Print and Performance in The 1820s
"In 1824, the anonymous narrator of a book entitled Revelations of the Dead-Alive claims to have travelled two hundred years into the future to experience life in London during the year 2023. He relates what he learned from conversations with twenty-first-century writers, artists, and scientists, and from his research in the twenty-first-century British Library, about how the history of his own century was recorded. Satirizing the literature, theatre, art, science, politics, and fashions of 1820s Britain from the imagined vantage point of 2023, Revelations speculates about a possible future. This bizarre text by Irish novelist and journalist John Banim at once describes and performs many of the distinctive features of the milieu from which it arose. Banim surveys the metropolitan landscape of 1820s London, with its intertwined industries of theatre and publishing. He identifies technological innovation and financial speculation as preeminent trends of his time, and he finds the transatlantic speculations of the 1820s mirrored in the imagined world of 2023 by "cargoes of speculators" who emigrate by "balloon-ship" to establish colonies on the moon"--
