit.88 Such illuminated train cabins soon made looking at the stars while traveling nearly impossible for the vast majority of train passengers.

The perceptual practice of night travelling highlights the importance of having time sitting somewhere with nothing else to do but look at the stars. As the nineteenth century continued fewer and fewer people travelled by ship and horseback, and these sorts of encounters with the heavens went from being a part of daily life to a special thing that needed to be sought out delib-erately, making everyday observation more difficult.

7. Courtyards & Rooftops (Via King’s Cross Station)

Back at the dangerous green space of Primrose Hill, a sec-ond set of railway tracks was visible father to the east: the Great Northern line to Cambridge. In that distant town the buildings and even the river Cam itself had been painstakingly engineered to protect its scholarly inhabitants from the dangers of the night. Colleges were veritable fortresses, featuring medieval turrets and moats. The Cambridge Chronicle and Journal reported that “students were wandering about the courts at most untimely hours to watch the bright but silent passage of these numerous bodies.”89Inside their gates, students could observe the heavens without the anxiety that accompanied walking around at night in even the most affluent green spaces of London.

86. Joseph Grich, “Letter to the Editor: The Meteors of 1866,” Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, November 17, 1866.

87. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 52–69.

88. Uncle Jonathan, “Walks In And Around London.”

89. “Cambridgeshire,” Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, November 17, 1866.

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Young mathematics student William Kingdon Clifford de-scribed the scene in Trinity College in a letter to his father: “We had great fun here looking at the meteors. The Great Court was full of men who clapped and encored whenever there was a good display.”90 Trinity College was particularly concerned with the physical and moral health of its students at night.91 In the early nineteenth century undergraduates lived in hostels outside the college. They were thus allowed to wander freely throughout the streets and much to the chagrin of the colleges, into brothels. In the 1820s, Trinity took action: it built a new courtyard designed to house undergraduates inside the walls of the college. This was as much an effort to keep the dangers of the night out as it was to keep the students locked in. The roof of New Court had an architectural feature that afforded Clifford a private observato-ry: parapets (Figure 17). He wrote to his father about how he and his friends “got well wrapped up,” climbed out a window onto the roof, “and lay in respective gutter…where we could see everything.”92 The protective parapets of the nineteenth-century Gothic-revival building enabled Clifford to lay down without risking falling off into the courtyard below.

***Back in London, others decided to climb up to the rooftops

not only to get a better view, but to have a more private experi-ence. The night has perhaps always been seen a hedonistic time, and this was especially the case in Victorian London. The night-time events at the Cremorne pleasure gardens were well known as creating a liminal encounters that allowed flirtatious encoun-ters that would never have been possible during the light of day.93

90. W. K. Clifford to William Clifford, November 17, 1866, CLIF A1/2, Papers of W. K. Clifford, Trinity College Library, Cambridge.

91. Warwick, Masters of Theory, 214–215.

92. Clifford to Clifford, November 17, 1866.

93. Nead, Victorian Babylon.

Figure 17 Left: Elevation drawing of New Court, Right: Section drawing of New Court showing where Clifford laid in the gutter (Source: drawing by author)

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A pair of roof-climbing astronomers was the subject of a Punch cartoon by George Du Maurier. The drawing depicts two observ-ers perched on a roof. Chimneys from the neighboring terraced houses recede into the meteor-strewn background. The observ-ers are hanging on to each other…perhaps to avoid falling off…perhaps for other reasons. The rooftops combined with the hope that everyone was distracted looking up at the meteors afforded them the privacy they needed for an intimate experience.

Young people weren’t the only Londoners climbing roofs to see the shower. One of the most comical scenes was reported in The Morning Star: “Respectable, middle-aged men so far forgot their wonted propriety as to occupy certain elevated regions usu-ally abandoned to the nocturnal visits of adventurous cats.’”94

These courtyard and rooftop tales show that the work re-quired to see the stars in the city was often about more than simply enhancing the visual sensations hitting the retina. The perceptual practices often created unusual situations that came with a new set of thrills and meanings. Yet for many, having the privacy required to enjoy these thrills without looming anxiety required removing oneself from the world behind a gate, on top of a roof, or locked inside a house. We finish our journey by heading to the realm of these houses: the southern suburbs of London.


