gaslight era
Late nineteenth century
The gaslight era is the period roughly from the 1840s to the 1910s when gas lighting illuminated streets and homes in Western cities.
The term evokes Victorian and Edwardian atmospheres—fog-shrouded streets, horse-drawn carriages, top hats and cloaks.
It appears in genre fiction, film, and design: a gaslight-era mystery, gaslight-era architecture.
The related aesthetic "gaslamp fantasy" blends this setting with supernatural elements.
- gas lampsFuel-burning light fixtures
- street lightingMunicipal outdoor illumination
- gas burnersFlame-producing cooking devices
- gasworksFactory producing heating fuel
- Victorian societyBritain under its longest-reigning queen
hansom · fog · pea soup fog · Victorian architecture · illumination · music halls · gin palace · lamplighter · urbanization · early cinema · suffragette movement · penny dreadfuls · coal gas · domestic life · Edwardian fashion · streetlamp · industrial revolution · literary realism
- 1800s AmericaOregon Trail, Trail of Tears, transcontinental railroad, Civil War, Abraham Lincoln
- erasera, epoch, age, bronze age, period
- Second EmpireNapoleon III, Second Empire, coup d'etat, Bonapartists, authoritarian rule
- Victorian TheatreHenrik Ibsen, proscenium, Oscar Wilde, footlights, backstage
- melodramavillain, heroine, hero, damsel in distress, happy ending
gaslight eradigital age
Epoch of computerized life
information age · computer age · modern era · space age · atomic age