Notes
Introduction
1. Not least because Arrival of a Train was not actually shown at the first public screening of films by the Lumières at the Salon Indien du Grand Café on December 28, 1895, a date that is often associated with the birth of cinema. For an explanation of why audiences for Arrival of a Train were extremely unlikely to have panicked, see Martin Loiperdinger, “Lumiere's Arrival of the Train: Cinema's Founding Myth,” trans. Bernd Elzer, Moving Image 4, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 89–118; Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Reading, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford University Press, 2004), 862–76.
2. Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (University of Exeter Press, 2000), 267.
3. This effect is most frequently referred to today as flicker fusion. See Barbara Anderson and Joseph Anderson, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited,” Journal of Film and Video 45, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 3–12.
4. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16.
5. See Rachel Teukolsky, Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Oxford University Press, 2020); Susan Zieger, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century, Fordham University Press, 2018); Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford University Press, 2008).
6. Teukolsky, Picture World, 8.
7. Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2007), 30.
8. Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford University Press, 2008), 139. Other examples of scholarship that place the novel in the context of Victorian “new media” include Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Harvard University Press, 1999); Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Aaron Worth, Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918 (Ohio State University Press, 2014).
9. Work on nineteenth-century literature and optical media includes Helen Groth, Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2014); John Plunkett, “Optical Recreations and Victorian Literature,” Literature and the Visual Media 58 (2005): 1–28; Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Zone, 2013); David J. Jones, Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-Cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670–1910 (University of Wales Press, 2011); Meegan Kennedy, “‘Throes and Struggles . . . Witnessed with Painful Distinctness’: The Oxy-Hydrogen Microscope, Performing Science, and the Projection of the Moving Image,” Victorian Studies 62, no. 1 (2019): 85–118; Jonathan Potter, Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking, Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2003). Two excellent studies of eighteenth-century literature and optical media also deserve mention here: Julie Park, My Dark Room: Spaces of the Inner Self in Eighteenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press, 2023); Peter Otto, Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2011).
10. See Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (University of Michigan Press, 2012); John Plotz, Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience Since Dickens (Princeton University Press, 2018); Timothy Gao, Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2021); Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2012); Jules Law, “Virtual Evidence,” Victorian Studies 56, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 411–24; Jules Law, “Victorian Virtual Reality,” in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=jules-law-victorian-virtual-reality, accessed December 13, 2023; Jonathan Farina, “Dickens’ ‘As If’: Analogy and Victorian Virtual Reality,” Victorian Studies 53, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 427–36.
11. For instance, optical media are given strikingly short shrift in Are We There Yet?, a study of virtual travel in the Victorian period that has barely a passing mention for the stereoscope, the paradigmatic virtual travel medium of the nineteenth century. Byerly's claim that virtual reality entails “a projection of the self into a fictive environment” grounded in “a sense of locatedness” that provides “a crucial connection between the physical self and the imaginative environment” would be significantly enhanced through a discussion of travel stereographs. See Byerly, Are We There Yet?, 15–16. While Plotz's Semi-Detached includes a chapter on William Morris's use of the magic lantern, it focuses on the relationship between the lantern and printing press as visual technologies, not the lantern's role in a growing virtual media culture. In his essay “Victorian Virtual Reality,” Jules Law gestures promisingly toward the relationship between virtuality in Middlemarch and technologies of visual illusion like the stereoscope, with an emphasis on “enhanced visual depth of field” as a reality effect in Victorian fiction. However, the discussion is brief and not fully conceptualized.
12. On the relationship between Western magic and colonialism in the nineteenth century, see Graham M. Jones, Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy (University of Chicago Press, 2017); Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard University Press, 2002); Peter Lamont and Crispin Bates, “Conjuring Images of India in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Social History 32, no. 3 (August 2007): 308–24; Peter Lamont, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History (Abacus, 2005).
13. For an overview of media archaeology, see Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (University of California Press, 2011); Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Polity, 2012).
14. Parikka and Huhtamo, Media Archaeology, 3.
15. Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oeve, “Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Epistemological and Methodological Reflections on Experiments with Historical Objects in Media Technologies,” in New Media Archaeologies, ed. Ben Roberts and Mark Goodall (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 45–68. See also Andreas Fickers, “How to Grasp Historical Media Dispositifs in Practice,” in Materializing Memories: Dispositifs, Generations, Amateurs, ed. Susan Aasman, Andreas Fickers, and Joseph Wachelder (Bloomsbury, 2018), 85–102.
16. Meredith Bak, “The Ludic Archive: The Work of Playing with Optical Toys,” Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 16, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 1–16.
17. See Eric Kluitenberg, ed., The Book of Imaginary Media (Nai, 2006); Eric Kluitenberg, “On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (University of California Press, 2011), 61–63; Erkki Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen,” ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image 7 (2004): 31–82.
18. On the afterlife of nineteenth-century optical toys in contemporary children's media, see Meredith Bak, Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture (MIT Press, 2020), 209–26. The artist and educator Robby Gilbert remakes optical media like the zoetrope as art installations; see his reflections on teaching animation with optical toys in Robby Gilbert, “The Concrete Zoetrope: Engaging Students in Pre-Cinema with an Eye to the Future,” Early Popular Visual Culture 18, no. 1 (2020): 44–57. In our panel “Beyond Pre-Cinema: Archaeology of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Visual Media” at the 2022 conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Robby Gilbert, Julie Park, Patrick Ellis, and I proposed the term “paracinematic” as a corrective to “precinematic.”
19. “How to See Pictures,” National Magazine, ed. John Saunders and Westland Marston (London, 1856): 23.
20. “How to See Pictures,” 23–24.
21. On the virtual image, see especially Tom Gunning, “The Play Between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century ‘Philosophical Toys’ and Their Discourse,” in Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, ed. Eivind Røsaak (Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 27–44; Tom Gunning “‘We Are Here and Not Here’: Late Nineteenth-Century Stage Magic and the Roots of Cinema in the Appearance (and Disappearance) of the Virtual Image,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 52–63; Tom Gunning, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3 (April 2012): 495–516; Tom Gunning, “To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision,” Grey Room 26 (2007): 94–127. Gunning's interest in an aesthetics of optical trickery that unites cinema with nineteenth-century stage magic and optical devices is a through line in his work from his earliest publications. See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (BFI Publishing, 2006), 56–62; Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment.”
22. Gunning, “The Play Between Still and Moving Images,” 33.
23. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (MIT Press, 2009), 7.
24. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 8. Friedberg claims that Brewster was the first to use the term “virtual” in English, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), he was predated by William Molyneux by more than one hundred years.
25. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 9. For an example of this usage, see the discussion of images formed by convex mirrors in David Brewster, A Treatise on Optics: First American Edition, with an Appendix, Containing an Elementary View of the Application of Analysis to Reflexion and Refraction, by A. D. Bache (Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1833), 24–25.
26. John Henry Pepper, Light: Embracing Reflection and Refraction of Light, Light and Colour, Spectrum Analysis, the Human Eye, Polarized Light (Scribner, Welford, and Armstrong, 1876), 68.
27. Teukolsky, Picture World, 3.
28. Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Steven Crane, and the Economics of Play (Harvard University Press, 1997).
29. On this, see Tom Gunning's theory of the optical toy as a device that produces images through the coordination of hand and eye in Gunning, “Hand and Eye.”
