'Voyage to the Moon' and Other Imaginary Lunar Flights of Fancy in Antebellum America

Voyage to the Moon and Other Imaginary Lunar Flights of Fancy in Antebellum America

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Editorial Board

Dinah Birch – University of Liverpool, UK

Kirstie Blair – University of Stirling, UK

Archie Burnett – Boston University, USA

Christopher Decker – University of Nevada, USA

Heather Glen – University of Cambridge, UK

Linda K. Hughes – Texas Christian University, USA

Simon J. James – Durham University, UK

Angela Leighton – University of Cambridge, UK

Jo McDonagh – King’s College London, UK

Michael O’Neill – Durham University, UK

Seamus Perry – University of Oxford, UK

Clare Pettitt – King’s College London, UK

Adrian Poole – University of Cambridge, UK

Jan-Melissa Schramm – University of Cambridge, UK

Voyage to the Moon and Other Imaginary Lunar Flights of Fancy in Antebellum America

Edited by

Paul C. Gutjahr

Anthem Press

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This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-740-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-740-4 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Richard Lars Kylberg Jr.

The person who first taught me to read, thus launching my own literary travels to thousands of hitherto unknown worlds.

The more that you read, the more things you know.

The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

Dr. Suess

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I VOYAGE TO THE MOON: WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS, SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY, OF THE PEOPLE OF MOROSOFIA, AND OTHER LUNARIANS (1827)

Joseph Atterley (George Tucker)

PART II HANS PHAALL—A TALE (JUNE 1835)

Edgar A. Poe

PART III GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES LATELY MADE BY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL (AUGUST 25–30, 1835)

Richard Adams Locke

PART IV ORRIN LINDSAY’S PLAN OF AERIAL NAVIGATION (MAY 1847)

J. L. Riddell

Appendix A Excerpt from Washington Irving’s A History of New York, 1809

Appendix B Excerpts from Anonymous Review of A Voyage to the Moon, reprinted from the American Quarterly Review No. 5 (March 1828)

Appendix C Note Added for Inclusion in the Hans Pfaall Version in Poe’s Collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840

Appendix D Richard Adams Locke in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Literati of New York City, 1850

Appendix E Contemporary Responses to Richard Adams Locke’s Great Astronomical Discoveries

Appendix F P. T. Barnum on Locke’s Moon Hoax, 1866

Suggested Further Reading

FIGURES

1John Herschel’s South African observatory with his 20-foot reflector telescope

2Title page, George Tucker’s A Voyage to the Moon

3The New York Sun, Front Page, Tuesday, August 25, 1835

4John Leonard Riddell’s journal, May 24, 1839

5George Tucker

6Edgar Allan Poe

7Richard Adams Locke

8The Illuminated Side of the Moon

9John Leonard Riddell

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In making these various journeys to the Moon, I was fortunate to have many fellow travelers. Principal among them were my research assistants, Richard Higgins and Megan Dyer. More companionable pilgrims one could not ask for. Every page of this volume bears the mark of their industry, intelligence and perseverance. It is a simple truth that without them by my side, this volume would have never been completed.

Others helped along the way as well. Nick Williams gave invaluable help with the volume’s introduction. Monique Morgan was incredibly patient when it came to answering all my questions about the genre and history of science fiction. Jonathan Elmer and Christoph Irmscher stood as constant inspirations to me with their own undying appreciation for antebellum American literature. Bruce Van Patter created a magnificent original cover image of Poe and Herschel flying to the Moon. Christina Jesse created a wonderful map of the Moon to accompany Locke’s Moon Hoax. As always, Alex Van Riesen and Bob Brown provided the kind of friendship that makes research labors of love such as this one possible. Richard Nash as well as Ray and Kathy Smith kept me sane as I finished the work on this volume during a time of particularly heavy administrative duties for me at Indiana University.

My wife Cathy and my sons Isaac and Jeremiah continue to stand as perhaps the most vivid examples of creativity, courage and curiosity in my life. They all continue to push themselves to learn new things, never satisfied to stand still in their own life journeys. Their spirits of adventure inspire me daily, and I count myself immensely fortunate to have them as role models in my life. My parents and my sister Karen continue to provide me with a bedrock foundation of support and encouragement. Their belief in me has propelled me forward in every path I have chosen and through every challenge I have faced.

