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f o o d f o r t h o u g h t edge of academic scholarship’ (which smacks rather of one of her own seminars in Cambridge). Nor, I think, can it be said that literature about food constituted a ‘new epistemological domain’, given that Rabelais, over a century earlier, had already piled the ‘cornucopian text’ about as high as it would ever get. But she must be right in arguing that coffee was the era’s drug of choice and ‘epitomized the dietary ambitions of those aspiring to a state of enlightenment’. The Spary café makes our Starbucks look hopelessly impoverished by comparison. Admittedly, it was often enough a den of iniquity, the haunt of ‘burglars, pickpockets and other unruly ruffians’. It also catered for prostitution, and chess and draughts. But it was above all the forum for philosophical conversation, subversive satire and wit. The Encyclopédie defined cafés as ‘manufactories of mind, whether good or bad’. They welcomed poetry and plays – and women. I was particularly taken with a certain Madame Curé. The daughter of a Paris limonadier, she ran the Café Allemand (omelette and boeuf à la vinaigrette were two specialities) but was also the author of La Muse Limonadière and La Coquette punie. Another point in her favour – she was scorned by the stuck-up Madame de Graffigny as insufficiently respectable. Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, in which Oriental travellers have their minds blown by the Parisian obsession with fashion, hairstyles, beauty spots, shoes and ‘alimentary knowledge’, was written in this period. This is a time not only of the rise of the gourmet and connoisseur, but also of intense controversy, as vegetarians tear chunks out of carnivores, rationalists and materialists fight it out over sauces and ragoûts, and abstemious Rousseau denounces just about everyone and everything: ‘While the commodities of life multiply, while the arts perfect themselves, and luxury spreads, true courage is enervated, the military virtues vanish.’ To read Spary, you don’t absolutely have to love words such as chylification, iatrochemical, and coction, but it probably helps. Her Enlightenment is a vast collage of wonderful weirdos, stretching well beyond the usual suspects, not to mention a cellarful of wines and liqueurs as well as the occasional mechanical duck. The Enlightenment, in her terms, is not a single main course, but rather an endless banquet of sides. Do we really need footnotes at the bottom of the page any more? They may put off more potential Spary readers than the ones they impress. Scholars should stick all their big data somewhere in the cloud, where it belongs, and produce shorter, more focused books. I would also have rationed those largely pointless adjectives, such as ‘profound’ and ‘overwhelming’. And I think we need to problematize phrases such as ‘it problematized contemporary social change’. But Spary is never less than quaffable. She is exemplary at bringing out how much the innovations in cuisine and thinking about food and drink challenged the social order. The Café Procope, just off the Boulevard St Germain, is surely right to claim that the French Revolution sprang from its tables. To order this book for £31.50, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 19 Literary Review | m a y 2 0 1 3 30
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g e n e r a l s e amus p e r r y Up, Up and Away Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air By Richard Holmes (William Collins 404pp £25) Balloonophiles must nurse a particular affection for Wolverhampton, for it was from there that, on 5 September 1862, one of the most celebrated ascents began. The pilots were James Glaisher, secretary to the Royal Meteorological Society, and Henry Coxwell, whose claim to scientific knowledge derived from his former career as a dentist, but who was a seasoned balloonist and, as it transpired, a good man to have in a tight spot. The balloon left the ground at one o’clock in the afternoon, filled with buoyant coal gas from the Wolverhampton gasworks. It was a beautiful day and they climbed quickly: forty minutes later they were past 20,000 feet; just before an hour was done they were at 29,000 feet. Then they hit a snag. Coxwell realised that the rope working the release valve had got tangled up, so he struggled out of the basket to try to unravel it. Oxygen grows thin at such altitudes and