30. On the relationship between the optical toy and the philosophical toy, see Gunning, “The Play Between Still and Moving Images.”
31. For instance, Laura Burd Schiavo argues that the stereoscope lost its connection to experimental science by the mid-nineteenth century, while Meredith Bak demonstrates how stereoscopes were used in American children's education. See Laura Burd Schiavo, “From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial Photography, and the Popularization of the Stereoscope,” in New Media, 1740–1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (MIT Press, 2003), 113–38; Bak, Playful Visions, 181–208.
32. On the use of optical instruments and experiments in eighteenth-century visual education, see Barbara Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education (MIT Press, 1994).
33. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (MIT Press, 1992).
34. For a robust critique of Techniques of the Observer's historical method and use of evidence, see Mitchell, Picture Theory, 21–22. Julie Park and Laura Burd Schiavo each make the case that Crary overstates the epistemic paradigm shift between objective and subjective models of vision by pointing to the technological and aesthetic continuities between “old” media like the camera obscura and “new” media like the stereoscope. See Park, My Dark Room, 23–24; Schiavo, “From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision,” 119–21.
35. For a complete list, see note 11.
36. Byerly, Are We There Yet?, 15.
37. Byerly, Are We There Yet?, 5.
38. Gao, Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel, 3.
39. Law, “Victorian Virtual Reality.”
1. Magic Panic
1. Notable instances of this argument can be found in Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Reading, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford University Press, 2004), 862–76; Tom Gunning, “The Long and Short of It: Centuries of Projecting Shadows, from Natural Magic to the Avant-Garde,” in The Art of Projection, ed. Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009), 23–35; Colin Williamson, Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015); Iwan Rhys Morus, “‘More the Aspect of Magic Than Anything Natural’: The Philosophy of Demonstration,” in Science and the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Frye and Bernard Lightman (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 336–70.
2. Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 819.
3. This line of inquiry is influenced by two books that make explicit, in different ways, the civilizational politics of magical and optical spectatorship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On optical illusions and citizenship in the American context, see Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). On stage magic and colonialism in the contexts of France and Algeria, see Graham M. Jones, Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
4. For a study that challenges the theory of a disenchanted modernity, see Jason Ananda Joseph Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
5. As Karl Bell has demonstrated, most nineteenth-century audiences held a range of occult and magical beliefs, a context often overlooked by media historians who take Victorian magic's appeals to skepticism at face value and as a representation of how magic spectatorship worked in practice. See Karl Bell, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
6. The narrative arc of Signor Brunoni's magic show and its aftermath was originally printed in Household Words as “The Great Cranford Panic. In Two Parts,” and appeared in two consecutive weekly issues in January 1853. When Cranford was printed as a novel, Gaskell configured the episode as a three-chapter arc: “Signor Brunoni,” which represents the magic show; “The Panic,” about the fears that it engenders; and “Samuel Brown,” in which the magician is revealed to be an impoverished soldier and his wife. These chapters tell the story of her sojourn from India back to England. Gaskell further signals the importance of stage magic to the novel in the final scene, which takes place at the Cranford Assembly Rooms as a second performance of Signor Brunoni's magic is about to begin.
7. My account of this event is taken from Jones's detailed and conceptually rich analysis in Jones, Magic's Reason, 27–43, but it is a well-known story and cited frequently in the literature on nineteenth-century stage magic. Other discussions can be found in Michael Mangan, Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (Intellect, 2007), 109–12; Murray Leeder, “M. Robert-Houdin Goes to Algeria: Spectatorship and Panic in Illusion and Early Cinema,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (May 2010): 209–25.
8. Robert-Houdin in Jones, Magic's Reason, 28.
9. Cited in Jones, Magic's Reason, 35.
10. Robert-Houdin cited in Jones, Magic Reason, 34–35.
11. Bell, The Magical Imagination, 92.
12. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Les secrets de la prestidigitation et de la magie: comment on deviant sorcier (Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 54. My translation. Legerdemain, from Middle French, literally translates as “lightness [or nimbleness] or hand,” whereas prestidigitation, of Middle French and Latin roots, breaks down to the “nimbleness [or quickness] of fingers.” In early modern discourses of magic, such as Ronald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), he distinguished witchcraft from what he called “juggling,” an entertainment that required manual agility. For more on manual dexterity in magic, see Tom Gunning, “‘We Are Here and Not Here’: Late Nineteenth-Century Stage Magic and the Roots of Cinema in the Appearance (and Disappearance) of the Virtual Image,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 54.
13. Gunning, “We Are Here and Not Here,” 55.
14. Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (Da Capo, 2004), 61.
15. Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant, 34.
16. Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant, 29, 31.
17. Alfred Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects, and Trick Photography (Dover, 1976), 55–60.
18. Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant, 83–88.
19. Gunning, “We Are Here and Not Here,” 54.
20. Gunning, “We Are Here and Not Here,” 56.
21. Giambattista della Porta, Natural Magick (Thomas Young and Samuel Speed, 1658), 370.
22. Gunning, “The Long and Short of It,” 28.
23. Gunning, “The Long and Short of It,” 28.
24. Quoted in Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (University of Exeter Press, 2000), 162.
25. Jeremy Brooker, The Temple of Minerva: Magic and the Magic Lantern at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, London 1837–1901 (Magic Lantern Society, 2013), 191.
26. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (John Murray, 1832), 5.
27. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 5.
28. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Stories (Modern Library, 2001), 21.
29. Srdjan Smajic, Ghost-Seers, Detectives and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 29.
30. Barbara Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education (MIT Press, 1994), 47.
31. Stafford, Artful Science, 67.
32. William Hooper, Rational Recreations: Volume the Second, Containing Experiments in Optics, Chromatics, and Acoustics, 3rd ed. (L. Davis, 1787).
33. William Hooper, Rational Recreations: Volume the First, Containing Arithmetical and Mechanical Experiments, 3rd ed. (L. Davis, 1787), v.
34. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 44.
35. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 66.
36. Stafford, Artful Science, 67.
37. Brooker, The Temple of Minerva, 29.
38. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 55.
39. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 55.
40. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 2.
41. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 46.
42. Bellion, Citizen Spectator, 5.
43. Bellion, Citizen Spectator, 15.
44. Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton University Press, 2006), 20.
45. Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 143.
46. Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 20–21.
47. Helen Groth, Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 96.
48. “A Shilling's Worth of Science,” Household Words 1 (July 24, 1850): 508.
49. Arthur Sketchley, “Mrs. Brown Visits the Polytechnic,” in Mrs. Brown at the Play (Routledge, 1871), 83.
50. Sketchley, “Mrs. Brown Visits the Polytechnic,” 89–90.
51. Sketchley, “Mrs. Brown Visits the Polytechnic,” 89.
52. Jeremy Brooker calls Letters on Natural Magic “a crucial document in articulating a philosophy” for galleries of science like the Royal Polytechnic Institution. Brooker, The Temple of Minerva, 17.
53. Morus, “More the Aspect of Magic,” 338.
54. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (Oxford University Press, 2011), 81. Further references to this text will be page numbers that are provided in parentheses.