Finally, I dedicate this volume to Rich Kylberg, my oldest friend and the person who first taught me to read. When we were but six years old, Rich pulled out a Dick and Jane reader one afternoon and proceeded to teach me to recognize my first printed word: LOOK. Little did I know then how that word would become a kind of mantra for my entire educational journey, first as a student and then as a teacher. In that single act of literacy kindness, Rich bears witness to how both people and books can radically change lives. While Rich and I traveled from preschool through Stanford University together, our paths rarely cross these days. I dedicate this book to him as a totem to remind us both that while the paths of our lives may have diverged, an invisible cord will forever join us together, woven by our many years of youthful friendship and held fast by the way he stands alongside me every time I pick up a book and LOOK anew at the world through its pages.

INTRODUCTION

When reminiscing about his Mormon youth, Oliver Huntington (1823–1909) was fond of telling Moon stories. He recounted hearing that Mormonism’s founding prophet, Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844), believed that there were men on the Moon who stood about six feet high, dressed like Quakers and lived to be a thousand years old.¹ Both Smith’s brother, Hyrum (1800–1844), and his eventual successor, Brigham Young (1801–1877), preached about the Moon and its people.² Huntington also told stories of being singled out by Church elders in 1837, when he was but 11 years of age, as someone who would preach the gospel to the inhabitants upon the islands of the sea, and—to the inhabitants of the Moon, even the planet you can now behold with your eyes.³ It would seem that the young Huntington was being prepared for a voyage to the Moon.

The four stories contained in this volume bear testimony to the popularity of dreams of Moon travel in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. In fact, such expeditionary thinking partook of longstanding European and American traditions of belief that there was life on other planets. What was more commonly known as the plurality of worlds theory—that God presided over a host of inhabited planets in the universe—was espoused by such early American luminaries as New England’s witch-hunting Cotton Mather (1663–1728), Yale College’s seventh president Ezra Stiles (1727–1795) and the multi-gifted and scientifically minded Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790).⁴ Franklin was so enamored with thoughts of life on other planets that he filled his immensely popular almanacs with his musings on the subject. For example, in his 1749 Almanack, Franklin’s very own Poor Richard (Franklin’s alter ego in print) proclaimed that It is the opinion of all the modern philosophers and mathematicians, that the planets are habitable worlds.⁵ Franklin was joined in his interstellar thoughts by America’s most famous astronomer of the era, David Rittenhouse (1732–1796), who went so far as to declare that The doctrine of the plurality of worlds, is inseparable from the principles of Astronomy.⁶

While the theoretical framework for the plurality of worlds had many advocates prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, the technology to prove that life might actually exist elsewhere in the universe was far more difficult to attain. Scientific innovations around the turn of the nineteenth century, however, breathed new life into the plurality of worlds theory as advances in the fields of aeronautical and telescopic engineering held out the tantalizing promise that humanity might indeed be able to reach across vast distances of space, either with grand new telescopes or gravity-defying vehicles, making some form of extraterrestrial communion possible.

The balloon was the device that inaugurated a new age in air travel. In 1783 French brothers Joseph-Michael and Jacques-Ètienne Montgolfier launched an unmanned hot-air balloon made from silk and paper. Their balloon stayed aloft for ten minutes and traveled over one mile. Manned balloon flights would follow only weeks later and, in 1793, the first manned balloon flight in America took off in Philadelphia with George Washington himself in attendance to enjoy the spectacular event.⁷ While variations on balloon flight would capture the largest share of antebellum American interest when it came to air travel, other scientifically minded Americans envisioned a wide range of aeronautical devices, including carts with moving wings or vehicles made out of antigravitational materials.⁸

While some dreamed of balloons pointing the way toward interplanetary travel, it would be late eighteenth-century improvements in telescopic design that would ultimately bring humans closer to the celestial bodies that filled their night skies. A key figure in regard to these improvements was the English organist turned astronomer, William Herschel (1738–1822). Pursuing astronomy as an amateur while composing and playing music in Bath, England, Herschel showed his considerable natural scientific ability when he created his own seven-foot telescope and then used it to discover the planet Uranus. The discovery led King George III to name Herschel to the post of court astronomer. With this royal appointment Herschel was able to dedicate the remainder of his life solely to his astronomical studies. In 1789, he built a gigantic forty-foot telescope on a pivoting base that enabled him to chart some five thousand new astronomical objects (stars, comets and nebulae) by 1820. His telescope would remain unrivaled in its powerful optical reach until 1845. By the time of his death in 1822, William Herschel had become the most famous astronomer in England, and few could rival his reputation around the world.

