Balloon Madness

Within only a few years, Britons from every walk of life were swept up in a fascination with the hot-air and gas balloon. Contemporary observers wrote that the whole world had gone balloon-mad during the frenzy that gripped the country between 1783 and 1786. The new invention sparked hopes and fantasies, changed fashions, prompted festivities, caricatures and comic verse, and led some people into daring flights of their own.

Brant treats this short-lived craze as a window onto the wider culture of Enlightenment Britain. She traces how the mania travelled from place to place, passed through crowds, and altered the everyday routines and imaginings of ordinary people. Political satire, fashionable trifles and light poetry inspired by balloons reveal how these marvels of air and speed were tied to the deeper concerns and unease of the period. A view from above prompted new ideas about humanity's place in the cosmos and the reach of its ambitions, while French success in aeronautics stirred anxieties about Britain's own national identity and the shape of a future global order.

The cast of this lively history ranges across kings, politicians, con artists, pickpockets, members of high society, duellists and animals. Although the practical limits of balloons soon closed off some of these possibilities, their hold on popular imagination endured and still resonates today.