55. Cranford's representation of stage magic has received negligible treatment in scholarship about Gaskell. Sustained readings of magic in Cranford can be found in my article Amanda Shubert, “In Defense of Credulous Women: Magic and Optical Spectatorship in Cranford,” Victorian Studies 63, no. 3 (Spring 2021): 377–400; Michael Jay Claxon, “The Conjurer Unmasked: Literary and Theatrical Magicians, 1840–1925” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003). Brief discussions of magic and the figure of the magician appear in Adrienne E. Gavin, “Language Among the Amazons: Conjuring and Creativity in Cranford,” Dickens Studies Annual 23 (1994): 205–25; Jeffrey Cass, “‘The Scraps, Patches and Rags of Daily Life’: Gaskell's Oriental Other and the Conservation of Cranford,” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature (Fall 1999): 417–33; Margaret Case Croskery, “Mothers Without Children, Unity Without Plot: Cranford's Radical Charm,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 52, no. 2 (September 1997): 198–220.
56. It is unclear whether Gaskell was aware that the “vanishing canary” trick, in which the magician made a canary vanish under a handkerchief and then reappear on a tray, really did involve killing the canary and then presenting a duplicate to the audience. An explanation of this trick can be found in Professor Hoffman, Modern Magic: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Conjuring (Routledge, 1894), 424–26.
57. Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
58. Signor Brunoni may have been modeled, at least in name, on Signor Blitz, a British stage magician born Antonio van Zandt who performed in London in the 1830s before settling in Philadelphia. Like Antonio van Zandt, the British Samuel Brown styles himself as a “Signor” in his stage act to present himself as an alluring and cosmopolitan foreigner. See Julie L. Melby, “Learned Birds and Other Acts,” https://www.princeton.edu/∼graphicarts/2012/04/broadside_1.html,accessed April 3, 2021; Bell, The Magical Imagination, 97.
59. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 60.
60. Shubert, “In Defense of Credulous Women.”
61. Hilary M. Schor, “Affairs of the Alphabet: Reading, Writing, and Narrating in Cranford,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 288–304.
62. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 3.
63. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–2.
64. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Cornell University Press, 1988), 12–13.
65. Wendy Carse, “A Penchant for Narrative: Mary Smith in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford,” Journal of Narrative Technique 20, no. 3 (1990): 326.
66. This motif of the conjurer's gaze dovetails with Hilary Schor's argument that Gaskell wrote into Cranford her editorial conflict with Charles Dickens, who published Cranford in serial in Household Words. In Schor's terms, “Dickens stands clearly as the male writer reading over Gaskell's shoulder as she writes Cranford,” surveilling and censoring her work. Mary, who is herself a writer, literally fantasizes a man standing behind her and watching over her shoulder after being surveilled covertly by the conjurer. See Schor, “Affairs of the Alphabet,” 293.
2. The Mirror of Ink
1. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Mirror of Ink,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin, 1999), 60.
2. Borges, “The Mirror of Ink,” 61.
3. Raymond Bellour, “Les mots-images,” Magazine Littéraire 259 (1988): 64. My translation.
4. William Wordsworth, “Preface,” in Lyrical Ballads (1802), in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads: 1789 and 1802 (Oxford University Press, 2013), 104. If anything, it is an embodiment of Wordsworth's greatest fear of “gross and violent stimulants” that “blunt the discriminating powers of the mind,” examples of which for him included not only “frantic novels” but optical shows like panoramas. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 99.
5. Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read: A Phenomenology (Random House, 2014), 11.
6. Mendelsund, What We See When We Read, 9.
7. Borges, “The Mirror of Ink,” 61.
8. Susan Zieger, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (Fordham University Press, 2018), 105.
9. Zieger, The Mediated Mind, 90.
10. The scholarship on George Eliot and realism is too extensive to contain in a single footnote, but the following examples are representative of the ways that Victorian literary scholars have thought about Eliot's realism as constituted in visual techniques and metaphors: J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited (Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Neil Hertz, George Eliot's Pulse (Stanford University Press, 2003); Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton University Press, 2009); Ruth Livesey, “George Eliot and Van Gogh: Radiant Realism,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Nineteenth Century 19 (2020): 1–26.
11. H. G. Wells, “The Remarkable Case of Mr. Davidson's Eyes,” in H. G. Wells, Short Stories (Penguin, 1972), 182.
12. Sir John Barrow, “An Account of Modern Egyptians,” Quarterly Review 59, no. 117 (July 1837): 195.
13. Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978), 149–66. Edward William Lane's substantial scholarly contributions include Modern Egyptians (1836), a translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1839–1841), Selections from the Koran (1843), and Arab-English Lexicon (1863–1893). For more on his career as an Orientalist, see Jason Thompson, Edward William Lane, 1801–1876: The Life of the Pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist (American University in Cairo Press, 2010).
14. Jason Thompson, “Edward William Lane's ‘Description of Egypt,’” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28, no. 4 (November 1996): 565–66.
15. Jason Thompson, “Edward William Lane in Egypt,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 34 (1997): 247.
16. Thompson, Edward William Lane, 312.
17. Said, Orientalism, 161–62.
18. Thompson, “Edward William Lane's ‘Description of Egypt,’” 569.
19. Thompson, Edward William Lane, 20–21.
20. Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (Dover, 1973), 270. Further references to this text will be page numbers that are provided in parentheses.
21. Zieger, The Mediated Mind, 101.
22. See Tom Gunning, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3 (April 2012): 495–515.
23. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (John Murray, 1832), 62, 65.
24. See Stefan Andriopoulos's discussion of Guyot's related illusion in Stefan Andriopoulos, “Kant's Magic Lantern: Historical Epistemology and Media Archaeology,” Representations 115, no. 1 (August 2011): 49–50.
25. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 62–63.
26. Barrow, “An Account of Modern Egyptians,” 202.
27. However, he continued to promote Barrow's essay as essential reading on the mirror of ink, referring readers to it in his remarks on the mirror of ink in his translation of The Thousand and One Nights.
28. Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs, 275.
29. Thompson, Edward William Lane, 313.
30. Jason Ananda Joseph Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 5–6.
31. Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton University Press, 2012), 5–7.
32. Quoted in Thompson, “Edward William Lane's ‘Description of Egypt,’” 556.
33. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (Routledge, 1995), 22–23.
34. “What Is Reading & Writing, & What Are the Advantages Likely to Accrue from a Knowledge Thereof?,” Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 12, no. 1 (1842): 203–4.
35. William MacLure Thomson, The Land and the Book, or Biblical Illustrations Drawn from the Manner and Customs, the Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land (Harper, 1859), 228.
36. See Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 2007).
37. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke University Press, 2011).
38. Sophia Lane-Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo, Written During a Residence There in 1842, 3, & 4, vol. 1 (Charles Knight, 1845), 168.
39. George Eliot, Adam Bede (Oxford University Press, 2008), 161–62. Further references to this text will be page numbers that are provided in parentheses.
40. The scholarship on Eliot and realism is extensive, but I am thinking here of key works on Eliot as a novelist of ordinary life, including Josephine McDonagh, George Eliot (Liverpool University Press, 1997); Harry Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Cornell University Press, 2004); Miller, Reading for Our Time; Rae Greiner, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Examples of scholarship that place Eliot's realism of ordinary life in the context of realist painting include Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (Yale University Press, 2005); Livesey, “George Eliot and Van Gogh”; Deborah Nord, “George Eliot and John Everett Millais: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Realism,” Victorian Studies 60, no. 3 (2018): 361–89; Yeazell, Art of the Everyday.
