Iwan Rhys Morus How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon: The Story of the Nineteenth-Century Innovators Who Forged the Future

We can believe in Victorians with steam-driven computers. And we can believe Victorians or Edwardians travelling to space in ways we can't really imagine of their predecessors. We can picture them belonging there, and making it part of their Empire, in ways that would be difficult to conceive a puritan divine, or a Regency buck. One of the reasons it is easy to imagine Victorians on the Moon is that they imagined it themselves. The moon seemed to be within the Victorians' grasp, teetering almost on the brink of reachability.