Chapter 1Magic PanicThe Pedagogy of Disenchantment
There is nothing more familiar to us today than looking at things that are not there. Between our phones and computers and the long history of cinema and television, we are thoroughly acculturated to a technological visual regime based on moving, dynamic, and mimetic virtual images. But in the early nineteenth century, as the field of physiological optics grew and optical technology became more popular and accessible, how people should engage in the spectatorship of virtual images and understand the presence of optical illusion in ordinary perceptual experience and everyday life were vast, open questions. This chapter investigates the construction of a popular scientific discourse of virtual spectatorship that I call the pedagogy of disenchantment, which defined and justified virtual aesthetics according to a civilizational logic. “Pedagogy of disenchantment” is my term for the project of cultivating modern and rational spectators through the eradication of superstition and supernatural belief and the development of practices of reflexivity and skepticism toward visual evidence. This pedagogy not only sought to teach spectators how to see and respond cognitively and emotionally to virtual images; it also advanced the European civilizational logic with which these competencies were imbricated.
This approach reformulates a key framework in nineteenth-century media history. Since the late 1980s, historians of film and media have argued forcefully that Victorian audiences were sophisticated and discerning, drawn to virtual images for their aesthetics of wonder and astonishment.1 For example, in a foundational essay, Tom Gunning challenged the myth of the naïve spectator of early cinema that I invoked in the introduction of this book, a spectator “whose reaction to the image is one of simple belief and panic” and whose encounter with virtual images reduces them “to a state usually attributed to savages in their primal encounter with the advanced technology of Western colonialists, howling and fleeing in impotent terror before the power of the machine.”2 For Gunning, this myth of early film spectatorship is an ideological construction that supports the apparatus theory of cinema as a disciplinary tool wielded against passive, complacent, and easily manipulated subjects. However, media historians tend to overlook the ways that the disenchanted virtual spectatorship that Gunning ascribes to early film audiences was itself an ideological construction. If magic panic is associated with “savages,” as Gunning suggests and as this chapter's historical archive will bear out, then disenchantment was not merely a fact of Victorian spectatorship but a profoundly troubling civilizational ideal.3
The intention of this chapter is not to challenge the idea that nineteenth-century spectators were disenchanted but to reframe the terms of the conversation.4 Rather than asking how spectators responded to virtual images, a question that risks flattening all Victorian audiences into a single historical type, I ask how spectators were being trained to respond to virtual images and what this tells us about the ways that virtual aesthetics was theorized in the first half of the nineteenth century. Across a rangy archive that includes scientific treatises, books of magic tricks, cartoons, and fiction, the pedagogy of disenchantment turned magical and optical spectatorship into an interpretive process that could go one of two ways. The first was toward recognition of an illusion as such, a form of self-reflexivity that relies on a basic understanding of the capacity of prestidigitators and optical conjurers to trick the eye. This disenchanted interpretation of an illusion aligned the capacity to be entertained—to enjoy trickery, as an aesthetically and perceptually amusing experience—with scientific rationalism, bourgeois respectability, and Western modernity. The second, considered primitive and dangerous, was an inability to recognize the technical or technological origins of an illusion, an intellectual failure that leads ineluctably to belief in the supernatural origins of the illusion and an infantile state of panic. We need not take these two interpretative stances at face value, as accurate representations of actual experiences of historical spectatorship. Disenchantment and superstition can clearly coexist, as we will see in numerous examples scattered across this book.5 Instead of reproducing the dichotomy between the rational and irrational, and between disenchantment and superstition, this chapter considers why nineteenth-century British writers, showmen, and scientific popularizers were so committed to presenting virtual spectatorship in dichotomous terms. When reframed in this way, it becomes clear that scientific and literary mobilizations of the pedagogy of disenchantment constructed the aesthetic appreciation of virtual images as a simultaneously practical and metaphorical form of sovereignty, one that served to justify colonial and patriarchal regimes of discipline and control.
