Comparing A Plea for Gas Lamps and Jekyll and Hyde :: comparison compare contrast essays

A Plea for Gas Lamps and Jekyll and Hyde In A Plea for Gas Lamps Robert Louis Stevenson describes how, with the approaching of urban hit manlight, a new age had begun for sociality and corporate pleasure seeking. Referring to the lamps as domesticated stars, he describes the new lamplit metropolis emerging graciously as a festive public sphere in which emollient joys prevail and people atomic number 18 convoked to pleasure. Wolfgang Schivelbush connects such gaslit pleasure at present to commerce. Gaslight offered life, passion and close-fittingness. 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 identical time, however, the industrial uniformity of gas street fervour made many uneasy. Like the railway, it equal a dehumanizing, centrally regulated urban infrastructure. With a public gas su pply, domestic lighting entered its industrial -- and dependent -- stage. No longer self-sufficiently producing its take in heat and light, each house was inextricably tied to an industrial zippo producer. . . . To contemporaries it seemed that industries were expanding, sending out tentacles, octopus-like, into every house.(28-29) This dread of uniformity became escalate as incandescent gas lighting, high pressure gas lighting (Robins 142), and finally voltaic arc-lighting grew more common in urban settings. the great unwashed 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, moreover all in a body and at once. A sincere electrician somewhere i n 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, that simple design.