Herschel’s only son, John (1792–1871), inherited both his father’s famous name and his great astronomical abilities. And, like his father, the younger Herschel was destined to become one of the most famous astronomers of his age. John continued his father’s work, but more importantly, he expanded it. Thus, while his father had carried out his astronomical observations entirely from England, John decided to establish an observatory near Cape Town, South Africa, where he spent four years (1834–1838) surveying stars from the Southern Hemisphere. Stars visible from the Southern Hemisphere had been little studied, and John charted so many new phenomena that many scholars still consider his 1847 book resulting from his time in Cape Town to be the greatest single publication in the whole history of observational astronomy.⁹ It would be the younger Herschel’s international fame in the 1830s, and the American publication of his A Treatise on Astronomy, that helped inspire both Edgar Allan Poe and Richard Adams Locke to create tales of life on the Moon.¹⁰

Figure 1 John Herschel’s observatory with his 20-foot reflector telescope just a few miles outside Cape Town, South Africa. (Library of the editor)

Scientific advances that complemented belief in the plurality of worlds were not solely responsible for the fact that four different literary Moon voyage stories were published by Americans prior to 1850. These lunar literary endeavors were deeply tied to profound changes happening in the country’s literary marketplace. As American astronomy was coming of age in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, so was American publishing. Changes in publishing technology and increasing literacy rates radically altered the American literary landscape. At the close of the eighteenth century, it was common for printers to produce print runs of tracts and pamphlets that seldom exceeded 2,000 copies. By 1855, publishers were producing editions of 100,000 or 75,000 and 10,000 copy print runs had become common.¹¹ The forty newspapers that had existed in the colonies during the Revolutionary War period had given way by the time of the Civil War to over two thousand weekly and daily papers.

The explosive growth of antebellum American print culture resulted from both evolving publishing technologies and American reading habits. Technological changes included the invention and adoption of steam-powered printing presses, machine-made paper, stereotype plates (rather than setting and resetting type by hand) and improved methods of distributing printed material: new canals and waterways, the emergence of a vast railway network and the introduction of steamboats.¹² These technological changes proved a potent brew when mixed with the rising rates of American literacy. The literacy rate for affluent white women had come to match that of white men in the United States, moving from roughly 45 percent in 1790 to around 90 percent by the time of the Civil War.¹³ In the words of one social historian of the period, by the middle of the nineteenth century reading had become a necessity of life.¹⁴ Simply put, the American appetite for printed material rose dramatically in the antebellum period and publishers strove to meet the demand using new printing technologies and distribution methods.

Not all printed material, however, was embraced equally by Americans. Fictional stories—and novels in particular—were singled out by many Americans as particularly dangerous reading material. The American Tract Society, a powerful religious publishing organization bent on spreading the Christian Gospel, published large numbers of tracts on the evils of reading fiction, pointing out how fiction inflamed unhealthy passions, wasted one’s time and money and drew one’s focus away from truly important considerations such as the state of one’s soul.¹⁵ Thus, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, novel reading was frowned upon while the reading of nonfiction works was encouraged. Nonfiction works focused on such fields as science, exploration, history and biography and provided facts about God and his creation, while fiction often misrepresented the Divine and misled his divine creation into dangerous paths of belief and behavior. Keeping in mind this deep suspicion of fiction, it is no surprise that the most popular printed materials of this period focused on the nonfiction topics of religion, science, travel, biography and history.¹⁶

It was into this exploding print culture that George Tucker (1775–1861), a newly appointed faculty member at the University of Virginia (UVA), offered America A Voyage to the Moon (1827), the country’s first novel-length fictional tale of a man traveling to the Moon. Thomas Jefferson had handpicked Tucker in 1824 to join the faculty of his newly established university in Charlottesville, Virginia, to fill the post of professor of moral philosophy. At the time, moral philosophy was broadly defined as the study of ethics in the pursuit of a virtuous life, but Tucker was soon also teaching courses on rhetoric, political economy (the interactions between economic markets and the laws and customs of the state) and literature. His Voyage to the Moon reflects all his varied and erudite interests.