To make this case, the chapter centers on two early to mid-nineteenth-century discussions of the pedagogy of disenchantment in magic spectatorship. The first is Letters on Natural Magic (1832), the seminal nineteenth-century treatise on scientific and technological magic that advances what I describe as the first fully fledged theory of virtual aesthetics. Written by the optical inventor and scientific popularizer David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic argued that disenchanted spectators—spectators both divested of supernatural belief and cognizant of the optical principles undergirding visual illusions—are uniquely capable of deriving aesthetic pleasure from virtual images. For Brewster, being entertained requires protecting oneself from fraud and imposture, turning the aesthetic experience of virtual images into both a sign and expression of political agency and discernment. In this context, superstitious responses like panic, confusion, and fear mark one as unable to govern oneself in the modern world and as susceptible to despotism and tyranny. While Brewster nominally presents virtual spectatorship as accessible to any person willing to be taught, his version of virtual aesthetics is marked by a gendered and racial colonial imagination that contrasts sovereign individuals with weak dependents.
This gender and racial subtext is made explicit in Cranford (1853). Written by Elizabeth Gaskell for Charles Dickens's weekly magazine Household Words, Cranford is an episodic novel that concerns the lifeways and beliefs of a group of genteel women in a small northern English town in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rarely discussed in scholarship on the novel is what I consider its centerpiece: a three-chapter narrative arc concerning the arrival of a mysterious Oriental conjurer and the outsized panic of the townswomen after witnessing his rather old-fashioned magic tricks.6 I read these chapters as a response to and critique of Letters on Natural Magic. By invoking and ultimately subverting the well-trod trope of female magic panic, Gaskell exposes the patriarchal and colonial logic undergirding Brewster's account of virtual aesthetics. Instead of making fun of the women for their insufficiently rational response to the magic show or portraying their panic as a moral and intellectual failing, the novel suggests that disenchanted magic, with its ostensibly antidespotic and pedagogical design, is deployed as a means of perceptual and social control. In other words, the novel makes visible the ways that the pedagogy of disenchantment simultaneously claimed moral superiority over native magic for its supposedly modern, technological rationality and deployed Western magic as a disciplinary regime of civilizational acculturation.
I begin this chapter with the emergence of magic's pedagogy of disenchantment in the rise of optical conjuring and the spread of rational recreations from an elite practice to a mainstream discourse, showing how these trends come together in Letters on Natural Magic. I then turn to the ways that Brewster situates disenchantment in an ideological framework that presents the aesthetic appreciation of virtual images as a moral and epistemic virtue and trace the influence of his thinking on the rise of commercial museums of science and gendered and colonial discourses of magic spectatorship. Next, I introduce Cranford as an example of one of those discourses of magic spectatorship and argue that it shows the pedagogy of disenchantment at work in everyday life. I conclude with an analysis of how the novel responds to Letters on Natural Magic by challenging the authoritarian impulse lurking within the pedagogy of disenchantment's civilizational logic.
A Pedagogy of Disenchantment
By some counts, the single most important French campaign against anticolonial resistance in Algeria was a magic show. In 1856, the renowned French illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin arrived in Algiers at the invitation of army colonel François-Edouard Neveu, political director of the Bureau of Arab Affairs, to perform two nights of magic shows for an audience of Arab elites.7 Neveu believed that these elites were under the sway of the marabouts, Muslim mystics and miracle workers branded by the French as charlatans and accused of using their supernatural authority to foment revolt against colonial rule. Robert-Houdin's mission was to discredit the supernatural claims of the marabouts through a performance of the modern, technological magic he had already made famous in Europe. Or, as Robert-Houdin put it in his memoir Confidences d’un prestidigitateur (1858), “it was hoped, with reason, that my performances would lead the Arabs to understand that the marabouts’ trickery is naught but simple child's play,” a process that “naturally . . . entailed demonstrating our superiority in everything.”8 While there is no reliable evidence that the magic shows had their desired effect, most extant textual records laud its resounding success in quelling Indigenous resistance and, according to one French Algerian newspaper, “mov[ing] colonization forward twenty years.”9 Robert-Houdin himself crowed about his ability to deceive his audience with pretended miracles. His memoir justified colonial rule by presenting Algerians as childlike and primitive, “besought by an indescribable terror” that led them to jump out of their seats and frantically fight for the exit.10
Where did this remarkably strange idea of military-sponsored stage magic come from? Why did French colonial administrators believe that a magician could secure colonial rule in a violent period of anticolonial resistance? The answers to these questions can be found in the nineteenth-century cultural discourse that I call the pedagogy of disenchantment. Decades before Robert-Houdin appeared on stage in Algiers, he and other magicians, trick designers, showmen, and scientific popularizers were already working to legitimize magic as a bourgeois Western entertainment by presenting magic performance as an essentially pedagogical method of exposing charlatanism, imposture, and pretense to occult powers. Like Robert-Houdin, the British figures I discuss in this chapter routinely mobilized a construction of “magic panic,” generally attributed to feminized and racialized audiences, against which they could articulate a mode of reasoned, pleasurable aesthetic appreciation of virtual images. The following pages turn to the emergence of nineteenth-century optical magic on stage and in popularizing texts to tell the story of how the pedagogy of disenchantment constructed virtual aesthetics in relation to patriarchal and colonial ideals of sovereignty.
