Mid-Victorian Fiction and Moving-Image Technologies
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Durham E-Theses The Eye in Motion: Mid-Victorian Fiction and Moving-Image Technologies BUSH, NICOLE,SAMANTHA How to cite: BUSH, NICOLE,SAMANTHA (2015) The Eye in Motion: Mid-Victorian Fiction and Moving-Image Technologies , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11124/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 The Eye in Motion: Mid-Victorian Fiction and Moving-Image Technologies Nicole Bush Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Studies Durham University January 2015 Abstract This thesis reads selected works of fiction by three mid-Victorian writers (Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot) alongside contemporaneous innovations and developments in moving-image technologies, or what have been referred to by historians of film as ‘pre-cinematic devices’. It looks specifically at the moving panorama, diorama, dissolving magic lantern slides, the kaleidoscope, and persistence of vision devices such as the phenakistiscope and zoetrope, and ranges across scientific writing, journalism, letters, and paintings to demonstrate the scope and popularity of visual motion devices. By exploring this history of optical technologies I show how their display, mechanism, and manual operation contributed to a broader cultural and literary interest in the phenomenological experience of animation, decades before the establishment of cinematography as an industry, technology, and viewing practice. Through a close reading of a range of mid-Victorian novels, this thesis identifies and analyses the literary use of language closely associated with moving-image technologies to argue that the Victorian literary imagination reflected upon, drew from, and incorporated reference to visual and technological animation many decades earlier than critics, focusing usually on early twentieth-century cinema and modernist literature, have allowed. It develops current scholarship on Victorian visual culture and optical technologies by a close reading of the language of moving-image devices—found in advertisements, reviews, and descriptions of their physiological operation and spectacle— alongside the choices Victorian authors made to describe precisely how their characters perceived, how they imagined, remembered, and mentally relived particular scenes and images, and how the readers of their texts were encouraged to imaginatively ‘see’ the animated unfolding of the plot and the material dimensionality of its world through a shared understanding of this language of moving images. Contents List of Illustrations……………………………………………….………………… 4 Acknowledgements…………………………………………....…………………… 7 Introduction ‘Something in Motion’: Literature, Technology, and the Cinematic……….…… 8 1. Sights and Sites of Spectacular Stasis: Victorian Visual Culture and Panoramic Narratives…………………………………………………………… 33 2. ‘Pictured!—He Saw’: Moving Panoramas, Dioramas, and Dissolving Views…………………………..……………….……………………………… 65 3. Dynamic Structures and Regulated Animation in the Kaleidoscope……….…... 109 4. Writing the Image: Durable Memory and Revolving Perception in Persistence of Vision Devices………………….……………………………….. 164 5. Seeing Spatially: Tactile Technology and the Mobility of the Eye……….…….. 220 Conclusion, or, Towards the Galloping Horse………………….…………………. 264 Bibliography……………………………………………..…………………………. 268 List of Illustrations Page 1 A phantasmagoria show. 38 2 Section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square. The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, 40 University of Exeter, UK. Item number 85143. 3 Handbill advertising a ‘Panorama of London’ at the Colosseum. The Bill 42 Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, UK. Item number 77255. 4 Inside the Royal Polytechnic Institution. 51 5 ‘The Queen’s Visit to the City’ panorama. The Bill Douglas Cinema 55 Museum, University of Exeter, UK. Item number 69325. 6 Handheld panorama of the Coronation procession of King George IV. The 55 Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, UK. Item number 69264. 7 Advertisement for a moving panorama of a ‘Voyage to Australia’, Regent 75 Street (29 July 1853). John Johnson Collection, Bodelian Library, University of Oxford, UK. Reference Dioramas 1 (21). 8 Excerpt from a handbill advertising Banvard’s Mississippi moving panorama. 