Engines of Empire

Steamships and the Victorian Imagination

Douglas R. Burgess Jr.

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804798983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XIX secolo

In 1859, the S.S. Great Eastern departed from England on her maiden voyage. She was a remarkable wonder of the nineteenth century: an iron city longer than Trafalgar Square, taller than Big Ben's tower, heavier than Westminster Cathedral. Her paddles were the size of Ferris wheels; her decks could hold four thousand passengers bound for America, or ten thousand troops bound for the Raj. Yet she ended her days as a floating carnival before being unceremoniously dismantled in 1889.

Steamships like the Great Eastern occupied a singular place in the Victorian mind. Crossing oceans, ferrying tourists and troops alike, they became emblems of nationalism, modernity, and humankind's triumph over the cruel elements. Throughout the nineteenth century, the spectacle of a ship's launch was one of the most recognizable symbols of British social and technological progress. Yet this celebration of the power of the empire masked overconfidence and an almost religious veneration of technology. Equating steam with civilization had catastrophic consequences for subjugated peoples around the world.

Engines of Empire tells the story of the complex relationship between Victorians and their wondrous steamships, following famous travelers like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Jules Verne as well as ordinary spectators, tourists, and imperial administrators as they crossed oceans bound for the colonies. Rich with anecdotes and wry humor, it is a fascinating glimpse into a world where an empire felt powerful and anything seemed possible—if there was an engine behind it.

PART I

Spectators

1

PHANTASMAGORIA

Steam and Spectacle in the Public Sphere

THINK BACK FOR A MOMENT to the S.S. Great Britain, the sea of upturned faces. What if, in that moment, the ship had not moved?¹ A launching is a pageant designed to elicit a specific emotional response. There are prayers, songs, speeches, flags. The crowd’s job is to be awed, and, if everything works as it should, they will be. Ten thousand tons of moving steel can hardly fail to impress. In March of 1895, for example, over 25,000 spectators gathered at the William Cramp Shipyards of Philadelphia to watch the launching of the largest American liner built, the St. Paul. Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, was invited to speak. In typical rambling style, his address praised the ship, its builders and owners, and the crowd that came to view the spectacle. His comments ranged from the absurd (“I do not mean that I care nothing at all for a whale’s opinion. . . . Of course it is better to have the good opinion of a whale than his disapproval”) to the disquieting (“When the Paris was half torn to pieces some years ago, enough of the Atlantic ebbed and flowed through one end of her, during her long agony, to sink the fleets of the world . . .”). But his conclusion was patriotic, symbolic, and (for him) only mildly silly:

I am glad, with you and the nation, to welcome the new ship. She is another pride, another consolation for a great country whose mighty fleets have all vanished, and which has almost forgotten what it is to fly its flag at sea. I am not sure as to which St. Paul she is named for. Some think it is the one that is on the Upper Mississippi, but the head quartermaster told me that it was the one that killed Goliath. But it is not important. No matter which it is, let us give her hearty welcome and godspeed.²

Twain never gave the speech. He stood on the dais on March 25, while out in the harbor the entire Pennsylvania General Assembly were gathered on an iceboat serving as a floating grandstand. Frances Griscom, the shipowner’s teenaged daughter, held a jeroboam of champagne at the ready. But the St. Paul did not move. Tugs strained against the hawsers, metal bit against wood, yet the hull remained stubbornly in place. After two hours in the cold, the crowd began to disperse.³ Mark Twain was due to leave for Europe the next day, appropriately enough on another ship of the American Line. His prepared remarks were shelved forever.

