It seems that through some unexplained failure of the insulator of an electric-lighting main a metal shop front became charged with wandering electricity and passers-by discovered that by touching it with their hands they could experience the delightful inconvenience of an electric shock. The circumstance that this luxury is in the minds of most people, and particularly of most street-urchins, associated with festival occasions and penny fees no doubt invested the unpriced supply in Walbrook with an added charm. ("Electricity Astray," Lancet, 1892, ii: 157)

The anecdote serves to cast some light on electricity's cultural place towards the end of the Victorian era. Entertainment was big business in Victorian London. A whole range of venues offered everything from the frivolous to the serious to the discerning public prepared to pay its money at the door. Natural philosophy and the mechanical arts were part and parcel of this culture of display. Scientific lectures jostled with gothic melodramas for the attention of the theatre-going public. Working models of the latest industrial machinery or experimental apparatus rubbed shoulders with collections of exotic curios and historical memorabilia of all sorts. The Lancet anecdote reminds us that this was the context in which most of the Victorian public encountered electricity as well: as something exotic, spectacular and consumable.

Exhibition mattered for Victorian electricity--for its producers as much as its consumers. It was through exhibition that electricity and electrical phenomena (and electricians themselves) were articulated, made sense of and assimilated. As far as most practising electricians were concerned, exhibitions of one sort or another provided them with their main opportunity to present themselves and their products to the public. By showing off their electrical machines and apparatus--making visible the ways in which those machines mimicked and reproduced the workings of nature--electricians demonstrated their own mastery over nature too.

Exhibitions provided an opportunity to demonstrate electricity's utility as well. Electricians sought to establish their status as inventors through flamboyant displays at Galleries of Practical Science or exhibition halls. This too made electricity look like part of the consumer culture that was being articulated and celebrated in such places. Through exhibition, electricity came to play a key role in Victorian narratives of social and economic progress. Electricians could show that electricity was not just the power that underpinned progress in the natural economy--it could power progress in political economy as well.

Queen's University Belfast

A view of the Royal Polytechnic Institution.

One particular feature of electricity that the Lancet anecdote also underlines, is the intimate relationship between it and the human body. From electricity's eighteenth century origins, electrical experiments were performed on and by the human body. Electricity rapidly became a way of performing with and on the human body, of making it do strange things or, even more subversively, getting it do quite normal things like moving a limb or blinking an eye. The Abbé Nollet's famous (or infamous) experimental demonstration of electrical conduction by shocking a line of Carthusian monks into leaping into the air simultaneously is probably the best-known example. For Enlightenment philosophers and their nineteenth-century descendants, electricity was a way of demonstrating the body as a machine. As such, for Victorian philosophical showmen, performing electricity on the body was a way of displaying oneself as the ultimate showman--the inventor-entrepreneur in command of his own body, in command of nature and promising the capacity to be in command of society as well.