Considered by many to be the first science fiction novel written by an American, Tucker sidestepped the criticism of those who looked askance at novel reading by filling his Voyage to the Moon with redeeming extended scientific and ethical discussions. The novel’s subtitle, With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians, hints toward the novel’s more educative aspects. Using the pen name Joseph Atterley (perhaps because Tucker as a newly appointed professor did not want to identify himself as a novel writer, knowing Thomas Jefferson’s strong dislike for the genre), A Voyage to the Moon poses as Atterley’s first-person account of his trip to the Moon and the ways in which the civilization he encountered there provided poignant commentary on various customs and beliefs found in the young American republic.¹⁷ In this way, Atterley’s reflections on lunarian culture is a tale written in the travelogue-as-social-commentary tradition perhaps most famously represented by Irish clergyman Jonathan Swift’s (1667–1745) Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift had sent his Gulliver to traverse various strange, new cultures and used such encounters as a means of offering insights into the good and bad of his own Anglo-Irish society.

Figure 2 Title Page. George Tucker’s A Voyage to the Moon with its extensive subtitle detailing the edifying aspects of the work (1827). Note the inscription of the author to Robley Duglison (1798–1869) at the top of the page. Duglison was a fellow faculty member at the University of Virginia. He had served as Thomas Jefferson’s personal physician and later came to be regarded as the father of American physiological studies. (Library of the editor)

Tucker offers his own readers a travel tale that, on the surface, is no less exotic than some of the most popular travel narratives of the antebellum period, including John Lloyd Stephens’s (1805–1852) multivolume Incidents of Travel in Yucatán (1843) and Herman Melville’s (1819–1891) immensely popular South Sea travel adventures Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). Unlike the dozens of travel writers plying their trade in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, however, Tucker filled his lunar travel account with both scientific possibility and entirely imaginary civilizations. His novel functions as both satire and as cultural critique. Through his novel, Tucker offers wide-ranging social commentary on everything, from American women’s fashions to agricultural practices to medical procedures to economic trade policies. Tucker toggles between making fun of Americans and offering more serious ideas on how his countrymen and women might pursue better ways of interacting with each other and with other nations. In the end, Tucker attempts to give his readers a new way of looking at themselves and their world through Atterley’s Moon visit.

While Tucker was establishing himself as a new professor at UVA, young Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) arrived as a new student at the university. Because of financial tensions with his adoptive father, Poe would remain at UVA for only a single semester, but his connection with, and intellectual debt to, Tucker would emerge eight years later when Poe—now a new assistant editor for the Richmond periodical The Southern Literary Messenger—penned the Moon story: Hans Phaall—a Tale (1835). Poe incorporated some ideas from Tucker’s novel into his own portrayal of men on the Moon, most noticeably the physiological link between the mental well-being of lunarians and the inhabitants of Earth. Poe’s tale, however, had a more sardonic tone than Tucker’s work. In his rather whimsical account of an out-of-work bellows repairman making a journey to the Moon to escape his creditors, Poe mixes wish fulfilment with the American populace’s love of a well-played hoax.¹⁸ Poe signals his satiric intent even in his protagonist’s name. Phaall’s last name when reversed becomes but a different way of writing the word laugh. Poe wished to either laugh at his readers for not seeing through his tale’s deceptive artifice or have his readers laugh with him as he recounts Hans’s rather bungling and slapstick journey to the Moon.

Unlike Tucker, Poe remains sensitive to symbolism throughout his story. It is no mere coincidence that Hans makes his ascent to the Moon on April Fool’s Day in a balloon shaped like the tasseled cap of a court jester, or fool, and made of newspapers coated with rubber. Poe uses the fool’s cap to underline the accomplishments and deceits associated with the nation’s exploding print culture. The term foolscap itself refers to a standard sheet of writing paper, helping Poe through his use of a fool’s cap–shaped newspaper balloon to signal how news periodicals are often little more than pieces of floating ephemera, filled not with meaning but with nothing more than hot air. Phaall’s occupation as a bellows mender reinforces this notion of meaninglessness. Hot air is Hans’s business. Thus, front-and-center throughout Hans Phaall—a Tale is Poe’s own critique of the print-saturated culture in which he lived and worked, and how he considered so many products of that print culture to be inconsequential and meaningless, good for little else than leading one’s thoughts toward the most fantastical flights of fancy.