Figure 18 Cartoon of couple observing the meteors (Source: “A Passion For Astronomy”, Punch, 1 December 1866, 222)

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8. Window Observatories

From the window of a late evening train heading south from Charing Cross towards Vauxhall, smoke poured out of the chim-neys of terraced house that stretch as far as the eye can see (Fig-ure 19). The middle of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of the railways to the outskirts of London. The arrival of the two parallel rows of iron rails was soon followed by the construction of hundreds of parallel rows of low-cost terrace houses aimed at families hoping to commute to the city. We disembark and walk down one of these streets.

The two to three story terraced houses on either side afford a reasonably good view of the night sky. These are the homes of London’s skilled laborers, artisans and lower clerks. Each family has three to six rooms. Some houses would be shared between two families.95 From time to time we might see a family in the road looking up at the skies. One particularly keen observer from the suburb of Camberwell whose account was published in the Evening Standard bundled up his family and took them out to the street at night in hopes of introducing them the stars. There were only a few meteors here and there, and at eleven p.m. his family went back inside, “expressing a hope that I should not be frozen.” Then the meteors started falling at an increasing rate. “I immedi-ately called them down...This continued till twelve o’clock, when the excessive cold drove me to bed.” 96

Looking up, we notice faces looking up at the meteors from behind first floor windows. To see what the observing experience was like for the majority of Londoners we must now leave the

95. Muthesius, The English Terraced House, 44–45.


Figure 19 “London—By Rail” (Source: Doré, London, a Pilgrimage, 120)

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public space of the street and enter into the private space of the home. To the Victorians, home was a sacred space.97 In 1865, John Ruskin wrote about “the true nature of home”: “it is the place of Peace, the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division.”98 The phrase “home, sweet home” was coined in an early Victorian song and quickly became pop-ular. The ideal of a home being a well-ordered space was rein-forced by wisdom dispensed by Isabella Beeton in the incredibly popular Book of Household Management. Beeton described how women should run the machinery of the home with the aim “to make her children feel that home is the happiest place in the world.”99 Critically the suburbs allowed men to live in a separate place from where they worked.

For these men, the price was for staying up to watch the shower was high: a night’s sleep. Even though they knew the shower was coming, staying up late was not something respon-sible family men took lightly. Comfortably middle class families went to bed early out of custom, perhaps after reading Mrs. Bee-ton’s advice: “In retiring the for the night, it is well to remember that early rising is almost impossible, if late going to bed be the order, or rather disorder, of the house.”100 For most working men, however, going to bed early was a physical necessity: workers needed to recuperate from the day’s manual labor, and get up early to report back to their job.101 The burden that the astron-omers had to meet was not simply to convince people that the shower was going to happen, but to convince them that it was worthwhile to stay up late to watch. John Bull’s editorial referred to staying up late as “a sacrifice on the altar of science.” The edi-torial describes the powerful patriarch thus: “Paterfamilias, in his dressing-gown and slippers, was prepared to forego a portion of his accustomed sleep and dedicate to astronomical investigation the hours usually regarded as sacred to Morpheus.” The undesir-ability of staying up late helps us triangulate just how much the public believed the claims of astronomers. Many did not trust forecasts: “The faith of the multitude in astronomic predictions has never been very great. The redness and abundance of our hedge-berries is regarded as a safer indication of the severity of a coming winter, than the most elaborate prophecies formed on the most broad astronomical inductions.” Yet, as the author contin-ues, “In this case, for once, the unscientific would seem to have reposed faith in the guidance of the learned.”102

One technology played a critical role in facilitating obser-vation for these watchers: the window. The view out from the window created a feeling of what Richard Sennett has called “protected openness:” the window allows maximum visibility while ensuring insulation from the outside world. 103 This was

97. Briggs, Victorian Things, 213–259.

98. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 147–148.

