‘The Steam Arm’:

Proto-Steampunk Themes in a Victorian Popular Song

Abstract

This article introduces an early Victorian popular song, with some preliminary reflections on how it, and indeed similar texts, might be relevant to twentieth and twenty-first century practitioners and critics of steampunk. ‘The Steam Arm’ describes a veteran who acquires a prosthetic limb, with disastrous consequences. As a text from the start of the ‘steam age’, it reveals the fantasies and anxieties surrounding technological progress in early Victorian literature.