Comparing A Plea for Gas Lamps and Jekyll and Hyde

A Plea for Gas Lamps and Jekyll and Hyde

In "A Plea for Gas Lamps" Robert Louis Stevenson describes how, with the advent

of urban gaslight, "a new age had begun for sociality and corporate pleasure

seeking." Referring to the lamps as "domesticated stars," he describes the new

lamplit city emerging gracefully as a festive public sphere in which "soft joys

prevail" and "people are convoked to pleasure." Wolfgang Schivelbush connects

such gaslit pleasure directly to commerce. "Gaslight offered life, warmth and

closeness. This was true also of the relationship between light and the shop

goods upon which it fell. They were close to each other, indeed, they permeated

each other, and each enhanced the effect of the other."(153)

At the same time, however, the industrial uniformity of gas streetlighting made

many uneasy. Like the railway, it represented a dehumanizing, centrally

regulated urban infrastructure. "With a public gas supply, domestic lighting

entered its industrial -- and dependent -- stage. No longer self-sufficiently

producing its own heat and light, each house was inextricably tied to an

industrial energy producer. . . . To contemporaries it seemed that industries

were expanding, sending out tentacles, octopus-like, into every house."(28-29)

This dread of uniformity became intensified as incandescent gas lighting, high

pressure gas lighting (Robins 142), and finally electric arc-lighting grew more

common in urban settings. People became immediately nostalgic for the flicker of

gaslight, and the inhuman qualities of street lighting were directly associated

with the brightness and uniformity of electric arc-lights. For Stevenson, the

immediacy and central control of electric lighting transforms the city into a

technological nightmare: "Our tame stars are to come out in future, not one by

one, but all in a body and at once. A sedate electrician somewhere in a back

office touches a spring -- and behold! . . . the design of the monstrous city

flashes into vision -- a glittering hieroglyph many square miles in extent." The

monstrosity of the city is defined by this sudden, startling uniformity, which

obliterates the its pleasing variety, rendering it a vast, but simple design.