Conclusion

Abstract

The balloon seemed to combine something from an imaginative world of myth while being itself, at the same time, a product of modern industry. As has been discussed, it was loaded with symbolism and contradiction. On the one hand it could remind a contemporary poet of the creation and shape of Milton’s Pandemonium, with shared implications of moral degeneracy, hubris and destructive political Jacobinism. On the other, to social meliorists like Wordsworth and Rousseau who both had an interest in flight, the new product of science pointed to change and new ways of improving existing society. Aeronautics brought the possibilities of a closer contact with natural phenomena, while the accuracy, calmness, detachment and self-discipline of the aeronauts themselves shared a Romantic sensibility which detected a moral value in the natural world to which ballooning gave intimate access. That flight seemed almost within touching distance in the eighteenth century is made clear in a discussion of some prescient lines from Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ which suggest that ‘The Soul of Man was made to walk the skies’. It is clear that the balloon made possible for a time a realisation of the core Romantic tenets Young describes.