“Atomic Wonders: Radioactive Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Fiction”

In the words of American historian Henry Adams, when in 1898 Marie Curie extracted from uranium ore the two ‘new’ elements that she (and Pierre Curie and later Gustave Bémont) called polonium and radium, an entirely new age began. Adams calls the more intriguing ‘matter’, radium, a “metaphysical bomb”. Indeed, as Lawrence Badash has made clear, after the tremendous craze for Roentgen’s X-Ray photography in the late 1890s, radium had to wait before it eventually made a similar scientific and epistemic global impact. And yet, in the words of historian of science Luis Campos, it was “the most wonderful and perplexing thing the modern world had ever seen – or had never seen…”. A substance both new and old, rare and unprecedently powerful, it seemed to offer amazement and riches, even at a time (from the late nineteenth century to the Thirties) when its tremendous potential for damage was unknown. Already in 1895, had the novel The Crack of Doom by Irish author Robert Cromie portrayed an atomic explosion, one year ahead of Becquerel’s discovery of ‘radioactivity’. But it was after 1898, on the spur of the international mania for radium as spectacle and as commodity, that literature recorded and responded to such amazing scientific discoveries with works that read it as a potential instrument for destruction, as a very vibrant matter enmeshed in a global market of imperial exploitation, but also as a literal source of future political revolution. In this chapter I read both Tono-Bungay (1909) and The World Set Free (1914) by HG Wells, who certainly read and appreciated physicist Frederick Soddy’s 1909 work The Interpretation of Radium and who imagines a world paradoxically made free by unleashed atomic energy in a fictional ‘world to end all wars’. But I also attend to a very different and controversial voice, that of Marie Corelli, whose interest in science, and radioactivity in particular, is less obviously well-known. Her novels The Life Everlasting (1911) and The Young Diana (1918) offer a different view of radium, by depicting it as a source of “life”, with vitalizing and rejuvenating effects which were also experimented upon in laboratories around the world.