Spectacles are fragile things, all the more so for the symbolism invested in them. Isambard Brunel would learn that for himself at the launch of the giant Great Eastern, so disastrous it foreshortened his life. Indeed, launchings often invite a demon of perversity, perhaps because they are so minutely choreographed. There was a long, nasty pause before the Mauretania began to slide down her ways in 1906; a few years later, Hannah von Bismarck swung the jeroboam at the Bismarck’s bow and missed (Kaiser Wilhelm II caught it on the backswing and finished the job).⁴ In 1935, Queen Mary launched the vessel that bore her name and then turned to an aide and said loudly into the microphones, “Should I press the button now?” The launching of the Imperator in 1913 was perhaps the most ill-omened of all: A piece of planking fell from the bow and nearly decapitated the royal guests, the anchor chains fell into the river Elbe, and the hull was sent careening towards an opposite quay crowded with spectators.⁵ Of more recent memory, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, was tasked to christen the Queen Victoria in 2008—after well over an hour of Te Deum and a prayer from the Archbishop of Canterbury—only to have the bottle hit the bow with a dull clunk and rebound, intact. The confetti cannons went off anyway.⁶ In those moments the allegorical pageant failed, and along with it the symbolism of triumphal progress, nationalism, international amity, and so on. They were a reminder of the fragility that lay behind the enterprise.

That fragility, that ephemeral allegory that the launching represents, is what we might call the phantasmagoria of steam. Phantasmagoria were image slides passed through a projector called a magic lantern. The image was projected either onto a flat screen or sometimes steam clouds, creating a kind of hologram. These phantasms were the closest thing in the mid-19th century to moving pictures and often could seem very real indeed. Their purpose was to excite wonder, to convince the observer that the fantastical could indeed be possible. The term dates from the same era as the first steamships. I am borrowing it to describe the amorphous line where technology overlaps with fantasy, which contemporary observers usually termed a “spectacle.”

In the early years of steam innovation, spectacles helped introduce the public to a new and seemingly magical form of transit: the carriage without a horse, the ship without sails. They also helped ameliorate fears, rational or imagined, that darkened the public’s response. Further, they encouraged investment. It was not a hard sell. The steam engine was rather magical, especially when put to some useful trade. It was the promoter’s task to persuade Mr. and Mrs. John Bull (and their cousins across the Atlantic, and on the Continent) that its magic was white and not black. “Like an elephant that picks up a needle and tears down a tree, there is no task too small, no work too great for the giant, Steam,” wrote one.⁷ A friendly giant, or a helpful genie; these were the most common depictions. And how better to illustrate that helpfulness—and power—than by public display?

The point of a spectacle was not to instruct the public on the workings of a steam vessel but to dazzle them with it. Demonstration, display, and spectacle were often presented as synonymous in this era; one need only picture the carnival barker outside the Bearded Lady’s tent: “Don’t let your children miss this once-in-a-lifetime educational opportunity!” Yet though they often overlap, there is a crucial distinction. Demonstrations are meant to educate; however thrilling, their purpose is to communicate knowledge. Spectacles are meant to astound. The difference is between vivisection and a magic show. As one historian describes it:

Engineers had a particular problem, more so, perhaps, than men of science, when it came to releasing, at the right moment and to the right audience, sanitised accounts of finished technological products. It was by no means easy to conceal the mess of technological process when the product was an innovative steam-powered mill, an “experimental” railway or a great steamship ready to be launched. . . . Part of the “representation” of technologies involved cultures of display in which marketing and carefully staged demonstration, often in public, went hand in hand.⁸

Promoters of steam power knew better than to bore their spectators with engineering lessons. The best way to appreciate the power and utility of the engine was to watch it work. Steamships and locomotives naturally leant themselves to this sort of performance; stationary engines did not. There is nothing lovely about an engine by itself. At rest it is grotesque, but when working it is a simulacrum of rage, hissing and sputtering, pistons beating the air. It produces a sound unlike anything in nature, a cacophony of shudders, bangs, and flatulence. The true enchantment of the machine—that it can repeat the same motion again and again without ever tiring—also makes it very boring to watch. The pistons moved “monotonously up and down,” Charles Dickens declared, “like the head of an elephant in melancholy madness.”⁹

But ships and locomotives were another matter. Now the machine was sheathed by an iron exoskeleton that concealed its workings, not unlike the voluminous robes of von Kempelen’s chess-playing Turk. When the great wheel turned, it seemed to do so by a kind of witchcraft. Even today there is something wondrous about watching a cruise ship leave dock: The stationary building suddenly breaks away from the pier, screws churning silently beneath the hull, and in that moment becomes a living object. This hints at the second distinction of these machines: They moved. Judging their success was as simple as measuring their speed; the faster they went, the better they were. Third and finally, there was the awesomeness of their size. Here the machine disappears altogether: The wonder exerted by the Great Britain had nothing to do with her engines but by the simple fact of her scale.

