The electric lamps are lit

Text 1: The Night of the New Light, by Martha Greaves

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

For a month the whole town has talked of nothing else. Poles have gone up in the market place, tall and raw and smelling of tar, with glass globes at their tops like the heads of enormous dandelions; men from London have strung wires between them and dug up the Corn Street pavement and been cursed at by every carter in the county. The gas company has written to the paper three times, each letter angrier than the last.

Tonight they lit it. By seven o’clock the square was so packed that I could not see my own feet, and the windows of the Swan were crowded with faces, and boys had climbed the market cross and clung there like ivy. The mayor made a speech that nobody heard. Then a gentleman in a silk hat raised his hand, somebody far off threw a switch, and nothing happened.

Nothing, for perhaps a dozen heartbeats. A groan began to rise from the crowd. And then, with a hiss and a crackle like fat thrown upon a fire, the globes flickered, faltered, and burst into a light so white, so fierce and so sudden that a great gasp went up from three thousand throats together, and women covered their eyes, and a horse in Corn Street reared and bolted.

I have tried since to describe that light, and cannot. It was not like gaslight, which is yellow and kindly and makes every face look well. It was a hard, cold, searching brilliance that flattened everything it touched. Every brick in the Town Hall stood out as sharp as if it had been drawn with a pen. Every face about me was the colour of chalk. I saw my neighbour Mrs Dobbs as I had never seen her, every line and wrinkle, and I am afraid she saw me the same.

I walked home by the old lamps in Sheep Street, and was glad of their dimness. They are to take them down in the spring.

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