41. See Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (University of Michigan Press, 2012).
42. Readings of Adam Bede's mirror of ink as part of the novel's theory of representation can be found in Hertz, George Eliot's Pulse, 97–101; Miller, Reading for Our Time, 12–14; Monica Fludernik, “Eliot and Narrative,” in A Companion to George Eliot, ed. Amanda Anderson and Harry Shaw (Wiley, 2013), 21–34. A careful reading of the mirror motif in Adam Bede in relation to nineteenth-century optical technology can be found in Meegan Kennedy, Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2010), 119–47, although Kennedy does not discuss the mirror of ink itself. Susan Zieger correctly identifies Adam Bede's mirror of ink as part of a culture of ink gazing as a “participatory visual entertainment,” but she does not elaborate on the metafictional significance of the passage. See Zieger, The Mediated Mind, 88.
43. See Kennedy, Revising the Clinic, 119–47.
44. Rachel Teukolsky, Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Oxford University Press, 2019), 134.
45. Teukolsky, Picture World, 135.
46. Miller, Reading for Our Time, 13.
47. Fludernik, “Eliot and Narrative,” 22.
48. Fludernik, “Eliot and Narrative,” 22.
49. Hertz, George Eliot's Pulse, 100.
50. Jacob Romanow, “Metafiction as Reality Effect: Trollope's Quixotism and Novel Theory,” ELH 89, no. 4 (2022): 1078–79.
51. Teukolsky, Picture World, 129–38; Byerly, Are We There Yet?, 73–80.
52. Teukolsky, Picture World, 135.
53. See Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
54. Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs, 272n2.
55. For a description of the tour, see Caroline Roberts, The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies (University of Toronto Press, 2002), 139–40.
56. Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life, Past and Present, vol. 2 (Lea and Blanchard, 1848), 138.
57. Winter, Mesmerized, 122.
58. Winter, Mesmerized, 122.
59. Harriet Martineau to Robinson, October 6, 1844, Robinson Papers. Quoted in Winter, Mesmerized, 224.
60. Martineau, Eastern Life, 256. On the dynamics of race and blackness in Martineau's account of the mirror of ink, see Zieger, The Mediated Mind, 107.
61. Martineau, Eastern Life, 255.
62. Martineau, Eastern Life, 256.
63. Richard Francis Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca, vol. 2 (Longman, 1855–1856), 180. Paulo Lemos Horta argues that the mirror of ink “proves uncannily prominent in Burton's self-fashioning as a cosmopolite” and allowed him to distinguish his cross-cultural and comparative ethnographic methods from Lane's monocultural approach. See Paulo Lemos Horta, “Richard Burton, Cosmopolitan Translator of the Nights,” in Scheherazade's Children, ed. Philip F. Kennedy and Marina Warner (New York University Press, 2013), 70–85.
64. Isabel Burton, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, vol. 2 (Chapman & Hall, 1893), 137–58.
65. Burton, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, 144.
66. “Mesmeric Phenomena,” The Era, no. 149 (August 1, 1841): 11.
67. Wilkie Collins, “Magnetic Evenings at Home,” The Leader (February 28, 1852): 19–20.
68. Wilkie Collins, “My Black Mirror,” Household Words 14 (September 6, 1856): 169.
69. Vanessa Ryan, Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 47.
70. Gordon Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Clarendon, 1968), 55.
71. Emily Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (University of Chicago Press, 2018), 103.
72. Ogden, Credulity, 103.
73. Ogden, Credulity, 103–4.
74. Robert H. Collyer, Psychography, or, the Embodiment of Thought, with an Analysis of Phreno-Magnetism, “Neurology,” and Mental Hallucination, Including Rules to Govern and Produce the Magnetic State (Redding, 1843), 31.
75. For readings of The Lifted Veil in the context of new media, optical technology, and sciences of mind, see Kate Flint, Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jules Law, The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk and Water in the Victorian Novel (Cornell University Press, 2011); Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford University Press, 2008); Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Blackwell, 1991); Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Macmillan, 2002).
76. Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 140.
77. Law, The Social Life of Fluids, 88. See also Potter's reading of Latimer's visions as dissolving views in Jonathan Potter, Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking, Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 89–92.
78. George Eliot, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob (Oxford World's Classics, 1999), 9.
79. Eliot, The Lifted Veil, 41.
80. Hertz, George Eliot's Pulse, 100.
81. Mendelsund, What We See When We Read, 11.
82. Maxim Gorky, “The Kingdom of Shadows,” in Authors on Film, ed. Harry M. Geduld (Indiana University Press, 1972).
83. I wish to thank Kaneesha Parsard for sharing this observation about the colonial significance of molasses.
84. Wells, “The Remarkable Case of Mr. Davidson's Eyes,” 182.
85. Wells, “The Remarkable Case of Mr. Davidson's Eyes,” 180.
86. Wells, “The Remarkable Case of Mr. Davidson's Eyes,” 182.
87. Wells, “The Remarkable Case of Mr. Davidson's Eyes,” 183.
88. It may also be inspired by the cases of traveling clairvoyants who traversed the far reaches of empire while under mesmeric influence, such as the case in which a clairvoyant “found” the lost explorer John Franklin through a mesmeric trance and saw things “only expert mariners and explorers could have known.” See Winter, Mesmerized, 124.
89. This reading of “The Remarkable Case of Mr. Davidson's Eyes” as an exploration of realist fiction and travel writing's claim to represent the real aligns with John Plotz's account of Wells as a “realist of the fantastic,” whose early scientific romances represent “various states of partial presence,” with characters simultaneously anchored in reality and “drifting away.” Indeed, Plotz argues that Wells offers a crucial link between Eliot's mid-century realism and the late nineteenth-century rise of speculative fiction. John Plotz, Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience Since Dickens (Princeton University Press, 2018), 176.
3. Mountains of Light
1. William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond (Bloomsbury, 2017), 7.
2. “London, Monday, July 1, 1850,” The Times, no. 20529 (July 1, 1850): 4, accessed July 27, 2022, link-gale-com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/apps/doc/CS67666657/GDCS?u=wisc_madison&sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=e800ba36.
3. “London, Monday, July 1, 1850,” 4.
4. Danielle Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor: Empire, Diamonds, and the Performance of British Material Culture,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2 (April 2009): 392.
5. See John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton University Press, 2009); Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (Hurst, 2017), 12–13.
6. “The Front Row of the Shilling Gallery,” Punch 5 (July 1851): 11; “The Koh-i-Noor Cut and Come Again,” Punch 23 (August 1852): 54.
7. “The Great Eastern Nave,” The Illustrated Exhibitor 1 (June 7, 1851): 19.
8. See Plotz, Portable Property. Other cultural histories of Victorian diamonds have foregrounded their status as material culture, imperial symbols, and role in domestic life and social constructions of gender. See Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor”; Suzanne Daley, The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities and Victorian Domestic Novels (University of Michigan Press, 2011); Adrienne Munich, Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings (University of Virginia Press, 2020).
9. On the concept of imperial media, see Aaron Worth, Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918 (Ohio State University Press, 2014).
