Helen Groth

Kaleidoscopic Vision and Literary Invention in an "Age of Things": David Brewster, Don Juan and "A Lady's Kaleidoscope"

David Brewsters Kaleidoscope caused a sensation in early nineteenth-century London and introduced a new and potent visual metaphor which still animates modern parlance. Yet the kaleidoscopes considerable cultural impact has received scant critical attention, partly because it lacks the uncanny proto-cinematic verisimilitude of the diorama, the panorama, or the stereoscope. This article reconstructs this overlooked reception history, moving back in time from recent theoretical engagements with the kaleidoscope to David Brewsters own account of his invention and its contemporary reception by both consumers and writers. This history reveals a sustained interrogation of the concept and experience of a unique form of visual transformation that never allows the eye to rest.

Moving images : nineteenth-century reading and screen practices

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices Chapter 1: Moving Books in Regency London Chapter 2: Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media Chapter 3: Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott Chapter 4: Reading Habits and Magic Lanterns: Dickens and Dr Peppers Ghost Chapter 5: Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice Chapter 6: Flickering Effects: George Robert Sims and the Psychology of the Moving Image Chapter 7: Literary Projections and Residual Media: Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul Bibliography.

Projections of Alice: anachronistic reading and the temporality of mediation

Anachronism is a particularly useful conceptual mechanism for unpacking the ways in which the work of a writer such as Carroll exemplifies the paradoxical temporality of representation at a transformative moment in media history. Retracing the late nineteenth-century circulatory networks in which images of Carrolls Alice moved from illustrated printed book, through the extractive distortions of a voracious reviewing system encompassing periodicals, magazines and newspapers, into the visual sphere of theatrical, magic lantern and early cinematic mediation, this article reveals the contours of a distinctively modern literary system at work. All these various media formations were governed to a greater or lesser extent by the logic of immediacy, of drawing the reader/viewer up close or projecting them into the same space as Alice, or alternatively, of projecting Alice backwards and forwards across time and space at the will of the reader. This article argues that the tantalizing prospect of bringing Alice to life that these various media promise, of literally being able to reach out and touch her as if she was there, is inherently anachronistic in it technological utopianism, that is, if we accept Gillian Roses suggestive concept of anachronism as “the time in which we may not be, and yet we must imagine we will have been.”

Domestic phantasmagoria : the Victorian literary domestic and experimental visuality

Illusion is a source of trauma in the opening sections of Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography. One encounter with a domestic magic lantern sends Martineau into a state of high anxiety. In its dismantled state, the lantern holds no mysteries for her. She recalls seeing it cleaned by daylight, handling all its parts, and “understanding its whole structure.” It was a different story at night, in a darkened room, when “my panics were really unaccountable. They were a matter of pure sensation without any intellectual justification whatever, even of the wildest kind. . . . such was my terror of the white circle on the wall, and of the moving slides.”1 Familiar apparitions flickering on a wall trigger an irrational affective response that reinforces Martineau’s alienation from her domestic environs. A possible explanation for this reaction lies a few pages earlier in a dream sequence: “Sometimes the dim light of the windows in the night seemed to advance till it pressed upon my eyeballs, and then the windows would seem to recede to an infinite distance. If I laid my hand under my head on the pillow, the hand seemed to vanish almost to a point, while the head grew as big as a mountain.”2 Martineau’s vivid dreaming takes on a phantasma-

Mediating Popular Fictions: From the Magic Lantern to the Cinematograph

In his travel memoir Pictures from Italy (1846), Charles Dickens turned to the analogy of the magic lantern to describe the way his mind mediated the beauty and spectacle of the landscape. He observed the ‘rapid and unbroken succession of novelties that had passed before me’, noting that ‘[a]t intervals, some one among them would stop’ to allow his mind to focus on the image for a moment before ‘it would dissolve, like a view in a magic lantern’ (1846, p. 107). Decades later, Proust’s narrator in the opening sections of Swann’s Way in Remembrance of Things Past (1913) wrote of the magic lantern images of Golo from the medieval legend of Genevieve of Brabant, ‘advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds’:

Panoramic Byron: Reading, History and Pre-cinematic Spectacle

In 1853, George Henry Lewes (1896, 3: 250) wrote in disgust of Charles Kean’s spectacular performance of Byron’s Sardanapalus: ‘Is the Drama nothing more than a Magic Lantern on a large scale? Was Byron only a pretext for a panorama? It is a strange state of Art when the mere accessories become the aim and purpose of representation.’ Lewes clings here to an ideal of authenticity profoundly antithetical to the collaborative ‘literary system of Byronism’ that Jerome Christensen (1993, xvi) argues sustained and disseminated the ‘residual affective charge’ of aristocratic glamour associated with the poet. This chapter reads the popular nineteenth-century visual mediation of Byron in a range of panoramic formats as part of this Byronic literary system’s habitual association of reading Byron with the automatic recognition of visual cues and emulative re-enactment. Beginning with the circulation of extracts from Byron’s poems in early panoramic guides and reviews of various Leicester Square panoramas and concluding with the spectacular use of panoramic technologies in mid-nineteenth century adaptations of one of Byron’s many controversial historical fictions, Sardanapalus, this chapter argues that the inter-medial and miscellaneous reading practices encouraged by these various panoramic revisions of Byron constitute far more than a mere accessory to the ‘aim and purpose of representation’.

Literary nostalgia and early victorian photographic discourse

to “look before and after,” and see whither leads the path he is pursuing: . . . The above should be the attitude to photography. It is long since crossed the pons asinorum, and entered the broad champaign which lies stretched before it. It remains to be seen whether it will ever climb the fabled mount or penetrate the charmed circle so jealously guarded, and be welcomed as an equal, instead of being coldly received as a parvenu or intruder. Stephen Thompson2