I don’t know about you youngsters, but to Old Fogies like me ‘gaslighting’ was a way of illuminating our city streets before the advent of electricity. And very romantic it was, too, although those shadowy corners gave plenty of opportunity for the likes of Jack the Ripper to operate unseen.
Do you remember Robert Louis Stephenson’s evocation of a Victorian childhood in Edinburgh in The Lamplighter?
For every night at teatime and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.
Or, for a more jaundiced view, one of TS Eliot’s disenchanted Preludes, written in the 1930s:
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
These luminous observations were prompted this week by the annual resurgence of the lucciole, the fireflies, flashing lustily as they flitted around in the gardens and grounds, particularly by the river. These are males searching for a mate, and the atmosphere is as sexually charged as in the deer rutting season, though mercifully not so loud.
It is said, probably inaccurately and probably by me, that when the lucciole are at full throttle, it is possible to read the Corriere della Sera at night with no artificial lighting. Watching the fireflies brings to mind WB Yeats’ description (which I always slightly misquote) of “a woman of such shining loveliness that men threshed corn at midnight by a lock of her golden hair.†What a wondrous image – and how very different from the images conjured up by today’s usage of the term ‘gaslighting.
You youngsters will know, and I quote the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Gaslighting (noun).1:psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator. 2:the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.
The term comes from the title of a 1938 play, and movies based on it, in which a man tries to convince he wife she is going mad, secretly making the house’s gaslights dim, and denying that they are doing so, persuading her that she can’t trust her own senses.
The dictionary says: “When gaslighting was first used in the mid-20th century, it referred to a kind of deception like that in the plots mentioned above (sense 1). In the current century, the word has come to refer also to something simpler and broader: “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage†(sense 2).
“In this use, the word is at home with other terms relating to modern forms of deception and manipulation, such as ‘fake news’’ and ‘deepfake’.â€
It was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2022.
O tempora! O mores! as Cicero would say. What a far cry from the cosy Edinburgh childhood teas of Stephenson’s The Lamplighter.