99. Beeton, The Book of Household Management, 16.

100. Ibid.

101. Chapman, “Poor, Obscure, and Self-Taught: Astronomy and the Working Class.”

102. “Star-Gazing,” John Bull, November 17, 1866.

103. Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye.

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important for observing the meteor shower, since viewing from behind a window provided a clear view of the sky and an experi-ence much more comfortable than being exposed to the elements. The new suburban houses featured better windows than their Georgian relatives closer to the city. Houses began sporting large bay windows since the Window Tax had been fully repealed in 1851. The previous decades had also seen major improvements in the quality of manufactured glass. Although it was still too expensive for most consumers, plate glass was increasingly used in large windows to provide near-perfect transparency.104 When the shower started, the light shining in through big bedroom windows was brilliant enough to wake people up. One man re-counted his experience in a letter to the editor of John Bull: “The prophet of the stars has spoken truth…Forgetting the prophecy, but wondering why light streamed into the room (there being no moonlight) I went to the window last night and saw what while memory lasts can never be forgotten.”105 Depending on what floor the window was on, the field of view out the window could potentially have been much greater than the view from the street, all without the danger of freezing to death.

Word of the “celestial pyrotechny” traveled through homes using an old-fashioned information-sharing network: screaming children waking up their parents. An Irish minister describes the scene inside his Parish house: “Soon a merry group of young people were out of their beds or bed-rooms…Shout after shout resounding through the house, proclaimed the arrival of each successive meteor, as it darted with more than lightning sped across the windows...”106 The clamour of excitement was so great that in distant Windsor Castle, Queen Victoria’s maid had the nerve to wake her from her slumber, as the Queen recorded in her diary: “Was roused after 1, by my maid coming in & saying Affie [her 23 year old son, Alfred] wished I should be told that the stars were most splendid. So, tired as I was, I got up, put on my dressing gown & went to the window, where the light was indeed marvellous.”107

Window observatories created intimate experiences. Those that observed from their windows could slink out of bed to the window, watch the spectacle in their pajamas, and then crawl back under the covers. There was no need to worry about peo-ple in the outside world. The privacy enabled families to gather round the windows and share the special time together. Crawling back into bed was a sad experience for many because they went to sleep with the solemn knowledge that a once in a lifetime oppor-tunity had passed…for most knew that they might not live to see the next shower in 33 years.

104. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds.

105. “Letter to the Editor: The Meteors,” John Bull, November 17, 1866.


107. Queen Victoria, “Diary of Queen Victoria, Volume 55 (Princess Beatrice’s Copies)” (Diary, Windsor Castle, November 13, 1866), RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W).

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***There is perhaps no clearer evidence of the similarities that

cold November night between scientific and everyday obser-vation than the fact that hard-working families weren’t the only ones watching from their windows: so did astronomers. Amongst those manning their window observatories were the likes of Glaisher and even the President of the RAS. Pritchard wrote a several page account of the sights he observed out of his commanding northeast-facing window in Good Words. He closed the article by asking why observing meteors matters: “Well, if for nothing else, these things exist for us to look at, and to guess at, not to wonder at…lest cotton, and rail-roads, and banks, and shares, and Bessemer steel, engross all our thoughts, and at last reduce us lower than the senselessness of a meteoric lump.” Here the role of observing the shower is similar to that of the home: to protect the mind from being overcome by the pres-sures of capitalism. Rather than “hid[ing] themselves in terror” at the sight, “a few weeks ago, when the very stars seemed to fall from their courses, thousands of Gods well-instructed creatures looked steadily at the fiery spectacle, not only without a shudder, but they felt…like children peacefully walking up and down in a Father’s abode, and gazing with joy at the bright treasures in a Father’s house.”108 Walking around in a Father’s house is the ultimate expression of domestic comfort and protection from the corrupting forces of the outside world. This quote shows that understanding the embodied practices of the observers is key to understanding the significance of an astronomical observation. Our night walk has shown how the place star gazers looked up at the sky was a definitive aspect of the experience.

