Immersive media: communal identity and the Victorian magic lantern show

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Philip and Rosemary Banham, David Evans, and Robert MacDonald for permitting the reproduction of images from their slide collections. I would also like to thank the amazing Richard Crangle, who has, for many years, generously answered my numerous questions on the magic lantern, and whose tireless work creating and maintaining the Lucerna database made this essay possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to Laurent Mannoni, the first sign of the “true magic lantern” is in 1659, with its requisite light source, slide carriage, lens, and optical box (2000, 33). In terms of the technological principle, the magic lantern changed little between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Slide genres and how they were produced and performed, however, changed dramatically throughout the nineteenth century, moving from artisan-produced slides for professional lanternists to mass-produced slides for independent performances.

2 Richard Altick notes that the rise in popularity is linked to the development of more compact (and thus more affordable) projectors, and manufacturers’ ability to reduce slide size from eight inches to three inches, which dropped the cost from twenty pounds to a single shilling per slide (1978). According to Richard Crangle, the final two decades of the nineteenth century was when the lantern was “at its most commercially developed, with successful enterprises covering most sectors of the market for supply of lanterns and slides” (2004, 39).

3 One notable exception is Phillip Roberts’s “Optical Pantomimes at the Royal Polytechnique Institution: George Buckland’s 1875 Production of Gabriel Grub and the Grim Goblin” (2016).

4 For criticism addressing the magic lantern’s use in literature, see Castle 1995; Armstrong 2008; Plunkett 2005; Marsh 2009; Orestano 2000; and Smith 2005. For scholarship on the lantern’s influence on the development of cinema, see Mannoni 2000; Kember 2009; and Rossell 1998.

5 York & Son and Bamforth & Co. were the leading life model manufacturers, together mass-producing roughly 850 sets between 1880 and 1910 (Robinson, Herbert, and Crangle 2001).

6 According to Karen Eifler, the cultural diffusion of charitable magic lantern shows outside urban settings was due to lecture circuits and traveling horse vans. From an examination of newspaper reports on audiences for the Church Army Van Mission alone, she estimates that, between 1892–1914, lantern services reached at least 1.5 million people, although the number could reasonably be estimated as high as 17.5 million (2010).

7 Bamforth & Co. was run by Methodists and did very well by manufacturing slides for the temperance movement (Heard and Crangle 2005).

8 See Claggett, “The Animal in the Machine: Punishment and Pleasure in Victorian Magic Lantern Shows” (2018).

9 Eifler’s work on socio-political and religious use of the lantern dovetails with my own insofar as she also stresses the goal of “creating emotional bonds to a community beyond the (temporary) exhibition” (2019, 65). Her methodology, however, focuses on the stated intentions of such organizations as the Church Army and the Co-operative Movement and reported audience reactions to specific performances, rather than the formal aspects of the lantern readings and slide sets.

10 Slide sets and lantern readings typically share the same title, although they are independently created. Italicized titles appearing in this essay refer to the slide sets produced by manufacturers, whereas lantern readings with the same name appear in quotations.

11 Speaking from my own experience as an amateur lanternist, projected images can be rendered quite large – indeed, almost life-size – simply by adjusting the lens and the lantern’s distance from the screen.

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Shalyn Claggett

Shalyn Claggett is a Professor of English and Graduate Coordinator at Mississippi State University. Her book Equal Natures: Popular Brain Science and Victorian Women's Writing (SUNY Press, 2023) argues that notable women authors used scientific understandings of the brain to challenge socially constructed forms of power. She is also the co-editor (with Lara Karpenko) of Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age (University of Michigan Press, 2017). She is currently at work on a book titled Victorian Cinema: Magic Lantern Shows and the British Imagination, which explores the relationship between lantern shows and other forms of narrative Victorian visual culture.