In the mid-1850s, when Robert-Houdin traveled to Algeria at the invitation of colonial administrators, Western stage magic was in its golden age. Victorian magic shows were modern, sophisticated entertainments based on Enlightenment principles of rationality and skepticism; magicians were rebranded as “professors” and marketed as inventors of patented technology in a signal of their newly bourgeois respectability and professionalism.11 Many early and mid-nineteenth-century magicians still specialized in sleight-of-hand tricks that used visual misdirection. The term “sleight of hand” as well as its nineteenth-century synonyms “legerdemain” and “prestidigitation” convey the origin of these illusions in manual skills of dexterity and manipulation—what Robert-Houdin called the art of calm yet agile hands.12 During this same period, however, Victorian magic came increasingly to rely not only on nimble hands and quick fingers but also on optical apparatuses. Incorporating existing media like magic lanterns and bespoke devices composed of mirrors, glass, and projected light, mid-nineteenth-century magic rapidly became an optical art, one based in a deepening knowledge of human eyesight; optical principles of light, reflection, and refraction; and “how people react to what they see (or think they see).”13 Historian of magic Jim Steinmeyer has termed this second kind of magic “optical conjuring” for its application of optical principles and media to magic performance.14
Victorian optical conjuring was a style of stage magic that sought not only to entertain the eye but also to cultivate the mind by teaching audiences the optical principles through which the eye was deceived. At the most basic level, optical conjurers harnessed the properties of light and glass to make things appear and disappear on stage. The most famous example is Pepper's Ghost, so-named for John Henry Pepper, showman at and later director of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London where the illusion was first exhibited in 1861 and one of the trick's two inventors along with Henry Dircks. Pepper's Ghost not only made “ghosts” appear—materializing and dematerializing before the audience—but allowed them to interact with actors on the stage. To create lifelike ghosts, Pepper refined Dircks's original model for what he called his “Dircksian Phantasmagoria” by placing a large pane of glass in front of the stage and tilted 45 degrees toward the audience. The angle of the glass and its flawless transparency rendered it invisible to anyone in the seats. When an oxyhydrogen lantern was trained on an actor beneath the stage, the glass acted as a mirror by reflecting the actor to produce a remarkably lifelike spectral image of a human being (figure 1.1). The reflection was “transparent and ghostly and would appear at a distance behind the glass equal to the actor's distance from the front of the glass,” meaning that the spectral image appeared to move around the stage alongside the flesh-and-blood actors.15 When all the actors were synchronized, this image—a perfectly uncanny theatrical ghost—could interact with the characters on stage.
Dircks’ and Pepper's ghost illusion marks the beginning of a half century of spectral appearances and disappearances on the stage. The Ghost's appearance in an 1862 theatrical adaptation of Dickens's “The Haunted Man” at the Polytechnic included effects like a glowing skeleton materializing out of thin air, “hazy at first, then brighter and brighter, until it seemed to glow in a transparent, unearthly way”; a character leaving his chair only to “leave his own glowing, transparent soul behind”; and actors walking through walls.16 While Pepper leased his patent for the Ghost across Britain and the United States, variations on his pane-of-glass technique proliferated and boasted improvements to the overall illusion. In the 1890s, the Cabaret du Néant in Montmartre, Paris, included an “x-ray illusion” based on the Pepper's Ghost technique in which a spectator, placed in an open coffin on the stage, is shown to transform into his own skeleton.17 Shortly after the premier of Pepper's Ghost, the magician Colonel Stodare exhibited “The Sphinx,” in which a head adorned with Egyptian headdress and detached from a body appeared on a small table and spoke to audiences at the Egyptian Hall. Invented by Thomas Tobin, this illusion used imperceptible mirrors beneath the table to reverse Pepper's Ghost by making the body of the actor playing the Sphinx disappear.18 While these tricks are part of a long history of theatrical special effects, optical conjuring is distinct from the better-known tradition of trapdoors and hidden compartments used to make people appear and disappear on stage in that its effects rely on virtual images. Optical conjuring used virtual images to amuse spectators with things that are not really there.
