It’s worth mentioning that “Locksley Hall” next touches on democracy, also a topic in The Last Man, and world government, a topic that The Last Man has no interest in. Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dewįrom the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be A van is “a wing with which the air is beaten” (Webster’s 1828).įor I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, The sailing balloon is mentioned a few other places in the text but described only here. Did Tennyson read The Last Man?įrom The Last Man Volume 1. Mary Shelley’s image of air travel is more detailed than Tennyson’s famous mention of air travel in “Locksley Hall”, written around five or ten years later. A balloon can’t tack into the wind like a sailboat, so power is required and wings were the known way to employ it. The sailing balloon was a good forecast for the time. I imagine the author would have been shocked to see how things actually turned out, with Britain by repeated minor reforms and without ever dissolving royalty becoming more egalitarian than her fictional republic, and much earlier. The politics of the new republic are realistic, with republican, aristocratic, and royalist factions. The king of England abdicates in 2073 and a republic headed by a Lord Protector is formed. In The Last Man the title character as a boy is a fully traditional shepherd and it’s still normal to travel by horse and sailing ship, though if you’re in a hurry you can go by the new “sailing balloon” with feathered wings. The revolutions of 1848 showed that social change was keeping pace, or at least threatening to. It was only later in the century, when these unprecedented basic advances in transportation and communication were unmistakably changing the world forever, that people realized how much the pace of change had accelerated. In 1826 the steam engine had been around for decades but railroads were just starting to spread and long-distance telegraphy had not been invented (the last critical innovation was the electrical relay, 1835). The book is set in the late 21st century so it gives us an interesting data point on the history of the future.
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