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On 18 September, 1784, at home in Lichfield and miserable less than three months before his death, Samuel Johnson wrote to his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, "I have three letters this day, all about the balloon, I could have been content with one. Do not write about the balloon, whatever else you may think proper to say."1 But who could not write about "the balloon"? After Vincenzo Lunardi's ascent three days earlier-the first human flight in England-it was all that anyone was talking about. The excitement had been building for months. "Balloons occupy senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody," Horace Walpole had proclaimed the previous December.2 When Anna Barbauld visited London the next month, her priorities were seeing one of two smaller balloons that had recently been launched (one of which was displayed at the Pantheon) and visiting Frances Burney, in that order. "Next to the balloon, Miss B. is the object of public curiosity." "Nothing," she wrote her brother, "(the sight of friends excepted), has given us so much pleasure as the balloon, which is now exhibiting in the Pantheon."3 "All the World gives their shilling to see it," agreed Betsy Sheridan, who visited the Pantheon to see Lunardi's balloon during a trip to London in October 1784. There she saw it "suspended to the Top of the Dome," carrying "Lunardi, and his poor fellow Travellers the Dog and Cat" who had accompanied Lunardi on his flight and "who still remained in the Gallery to receive the visits of the curious."4 The enthusiasm for ballooning, which had transformed it into an object of "public curiosity," had extended from science to show-business, beyond a fascination with the flights themselves to the extravagant interior world of genteel metropolitan culture. Or more accurately, the "balloonomania," as Walpole put it, was a cultural phenomenon in which the public's chief fascination was with its own ability to be fascinated (Correspondence, 25: 596).
Rather than treating ballooning as a single cultural phenomenon, it is more accurate to describe its early days as a cacophony of overlapping events, activities, debates, literary texts, and endless paraphernalia, from the spectacle of the flights themselves to indoor displays to scientific treatises to real and fictitious travelogues to fashion trends to broadsheet ballads to satirical prints to...