In September 1838, Mr. Charles Green, already considered England’s greatest balloonist (or aeronaut, as he preferred to say), entertained London crowds by making several ascents in his newest balloon, the Nassau, from Vauxhall Gardens. On one of these, he was accompanied by John Poole, then one of London’s leading playwrights (and soon to be author of the comic classic, Little Pedlington and the Pedlingtonians. Together they flew across London from west to east, enjoying a bottle of sherry and watching dusk settle over the city, until they came to ground somewhere along the road to Chelmsford.
Crotchets in the Air, Poole’s account of the trip, is as light as the gas filling Green’s balloon and unashamedly unscientific. “Why did you go?” Poole asks himself in hindsight. “To get out of the city,” is his reply, the balloon merely offering a novel and altogether more pleasant alternative to going by land:
One gets tired of being suffocated in coaches, choaked with coaldust in steam-boats, rattled and rumbled on railroads. But, up yonder, the ineffable stillness, the progressing movement without the slightest sensation of motion! whether up, down, forward, back, you seem to be suspended motionless in the air, whilst everything above, below, and around, is complaisantly taking the trouble of moving out of your way.
And unlike these forms of locomotion, travel by balloon is … quiet.
And then, the noiselessness, the perfect quiet, which I have before alluded to! It is the sublime of stillness. They who have not heard it — do not add this expression to your collection of bulls — they who have not heard it (for the ear is affected by it) can form no idea of it. In the tillest night, on the quietest spot on earth, some sound is occasionally heard, how soft or slight soever it be — the ripple of water, the buzzing of an insect, the fall of a leaf. But up there, you might fancy yourself living in an age antecedent to the creation of sound. There might you indulge to the uttermost in the luxury of thought, reflection, meditation there revel in all the delights of imagination, with not the ruffling of a utterfly’s wing to put your fancies to flight.
Indeed, the experience is so novel and so much more graceful than any of the land-bound options that even the departure comes in an unexpected manner. “I do not despise you for talking about a balloon going up, for it is an error which you share in common with some millions of our fellow-creatures,” Poole writes his friend. Instead, when Mr. Green casts off his anchor ropes, the balloon sits still and the land falls away.
[D]own it went with everything on it; and your poor, paltry, little Dutch toy of a town, (your Great Metropolis, as you insolently call it,) having been placed on casters for the occasion — I am satisfied of that — was gently rolled away from under us.
And the sights to be seen from several angels up (as RAF pilots used to put it) surpass those of travel on land (“Trees, rivers, and fields; fields, trees, and rivers! with here and there a hill some certain number of feet higher or lower than another!”). “Sights, oh! such sights! Gulliver not fabulous. Men and women six inches tall; and in proportion as we rose, they diminished — to five, four, three inches.”
Height eliminates all distinctions of class or rank: “The proud, the humble, the dignified, the lowly, yet, to us, the greatest amongst them was undistinguishable from the rest!” Poole admits, though, “I am glad I am down again, for I was imbibing a very contemptuous opinion of my species.”
Poole traces their route in the landmarks below. Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, Blackfriars, St. Paul’s. Seeing St. Paul’s from above gives him the frisson of discovering a whole new sense of awe: “like possibilifying of an impossibility.” Seeing Newgate Prison, on the other hand, evokes feelings of outrage.
With what stomach for your breakfast would you get out of your bed at eight in the morning to be strangled at nine, in the open face of day, and in the presence of thousands of persons collected together to glut their eyes with the sight of a human being throttled with a rope — for such is the fashionable phrase — you call it the cant — for describing the execution of a murderer: how, I say, would you like that?
And as they drift away from the city and the sun sets, Poole sees London as any airline passenger would know it — but as none of its residents has seen it before: “And now conceive yourself looking down on an enormous map of London, with its suburbs to the east, north, and south, as far as the eye could reach, DRAWN IN LINES OF FIRE!”
Not everything about air travel is better, however.
There are no inns in the whole of that country so that when what we had “got in that bottle,” which was some sherry, was exhausted in drinking to the health of our dear little Queen, we could not get our bottle replenished for love or money.
Crotchets in the Air can be found on the Internet Archive and will take less time to read than it took Green and Poole to travel across London. It’s a sublime little gem and a perfect escape for anyone suffering from the lockdown blues.