Comparing A Plea for Gas Lamps and Jekyll and Hyde :: comparison compare contrast essays

A Plea for Gas Lamps and Jekyll and Hyde In A Plea for Gas Lamps Robert Louis Stevenson describes how, with the advent of urban gaslight, a new while had begun for sociality and corporate pleasure seeking. Referring to the lamps as domesticated stars, he describes the new lamplit city emerging gracefully as a festive earth sphere in which soft joys prevail and people are convoked to pleasure. Wolfgang Schivelbush connects such(prenominal) gaslit pleasure directly to commerce. Gaslight offered life, warmth and closeness. This was true also of the relationship mingled with light and the shop goods upon which it fell. They were close to each other, indeed, they permeated each other, and each enhance the effect of the other.(153) At the same time, however, the industrial uniformity of gas streetlighting make many uneasy. Like the railway, it represented a dehumanizing, centrally regulated urban infrastructure. With a public gas supply, domestic lighting entere d its industrial -- and qualified -- stage. No longer self-sufficiently producing its own heat and light, each house was inextricably tied to an industrial energy producer. . . . To contemporaries it seemed that industries were expanding, sending out tentacles, octopus-like, into both house.(28-29) This dread of uniformity became intensified as incandescent gas lighting, laid-back pressure gas lighting (Robins 142), and finally electric arc-lighting grew more crude in urban settings. People became immediately nostalgic for the flicker of gaslight, and the brutal qualities of street lighting were directly associated with the brightness and uniformity of electric arc-lights. For Stevenson, the instancy and central control of electric lighting transforms the city into a scientific nightmare Our tame stars are to come out in future, not one by one, but all in a torso and at once. A sedate electrician somewhere in a back office touches a spring -- and behol d . . . the design of the horrifying city flashes into vision -- a glittering hieroglyph many settle miles in extent. The monstrosity of the city is defined by this sudden, startling uniformity, which obliterates the its pleasant variety, rendering it a vast, but simple design.