Eclipse Mania gripped the imaginations of people throughout the 1800s, much like today. With advancements in science and technology human perception of celestial events changed dramatically.
A burgeoning middle class in Europe and America combined with improvements in transportation, more people could experience the path of totality to first hand. Many more witnessed partial eclipses from their homes. With advancements in communications and affordable print media, everyone could join in Eclipse Mania.
But knowledge did not dampen the sense of awe and wonder people felt as they gazed upward at solar or lunar eclipses.
“…though a corona of rays of light appeared beyond. The gloom of night was upon us. A breathless intensity of interest was felt by all…Connected with all grand movements in the skies there seems an instinctive sense of inquiry, of anxious expectation; akin to awe…” (James Fenimore Cooper from The Eclipse of 1806)
Science Became A Chic Pastime
Victorian Era Solar Eclipses caused flurries of excitement just as they do today. Even without Social Media, people throughout the 1800s gathered to marvel at the profound beauty and other worldliness of science in motion. Astronomers already understood much about the mechanics of the solar system.
Eclipse Mania did not develop in a vacuum.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert did much to make science and technology accessible to the masses. More than 6 million people visited Queen Victoria’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition.
Festive science shows became cutting-edge events in the 19th century. Chemistry demonstrations and the like were so popular that fashionable people competed for front-row seats where they would be seen.
Increasing numbers of men and women were working in the sciences including Astronomy, Entomology and Botany. Lay people became obsessed with scientific pursuits like collecting ferns and growing exotic plants that were brought from all over the world in Wardian cases.
It was no surprise that Eclipse mania took hold during the Victorian Era.
Author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in The Social Event of the Season: Solar Eclipse Expeditions and Victorian Culture writes about a lecture on a spring evening at the Crystal Palace in London near the end of the nineteenth century.
“The lecture and exhibition were kicked off by an evening soiree and lecture hosted by the Royal Photographic Society. The speaker was William Christie who spoke about a solar eclipse expedition to India from which he had recently returned.” (Pang / JSTOR)
Events like this one were well-publicized affairs at the time when journeys to exotic places were becoming routine. According to NASA, 242 solar eclipses occurred between 1801 and 1900. Sixty-three of those were total.
Expeditions sponsored by governments, scientific societies and wealthy amateurs with Eclipse Mania all set out on elaborate expeditions to locations around the world.
Advances In Transportation Put Exotic Journeys In Reach
Pang notes that these expeditions were like the packaged, luxury tours arranged by Thomas Cook in the 1840s. For those who could afford it, passenger liners and railroads offered lavish décor, promenade decks, social activities, and dining facilities.
While eclipses are brief events measured in minutes, the organization and planning of expeditions took many months. Large amounts of supplies were necessary to set up camp in the path of totality, which often occurred in remote locations.
Researchers and observers hauled highly sensitive, often bulky scientific and photographic equipment to distant locations. They often spent days or weeks setting up, testing and sometimes training locals to help them when the precious moments of eclipse finally arrived.
Average People Followed Nellie Bly’s Lead
Through the 1800s, transportation improved and became affordable. By the late 1800s Eclipse Mania was an attainable goal for many.
Railroads changed the speed and comfort of travel across continents while steamships reduced voyage times between Europe and the rest of the world. With the opening of the Suez Canal, trips to India, Asia and Australia became possible.
People routinely made wagers to break world records for travel times to various locations. In 1889-1890 and for decades to come, Nellie Bly’s trip to beat Jules Verne’s fictional record around the world in eighty days undoubtedly inspired others to adventurous journeys.
Even Elizabeth Bisland, who was a reluctant traveler, jumped on an experimental high-speed mail train to beat Nellie Bly in the opposite direction around the globe.
Advances In Publishing Fostered Popular Eclipse Literature
The technology of printing and communications also fed Eclipse Mania of the Victorian Era.