Pepper's Ghost may be the clearest, best-known, and most influential example of optical conjuring, but the use of mirrors and glass to create virtual images has a long and vital history that stretches back to the sixteenth century. Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) first distinguished between two forms of magic, witchcraft and “juggling,” an archaic term for conjuring. Unlike witchcraft, the existence of which Scot doubted, juggling was not supernatural or occult but an entertaining practice based on manual skill and ingenious devices performed “to the delight of the beholder.”19 Early modern conjurers like Giambattista Della Porta and Athanasius Kircher took on the identity of “natural magician,” or the magician who reveals the wonders of nature, inventing in the process a new kind of optical magic that used lenses and mirrors to create fantastical virtual images.20 In his treatise Magia Naturalis (1558), published in English as Natural Magick in 1658, the inventor and showman Della Porta described the way a polished glass window can reflect things into a room that are actually outside the room—the basis of Pepper's Ghost. If a spectator is standing outside and looking into the window, objects arranged out of his sightline behind or above him could appear to be inside. He called this magic trick “How we may see in a Chamber things that are not.”21
Pepper's Ghost drew on a long tradition of optical entertainment that represented virtual images as ghosts in order to advance an antisupernatural pedagogy. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, optical magic shows like the phantasmagoria—a precursor to Pepper's Ghost that created spectral illusions using a hidden magic lantern—designed optical technological illusions that resembled ghosts, presenting effects that seemed supernatural while avowing their nonsupernatural origin. As the phantasmagoria showman Paul Philidor put it to his audiences, “I will not show you ghosts, because there are no such things; but I will produce before you enactments and images. . . . I do not wish to deceive you; but I will astonish you.”22 Shows like the phantasmagoria did not manufacture belief in the supernatural but rather generated what Gunning calls “entertaining confusion.”23 As one French spectator of the phantasmagoria wrote in 1800, “Reason has told you well that these things are mere phantoms, catoptric tricks devised with artistry . . . [yet] we believe ourselves to be transported into another world and another century.”24 I will discuss the phantasmagoria and its legacy in more detail in chapter 4. For now, I wish simply to highlight the way Victorian optical entertainers disavowed supernatural agency while capitalizing on the allure of visual illusion to help produce a disenchanted audience capable of understanding that the tricks are not real. Pepper's Ghost, for example, was advertised as “A Strange Lecture” with Professor Pepper, a showman known for his lecture-type demonstrations, performing alongside a magic lantern and other optical devices to emphasize the scientific and technological context for the Ghost illusion.25 These shows played out as a hermeneutic game in which discerning spectators were encouraged to marshal their knowledge of technology, stagecraft, optics, and the human eye to wonder at how the tricks were achieved.
Letters on Natural Magic (1832)
We can see already see that Robert-Houdin's Algerian magic show participated in an evolving tradition of magic performance that considered the visual pleasures of optical technology and illusion to be means for demystification. But how did this tradition link visual pleasure and disenchanted spectatorship with the exercise of sovereignty? To answer this, I turn to what I consider the definitive formulation of optical magic's pedagogy of disenchantment in the early nineteenth-century writings of Sir David Brewster. An optical inventor and tireless scientific popularizer, Brewster will appear across the chapters of this book because, from the beginning of his career at the turn of the century until his death in 1868, he was involved with many of the most popular nineteenth-century optical toys, exhibitions, and entertainments. If his name is known today, it is as the inventor of what were arguably the two most beloved optical toys of the nineteenth century. His kaleidoscope, a coinage from Ancient Greek roots that literally means “observation of beautiful forms,” was a tube that combined tilted mirrors with colorful pieces of glass to create ever-changing symmetrical views, while his lenticular stereoscope—a streamlined version of Charles Wheatstone's cumbersome tabletop device—transformed the way Victorians experienced photography by making it simple and accessible to view images in stereo.