108. Charles Pritchard, “The Meteoric Shower of November 14, 1866,” ed. Norman Macleod, Good Words 8 (January 1867): 17.

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Readers of the newspapers on the days following the meteoric shower were greeted with lengthy compilations of accounts from around the British Isles. It was the leading subject of newspaper editorials in papers ranging from the working-class Reynold’s Newspaper to the paper of record, The Times. After the 1833 shower, news had spread between American cities via horseback. Now news of the observation travelled via telegraph networks connecting London with the provinces, Europe, and America. Observation reports from Paddington Green were juxtaposed with accounts of the thunderstorms of Liverpool and the dramat-ic spectacle of the meteors over Edinburgh Castle.

The public thought that all knowledge could be useful and sent observations to the editors of nearly every newspaper in the country. The published letters displayed a remarkably serious tone. The Times dedicated nearly an entire page to observation re-ports, part of which is shown in Figure 20. Although three of the fifteen datasets used in Herschel’s definitive computation of the radiant point were taken from accounts published in the press, for observer John Moore Heath (a member of the clergy with no scientific training) sharing observations was not just about assisting a broader scientific enterprise. It was also an exercise in remembering:

As no other equally favourable opportunity of extending our knowledge of [meteors] by ob-servation will recur for 33 years, when most of us will be in our graves, it will be very desirable that all that was observed anywhere during this morning’s meteoric display should be collected as speedily as possible and recorded before it is forgotten and so finally lost to science. 109

109. J. M. Heath, “Letter to the Editor: The Meteor-Shower,” The Times, November 15, 1866, sec. The Meteor-Showers; See brief biography at Heath-Caldwell, “Rev John Moore Heath”.

Chapter 5Predicting the Future

As it seems to us, people have been a good deal taken by surprise. The apparition has been far out of the common range of ideas. —The Times, 15 November 1866

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The successful prediction of the meteors seriously strength-ened the authority of scientific predictions. In few places is this more evident than in the archetypal character that consistently emerged in accounts of the shower: The Sleepy Friend. Reverend Crampton’s tract begins by making fun of this poor friend:

“But what of this meteoric shower, of which you speak so confidently?” says some sleepy friend, who having just read one of the many predictions in the newspapers, was retiring calmly to bed notwithstanding, with the impression, “What fools astronomers are to trouble their heads about falling stars and meteors, of which they know nothing; and how much greater fools are those who believe them, so as to expose themselves to the risk of catching cold.” But morning arrives. “Come, now” says our no longer sleepy friend, who looks rather disappointed when he hears of such magnificent doings while he slumbered, “tell us really what you saw, and mind, don’t exagger-ate, but tell us what those meteors are, and how you came to know they were coming?”110

The Sleepy Friend also appeared in The Daily News: “Those who, placing faith in astronomical calculations, sacrificed Tues-day night’s sleep to watching the heavens were richly repaid, and were yesterday the envy of their more somnolent friends.”111 There is little doubt that anyone who heard about the meteor


111. “The ‘Meteoric Shower,’” Daily News, November 15, 1866.

Figure 20 Observations published in The Times (G. J. Symons, “Letter to the Editor: The Meteor-Shower,” The Times, November 15, 1866)

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shower but slept through it would feel a pang of jealousy. The effect of mocking the Sleepy Friend was to shame those who doubted the power of astronomical prediction.

In Victorian England the success of such successful pre-dictions and calculations was stabilizing time into an abstract entity, capable of new forms of navigation. The ILN’s editorial stated: “It is natural…to project one’s mind into the future and to imagine some of the conditions under which Englishmen and Englishwomen will next time watch for the meteoric rush across the skies.”112 The Daily Telegraph concluded their editorial by time traveling ahead 33 years to the date of shower’s predicted return:

Will those that see the stars shoot then know a great deal more about it all than we do?…Will it be a much better age than this, with no terrors of death, no contests of religion, no knaves, no fools, no Tories? The world travels fast nowadays, in events as well as space, and it is a wonderful thing to reflect upon what has happened in it since the celestial pyrotechny was last celebrated. And speed breeds speed, and events hasten events; so that without doubt the balance of the century will witness some wonderful consummation.

