Right at the end of the reign of Queen Victoria, as the 19th century turned into the 20th, a serialised novel appeared in the Strand magazine called ‘The First Men in the Moon’.
Published 35 years after Jules Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon’, HG Wells’ novel hypothesises on concepts that we now know – thanks largely to the Apollo missions of the 1960s – to be accurate. Leaving aside the English novelist’s prediction of ‘great beasts’ and ‘monsters of mere fatness’, there are more recognisable references to how desolate the Moon is – think Buzz Aldrin’s “magnificent desolation” – and weightlessness. The inescapable fact is that lunar landings featured large in the Victorian consciousness.
More importantly, says Iwan Rhys Morus in his excellent ‘How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon: The Story of the Nineteenth-Century Innovators Who Forged the Future’ (Icon Books, £25, ISBN 9781785789281), during this phase of the Industrial Revolution there was an...