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apparatus for a balloon. It resembles some enormous firework case, or skeleton of some great fabulous bird. These long wings are, in fact, to be used as immense oars, a project somewhat resembling that of Messrs Aine and Robert in 1784. Mr W. Sadd of Wandsworth exhibits a singularly light and curious aërial machine, evidently the result of immense consideration in its principles and details. . . .
    A pamphlet has just been published by Mr Luntley, with a frontispiece of a very new kind of balloon, in form not unlike two bagpipes of the early Italian shepherds, sewed together. It is to be of prodigious magnitude. The principle of propulsion will be that of the screw; but the balloon is to be its own screw, and work itself, by rotation, through the air. A wheel and strap are to give the rotatory motion, and the inventor is convinced that one end of the bagpipe (or queer curled point) will propel, and the other attract the air in its embrace, which will enable the aëronaut to advance in any direction he pleases. His power is to be derived from steam; and the weight of cargo he expects to be able to carry (besides the weight of his machine and apparatus) is the moderate amount of twenty-seven tons – about the weight of six full-grown elephants, with their ‘castles’.
    Richard H. Horne, ‘Ballooning’, Household Words, Vol. IV (1851)
    FORWARD LET US RANGE
    Let me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,
    When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;
    Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,
    Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father’s field,
    And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,
    Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;
    Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:
    That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:
    For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
    Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
    Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
    Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
    Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
    From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
    Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
    With the standards of the people plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;
    Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
    In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
    There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
    And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law. . . .
    Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
    Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves* of change.
    [* Tennyson thought that railway lines were grooved.]
    Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall (1842)

TWO
Ladies, Gentlemen and Others
    I’ll lay you a hat, a guinea one . . . that he’s a man of dibs and doesn’t follow no trade or calling, and if that isn’t a gentleman, I don’t know what is.
    R.S. Surtees, Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities (1838)
    A t the top of the social pyramid were some 4,000 aristocratic families, their wealth derived from large estates and investments; at the bottom were the urban prostitutes: the police estimated some 30,000 in England and Wales, and over 8,000 in London (a tenth of some others’ more sensational figures) – though numbers declined later in the century.
    The aristocracy remained a fairly self-contained social group, though frequently ‘marrying out’ into the upper squirearchy and wealthy professional classes. The wives supervised access through elaborate rituals and etiquette, admission being dependent more on background and lifestyle than on (‘new’) money, though by the late 1870s, with the landed classes’ economic base weakened by the