In 1873, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell published "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" in Cambridge, presenting his unified mathematical theory of electromagnetic phenomena. Maxwell's equations demonstrated that light itself was an electromagnetic wave, unifying optics with electricity and magnetism in a single theoretical framework. This work, written at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, is considered one of the greatest achievements in theoretical physics and laid the groundwork for all twentieth-century electrical technology.

Maxwell's unification of light, electricity, and magnetism into a single mathematical framework had profound implications for the literary imagination. If light was an electromagnetic wave, then all visual experience was fundamentally electrical, a realization that shifted the metaphorical ground beneath centuries of poetic light imagery. Maxwell, who wrote poetry himself and was a friend of Lewis Carroll, embodied the interconnectedness of literary and scientific culture in Victorian Cambridge. His theory's prediction of electromagnetic waves traveling through empty space suggested invisible worlds of energy surrounding us, a concept that would profoundly influence Symbolist and modernist poetry.