at this point both men began to feel the lack of it. Glaisher, who seems to have gone about the gathering of scientific data with a positively religious zeal, found his ability to read the barometer strangely impaired: his vision was blurred, and his magnifying glass did not help; then his head fell unaccountably onto his left shoulder, and when he corrected that, it promptly flopped to the right. Sensibly he reached for the brandy, but before he could grasp it he collapsed in a corner of the basket and found himself paralysed. ‘In an instant intense darkness overcame me,’ he would recall, ‘so that the optic nerve lost power suddenly, but I was still conscious, with as active a brain as at the moment while writing this.’ Meanwhile, Coxwell grappled with the ropes, his fingers by now frozen black, finally managing to free the rope with what must have been a sturdy set of teeth. (Good thing he had been a dentist.) With a last desperate tug the valve was released and gas began to leave the balloon. Back in the basket, Coxwell suspected the worst for the secretary to the Royal Meteorological Society: ‘I began to fear that he would never take any more readings,’ he touchingly recollected. However, Coxwell was not one to give up and he knew the way to his fellow aeronaut’s heart: ‘Do try to take temperature and barometer observations, do try,’ he pleaded, and soon Glaisher came round. ‘I have been insensible,’ said Glaisher. ‘You have,’ Coxwell & Glaisher: seven miles high replied Coxwell, ‘and I too, very nearly.’ Pulling himself together, Glaisher started taking observations again, pausing only to pour brandy humanely over Coxwell’s black hands. The balloon finally came to ground near Ludlow. No further transport to be found, they walked seven miles to the nearest pub and drank a pint of beer. They deserved a drink: they had reached an altitude of about seven miles, though Glaisher characteristically confirmed a more modest estimate of six. (Their record would not be broken for the rest of the century.) A leader in The Times claimed for the exploit a place ‘among the unpatrolled junctures and critical and striking moments of war, politics or discovery’. The episode is full of superhuman daring and bravery, of course, but no less moving in its quirky comedy of Victorian manners surviving under extraordinary strain. It forms but one of many turns in the diverting and colourful cast of heroes, fantasists, entrepreneurs and serious oddballs that Richard Holmes has assembled in his hugely enjoyable, richly embellished study of ballooning in the Romantic age and beyond. Holmes refers to the book, with a modesty of his own, as a ‘cluster of balloon stories’; but while there is no thesis to labour, there is a consistency of interest, not least in that so many of his aerial adventurers display a similar mixture of great heroism and profound dottiness, something that comes to feel somehow characteristic of the genre. Holmes enjoys Glaisher dashing between his barometers miles up in the sky, but he is also interesting about the serious implications of those findings for an understanding of the atmosphere. There are absorbing pages, too, about the great Charles Green, who made 526 successful ascents earlier in the century and cheerfully referred to himself as ‘an Ancient Mariner of the Upper Atmosphere’, as well as a moving chapter about the role of balloons during the American Civil War. But I suspect that Holmes’s favourite in all this is the irrepressible Frenchman Félix Nadar. His lumbering monster of a balloon, called Le Géant, had a second flight of quite sensational misfortune, blown out of control over four hundred terrifying miles, losing all its passengers except Nadar and his wife one by one, and at one point only narrowly escaping a crash with an express train. But Nadar was one of those people to whom unmitigated disaster represents but another opportunity; and, nothing deterred, he wrote up the story in a high old style before turning to propagandising for air travel in general. Nadar was every inch a man of his age, and flight was not to be considered something merely desirable: rather it was to be thought of ideologically, as a right. His breathless book Le Droit au vol captured the heart of his chum Victor Hugo, who produced an open letter (addressed ‘To the Whole World’) enthusing about this breakthrough in human liberty: m a y 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 31