Poe’s writing is never one-dimensional, however, for he layers his satire with a level of seriousness. In order to engage his reader’s attention and encourage some possibility of belief in his tale, Poe filled his story with what he termed verisimilitude, in the application of scientific principles (so far as the whimsical nature of the subject would permit).¹⁹ Through his commitment to verisimilitude, Poe navigated the treacherous waters of fiction writing in the period, while at the same time capitalizing on the immense growth and interest in various scientific accomplishments of the age. Science was everywhere in the young American republic, and it touched every aspect of life from new modes of transportation (canals, clipper ships and the railroad) to new forms of mass production (the cotton gin as well as steam-powered textile looms and printing presses). New scientific discoveries also led to burgeoning interest in such fields as geology, astronomy, meteorology, botany and medicine.²⁰ With its careful attention to scientific detail, Poe’s Hans Phaall set the course for what would later come to be called hard science fiction writing. It is this particular genre of hard science fiction that would mark not only Poe’s Moon story, but also the last two Moon stories that would appear before the Civil War.

While science-fiction writing is most often referred to as a genre of imaginative fiction basing its narratives upon a special concern for the use of real or potential scientific beliefs, practices, and discoveries, Hard science fiction is a subset of this larger genre and has a particular emphasis.²¹ As its name implies, hard science fiction is distinguished by its more intense—or harder—interest in science. Such heightened interest often takes the form of elaborate expository passages detailing evidence of scientific thought at work.²² The science-fiction scholar Allen Steele distinguishes hard science fiction by its use of either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone.²³ Poe was concerned in his Hans Phaall with providing carefully wrought details such as the balloon’s pressurized, airtight gondola, so that his readers might be drawn into both the complexities and the possibilities of interplanetary travel.

After Poe’s Hans Phaall, the next lunar tale to appear became the most popular Moon story of the antebellum period. It was also a tale thoroughly committed to Poe’s notion of scientific verisimilitude. Not knowing of Poe’s Moon story, but following its appearance by just a few weeks, Richard Adams Locke’s Great Astronomical Discoveries appeared in late August 1835. It reached its readers in the new medium of the penny newspaper, an extremely low-cost newspaper made successful by Benjamin Day (1810–1889), an audacious workaholic and publishing pioneer. When Day’s The New York Sun first appeared on the streets of New York City, the most widely read paper in this city of just over 200,000 inhabitants was a 6-cent affair called the Courier and Enquirer, which boasted a circulation of some 4,500 readers.²⁴ Within two years of The Sun’s appearance, it had knocked the Courier from its pride of place in utterly convincing fashion. Edgar Allan Poe believed that at the time of the appearance of Locke’s Moon story, The Sun enjoyed a circulation of some 50,000 readers. Whether Poe’s estimation is correct, it is clear that the readership of Locke’s Great Astronomical Discoveries was several levels of magnitude greater than any story carried in the hitherto most-popular Courier. The Sun also dwarfed the readership of both Poe’s Hans Phaall and Tucker’s Voyage to the Moon.²⁵

At the time Day’s penny newspaper appeared, all New York City papers in this era, no matter their cost, comprised four pages. It was a simple format that allowed the newspaper to be printed on a single sheet of paper that was then folded in half. A paper’s front and rear pages were largely given over to advertisements, announcements, reprinted speeches and news stories. If a newspaper contained serialized fiction it was almost always found in the paper’s interior two pages. The installments of Locke’s Moon story appeared on page one, a deviation from the common, interior placement of fictional works, a positioning that quite possibly unsettled the newspaper’s readers, forcing them to wonder if the story was serialized literary fiction or reported fact. In truth, so many readers came to believe the veracity of Locke’s tale that the collection of articles in later years came to be known by the more popular title The Moon Hoax. In praising the effectiveness of Locke’s deception, the great showman P. T. Barnum (1810–1891) noted that the sensation created by this immense imposture fooled nearly everybody, the gravest and the wisest, too, was completely taken in at the time.²⁶

Figure 3 The New York Sun , Front Page, Tuesday, August 25, 1835, offering the first installment of Locke’s Moon story. (Courtesy of Newseum Collection, Washington, DC)

Locke builds his story upon the real-life scientific adventures of the great English astronomer John Herschel. In 1833 Herschel traveled to South Africa, where he established an observatory near Cape Town, then the southernmost fortified European settlement in the world. The existence of Herschel’s South African observatory was known to many of the more-educated Americans of the day, and Locke capitalized on this knowledge of Herschel’s work in South Africa. Locke fabricated a series of articles that seemingly originated from one of the astronomer’s assistants, who had reportedly published many of Herschel’s groundbreaking astronomical discoveries in a scientific periodical, The Edinburgh Journal of Science.²⁷ Locke offered his readers a Moon story with a carefully crafted scientific veneer.