77 Egyptian Hall, London ([1848]). John Johnson Collection, Bodelian Library, University of Oxford, UK. Reference Entertainments folder 7 (4) – Panoramas. 9 The architecture of the diorama, showing its rotating amphitheatre. John 83 Johnson Collection, Bodelian Library, University of Oxford, UK. Reference Dioramas 2 (69a). 10 John Heaviside Clark’s portable diorama. The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, 89 University of Exeter, UK. Item number 69058. 11 Pepper’s Ghost. Gaston Tissandier, Popular Scientific Recreations (London, 94 [1883]). The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, UK. Item number 42637. 12 Early twentieth-century dissolving view lantern. Illustrated Catalogue of 102 Magic, Optical, and Dissolving View Lanterns ([1902-3]). The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, UK. Item number 36623. 13 Ruthven’s kaleidoscope, with interchangeable filled glass cells. National 120 Museums Scotland, ref. T.1825.20. 14 Projecting the kaleidoscope’s display. 125 15 Darker’s oxy-hydrogen projection kaleidoscope, and detail of display. 126 16 William Holman Hunt, Kaleidoscope, c.1860. Pencil and watercolour sketch. 147 17.8 cm x 13.4 cm. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. 17 Hexagonal pattern seen through a ‘hexascope’ kaleidoscope. 150 18 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blue Bower (1865). Oil on canvas. 84 x 70.9cm. 151 With kind permission of The Henry Barber Trust, © The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, UK. 19 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Monna Rosa (1867). Oil on canvas. 57 x 40.7cm. 153 Private Collection. 20 Roget’s illustration of the curved spoke phenomena. 174 21 Faraday’s cogged wheel device. 182 22 Mr. Seymour demonstrating the thaumatrope. 184 23 The phenakistiscope. 185 24 Set of five Ackermann fantascope discs, 1833. The National Media Museum, 186 Bradford, UK. Object number 1934-140. 25 ‘The Wheel of Life Polka’, Music Sheet for the Pianoforte by Emile Ettling, 188 Robert Cocks and Co., London. The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, UK. Item number 50440. 26 Victorian zoetropes. The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of 189 Exeter, UK. Item numbers 69010 and 69110. 27 Front cover of H. G. Clarke’s pamphlet on the zoetrope. British Library 190 General Reference Collection 8715.aaaa.45. 28 The praxinoscope-théâtre. 193 29 Illustration and detail of the Great Hall, showing the large ‘wheel of life’. 194 An earlier version of parts of Chapter Three are forthcoming in ‘Repetition, Virtuality, and Mechanical Pattern: The Significance of the Kaleidoscope for the ‘Fine and Useful Arts’’, Art versus Industry: New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth- Century Britain, ed. by Kate Nichols, Rebecca Wade, and Gabriel Williams (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author’s prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Acknowledgements The research for this thesis was conducted at two institutions, and I am grateful to friends and colleagues at both Northumbria University and Durham University for their welcome and support. I am particularly grateful to the librarians at both Universities who ably managed my numerous inter-library loan requests. My thanks go also to the staff of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum and the University of Westminster archives. Moving to a new city to undertake this doctoral work, I was lucky enough to meet a fantastic bunch of fellow Victorianists with whom I could share the faltering starts, swimming middle, and hushed end of a PhD. We worked together on reading groups, grant applications, conferences, and exhibitions, and I am very thankful to have had the chance to undertake these activities with colleagues I could also call friends. For the sharing of anecdotes, references, advice, good and bad fortunes, numerous THE articles, and drinks at unsociable hours in the Carriage, I will always fondly remember and be particularly grateful to Harriet Briggs, Leanne Stokoe and, of course, Kate Katigbak and Beatrice Turner. Throughout the research and writing of this thesis, my supervisor Peter Garratt has plentifully offered his support, advice, and intellectual guidance, and for this he is due my sincerest gratitude. I am very thankful for his enthusiasm for the project, ready involvement in the topic, and inspiriting feedback on my writing and ideas. His humour and kind friendship have been much valued across the long process