Reviewed by Lucinda Guy

Boxing matches performed by actors wearing asbestos overalls under a layer of fireworks. A burning effigy of the Pope, stuffed with live cats for maximum audio-visual impact. Explosive reenactments of battles, within days of the real thing. A nine-metre-high portrait of Queen Victoria, encircled by the flags of the British Empire. Full-size animations of dramatic rail crashes. A pyrotechnic Father Thames riding a dolphin along the river. The destruction of Pompeii, complete with performers and an erupting volcano. Fireworks co-ordinated with scratch-and-sniff cards for a multi-sensory experience.

In A History of Fireworks, John Withington expands the reader’s vocabulary—marrons, peonies, carnations, squibs, lancework—along with their perception of the purposes of fireworks, including news reporting, theatre, displays of colonial power, and attempts at island postal delivery. This is a meticulous, extremely detailed account of how fireworks have been produced and deployed since the early Chinese firecrackers that exploited the naturally explosive properties of bamboo. There is sufficient chemistry throughout that the reader might attempt to produce some of their own, as did ordinary people in their own homes throughout history, often with disastrous consequences.

Fireworks are big business too, but the evil twin of the fireworks display—war itself—is never far away, and the manufacturers of one kind of explosive were generally the manufacturers of the other. Developments in pyrotechnics transferred to military use, but also served as a replacement, a peacetime show of power and spectacle. Continued use of fireworks at America’s 4th July celebrations have reportedly caused as many deaths as at key battles in the war of Independence. And their use as imperialist propaganda to “overawe the Native Americans”, for example, is documented here with one-sided accounts, such as those of local people who “thought they were rather the works of gods than of men”. More critique of these perspectives would be welcome.

Lost hands, disfigured faces, spontaneous combustion, accidents causing 100s of deaths at once… despite so much risk and suffering, with countless lives lost and buildings destroyed, especially in the eras when fireworks were an underground cottage industry, the continued fascination of fireworks presents a question that isn’t fully addressed here. A passing reference to the sublime, in the chapter on Fireworks in the Arts, could have been explored in depth, and a bit more ‘why’ in addition to Withington’s thorough investigation into what, when and how, might make for another, equally interesting book. Or a final chapter for this one, which ends rather abruptly.

Perhaps this other book is Philip Pullman’s excellent novel for children, The Firework Maker’s Daughter, the plot of which is included here, and its revelation that “Everything that exists flickers like a flame for a moment and then vanishes.” The twin of war and a metaphor for sex, but more than that, the beauty and ephemerality of art, and of life, taken to its logical conclusion, seems to be something people need to witness again and again, oohing and aahing as they do.