This veneer appears in the series’ opening article, which spends most of its allotted space—in true hard science-fiction fashion—offering rather complex and detailed explanations of Herschel’s giant telescope and the way in which its massive lens was so constructed that it enabled scientists to view objects on the Moon with unprecedented clarity. Thus, Locke’s voyage to the Moon was optical rather than physical. His characters did not physically touch the lunar landscape: they simply observed it. These supposed observations fooled thousands of readers as Locke reported that Herschel and his assistants had discovered distinct Moon civilizations populated by bipedal beaver-like beings and flying bat-like humanoid creatures. Locke meticulously recounted for patrons of The New York Sun how the Moon was full of cities and temples, as well as beasts that resembled buffalos and unicorns. Unlike Tucker’s novel, which used descriptions of the Moon’s inhabitants as a means of furthering reflection on American society, Locke’s tale is one of stupendous scientific discovery bent on compelling the inhabitants of Earth to confront the seeming reality that they were not alone in the universe.

While Poe, with his commitment to scientific verisimilitude, took a step toward hard science fiction, and Locke also stepped in that direction with his even more elaborate scientific excursuses, the final American Moon voyage story to appear before the Civil War offered the hardest science fiction tale of all. That story was composed by John Leonard Riddell, a man who was an actual scientist rather than a literary editor or a newspaperman. A professor of chemistry at the Medical College of Louisiana (later Tulane University), Riddell had prodigious scientific interests and expertise, including accomplishments in fields as diverse as botany, geology, chemistry, optics and medicine.

For many years, Riddell had delivered public lectures stemming from his wide-ranging scientific interests. In the spring of 1847, he was invited to give a talk at the New Orleans Public Lyceum, and he chose that moment to deliver one of his only fictional creations: Orrin Lindsay’s Plan of Aerial Navigation. In it, Riddell tells how Orrin Lindsay, supposedly a former student, built a vehicle capable of interplanetary travel and had used that vehicle to reach the Moon. Although Riddell’s story was later published in pamphlet form and proved popular among those who had heard—or heard about—his lecture, it was a tale that never attained the levels of readership enjoyed by Locke’s massively popular Moon Hoax or even Poe’s more literary Hans Phaall.

In fact, Riddell’s purpose for composing his story of Orrin Lindsay’s journey was not to fool his listeners or achieve popular success. Instead, Riddell wished to educate his audience concerning what he believed was the real possibility of travel beyond the confines of the Earth’s atmosphere. The possibility of such travel was a topic that Riddell had been contemplating for nearly a decade when he offered his 1847 lecture. As far back as 1839, Riddell reveals his interest in Moon travel when he uses his personal journal to muse about what kind of vehicle might be able to make the roughly quarter of a million–mile journey to Earth’s only satellite. Riddell took time to sketch such a spaceship in his journal along with making notes about what other American scientists were saying about inventions capable of sustained atmospheric and orbital flight. The thinking born of Riddell’s lunar reflections finally emerged before the larger public in his 1847 Lyceum lecture, a (science) fictional tale full of complex tables and equations outlining the real-life obstacles to Moon travel and the possible means of overcoming those obstacles.

Figure 4 John Leonard Riddell’s journal, May 24, 1839. Noteworthy here is his early conception of a vehicle capable of traveling into space. (Courtesy of John Leonard Riddell papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University)

Riddell fills his story with scientific insights bearing on travel to the Moon, including how one might maintain a viable oxygen supply in one’s vehicle, how one might compensate for the extreme temperatures of outer space, the physical effects of high altitude on the human body, and even the dangers involved in space travel when it came to the possibility of colliding with meteorites and other space debris. Perhaps most striking, however, is how Riddell uses his Moon tale to lay out his own thinking about the nature of Earth’s gravity, a theory that differed significantly from Isaac Newton’s (1643–1727) widely accepted gravitational theory. Newton’s theory had postulated that all objects are attracted in proportion to their mass and to the distance between one another. Riddell found such a theory ridiculous. Instead, he argued that gravity was in no way material but rather resulted from radiations of ethereal particles in all directions; having the power to impart their momentum to ponderable matter.²⁸ According to this line of thinking, Riddell argued, a cannon ball or other object in the air has a tendency to approach the Earth because it receives the impulses of those moving particles from all directions except toward the Earth, where the momentum of those due from that direction has already been intercepted.²⁹