Less well known is Brewster's copious body of writing that transformed the way people played with optical instruments and experienced optical shows. Letters on Natural Magic (1832) was the most influential of these volumes. First published in London by John Murray as part of Murray's Family Library, a collection of affordable and educational texts for the family reading market, Letters on Natural Magic introduced the scientific and technological origins of apparently magical phenomena to a mass audience. It was a treatise on illusions, including those caused by acoustics, hydrostatics, and mechanics, but its primary concern was with optical illusions. Of all the sciences, Brewster wrote, “Optics is the most fertile in marvelous expedients.”26 As a result, it is “the principal seat of the supernatural,” proliferating visual phenomena that seem to be occult in nature.27 What Brewster aimed to teach his readers was how to experience the beauty and wonder of such supernatural-seeming visual phenomena by correctly identifying their source in physiological or technological optics. Like his optical toys, which he promoted for their capacity for “rational amusement,” Letters on Natural Magic views optical instruction and aesthetic pleasure as inextricable. I read this text as the nineteenth century's first theory of virtual aesthetics, which argues that optical literacy and antisupernaturalism are preconditions for the aesthetic enjoyment of virtual images.
Letters on Natural Magic united two strands of popular scientific writing. The first was a growing body of scientific literature that sought to explain the optical, physiological, and technological origins of what were called apparitions or spectral illusions, visual perceptions that cannot be empirically verified. The theory of apparitions was understood as a means of driving ghost belief out of Britain. John Ferriar's An Essay Towards the Theory of Apparitions (1813) and Samuel Hibbert's Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions; or, an Attempt to Trace Such Illusions to Their Physical Causes (1824) popularized scientific arguments against the existence of ghosts by arguing that apparitions were the result of ocular deceptions inherent to the human eye. Ferriar and Hibbert were both physicians, and they claimed that apparitions could be caused not only by overexcited imaginations and vivid memories but also by indigestion and diseases of the stomach, a theory that is probably best remembered today through Scrooge's retort to Marley's ghost in A Christmas Carol that he is nothing but “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an undone potato.”28
Letters on Natural Magic opens with a discussion of apparitions meant to train readers in how and why such illusions occur and to empower them to understand their own experiences of apparition through a demystifying scientific frame. Its pedagogical agenda was not to teach readers how not to see apparitions, which was considered an unavoidable condition of human vision, but rather to teach readers how to see apparitions without believing that they are ghosts.29 In directing this antisupernatural pedagogy toward the working- and middle-class readership of Murray's Family Library, Letters on Natural Magic was a self-improvement tract invested in social change through the diffusion of scientific knowledge.
In addition to the scientific literature on apparitions, Brewster wrote as part of an Enlightenment tradition of magic demystification known as rational recreations. Inspired by John Locke's promotion of instructive scientific games for children's education, rational recreations were science experiments and conjuring tricks that children and their guardians could perform at home to learn about subjects like optics, chromatics, hydrostatics, and pyrotechnics through what Barbara Stafford calls the “participatory enactment” of scientific practice.30 Families could purchase portable instruments like microscopes and magic lanterns along with affordable illustrated books of experiments that children could conduct with their new instruments and thus harness the playful allure of conjuring and the pleasures of visual illusion to make scientific knowledge easily comprehensible.31 Rational recreations were imagined to protect individuals and, by extension, the nation, from despotism, imposture, and fraud by training them in practices of critical thinking and scientific rationality. For instance, William Hooper's four-volume set Rational Recreations promised to teach the reader “a knowledge of his own ignorance” through easy and fun experiments with sensational-sounding names like “the magician's mirrors,” “the marvelous portrait,” “the burning fountain,” and “winter changed into spring.”32 Hooper's instructions on creating catoptric, anamorphic, and metamorphic virtual images and lessons on how to use invisible ink and perform card tricks were meant to show the reader “the fallacy of what he thought most certain, the evidence of the senses” and enable him to “divest himself of those prepossessions, from whence so many of the evils of life proceed.”33 Like Rational Recreations, Letters on Natural Magic is a collection of educational magic tricks that readers can perform at home. It advanced the mandate of defeating superstition by teaching readers about the tricky relationship between reality and the senses and empowering them to think and act self-reflexively.
