1838 DICKENS FRIEND DARES A BALOON TRIP OVER LONDON
John Poole. CROTCHETS IN THE AIR; OR, AN (UN) SCIENTIFIC ACCOUNT OF A BALLOON TRIP IN A FAMILIAR LETTER TO A FRIEND (Henry Colburn, London, 1838) Softcover, disbound. 98pp. without ads at rear.
Good overall: Tape at spine; corners clipped of title, which is somewhat darkened and slighty soiled, and the last few pages, several pages frayed at edges with no loss of text.
A tongue-in-cheek account, by an old friend of Charles Dickens, of a balloon trip above London with famous Aeronaut Charles Green, “enjoying a bottle of sherry and watching dusk settle over the city...”
In Dickens’ first book, Sketches by Boz, there is a short description – illustrated on the title-page by George Cruikshank – of the author’s joining cheering spectators in Vauxhall Gardens, the public park in London, to watch dangerous hot-air balloon ascents by Charles Green, the most celebrated British aeronaut of his day. Dickens himself did not dare to go aloft with the balloonist, who might come crashing to the earth, later describing the scene as akin to the popular pleasure of watching a public hanging. Years later, in his novel Bleak House, describing London as it might be seen from above, he revealed a certain fascination with looking down upon the earth from a balloonist’s perspective.
Dickens had a long association with John Poole, a leading playwright of his younger years, favoring the dramatist’s farcical plays in his own lifelong hobby as actor and stage manager of amateur theatricals; he also helped Poole obtain a pension in his old age. And no doubt, in 1838, he was among the readers of this “(un)scientific account” who probably appreciated Poole’s quip that seeing one’s fellow men from a great height eliminated class distinctions since “the proud, the humble, the dignified, the lowly,” were “undistinguishable from the rest”