10. I agree with Danielle Kinsey, Paul Young, Lara Kriegel, and others who argue that there were multiple, contradictory narratives of empire and British India at the Great Exhibition and that the Koh-i-noor must be understood as signifying in multiple ways. See Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor”; Paul Young, “‘Carbon, Mere Carbon’: The Kohinoor, the Crystal Palace, and the Mission to Make Sense of British India,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 29, no. 2 (December 2007): 343–58; Lara Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent,” in The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Louise Purbick (University of Manchester Press, 2001).
11. See Plotz, Portable Property; Daley, The Empire Inside; Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor”; Munich, Empire of Diamonds; Jean Arnold, Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel: Prisms of Culture (Ashgate, 2011); Marcia Pointon, Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (Yale University Press, 2009).
12. Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 19.
13. Daley, The Empire Inside, 62.
14. Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 12.
15. Munich, Empire of Diamonds, 3. On the aesthetics of diamonds, see also Stefanie Markovits, “Form Things: Looking at Genre Through Victorian Diamonds,” Victorian Studies 52, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 591–619.
16. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford University Press, 2008), 12.
17. Pointon, Brilliant Effects, 44.
18. Munich, Empire of Diamonds, 3.
19. A. D. Morris-Low, “Brewster and Scientific Instruments,” in “Martyr of Science”: Sir David Brewster 1781–1863: Proceedings of a Bicentary Symposium: Held at the Royal Scottish Museum of 21 November 1981: Together with a Catalogue of Scientific Apparatus Associated with Sir David Brewster: And a Bibliography of His Published Writings, ed. A. D. Morrison-Low and J. R. R. Christie (Royal Scottish Museum, 1984), 60. On the jewel microscope, see Gerard L’Estrange Turner, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewel Microscope,” in Essays on the History of Microscope (Senecio, 1980), 109–10.
20. Andrew Pritchard, The Microscopic Cabinet of Select Animated Objects: With a Description of the Jewel and Doublet Microscope, Test Objects, &c., to Which Are Subjoined, Memoirs on the Verification of Microscopic Phenomena, and an Exact Method of Appreciating the Quality of Microscopes and Engiscopes (Whittaker, Treacher, and Arnot, 1832), 106–7.
21. David Brewster, “On the Microphotograph,” Photographic Journal 8 (January 15, 1864): 441.
22. Priti Joshi, Empire of News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India (State University of New York Press, 2021), 93.
23. John Tallis, Tallis’ History of the Crystal Palace, vol. 2 (London Printing and Publishing, 1852), 150.
24. Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent,” 166.
25. Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor,” 406.
26. Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent.”
27. Joshi, Empire of News, 93.
28. Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent,” 166.
29. Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 188.
30. Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 185.
31. Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor,” 393; Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 203; Joshi, Empire of News, 94–95.
32. Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 191, 203.
33. Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 6–7.
34. Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 118, 121.
35. Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor,” 396.
36. Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor,” 396.
37. Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 223.
38. “The Great Eastern Nave,” 19.
39. “The Koh-i-Noor Diamond,” Reynolds Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, Science, and Art 13, no. 335 (December 9, 1854): 312; “Five Shilling Days and One Shilling Days,” Illustrated London News (July 1851): 102; “Interesting to Burglars, Philosophers, &c.,” The Leader 2, no. 60 (May 17, 1851): 465.
40. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 230.
41. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 142.
42. Quoted in Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 142.
43. “Interesting to Burglars, Philosophers, &c,” 465.
44. Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 3–4.
45. Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 223.
46. Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 216.
47. Charles King, Antique Gems: Their Use, Origin, and Value as Interpreters of Ancient History; and as Illustrative of Ancient Art (John Murray, 1860), 68.
48. John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Sutton, 1999), 138.
49. Charles Baggage, “Art. IX—The Exposition of 1851; or, Views of the Industry, the Science, and the Government of England. By Charles Baggage, Esq., Corresponding Member of the Academy of Moral Sciences of the Institute of France. London, 1851. Second Edition,” North British Review 15 (1851): 542.
50. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 142.
51. Margaret Maria Gordon, The Home Life of David Brewster (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 213; Dalrymple and Anand, Koh-i-Noor, 225.
52. “Precious Stones in the Crystal Palace,” The Illustrated Exhibitor, no. 6 (July 12): 94, accessed July 27, 2022, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31175001860983?urlappend=%3Bseq=160.
53. “The Front Row of the Shilling Gallery,” 11.
54. “The Koh-i-Noor Cut and Come Again,” 54.
55. See Kinsey, “Koh-i-Noor.”
56. “Preface,” The Parlour Magazine of the Literature of All Nations, vol. 1, n.p.
57. Kevin Corstorphine, “Fitz-James O’Brien: The Seen and the Unseen,” The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural, and Fantastic Literature, no. 5 (Bealtaine, 2015), 15.
58. Fitz-James O’Brien, “The Diamond Lens,” in The Diamond Lens and Other Stories (Hesperus, 2012), 9. Further references to this text will be page numbers that are provided in parentheses.
59. O’Brien may also have been thinking of the rumor that the Pitt Diamond, the 400-carat gem acquired by Thomas Pitt in 1702 while he was serving as governor of Madras, was smuggled from its mine by an enslaved man. Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 12–13.
60. Pritchard, The Microscopic Cabinet of Select Animated Objects, 108.
61. David Arnold, “Envisioning the Tropics: Joseph Hooker in India and the Himalayas, 1848–1850,” in Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, ed. Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 137.
62. See Meegen Kennedy, “‘Throes and Struggles . . . Witnessed with Painful Distinctness’: The Oxy-Hydrogen Microscope, Performing Science, and the Projection of the Moving Image,” Victorian Studies 62, no. 1 (2019): 85–118; Jeremy Brooker, The Temple of Minerva: Magic and the Magic Lantern at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, London 1887–1901 (Magic Lantern Society, 2013).
63. Rachel Teukolsky, Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Oxford University Press, 2020), 285.
64. The Athenaeum 1586 (March 20, 1858), 371–72.
65. See Tiago de Luca, Planetary Cinema: Film, Media, and the Earth (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).
66. De Luca, Planetary Cinema, 144.
67. I have not been able to source which world's fair this is, but handwritten notes on the back of the stereograph itself—which is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum—suggest that it is either the International Exhibition of 1865 (Dublin) or the International Exhibition of 1867 (Paris).
68. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (Routledge, 1995), 57–58.
69. Quoted in Young, “Carbon, Mere Carbon,” 344.
70. Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent,” 155.
71. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Modern Library, 2001), xxiv. Further references to this text will be page numbers that are provided in parentheses.
72. Arnold, Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel, 80. Collins likely conflates Shiva in his incarnation as Somanatha, “Lord of the Moon,” who was indeed worshipped at a shrine at Somnauth, with Vishnu, who is often depicted as having four arms. See Collins, The Moonstone, 485n3.
73. King, Ancient Gems, 68n.
74. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Text (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 61–69.
75. Ian Duncan, “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic,” Modern Language Quarterly 55, no. 3 (September 1994): 300.
76. “What the Richer Are We?,” The Expositor: A Weekly Recorder of Inventions, Designs, and Art-Manufactures (May 24, 1851): 59.
77. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient (Penguin India, 2008), 128.
78. Collins's original title for the novel was The Serpent's Eye, an allusion to the gemstone serpentine. See Mark M. Hennelly, “Detecting Collins’ Diamond: From Serpentstone to Moonstone,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39, no. 1 (1984): 25–47.
79. Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life, Past and Present, vol. 2 (Lea and Blanchard, 1848), 256.
80. Susan Zieger, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (Fordham University Press, 2018), 114.
81. E. M. Collingwood, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Polity, 2001), 1.
4. Recalled to Life
1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Wildside Press, 2008), 15.
2. On ghosts in Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Routledge, 1994), 107–20; Martin Harries, “Homo Alludens: Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire,” New German Critique 66 (Autumn 1995): 35–64.
3. Terrell Carver, “Imagery/Writing, Imagination/Politics: Reading Marx Through the Eighteenth Brumaire,” in Marx's ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’: (Post)Modern Interpretations, ed. Mark Cowling and James Martin (Pluto, 2002), 121.
4. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 15.
5. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 16.
6. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 20.
7. Accounts of the phantasmagoria have tended to focus on three distinct areas: its relationship to the gothic, influence on German philosophy, and place in the history of cinema. On the phantasmagoria as gothic medium, see Francesco Casetti, “Rethinking the Phantasmagoria: An Enclosure and Three Worlds,” Journal of Visual Culture 21, no. 2 (2022): 349–73; Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (October 1988): 26–61; David J. Jones, Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-Cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670–1910 (University of Wales Press, 2011), 57–78. On the phantasmagoria's legacy in German idealist and Marxist philosophy, see Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Zone, 2013), 49–72; Margaret Cohen, “Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria,” New German Critique 48 (1989): 87–107. On the phantasmagoria as precinematic visual spectacle, see Noam M. Elcott, “The Phantasmagorical Dispositif: An Assembly of Bodies and Images in Real Time and Space,” in Screen Space Reconfigured, ed. Susanne Ǿ. Saether and Synne T. Bull (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 283–316; Thomas Elsaesser, “Between Knowing and Believing: The Cinematic Dispositif After Cinema,” in Cine-Dispositifs: Essays in Epistemology Across Media, ed. François Albera and Maria Tortajada (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 45–72; Tom Gunning, “Illusions Past and Future: The Phantasmagoria and Its Specters,” paper presented at the First International Conference on the Histories of Art, Science, and Technology, Banff New Media Institute, Canada, 2005, https://www.mediaarthistory.org/refresh/Programmatic%20key%20texts/pdfs/Gunning.pdf;Tom Gunning, “The Long and the Short of It: Centuries of Projecting Shadows, from Natural Magic to the Avant-Garde,” in The Art of Projection, ed. Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009), 23–35; Tom Gunning, “The Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusion and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus,” in The Cinema: A New Technology for the 20th Century, ed. André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Véronneau (Editions Payot, 2004), 32–44.
8. Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard University Press, 2002), 104.
9. See my article: Amanda Shubert, “A Bright Continuous Flow: Phantasmagoria and History in A Tale of Two Cities,” Victorian Literature and Culture 48, no. 4 (2020): 693–720. Some of the research and analysis in this chapter derives from my earlier article, although the argument and approach differ substantially. I will indicate in the endnotes when my chapter corrects mistakes made in the article.
10. Max Milner, La Fantasmagorie: Essai sur l’optique fantastique (Presses universitaires de France, 1982), 20. My translation.
11. Mervyn Heard, Phantasmagoria: The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern (Projection Box, 2006), 76.
12. Heard, Phantasmagoria, 83. The reason I call this a possible account of his disappearance is that Tussaud is actually speaking of a man named Paul de Philipstahl, who Heard believes is the same as Paul Philidor. I am somewhat more circumspect about whether the evidence points definitively in this direction.
13. Laurent Mannoni, “The Phantasmagoria,” trans. Ben Brewster, Film History 8, no. 4 (1996): 397.
14. Mannoni, “The Phantasmagoria,” 398.
15. Mannoni, “The Phantasmagoria,” 397–98.
16. Heard, Phantasmagoria.
17. Gunning, “The Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusion and Wonder,” 34.
18. Casetti, “Rethinking the Phantasmagoria,” 356.
19. Elsaesser, “Between Knowing and Believing,” 67–70.
20. Elcott, “The Phantasmagoric Dispositif,” 291.
21. Elcott, “The Phantasmagoric Dispositif,” 298.
22. On the phantasmagoria as gothic assemblage, see Jones, Gothic Machine.
23. Elsaesser, “Between Knowing and Believing,” 69–70.
24. Ronen Steinberg, The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2019), 128. Steinberg wrongly attributes the invention of the phantasmagoria to Robertson and therefore reads it as the product of postrevolutionary France that reflects on the legacy of the Reign of Terror, when in fact it emerged much earlier—after the formation of the republic and just a month before the execution of the king. However, his argument that Robertson's phantasmagoria offered a means of making sense of the legacy of the Terror still stands.
25. Steinberg, The Afterlives of the Terror, 126–28.
26. For example, Mervyn Heard and Ronen Steinberg cite this editorial as an eyewitness report, a mistake I uncritically reproduced in my essay Shubert, “A Bright Continuous Flow.”
27. François Martin Poultier D’Elmotte, “Fantasmagorie,” L’Ami des Lois, par le représentant Poultier, et autres gens de lettres, sous la direction des frères Sibuet, propriétaires 955 (March 28, 1798), 1. All translations from this editorial are my own, with assistance from Grace An.
28. The source of the error seems to be an 1871 English edition of Fulgence Marion's The Wonders of Optics that was translated and edited by Charles W. Quin (Scribner, 1871). Quin's translation of this line as “A decimvir of the republic has said that the dead return no more, but go to Robertson's exhibition and you will soon be convinced of the contrary, for you will see the dead returning to life in crowds” makes it difficult to identify the “decimvir” in question as Bertrand Barère. For example, Barère's aphorism was known in Victorian culture as “only the dead return not,” not as “the dead return no more.” Along with other scholars like Mervyn Heard, my essay, Shubert, “A Bright Continuous Flow,” quoted Quin's translation without comparing it critically with the French original. I am grateful to Ellen Perry and Julie Hayes for helping me identify the quotation from Barère.
29. See Bertrand Barrère, Memoirs of Bertrand Barère, vol. 1, trans. De V. Payen-Payne (H. S. Nichols, 1896), 14.
30. D’Elmotte, “Fantasmagorie,” 2.
31. D’Elmotte, “Fantasmagorie,” 1.
32. D’Elmotte, “Fantasmagorie,” 1.
33. Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques du physician-aéronaute E. G. Robertson (Librairie encyclopédique de Roret, 1840), 215. All translations are my own, unless otherwise marked.
34. See Casetti, “Rethinking the Phantasmagoria.”
35. Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs.
36. Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, 283–84; Heard, Phantasmagoria, 111.
37. Quoted in Casetti, “Rethinking the Phantasmagoria,” 353.
38. Mannoni, “The Phantasmagoria,” 398. Robertson was among the first to introduce Galvanism in France.
39. Jones, Gothic Machine, 65.
40. Jones, Gothic Machine, 65.
41. Jones, Gothic Machine, 61.
42. Jones, Gothic Machine, 61.
43. Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, 276.
44. Suzanne Glover Lindsay, “The Revolutionary Exhumations at St-Denis, 1793,” Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2014), https://doi.org/10.22332/con.ess.2015.2.
45. Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, 276.