According to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang:
“Eclipse observers and readers of eclipse narratives were part of the first generation to grow up reading from the mass, urban-based literary market that was one of the great innovations of Victorian society,” writes Pang. Illustrated lectures, much coverage in the popular and scientific press, and books were the result.” (Alex Soojung-Kim Pang)
One of the finest examples of contemporary scientific literature came from Mabel Loomis Todd who was married to David Peck Todd, a noted American astronomer and teacher who designed several observatories and organized multiple scientific expeditions in Japan, Peru and Texas to name a few. Mabel Todd Todd was exposed to leading-edge thinking and developments in astronomy. With her fine writing skills, she edited her husband’s scientific papers and joined him in his fieldwork and expeditions.
Her book Total Eclipse of the Sun was published in 1894. It incorporates the highest levels of scientific knowledge of Victorian Era Solar Eclipses with a poetic sensibility. She had a unique talent for transforming scientific knowledge into a form that was accessible to every person who observed the splendor of the skies.
For those who did not have access to books, newspapers were accessible to the masses. They routinely reported on the science and social aspects of Eclipse Mania.
“Thousands of residents stood with necks craned and peered wide-eyed through smudged glass as the moon sped between the sun and earth, gradually shutting off the bright morning light. From President Coolidge to the urchins with bundles of papers under their arms, the city marvelled at the awesome but magnificent sight.” (Washington Post, Jan. 25, 1925)
Awe Remained The Common Denominator Over Time
Throughout history, people around the world have seen eclipses as disruptions of the natural order, often associated with a belief in bad times ahead.
Matthew Smith in Origins-Ohio State University writes:
“Cultures through history have heralded eclipses as portentous, ominous events. Sites aligned to solstices and equinoxes—England’s Stonehenge, Ohio’s Serpent Mound—indicate universal interest in the passage of the sun among ancient peoples. But the rarity of a solar eclipse always stands out. “ (Matthew Smith/Origins)
From fear to wonder to joy, the common denominator of those swept up in Eclipse Mania was a sense of Awe. Following are just a few of our favorite passages, all still relevant today as we look to the sky.
“Then out upon the darkness, gruesome but sublime, flashes the glory of the incomparable corona, a silvery, soft, unearthly light, with radiant streamers, stretching at times millions of uncomprehended miles into space, while the rosy, flaming protuberances skirt the black rim of the Moon in ethereal splendor. It becomes curiously cold, dew frequently forms, and the chill is perhaps mental as well as physical.” (Mabel Todd, Total Eclipse of the Sun p. 22)
Following is from The Eclipse by James Fennimore Cooper, about the solar eclipse he experienced in 1806 in the highlands of Lake Ostego in New York.
“The lake, the hills, and the buildings of the little town were swallowed up in the darkness. The absence of the usual lights in the dwellings rendered the obscurity still more impressive. All labor had ceased, and the hushed voices of the people only broke the absolute stillness by subdued whispering tones.
“Hist! The whippoorwill!” whispered a friend near me; and at the same moment, as we listened in profound silence, we distinctly heard from the eastern bank of the river the wild, plaintive note of that solitary bird of night, slowly repeated at intervals. The song of the summer birds, so full in June, had entirely ceased for the last half hour. A bat came flitting about our heads. Many stars were now visible, though not in sufficient number to lessen the darkness. At one point only in the far distant northern horizon, something of the brightness of dawn appeared to linger.
At twelve minutes past eleven, the moon stood revealed in its greatest distinctness — a vast black orb, so nearly obscuring the sun that the face of the great luminary was entirely and absolutely darkened, though a corona of rays of light appeared beyond. The gloom of night was upon us. A breathless intensity of interest was felt by all. There would appear to be something instinctive in the feeling with which man gazes at all phenomena in the heavens. The peaceful rainbow, the heavy clouds of a great storm, the vivid flash of electricity, the falling meteor, the beautiful lights of the aurora borealis, fickle as the play of fancy, — these never fail to fix the attention with something of a peculiar feeling, different in character from that with which we observe any spectacle on the earth. Connected with all grand movements in the skies there seems an instinctive sense of inquiry, of anxious expectation; akin to awe… ” (James Fenimore Cooper)
Wishing you Eclipse Mania and a sense of Awe.
Racing Nellie Bly
Victorian Secrets From Footnotes In History
Know The Past To Invent The Future