What distinguishes Brewster's work within both these traditions of physiological optics and rational recreations is his commitment to theorizing and advocating for a kind of aesthetic experience distinct to the apprehension of virtual images. For example, an early chapter offers the medical case study of a “Mrs. A.,” in fact the wife of the Edinburgh doctor John Abercrombie, whom Brewster treated when she was suffering from spectral illusions of dead and absent relatives. While some of the apparitions were acoustic only, most were visible and appeared to her with “all the vivid coloring and apparent reality of life.”34 Later, when laying out his design of a catoptrical phantasmagoria, Brewster encourages his readers to create similar apparitions technologically: a bright light-source trained on a bust or portrait of “an absent or dead friend” and placed before a concave mirror will create a virtual image very much like Mrs. Abercrombie's apparitions that can be projected on air or smoke. Her diseased visions become the model for an amusing and impressive technological entertainment: when “the instruments of illusion are themselves concealed,” he writes, “even those who know the deception, and perfectly understand its principles, are not a little surprised as its effects.”35 Here, his project of explaining the theory of apparitions and encouraging readers to learn about vision through hands-on experiments transcends the purposes of education. He is clearly fascinated—even intoxicated—by the wonder of optics. We can see this aesthetic impulse from the beginning of Brewster's career. For instance, Stafford notes that Brewster's Treatise on the Kaleidoscope (1817) shows a “baroque penchant” for creating and exhibiting beautiful forms that Enlightenment visual education generally maligned.36 More than a love of beauty, Letters on Natural Magic reveals Brewster's flair for showmanship.37 He not only lays out experiments that teach optical principles, but he continually improves upon existing technological design with the aim of creating more entertaining virtual images and generating greater novelty (“surprise”) among educated spectators, those who “know the deception.”
For Brewster, virtual aesthetics is predicated on disenchantment and disbelief—on “know[ing] the deception” and “understand[ing] its principles.” Disenchantment is what distinguishes an optical spectator from a scared person seeing a ghost. For a person who believes in the supernatural, an apparition is not an image—it is an occult presence, a visitation. Their experience is not aesthetic but an encounter with the living dead. Only a thorough disbelief in the supernatural frees the spectator to have an aesthetic experience of virtual images—to appreciate their beauty, to marvel at their lifelikeness, and to wonder at their uncanny appearance. In this sense, optical education serves a different function for Brewster than it did for Hooper. Hooper wanted to teach his readers to distrust the evidence of their senses and thus avoid succumbing to supernatural belief; Brewster additionally believes that these competencies are important because they make possible new kinds of visual pleasure. The basic optical literacy that he teaches in Letters on Natural Magic is meant to enable a new form of aesthetic playfulness that relies on an active and educated eye and a commitment to tracing visual phenomena to their material origins. Although his focus is on the appreciation of technologically produced virtual images, Brewster also believed that spectral illusions resulting from “bodily indisposition”—the digestive issues that his forebears Ferriar and Hibbert cited as the cause of apparitions—could be a source of aesthetic pleasure.38 When one understands their physiological origins and correctly identifies them as symptoms of illness, he writes, “spectral apparitions are stripped of all their terror.” It then becomes possible to “deriv[e] pleasure from the contemplation” even of the most “alarming” apparitions.39 Like scientific education, diagnosis serves the purposes of entertainment.
Whether someone could be entertained by virtual images had inherently political stakes. For Brewster, the opposite of entertainment was not boredom or displeasure but submission to despotic power. This point of view did not originate with Brewster. In Rational Recreations, Hooper wrote that his book was an antidote for those who have indulged in “slavish submission to their own tyrannic passions.” Both the fraudulence of the senses and the potential deceits that could be exercised on the senses by others are metaphorically depicted as forms of slavery from which one can be freed by the practice of rational recreations. Brewster's argument in Letters on Natural Magic is even more specific. He decries the use of optical illusions by those in power—governments, religious orders—in the service of supernatural imposture, while lauding the experience of being entertained by optical illusions as both the basis for and an expression of epistemic liberty. Writing about “the tyrants of antiquity” who “rule[d] with the delegated authority of heaven”—a charge that he also levels against the Catholic Church—Brewster describes “a dark conspiracy to deceive and enslave their species” exercised by princes, priests, and sages through the use of virtual images.40 Because it requires practices of disenchantment and demystification, Brewster views the aesthetic experience of virtual images as a practice of sovereignty that can protect individuals from becoming epistemically and politically enslaved or, as he describes it elsewhere, from becoming “the dupe of preconcerted imposture—the slave of [their] own ignorance—the prostrate vassal of power and superstition.”41 Here, “dupe” is another word for “slave” or “vassal”; to be duped is to be made politically subordinate and stripped of legal rights. To be entertained by virtual images is to practice a form of self-government that thwarts and defies would-be tyrants and despots, turning their supernatural impostures into pleasing and amusing conjuring tricks. As an aesthetic experience, virtuality is an expression of political agency and discernment.