46. Lindsay, “The Revolutionary Exhumations at St-Denis.”
47. Joss Marsh, “Dickensian ‘Dissolving Views’: The Magic Lantern, Visual Story-Telling, and the Victorian Technological Imagination,” Comparative Critical Studies 6, no. 3 (2009): 334.
48. Marsh, “Dickensian ‘Dissolving Views,’” 334.
49. During, Modern Enchantments, 145. For a more thorough discussion of Pepper's Ghost, see chapter 1 of this book.
50. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (Oxford World's Classics, 2005), 337.
51. See Castle, “Phantasmagoria.”
52. Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs (Broadview, 2006), 133.
53. Marx read Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History, which Jean Bruhat lists among the sources Marx consulted on the history of the French Revolution. See Jean Bruhat, “La Révolution française et la formation de la pensée de Marx,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 184, no. 1 (1966): 125–70.
54. Castle, “Phantasmagoria,” 26. For other discussions of “phantasmagoria” and “phantasmagory” as key terms in Carlyle's oeuvre, see Mark Cumming, A Disimprisoned Epic: Form and Vision in Carlyle's French Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 131–48; Tamara Gosta, “Thomas Carlyle's ‘Real-Phantasmagory’: The Historical Sublime and Humanist Politics in Past and Present,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 45, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 89–111; John D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History (Clarendon, 1985), 24.
55. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History in Three Volumes, Vol. I: The Bastille, ed. Mark Cumming and David R. Sorensen (Oxford University Press, 2020), 146.
56. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History in Three Volumes, Vol. III: The Guillotine, ed. Mark Cumming and David R. Sorensen (Oxford University Press, 2020), 22.
57. Thomas Carlyle, “On History,” in The Works of Thomas Carlyle: Volume 27: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Henry Duff Traill (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 88.
58. Carlyle, “On History,” 90.
59. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 149.
60. Thomas Carlyle, “The Diamond Necklace,” in The Works of Thomas Carlyle: Volume 28: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays III, ed. Henry Duff Traill (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 328.
61. See Jonathan Potter, Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking, Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 69–107.
62. For a more concrete description of how the phantasmagoria created this effect using slipping slides, see Shubert, “A Bright Continuous Flow.”
63. Carlyle, The French Revolution, Vol. I, 160–61.
64. I am thinking here of what Richard Schoch identifies as an “aspiration towards the theatrical” in Carlyle's work, arguing that he adopts theatrical conventions in order to provide his readers with a “vibrant, animated, and enacted history.” Building on Schoch's work, I propose that the theatrical form that history and history writing most resemble in The French Revolution is the phantasmagoria. See Richard W. Schoch, “‘We Do Nothing but Enact History’: Thomas Carlyle Stages the Past,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54, no. 1 (1999): 33.
65. Nora Foster, “‘Free of Formulas’: Innovation, Prophecy, and Truth in Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution,” Carlyle Studies Annual 24 (2008): 106.
66. On this point, see Tamara Gosta's claim that Carlyle's use of the term “real-phantasmagory” in Past and Present (1843) indexes the historical text's capacity to “materializ[e] a forgotten past.” Gosta, “Thomas Carlyle's ‘Real-Phantasmagory,’” 107.
67. Michael Goldberg, Carlyle and Dickens (University of Georgia Press, 1972), 161.
68. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin, 2003), 117. Further references to this text will be page numbers that are provided in parentheses.
69. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (Harcourt, 1949), 213–14.
70. I develop this point more fully in Shubert, “A Bright Continuous Flow,” 702–11.
71. See Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, as well as Heard's translation of Robertson's program in Heard, Phantasmagoria, 107–10.
72. Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, 283.
73. Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, 327.
74. Georg Lukàcs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 243.
75. Lukàcs, The Historical Novel, 42.
76. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (Verso, 2015), 286.
77. In my earlier publication on this topic, I was unaware of the semantic similarities between “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” and Mémoires récreatifs and mistakenly attributed language to Dickens that actually has its origins in Robertson's memoir. See Shubert, “A Bright Continuous Flow,” 698–99.
78. See Helen Groth, Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 100–125; Marsh, “Dickensian ‘Dissolving Views’”; Christopher Pittard, “The Travelling Doll Wonder: Dickens, Secular Magic, and Bleak House,” Studies in the Novel 48, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 279–300; Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2003).
79. Charles Dickens, “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts,” Household Words, no. 253 (January 27, 1855): 557.
80. Dickens, “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts,” 554, 555.
81. Dickens, “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts,” 557.
82. Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, 166.
83. Giacomo Leopardi, Pensieri, trans. W. S. Di Piero (Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 37–39.
84. Gunning, “The Long and Short of It,” 28. Gunning also notes that a strikingly similar scene takes place in Bertolt Brecht's Galileo.
85. Because Robertson refers to it as an existing story—the reader is interpellated as “hav[ing] seen” these events take place—it is, of course, possible that both Robertson and Leopardi share a different common source, although Leopardi's dating of the event to 1831 does seem like a covert acknowledgment that his source is Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, which was published that year.
86. Dickens, “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts,” 557.
87. Lukàcs, The Historical Novel, 23.
88. Lukàcs, The Historical Novel, 23.
89. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (Pimlico, 2003), 3.
90. Priti Joshi, “Mutiny Echoes: India, Britons, and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities,” in Global Dickens, ed. John O. Jordan and Nirshan Perera (Routledge, 2012), 470.
91. Joshi, “Mutiny Echoes,” 468.
92. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (John Murray, 1832), 46.
5. Spinning in Place
1. Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford University Press, 2008), 186–87. See also Garrett Stewart, “Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-Reflection,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 2 (December 1976): 295–314.
2. Stewart, “Modern Hard Times,” 313.
3. Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudreault, “Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of the Attraction: Optical Toys and the Emergence of a New Cultural Series,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 227–44.
4. Stewart, “Modern Hard Times,” 297.
5. Even André Gaudreault's concept of “monstration,” the most elemental form of film narrative that he defines as unfolding events, is impossible when we are speaking of a loop of moving images. See André Gaudreault, “Film Narrative, Narration: The Cinema of the Lumière Brothers,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, with Adam Barker (BFI Publishing, 1990), 68–75.
6. The scholarship on Thomas Hardy and visual culture is more extensive than I can cover in this footnote, but for Hardy and optical technology, see especially Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2014); Joan Grundy, Hardy and the Sister Arts (Macmillan, 1979). Grundy focuses on the “cinematic” qualities of Hardy's poetry and prose, a topic also taken up in J. B. Bullen, “Is Hardy a Cinematic Novelist? The Problem of Adaptation,” Yearbook of English Studies 20 (1990): 48–59; David Lodge, “Hardy and Cinematographic Form,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 7, no. 3 (Spring 1974): 246–54; Paul J. Niemeyer, “Hardy and Cinema: A Plethoric Growth in Knowledge,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Rosemarie Morgan (Ashgate, 2010), 315–28; Roger Webster, “From Painting to Cinema: Visual Elements in Hardy's Fiction,” in Thomas Hardy on Screen, ed. T. R. Wright (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 315–28.
7. An exception is Zena Meadowsong's analysis of industrial machinery in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. See Zena Meadowsong, “Thomas Hardy and the Machine: The Mechanical Deformation of Narrative Realism in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 64, no. 2 (2009): 225–48.