The editorial finishes on a bittersweet note by accepting that most of the readers won’t be around in 1899: “Well, it is pos-terity’s concern! And posterity just now is making pothooks and eating jam on its bread and butter; taking more interest in a good sixpenny rocket than in all the stars which shot on Tuesday be-tween Sagittarius and Hercules.”113

This keen awareness of mortality was a constant theme in writings after the shower was over. At a time when the life ex-pectancy of a child born in London was 38 years, the period of the phenomena was more of a reminder about death than about the power of astronomers.114 The ILN’s editorial captured the sentiment: “Thirty-three years, indeed, make a large portion of a man’s life; and, taking the average of contingencies, it may be said that most of those who are of middle age and who saw the magnificent display of Wednesday morning will probably not see the like again.”115 The editorial continues by comparing the experience of two groups of people crawling back into bed after watching from their windows. The first observer opposes reform:

Many, we doubt not, as they sought their beds after the marvellous sight, and remembered that it would not again be seen for thirty-three years, looked out gloomily towards the imaginary hori-zon. Will England be worth living in, then? Will


113. “London, Thursday, November 15,” The Daily Telegraph, November 15, 1866.

114. Szreter and Mooney, “Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate.”


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the rage for change have destroyed the charac-teristics of the nation?…Shall we have learned to lose all reverence for rank, and tradition, and an-tiquity, and graceful superstition? Shall we be all equal, and the equality be in degradation of moral tone, and in a common homage to materialism? Who shall say? And the melancholy muser winds up his gold watch…

The second group of observers were more optimistic:But there were, of course, other prophets who betook themselves more hopefully to their slumbers, and who thought of what may hap-pen before London is at its windows and on its housetops to see the meteors of 1899. These vaticinators had at least the good sense to derive a lesson of trust in the supreme will of Providence from the sight which they had witnessed. …If a meteor, a luminous mass rushing across the skies, is a glorious thing, what is the brain of the man who can foretell the arrival of that starry won-der, and, a century in advance, can time it as if it were the car of a railway, to be expected at a given minute! “An undevout astronomer is mad,” the poet has said; but we might class an unhopeful astronomer in the same category. He is untrue to his splendid faith if it does not lead him to a faith beyond the stars.116

Without a knowledge of how meteor-gazers looked up at the star shower this passage might appear like an excerpt from a typical optimistic reform tract. Indeed, as Simon Schaffer has argued, meteors and comets have always been ambiguous signs that demanded explanation and provided occasions for political speculation. 117 Yet commentaries such as this must be considered alongside the embodied practices of window-watching described in Chapter 4. Doing so allows us to reach some conclusions about the meaning of the astronomical predictions.

During the 1860s, new technologies “changed the percep-tions of time and space through which daily life was lived.” One of the most striking transformations was the opening of the Metropolitan Railway (the predecessor to the Underground and the world’s first underground train service) in 1863. “Now,” says Nead, “instead of traversing space…[the Metropolitan Railway passenger] could descend at one point in the city and emerge at another, with little sense of the spaces in between, or the meaning of the time taken in the journey.”118 At first glance it seems that the abstraction of time accomplished by the successful prediction

116. Ibid.

117. Schaffer, “Comets and the World’s End.”

118. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 36.

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of the meteor shower made it possible to experience exactly the same kind of discontinuities in time that the underground rail-way had made possible in space: Victorians could descend at one point in time and emerge at another in the future.

When we look at the successful predictions of the 1866 me-teoric shower from the perspective of the terraced house obser-vatory instead of the Royal Observatory we see that rather than making time the subject of abstract calculations, what was most remarkable was the way that the predictions enabled observation, which in turn created a space outside of the grind of constant quantification, where observers could contemplate their hopes, fears and futures. As shown in these editorials, specific kinds of everyday observation—the intimate ones that take place within the safe confines of home, sweet home—had the power to trig-ger reflection. It forced Victorians to stop and think. When they did, the second prediction (the 33 year period of the shower) encouraged time travel into the future. Through this act of time traveling, done within the safe space of the home, the 33 year pe-riod came to embody the mortality and wrenching technological changes that characterized life in Victorian England.