These oppositional constructions—the self-reflexive spectator and the dupe, the optical conjurer and the slave—have patriarchal and colonial connotations that are built into the popular scientific imaginary of the period. More than half a century before Letters on Natural Magic, Hooper had presented visual education as a protection against the feminized and racialized threat of sensory experience, a “passion” at once “slavish” and “tyrannic.” Rational recreations were a masculinizing bulwark against the decadence of the senses, a patriarchal and colonial assertion of intellectual sovereignty over one's own primitive impulses. Brewster reproduces this logic in Letters on Natural Magic when he describes the superstitious person as a “slave” and “prostrate vassal.” Brewster's fixation on forms of political and religious imposture exceeds Hooper's, however, and reveals distinct political ambitions and anxieties. Letters on Natural Magic was published the same year as the Reform Act of 1832, which extended citizenship rights to a new class of men including small landowners, householders, and shop owners and for the first time in written law formally barred women from the franchise. While his manifest concern is with ancient governments, Brewster's agenda of democratizing the rational recreation of optical play—what had been in the eighteenth century an elite set of practices and entertainments—comes at a time when a newly enfranchised male population were entrusted with stewardship of the nation and, by extension, the empire. Writing about the early American republic, Wendy Bellion argues that technologies of optical illusion cultivated citizenship by inaugurating “a cultural dialectic of deceit and discernment” that “challenged Americans to demonstrate their perceptual aptitude.”42 In this context, perceptual aptitude ensures political agency and “able citizenship.”43 During a period when liberal political theorists in Britain argued that “progress was a matter of increasing rationality and cognitive capacity,” playing with optical technology and experiencing artful optical deceptions without being deceived was a kind of civilizational training that prepared Victorian men for the responsibility of the franchise.44
Brewster's concern with magic's use for the “dark conspiracy . . . to enslave” not only evokes the political reforms that were being debated and implemented in the early 1830s but also reflects their relationship to Britain's continued use of slavery in its colonies and violent practices of colonial conquest. The threat of being “enslaved” to despotic power simultaneously expresses British anxieties about the ambitions of neighboring European empires in the wake of the Napoleonic wars and the political philosophy that Jennifer Pitts calls imperial liberalism. Imperial liberalism combined a commitment to individual liberties with a belief in “civilizing despotism,” or the selective use of despotism as a tool of colonial conquest.45 The rationale of civilizing despotism, which was firmly entrenched in British politics by the 1830s, was that the peoples Britain marked for enslavement and colonization were “regarded as being at ‘earlier’ stages of development” than modern and enlightened Westerners, “cognitively limited,” “mired in error and enslaved to superstition,” and therefore “incapable of participation in their own government.”46 Brewster's discussion of ancient despotic conspiracies invokes the colonial stereotype of backward and barbaric nations. If his virtual aesthetics is characterized by the same practices of rationality and discernment necessary for citizenship, it also rehearses the epistemological justifications for empire.
The Boy Conjurer and the Foolish Woman
The civilizational agenda implicit in Brewster's optical pedagogy was made explicit by John Henry Pepper. Pepper was the optical entertainer and inventor who lent his name to the ghost illusion. Just as he put Brewster's pedagogy of disenchantment to work as lecturer at, and later director of, the Royal Polytechnic Institution, Pepper authored a children's book of scientific games and experiments in the tradition of Letters on Natural Magic and Rational Recreations. However, The Boy's Playbook of Science (1860) distinguished itself from the work of Brewster and Hooper in addressing itself specifically to a male readership that it metonymized as “Young England.” Pepper thus focused explicitly on the moral and intellectual improvement of middle-class boys, a project that he viewed as integral to nation building and the future of Britain's empire.47 “Young England” was exhorted to “nourish the desire for the acquisition of ‘scientific knowledge’” as “a useful ally” in “the mental race he has to run with the educated of his own and of other nations,” a race that Pepper further characterized as “‘The Battle of Life.’” While Pepper's explicit gendering of scientific learning as a masculine endeavor seems to break from the gender agnosticism of Hooper and Brewster's work, which imagined both male and female readers, it also simply reveals what was implicit in these earlier works. Pepper strips away Brewster's meditations on scientific learning as a means to aesthetic pleasure to reveal what was always underneath: scientific learning as a “useful ally” in the deliberative masculine work of national and imperial governance. By presenting scientific education as a counterpart to “manly sports,” Pepper defines science as a distinctly masculine recreation that is necessary for a boy's coming of age as a productive steward of empire. Cultivating the boy conjurer is tantamount to cultivating imperial progress.
