Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740-1840

This book investigates the science of electricity in the long eighteenth century and its textual life in literary and political writings. Electricity was celebrated as a symbol of enlightened progress, but its operation and its utility were unsettlingly obscure. As a result, debates about the nature of electricity dovetailed with discussions of the relation between body and soul, the nature of sexual attraction, the properties of revolutionary communication and the mysteries of vitality. This study explores the complex textual manifestations of electricity between 1740 and 1840, in which commentators describe it both as a material force and as a purely figurative one. The book analyses attempts by both elite and popular practitioners of electricity to elucidate the mysteries of electricity, and traces the figurative uses of electrical language in the works of writers including Mary Robinson, Edmund Burke, Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall, Mary Shelley and Richard Carlile.

Mary Fairclough is a Lecturer in the department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York, UK. She is the author of The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (2013), and various articles on the intersection between literature, science and politics in the eighteenth century.