The notion of intercepting gravity-inducing ethereal particles became central to Riddell’s Orrin Lindsay lecture. In his exploration of gravity as an immaterial and propulsive force found everywhere at what would later be termed an atomic level, Riddell has Lindsay prepare a spacecraft made of a substance with a molecular structure impervious to such gravity-imparting particles. According to Riddell, Lindsay had discovered that a substance combining steel and magnetized quicksilver was able to block the gravitational particles found near the Earth’s surface. Lindsay’s vehicle manipulated this strange substance to produce a type of gravitational shield and, through such manipulation, he was able to propel his vehicle beyond the confines of the Earth’s atmosphere. In such a manner, Riddell used his fictional account of Lindsay’s voyage to the Moon as the means to provide an extended scientific critique and alternative—complete with mathematical equations—to Newton’s well-established theories on gravity.

The four Moon voyage tales found in the following pages are remarkable for the ways in which they incorporate a wide diversity of literary agendas coupled to a diverse array of printed material. Such varied material includes a traditional novel, a literary periodical short story, a series of newspaper articles and, finally, a scientific pamphlet. The social critiques of Tucker and Poe, the manipulative power of startling scientific revelations demonstrated in Locke’s work, and the more measured scientific discussions found in Riddell bear witness to the power of both print and science in the antebellum period. These stories challenged their readers to open their minds to new perspectives fostered by the scientific and technological advances of their age. At one point in his novel, Tucker proclaims, surely there is nothing certain in the universe; or rather, truth is one thing on the moon, and another thing on earth.³⁰ The advances in American science and the relationship of that progress to a wide range of accepted truths were—along with the lunar landscape itself—a central point of exploration in each and every one of these voyages to the Moon.

Notes

1 Journal of Oliver B. Huntington, book 14, original at Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

2 Hyrum Smith, Concerning the plurality of gods & worlds, April 27, 1843 as cited in Eugene England ed., Brigham Young University Studies 18 (Winter 1978), 27. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses (July 24, 1870) 13: 271.

3 Young Woman’s Journal (Salt Lake City: The Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Associations of Zion, 1892) 3: 263–264.

4 Cotton Mather, Christian Philosopher, a Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature, with Religious Improvements (London: E. Matthews, 1721), 19; Stiles is referenced in Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 245; L. W. Labaree et al., eds., Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) I: 102–103.

5 L. W. Labaree et al., eds., Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) III: 345.

6 The renowned early American poet Philip Freneau called Rittenhouse the prince of astronomers. Philip M. March, ed. A Freneau Sampler (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1963), 292–293. David Rittenhouse. An Oration, Delivered February 24, 1775, before the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1775), 19. William Darlington, Memorials of John Bartram and Humphrey Marshall (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1849), 399.

7 John Wise, A System of Aeronautics, Comprehending its Earliest Investigations, and Modern Practice and Art (Philadelphia: Joseph A. Speel, 1850) 148.

8 Examples of such flying machines can be found in the John Leonard Riddell journal, May 24, 1839, pages 52–53, John Leonard Riddell Papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University.

9 John Herschel, Results of Astronomical Observations Made During the Years 1834, 5, 6, 7, 8 at the Cape of Good Hope (London: Smith, Elder, 1847). Michael Hoskin, ed., Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 252.

10 John F. W. Herschel, A Treatise on Astronomy (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman and John Taylor, 1833). The Philadelphia firm of Carey, Lea and Blanchard would produce three American editions of this book by 1835. Its first American printing was in 1834.

11 New York Daily Times , September 28, 1855. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1. Frederic Hudson. Journalism in the United States from 1690 to 1872 (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1968), 771.

12 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 231–249. Thomas, The History of Printing , 33; Gaskell, A New Introduction , 207–213; Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing , 201. American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking (New York: Howard Lockwood, 1894), 208. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 2: 311–334.

13 Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 21; 38–43. Maris A. Vinovskis and Richard M. Bernard, Beyond Catharine Beecher: Female Education in the Antebellum Period, Signs 3: 4 (Summer 1978): 863.

14 William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: Tennessee University Press, 1989), 1–15.

15 A good example of such anti-fiction tract material includes the American Tract Society’s Tract #515 entitled Novel Reading (New York: