Literary Skies After 1800

Abstract

The British Romantic poet Lord Byron, in three stanzas of a poem entitled " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, " described an Italian twilight scene with spectacular colors filling the sky. Byron noted that the Moon was visible and that a " Single Star is at her side. " How could we use biographical information, letters, diaries, and other clues to determine that an actual event in 1817 inspired these stanzas? Where in Italy did this occur? On what date did Byron observe this scene? Can we identify the " Single Star " near the Moon? And what is the connection between the remarkable twilight hues observed by Byron in Italy and a volcanic eruption half a world away in Indonesia? Edgar Allan Poe, in the 1838 short story " The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, " described an apocalyptic event that destroys all life on Earth when a comet's atmosphere mingles with that of Earth. What were Poe's sources for this story? What nineteenth-century scientific books did he consult? How can we deduce that Poe's reading must have included volumes by the scholars Thomas Dick, Elijah Burritt, and John Herschel? What actual comets followed paths that made close approaches to Earth's orbit? The characters in the story also discuss a comet that traveled very near to the planet Jupiter, so close that the comet actually passed through the system of Jupiter's moons. What actual comet made this remarkable close approach to Jupiter? Have previous scholars correctly identified the comets that inspired Poe's story? The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins caused a sensation in nineteenth-century England. Before publication as a novel, the story appeared in serial form over the course of 40 weeks between November 1859 and August 1860. Readers awaited each weekly installment with anticipation comparable to that seen at the modern release parties for the Harry Potter novels. No less of an authority than Charles Dickens himself judged that the moonlit encounter that ended the first installment of The Woman in White was one of the " two scenes in literature which he regarded as being the most dramatic descriptions. " In this passage, a full Moon illuminates the landscape where a young man is walking after midnight on a rural road north of London. Suddenly a mysterious woman dressed entirely in white startles him. Collins correctly judged that the cliffhanger ending of this sequence would induce readers to buy the next installment. Modern scholars attempted to deduce 9 Literary Skies After 1800 Fig. 9.1 Left: Lord Byron (1788–1824) in a nineteenth-century colored engraving based on a portrait by Thomas Phillips (1770–1845). RIGHT: John Cam Hobhouse (1786–1869), a good friend of Byron's, in an engraving based on a drawing by Abraham Wivell (1786–1849) the date of a similar moonlit event in the life of the author Wilkie Collins, but they obtained contradictory results in a wide range of years. Can we combine calculations of the Moon's phase, analysis of nineteenth-century meteorological records, biographical information, and other clues to determine a precise date for the actual event when Wilkie Collins him-self encountered a woman in white on a full Moon night? How does this date compare with the results of previous researchers? What is the connection to the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais and to his celebrated paintings of Ophelia and The Proscribed Royalist, 1651, from the 1850s? And who was the actual " woman in white " ?