Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1 Keith Summers Collection C1002/71. 2 An example of this very different performance style can be heard in the Roger Wagner Chorale’s version of ‘Rio Grande’, with its key shifts and final Broadway-style flourish on the word ‘Rio!’ (pronounced ‘Ree-oh’). 3 As Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies note, Conrad is conflating two songs: ‘The Banks of Sacramento’ and the capstan shanty ‘Santa Anna’ or ‘The Plains of Mexico’ (CL 4: 352n). In 1915, Conrad declined an invitation to collaborate with the British composer Granville Bantock, pleading damaged vocal chords. The details of Bantock’s proposal are not known but since he had recently begun collecting and scoring folk songs from around the world, he could well have approached Conrad about using sea-shanties in an opera or song-cycle. I am grateful to Mr Ronald Bleach for supplying biographical information about Bantock. 4 See Hawthorn, 2003. 5 I am indebted to Mr Gavin Sprott for this information. 6 Times Literary Supplement, 3565 (25 June 1970): 673. See Purdy, 1984; Hunter, 1983; Griffith, 1995; Hampson, 2000; Youngs, 1994; Roberts, 1993; and Parry, 1983. 7 Watts, 1989, 97–103; Morf, 1976, 80–1; Tanner, 19. See also Dryden, 2002; Collits, 2004; Mallios, 2003. 8 Morf, 1976, 292. 9 Conrad, 1981, 155; Sherry, 1966 and 1971. 10 On Conrad’s enthusiasm for each of these activities, see Conrad, 1981: 20, 103, 110, and 32. 11 See Hobsbawm, 1989, and Perkin, 1989. For a detailed case study of these changes in the context of Bristol see Meller, 1976. It is a nice irony that Conrad, by inclination a Conservative, should have been offered a knighthood by the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. 12 See, for example, Leonard, 1998, and Varnedoe and Gopnik, 1991. 13 For a fuller account of the history of this debate in relation to the theorists of the Frankfurt School, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, the theories of Antonio Gramsci, and the development of Cultural Studies as a discipline in the Anglo-American academy see Strinati, 1995, and Storey, 2003: 1–62. See also Brantlinger, 1983, 222–48. 14 See Williams, 1987. 15 Possibly in hopes of resolving such ‘institutions’, Italy’s Agricultural Ministry launched a scheme in October 2002 that would give credentials to restaurants serving ‘genuine’ Italian cuisine. 16 The subjects of another ink sketch that Conrad made in the mid-1890s (Knowles and Moore, 2000: 294) are not, as Jessie’s pencilled caption opti- mistically suggests, ‘ballet dancers’ but, rather, chorus girls lifting their skirts. 198 Notes 199 1 Visual Entertainment 1 Oesterreichischer Komet 220 ( July 1914): 4. Reference kindly supplied by Mr Günter Krenn. 2 Brixener Chronik, 9 January 1915: 3. 3 See Moore, 1997. 4 Conrad’s residual unease about the medium should not be confused with the myth that early film spectators were unable to differentiate between illusion and fact. See Gunning, 1995a. 5 Times, 27 May 1914: 2. Marie Lloyd was appearing at the Gaiety Music Hall in Chatham when Conrad literally crashed through the village in late August 1904. 6 See Reed, 1997: 27–49. 7 See MacKenzie, 1986; Price, 1972, especially 132–77; Schivelbusch, 1988: 115–20. Conrad recalled having suppressed giggles during a visit to Sydney Pawling, his and Caine’s publisher, ‘with the photo of the Great Callan, on the mantelpiece, looking at me’ (CL 3: 340). 8 See, for example, Suárez, 2001; Fraser, 1994, 1–13; Tiessen, 1997; and Cohen, 2004. 9 ‘There are millions of perfectly healthy people who are stupid, for whom all art other than oleograph reproduction is morbid’ (CL 5: 238–9). 10 Shipwrecks were a favourite theme among audiences during the magic lantern’s heyday in the 1880s and 1890s. A regular feature of disaster photograph-slides such as The Bay of Panama, a ship wrecked off Cornwall in 1891, they also appeared in painted dissolving views such as the popular melodrama Jane Conquest in which a captain’s wife, like Jane Dunbar in Conrad’s ‘The Partner’ (1911), watches despairingly from the shore as her husband’s ship founders. See Humphries, 1989: 60–2 and 150–3. 11 Hawthorn, 2002: xxv. See also Peacock, 1996: 113–33. 12 See Hepworth, 1894: 281–2. 13 See Powell, 2002: 126–37, and Schwartz, 1998: 157–76. 14 CL 1: 56; CL 5: 452, 686; LL 2: 335. See Jean-Aubry, 1924. 15 Ryf, 1972; Houston, 1998; Joy, 2003. 16 See Pugliatti, 1988; Bufkin, 1975; and Baldanza, 1980. 17 See CL 4: 210, 4: 218, 5.696; LL 2: 270. 18 See also Hand, 2003; Hand and Wilson, 2002: 1–78; and Wheatley, 2002. 19 The aphorism quoted by Callan in Conrad and Ford’s The Inheritors, ‘Photography – is not – Art’ (I 15), is pure Baudelaire. 20 On the theory of retinal retention in Victorian fiction and scientific literature see Gunning, 1995b: 37–9. 21 For humorous treatments of the subject in fiction see Lang, 1895; and Griffith, 1896. The fabrication of spirit photographs was also mocked in numerous early films, including J. Stuart Blackton’s A Visit to a Spiritualist (1897), G. A. Williamson’s Photographing a Ghost (1898), George Méliès’ The Spiritualist Photographer (1903), J. H. Martin’s The Medium Exposed (1906) and Arthur Cooper’s A Visit to a Spiritualist (1906). 22 Conrad again associates Stead and Crookes with spirit photography in ‘The Planter of Malata’ (1914), where they are alluded to as ‘a very famous author [whose] ghost is a girl’ and ‘a very great man of science’ (WT 67). 200 Notes 23 On Stead and Conrad, see Donovan, 2000. 24 In ‘The Return’ (1898), Alvan Hervey is granted a similarly ‘ghastly kind of clairvoyance’ by the news of his wife’s infidelity: ‘[H]e could see the towns and fields of the earth, its sacred places, its temples and its houses, peopled by monsters – by monsters of duplicity, lust, and murder ....How many men and women at this very moment were plunged in abominations – med- itated crimes’ (TU 135). 25 In The Shadow-Line, a photograph of the deceased captain’s sweetheart reminds Conrad’s narrator of ‘a low-class medium’ (SL 59). 26 See the essays by Cedric Watts, Robert Hampson and Hugh Epstein in Moore, 1992. 27 Anarchists and music-hall artists could be neighbours in other ways, too. When Conrad wrote the story in late 1905, the Variety Artists’ Federation was being radicalized by an influx of anarchist militants, precipitating an acri- monious and highly public strike in Spring 1906 that was dubbed ‘The Music Hall War’ in the press. In a deleted manuscript passage of ‘The Partner’, Conrad describes a stevedore’s management of two music halls in ‘the “Variety”’ world’ as bringing him into contact with ‘certain audacious unsus- pected adventures which brush [past] our doors, our respectable uncontami- nated doors’ (Dalgarno, 1975, 42). 28 The theoretical and methodological problems raised by this ‘modernity thesis’ are usefully examined in Singer, 2001: 101–30. 29 Compare The Arrow of Gold: ‘. that odd air wax figures have of being aware of their existence being but a sham’ (AG 69). 30 For detail of the Aquarium’s entertainments see Robertson, 1897: 216. 31 A consideration which perhaps led Conrad to depart from his source: an off-hand remark that the original bomb victim’s sister ‘committed suicide afterwards’ (SA 5). 32 See Hockenjos, forthcoming 2005. I am greatly indebted to Vreni Hockenjos for allowing me to read work-in-progress from her doctoral dissertation, ‘Picturing Dissolving Views: August Strindberg as Media History’ (Department of Film Studies, Stockholm University). For an example of immediate precur- sors to the cinematic life review see the description of Dan Dabberton’s Dream (1892), a combination-photograph slide-show that featured a reformed drunkard’s pictorial review of his life, in Cook, 1963, 111–13. 33 For a photograph of the life review in Histoire d’un crime see Olsson, 1996: 37. 34 On the prominence of tableaux in contemporary dramaturgy, see Brewster, 1997. 35 For photographs of the Musée Grévin’s tableau series ‘Histoire d’un Crime’, see Schwartz, 1998: 124–6. 36 Curiously, Andrew Michael Roberts passes over this image without comment in his acute discussion of the novel’s gendered visual politics in Roberts, 1992. 37 All are included on the ‘Opinions of the Press’ page of the 1898 Heinemann edition. 38 The statement also appeared in several subsequent American editions of the novel. See Najder, 1984: 205. 39 See Barnes, 1996–98, 2: 143–5, 1: 194; and Moore, 1997: 40–1. In September 1898, London newspapers such as the Daily Mail advertised the Palace as showing ‘all the newest pictures of the Spanish-American War series’. On the Notes 201 cinematic dimensions of what Conrad called Crane’s ‘imaged style’ (LE 121), see Brown, 1996: 125–66. 40 Several hand-colouring processes were in existence by 1900, Kinemacolour films were shown regularly in London from 1909, and there were several attempts at synchronizing sound and projected images in the early 1910s. 41 See Cartwright, 1995: 106–7. 42 Early examples of this trope include the anonymous magazine story ‘In the Dark’ (Pick-Me-Up, 16 May 1896) and Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘Mrs Bathurst’ (1904). 43 See Dutheil de la Rochère, 2005. 44 Unpublished in his lifetime, Conrad’s text is reprinted in Schwab, 1965. 45 In The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), G. K. Chesterton likens the shimmer of sunlight and shadows as ‘almost recalling the dizziness of a cinemato- graph’ before recounting a protracted chase by horse, car, and fire-engine (Chesterton, 1908: 223).