“Power Play: Coal-Gas Infrastructure in Media and Culture”
At the outset of the nineteenth century, the British gas industry initiated a radical transition from self-tended candles and oil lamps to networked light and heat, supplied by private companies. “Power Play” reveals that strategies for managing public perception remain among the industry’s most potent legacies, behavior we would now describe as psychological gaslighting.
This history runs as an undercurrent through “Power Play,” which explores, more broadly, complex interrelations between coal-gas power and period media. Through digital mapping, I demonstrate that theater, journalism, and the urban novel were not only deeply impacted by coal-gas technology but also instrumental in the gas network’s cross-continental spread.
However, the stage, press, and novel were contradictory sites of mediation. “Power Play” argues that the challenges of representing and comprehending an unprecedented energy system led authors to experiment with artistic form in ways that undermined the gas industry’s calculated narrative of itself—as future-oriented, scientifically sound, and blameless.
Rooted in material history, this examination of media and manipulation recovers an untold prehistory of our own vexed relationships with fossil fuels, which we draw on to the point of resource exhaustion even was we try to imagine life beyond their ubiquity. “Power Play” concludes by discussing Big Oil’s ongoing practice of displacing culpability for environmental harm onto individual consumers, a more sophisticated version of Coal Gas’s originary tactics. I ask how reorienting ourselves toward institutional-scale behavior might help us navigate the insidious strain of petroculture called gaslighting— a deceptive, narrative-driven phenomenon that scrambles agency through evasion and victim-blaming.
Spanning the rise and decline of the coal-gas network (1817-1946), “Power Play” takes a comparative approach to media from Britain and the U.S.
My dissertation is scheduled for defense in the Spring of 2025. Its final version will include a written manuscript and a multimedia book.
Explosion and the Diegetic Breach: Gaslit Theater explores the mutually constitutive relationship between the emergence of urban-scale gaslight and early-nineteenth-century theater, with emphases on the performance histories of Samuel James Arnold’s melodrama The Woodman’s Hut (1814) and John Oxenford’s burletta No Followers (1837).
Chapter One
“A voice beyond the rushing whistle in the pipe”: Journalism by Gaslight joins two mid-century histories of gaslight and information. It begins by discussing experiments in the urban journalist’s persona inspired by gas infrastructure. Part two considers housekeeping literature authored for and often by women who treat in-home gas lamps as tell-tales of danger.
Chapter Two
The Gas Network and the Urban Novel compares Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Both novels concern characters who attach themselves to a network powered by potentially dangerous sources. Relatedly, these texts probe the “philosophy of not taking notice of the inside of facts.”
Chapter Three
After-Effects: Neo-Victorian Gothic Experiments features Patrick Hamilton’s melodrama Gas Light (1938), through which the concept of psychological gaslighting crystallized, and Ann Petry’s novel The Street (1946), which unmasks psychological gaslighting as a not simply an interpersonal harm, but, rather, a form of systemic slow violence.