8. A. Bowdoin Van Riper, “In the Shadow of Machines: Modern Times and the Iconography of Technology,” in Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon Through Critical Lenses, ed. L. Howe, J. E. Caron, and B. Click (Scarecrow, 2013), 85.
9. Jeffrey Vance, Chaplin: Genius of Cinema (Abrams, 2003), 33–34.
10. Vance, Chaplin, 210, 221.
11. Stewart, “Modern Hard Times.”
12. Plateau's phenakistoscope is essentially identical to the stroboscope, invented at the same time by Austrian Simon Stampfer. For the complete history, see Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: An Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (University of Exeter Press, 2000), 223–47.
13. While still widely in use, including by film scholars, we now know that persistence of vision is not an adequate explanation of the illusion of motion. For a fuller explanation, see Barbara Anderson and Joseph Anderson, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited,” Journal of Film and Video 45, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 3–12.
14. Romana Karla Schuler, Seeing Motion: A History of Visual Perception in Art and Science (Gruyter, 2015), 33. For more on the prehistory of the modern study of retinal afterimages, see Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 202.
15. Joseph Plateau, Dissertation sur quelques propriétés des impressions, MA thesis, University of Liège, May 1829, quoted in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (MIT Press, 1992), 109.
16. Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 215–16.
17. Plateau, quoted in Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 216.
18. David Robinson, “Animation: The First Chapter, 1833–1893,” Monthly Film Bulletin 59, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 251.
19. Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, and Jeff Smith, Film History: An Introduction, 5th ed. (McGraw Hill, 2022), 4; Deac Rossell, Living Pictures: The Origin of the Movies (State University of New York Press, 1998), 19.
20. See Barbara Anderson and Joseph Anderson on how “myth of persistence of vision” posits “a passive viewer upon whose sluggish retina images pile up,” a construction that they argue gives rise to Marxist-Lacanian theories of cinema suspicious of cinema's ideological power over the malleable film subject. Anderson and Anderson, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision Revisited,” 3. An example of how this theory of passive spectatorship is applied to the analysis of the phenakistoscope can be found in Jonathan Crary's claim, in Techniques of the Observer, that optical toys leave the spectator “susceptible to external procedures of manipulation and stimulation that have the essential capacity to produce experience for the subject.” Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 92.
21. W. G. Horner, “On the Properties of the Daedaleum, a New Instrument of Optical Illusion,” London Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 4, no. 19 (January 1834): 37.
22. Tom Gunning, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3 (April 2012): 495–516.
23. Dulac and Gaudreault, “Circularity and Repetition,” 232.
24. For an overview of phenakistoscope design, see Stephen Herbert's discussion of phenakistoscope and stroboscope disks in his digital project, Stephen Herbert, The Wheel of Life, “The Phenakistoscope, and Stroboscopic Disc, Parts 1 and 2,” https://www.stephenherbert.co.uk/phenakPartOne.htm and https://www.stephenherbert.co.uk/phenakPartTwo.htm.
25. David J. Jones, Gothic Effigies: A Guide to Dark Visibilities (Manchester University Press, 2008), 117.
26. Meredith Bak, Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture (MIT Press, 2020), 111.
27. Herbert, “The Phenakistoscope, and Stroboscopic Disc, Part 1,” https://www.stephenherbert.co.uk/phenakPartOne.htm, accessed December 7, 2022.
28. Bak, Playful Visions, 111.
29. Bak, Playful Visions, 111.
30. Bak, Playful Visions, 110–11.
31. Stewart, “Modern Hard Times,” 311.
32. Herbert, “The Phenakistoscope, and Stroboscopic Disc, Part 2,” https://www.stephenherbert.co.uk/phenakPartTwo.htm.
33. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (Norton, 1961), 24.
34. See Amanda Shubert, “‘To Become a Devil’: Special Effects, Magic Tricks, and the Technological Image in Faust,” Film Criticism 48, no. 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.5693.
35. John Plotz, “Motion Slickness: Spectacle and Circulation in Thomas Hardy's ‘On the Western Circuit,’” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 370. As Mark Ford's biographical study Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (Harvard University Press, 2016) reminds us, Hardy was much more metropolitan than most of his characters.
36. Margaret Kolb, “Plot Circles: Hardy's Drunkards and Their Walks,” Victorian Studies 56, no. 4 (Summer 2014): 596.
37. Kolb, “Plot Circles,” 595. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (Modern Library, 2002), 328. Further references to this text will be page numbers that are provided in parentheses.
38. Caroline Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons (Stanford University Press, 2021), 126.
39. Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy's ‘Poetical Matter’ Notebook, ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford University Press, 2009), 15.
40. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, quoted in Lawrence J. Starzyk, “Hardy's Mayor: The Antitraditional Basis of Human Tragedy,” Studies in the Novel 4, no. 4 (Winter 1972): 593.
41. Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, 328.
42. Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, 328.
43. This condition recalls an earlier moment in the novel, when Elizabeth-Jane wonders about the source of her own consciousness, “which spun in her that moment like a top.” The physics of spinning objects and consciousness are once again metaphorically linked.
44. Elaine Scarry, “Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century Novelists,” Representations 3 (1983): 106.
45. Scarry, “Work and the Body in Hardy,” 102.
46. Scarry, “Work and the Body in Hardy,” 98.
47. Scarry, “Work and the Body in Hardy,” 91, 116, 92.
48. Martin Ray, Thomas Hardy: A Textual Study of the Short Stories (Routledge, 1997), 168.
49. Thomas Hardy, “On the Western Circuit,” in The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales (Penguin Classics, 1979), 244. Further references to this text will be page numbers that are provided in parentheses.
50. As Ray explains, Hardy changed the title to “On the Western Circuit” quite late in the composition process. See Ray, Thomas Hardy, 202.
51. Michael Niblett, “‘Time's Carcase’: Waste, Labour, and Finance Capital in the Atlantic World-Ecology,” Atlantic Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 77.
52. John Plotz notes that “the description of Charles watching Anna seems to derive from the experience of watching a ‘phenakistoscope.’” See Plotz, “Motion Slickness,” 376.
53. See especially Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford University Press, 2008), 101, 112.
54. See Nada Al-Ajmi, “Women in Thomas Hardy's ‘On the Western Circuit,’” Hardy Society Journal 2, no. 2 (2006): 44–51; Trish Ferguson, “Machinations Versus Mechanization: Desire in ‘On the Western Circuit,’” Hardy Review 19, no. 2 (2017): 61–69.
55. Thomas Hardy, “The Fiddler of the Reels,” in The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales (Penguin Classics, 1979), 286. Further references to this text will be page numbers that are provided in parentheses.
56. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 358.
57. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 350.
58. Shannon Draucker, Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature (State University of New York Press, 2024), 122–24.
59. Frank R. Giordano, “Characterization and Conflict in Hardy's ‘The Fiddler of the Reels,’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17, no. 3 (1975): 617–33.
60. Hardy, Thomas Hardy's ‘Poetical Matter’ Notebook, 15.
61. Lev Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?,” in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, ed. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Reframe Books, 2016), 1.1 What Is Digital Cinema? (sussex.ac.uk), accessed November 14, 2023.
Epilogue
1. Thomas Elsaesser, “Louis Lumière: The Cinema's First Virtualist?,” in Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel, or Cable: The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman (Amsterdam University Press, 1988), 57–58.
2. André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (University of California Press, 1967), 21–22.
3. Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” 21.