ABSTRACT
The stories discussed in this chapter illustrate the changing nature of the relationship and contexts, and how they influenced writings about electricity. The chapter demonstrates the variety of fiction responses to electricity, which ranges from comic ephemera to elaborate tales of the supernatural. The comic potential of being electrified was fully recognised by late 1830s and 1840s periodical writers. However, literary engagements with scientific concepts were often determined by publication forums and readerships as much as authors' understandings of scientific developments. Nineteenth-century fiction authors appear to be keenly aware of the tension between the emerging authority of laboratory-based science and the anecdotal nature of the supernatural, and they explore the fictional possibilities of both. Investigations of telepathy, telekinesis, mesmerism and the like, as aspects of science, were widespread and, in fiction and non-fiction, scientific advances often contributed to perceived alliances between the supernatural and electricity.