As there were two measures of preeminence—size and speed—there were two forms of spectacle: the exhibition and the race. Exhibitions were public fêtes designed to promote the vessel. The exact nature varied with the intended audience. Launchings, goodwill tours, and open houses amassed large crowds (and, as often as not, made a tidy sum on entrance fees). Like a village fête or a parade, all classes of society were encouraged to attend. Special events, on the contrary, catered to a much smaller and more elite collection of visiting dignitaries, reporters, and the like. Visitors were to be amazed by the ship’s massiveness and the luxury of its quarters. While the former was undeniable, the latter could be fudged a bit. Day-trippers to the new Collins liners in the 1850s were greeted by a plethora of Oriental rugs, potted palms, and fine furniture; reporters duly referred to them as “floating palaces.” But once the ship left New York, the realities of the rolling Atlantic took precedence: the carpets were rolled up, the fine furnishings stored until the next port day.

There is an echo of Walter Benjamin’s Paris arcades here. The sight of those plush steamship lounges surely inspired many day-trippers to strive even harder in the capitalist marketplace to earn enough to gain access to them. But exhibition was more than ginning up potential customers. It was about creating a shared experience (just as was the Great Exhibition of 1851, as we shall see) and also a shared sense of pride. Spectators were encouraged to believe that this marvel of technology owed itself in some small part to them. It is what one might call the celebrity effect. Just as meeting a famous person establishes a connection between yourself and the celebrity, fleeting though it may be, spectators became part of the community of the ship simply by having seen it.

Races were a means of establishing precedence among competitors. Sound commercial thinking was at work; the fastest boat or train earned the most passengers or freight. But in a sportif era, such races were also public events that attracted as much attention and comment as Ascot or the Derby. They were announced in the newspapers. Punters wagered on the results.¹⁰ Similar to exhibitions, races were a means for persons who had no actual stake in the ship or locomotive to feel vicariously attached to it. There is no more proprietary feeling than placing a fiver on a favored horse. Even if no actual money was involved, spectators along the banks or following the race in their newspapers could hardly help getting caught up in the excitement of it all. Once again, this time through the mechanism of a race, an artificial community is created.

The phantasmagoria of steam was much more than images flashing against a translucent cloud. Pomp and pageantry aside, it worked a profound transformation in the Victorian mind. To chart this transformation, we must consider both the spectacle itself and the intended audience. As interested spectators, the public was conditioned by repeated spectacles to regard steam as a human miracle—a very loaded concept. Steam, as something magical and miraculous, had unlimited power for good—only good, for how could a miracle ever be bad? As a work of humankind, it was not subject to divine whim but earthly regulation. In other words, steam locomotion was a servant of man, not some barely tamed natural phenomenon like wind or water or lightning. Its subservience was another mark of its beneficence, and that of its creators, the engineers. The veneration of steam power thus became tantamount to cult worship of human ingenuity. Allegorical imagery was everywhere: in stations, universities, within the ships themselves. Contrary to traditional religious norms, pride became a virtue, and human perfectibility through technological progress replaced old Adam’s sin. This was not without consequences, as we shall explore.

. . .

On August 22, 1787, an impoverished inventor named John Fitch invited members of the Constitutional Convention down to the Philadelphia docks to witness a spectacle, the first demonstration of steam on water. In fact, he had been trying to lure them for months. “Sir,” he wrote in one such pleading letter to Benjamin Franklin, “In a conference that I had the honor of with your Excellency, I heard you mention that the Philosophical Society ought to be furnished with a Model ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: The Bristol Crowd, 1843
• Introduction: Annihilating Space
• Part I. Spectators
• Part II. Tourists
• Part III. Imperials
• Conclusion: Transportation Is Civilization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index