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This dissertation has argued that accounts of the 1866 meteoric shower must push beyond looking at the successful astronomical predictions as an episode in the triumph of theoretical astronomy, and instead attend to how Londoners across the social spectrum combined their sensations with scientific knowledge to meaning-fully observe the heavens. Attending to the material constraints and practices of meteor-gazing has shown that though the stars were still visible in the skies above London, getting a good view in the dangerous night was difficult. Rather than gazing from a tranquil hilltop, most observers watched from a perch at home. Analyzing the reactions to the meteor shower in the press shows how predictions came together with everyday observations to create a space for reflection.

I suggest that the history of the wilderness can help us un-derstand the relationship between prediction and reflection. In American culture the wilderness signifies a wild place, untouched by civilization, where one goes to escape from the pressures of modern life. As William Cronon has shown, this conception of the wilderness is a recent invention: it was only over the course of the nineteenth century that wilderness changed from being a place of danger to a place of safety, recreation and reflection.119 Cronon argues that this conception of nature was the product of industrial society: it was shaped by an urban elite who desper-ately needed an escape from the pressures and pollution of the modern city. This narrative sheds light on the paradoxical effects of the astronomers’ predictions. It was precisely the pressures of living in a world where time was increasingly subject to calcula-tion and management that created the need for an escape. Rather than fleeing into the mountains like the Americans, the English escaped the collapse of time and space on that cold November night by retreating into their homes to watch the meteor shower.

Now that the only way to experience the night sky is to go to a distant dark sky park it is easy for us to imagine that in the days before light pollution, the night sky was always a source of

119. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness.”

Conclusion

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peaceful reflection. Yet this intuition commits the same offense as those that take the concept of wilderness as a given. An em-bodied history of astronomy shows that in reality for much of time observing the night sky could evoke fear. Not only did early observers see portents of doom in the skies, but also on a more basic level, walking around at night was dangerous. The Novem-ber meteors of 1833 and 1866 provide an index to this change: the 1833 shower induced panic in many Americans, while the 1866 shower was greeted with reverent awe.120 This change in the night sky from a wild and dangerous place to a safe space occurred at roughly the same time as the parallel reformulation of the concept of wilderness. Most of the history of popular science describes the visible work astronomers did by diffusing facts, yet this story suggests that the most powerful work done by astrono-mers was the subtle reframing of the sky into a safe space acces-sible to everyday observation.121 More attention must be paid to this transformation of the embodied practice of stargazing.

The newfound appreciation for the night sky caused by the meteoric shower of 1866 conspicuously coincides with the start of what many have identified as the great age of popular astron-omy. Indeed, 1866 was an auspicious year for the popularization of astronomy: it is when Richard Proctor moved to London to begin his writing career.122 Although historians have focused on the influence of Proctor’s journalistic style in influencing a new generation of science enthusiasts, this story suggests that the embodied experiences of observing the meteor shower could have also had a tremendous influence by turning the night sky itself into an allurement, training their senses to pay attention to the wild nature above their terraced houses.

When these stories of everyday observation are extended over the longue durée, a different picture of the development of science emerges. As cities made obtaining a clear view of the night sky more difficult, intense personal experiences with the stars required increasing effort, turning the night sky into a kind of distant wilderness only accessible after travelling to the fringes of civilization. While scientific knowledge has become seemingly more accessible, it suggests that the public has become increas-ingly estranged from the sensory experience of the phenomena of scientific inquiry.

120. Littmann, The Heavens on Fire.

121. Schaffer, “Comets and the World’s End” argues that “somehow or other Euro-peans learnt to stop worrying and trust the astronomers.” This is subtly different, because the reframing I am talking about is more than simply the disenchantment of the sky, but rather the way it was turned into a thing that the public could and should observe.

122. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science Designing Nature for New Audiences, 295–352; Nall, “News From Mars: Trans-atlantic Mass Media and the Practice of New Astronomy, 1870-1910.”

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Looking Up At The Falling Stars of 1866

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