The Conquest of the Air: Aeronautics and Social Revolution in Edward Douglas Fawcett's Hartmann the Anarchist and W. Graham Moffat and John White's What's the World Coming To?

This article examines the way in which two scientific romances published in 1893, Edward Douglas Fawcett's Hartmann the Anarchist and W. Graham Moffat and John White's What's the World Coming To? A Novel of the Twenty-First Century, Etc., respond to late-nineteenth-century developments in aeronautics. Both of these texts appropriate aeronautical speculation to create verisimilitude for their depiction of navigable ‘flying machines’ and intervene in disputes over the most probable means of accomplishing controlled flight. Continuing a longstanding literary tradition in which the balloon is identified as a symbol of anarchy and revolution, Hartmann the Anarchist and What's the World Coming To? A Novel of the Twenty-First Century, Etc. depict the accomplishment of aerial navigation as the catalyst for the attempted or actual overthrow of capitalism in favour of the oppressed multitudes.