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g e n e r a l s e amus p e r r y

Up, Up and Away Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air

By Richard Holmes (William Collins 404pp £25)

Balloonophiles must nurse a particular affection for Wolverhampton, for it was from there that, on 5 September 1862, one of the most celebrated ascents began. The pilots were James Glaisher, secretary to the Royal Meteorological Society, and Henry Coxwell, whose claim to scientific knowledge derived from his former career as a dentist, but who was a seasoned balloonist and, as it transpired, a good man to have in a tight spot. The balloon left the ground at one o’clock in the afternoon, filled with buoyant coal gas from the Wolverhampton gasworks. It was a beautiful day and they climbed quickly: forty minutes later they were past 20,000 feet; just before an hour was done they were at 29,000 feet. Then they hit a snag.

Coxwell realised that the rope working the release valve had got tangled up, so he struggled out of the basket to try to unravel it. Oxygen grows thin at such altitudes and at this point both men began to feel the lack of it. Glaisher, who seems to have gone about the gathering of scientific data with a positively religious zeal, found his ability to read the barometer strangely impaired: his vision was blurred, and his magnifying glass did not help; then his head fell unaccountably onto his left shoulder, and when he corrected that, it promptly flopped to the right. Sensibly he reached for the brandy, but before he could grasp it he collapsed in a corner of the basket and found himself paralysed. ‘In an instant intense darkness overcame me,’ he would recall, ‘so that the optic nerve lost power suddenly, but I was still conscious, with as active a brain as at the moment while writing this.’ Meanwhile, Coxwell grappled with the ropes, his fingers by now frozen black, finally managing to free the rope with what must have been a sturdy set of teeth. (Good thing he had been a dentist.) With a last desperate tug the valve was released and gas began to leave the balloon.

Back in the basket, Coxwell suspected the worst for the secretary to the Royal

Meteorological Society: ‘I began to fear that he would never take any more readings,’ he touchingly recollected. However, Coxwell was not one to give up and he knew the way to his fellow aeronaut’s heart: ‘Do try to take temperature and barometer observations, do try,’ he pleaded, and soon Glaisher came round. ‘I have been insensible,’ said Glaisher. ‘You have,’

Coxwell & Glaisher: seven miles high replied Coxwell, ‘and I too, very nearly.’ Pulling himself together, Glaisher started taking observations again, pausing only to pour brandy humanely over Coxwell’s black hands. The balloon finally came to ground near Ludlow. No further transport to be found, they walked seven miles to the nearest pub and drank a pint of beer. They deserved a drink: they had reached an altitude of about seven miles, though Glaisher characteristically confirmed a more modest estimate of six. (Their record would not be broken for the rest of the century.) A leader in The Times claimed for the exploit a place ‘among the unpatrolled junctures and critical and striking moments of war, politics or discovery’.

The episode is full of superhuman daring and bravery, of course, but no less moving in its quirky comedy of Victorian manners surviving under extraordinary strain. It forms but one of many turns in the diverting and colourful cast of heroes, fantasists, entrepreneurs and serious oddballs that Richard Holmes has assembled in his hugely enjoyable, richly embellished study of ballooning in the Romantic age and beyond. Holmes refers to the book, with a modesty of his own, as a ‘cluster of balloon stories’; but while there is no thesis to labour, there is a consistency of interest, not least in that so many of his aerial adventurers display a similar mixture of great heroism and profound dottiness, something that comes to feel somehow characteristic of the genre.

Holmes enjoys Glaisher dashing between his barometers miles up in the sky, but he is also interesting about the serious implications of those findings for an understanding of the atmosphere. There are absorbing pages, too, about the great Charles Green, who made 526 successful ascents earlier in the century and cheerfully referred to himself as ‘an Ancient Mariner of the Upper Atmosphere’, as well as a moving chapter about the role of balloons during the American Civil War. But I suspect that Holmes’s favourite in all this is the irrepressible Frenchman Félix Nadar. His lumbering monster of a balloon, called Le Géant, had a second flight of quite sensational misfortune, blown out of control over four hundred terrifying miles, losing all its passengers except Nadar and his wife one by one, and at one point only narrowly escaping a crash with an express train. But Nadar was one of those people to whom unmitigated disaster represents but another opportunity; and, nothing deterred, he wrote up the story in a high old style before turning to propagandising for air travel in general. Nadar was every inch a man of his age, and flight was not to be considered something merely desirable: rather it was to be thought of ideologically, as a right. His breathless book Le Droit au vol captured the heart of his chum Victor Hugo, who produced an open letter (addressed ‘To the Whole World’) enthusing about this breakthrough in human liberty:

m a y 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 31

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