The implicit gendering of Brewster's pedagogy of disenchantment was also made explicit in a subgenre of comic essays, stories, and cartoons that proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century. These texts, which I call satires of superstition, sought to illustrate the importance of disenchanted spectatorship by the negative example of bad female spectators whose magic panic disrupts the respectable bourgeois space of the lecture hall. For example, in an essay called “A Shilling's Worth of Science” (1850), published in Household Words in its first year of circulation, the narrator tours the Royal Polytechnic Institution while bemoaning his “fate to sit next to two old ladies” at a lecture on “Magnetism and Electricity” who “seemed to be very incredulous about the whole business”:
“If heat and light are the same thing,” asked one, “why don’t a flame come out at the spout of a boiling tea kettle?”
“The steam,” answered the other, “may account for that.”
“Hush!” cried somebody behind them; and the ladies were silent; but it was plain they thought Voltaic Electricity had something to do with conjuring, and that the lecturer might be a professor of Magic.48
The trope of foolish women misinterpreting a scientific lecture-demonstration as a magic show had wide currency in the second half of the nineteenth century. In “Mrs. Brown Visits the Polytechnic” (1871), a story written by the English humorist George Rose under his pen name Arthur Sketchley, Mrs. Brown is invited to tag along to the Royal Polytechnic Institution when “young Trueman,” a civil engineer set to marry her friend's daughter Mary-Ann, takes Mary-Ann to the Polytechnic “for to improve ‘er mind.”49 But Mrs. Brown's mind, marked as inferior by her working-class accent, is not improved by any of the Polytechnic's many spectacular exhibitions. “There's too much in that Pollyntechnic for one human brain to stand,” she complains, “as is downright bewilderin’ to the understandin’.” In reference to Pepper's Ghost, or the “ghosts ‘as been showed in . . . [of] course they’d be real at the Pollyntechnic,” Mrs. Brown reflects that “they’re things as I don’t think ought to be brought up for amusements, as is solemn things, and ‘as frightened parties to death.”50 In a Punch cartoon called “Microscopy for the Million” (1878), also set at the Polytechnic, a woman chastens her husband for his inability to understand the danger of a Polytechnic lecturer's demonstration of the projection microscope, which magnifies microscopic organisms on a screen: “What wad come o’ us if thae awfu’-like brutes was to brek out of the watter!!” (figure 1.2). Confused and terrified, like Mrs. Brown, the woman in the Punch cartoon cannot improve or enjoy herself.
Figure 1.2. “Microscopy for the Million,” cartoon by Charles Samuel Keene. Punch, or the London Charivari, 1878.
In these satires of bad female spectatorship, superstition is represented through a gender and class code that is implicit in Letters on Natural Magic. The unruly women who disrupt the lecture-demonstration by whispering to one another or loudly complaining about “the larks played on you” by lecturers and entertainers are unable to distinguish scientific demonstrations from the occult magic that they were designed to debunk.51 Inspired by Brewster's writing on natural magic and partly led by his disciple Pepper, the Polytechnic capitalized on the fashion for stage magic through a visually appealing brand of scientific entertainment that would demystify apparently supernatural phenomena and inculcate rational modes of visual spectatorship.52 Advancing the pedagogy developed by Brewster in Letters on Natural Magic, the Polytechnic sublimated the appeal of the magic show to teach scientific principles, “pander[ing],” in Iwan Rhys Morus's words, “to their audiences’ sense of their own superiority—their sense that they were the kind of people who could be depended upon to see through the smoke screen of effects.”53 Polytechnic shows were not meant to bewilder the understanding or play tricks, as Mrs. Brown charges, but rather to effect the opposite—to educate the understanding by subverting the logic of the magic trick through scientific demystification of spectacular illusions. The inability of these women to distinguish a lecturer from a conjurer and to recognize the artifice undergirding spectacles like Pepper's Ghost marks them as primitives in a temple of technological modernity. They are not only unable to participate in the hermeneutic game of deciphering the showman's spectacular illusions, but they are also unable to recognize that a game is taking place at all. All three texts cultivate that “sense of superiority” in its readers by mocking the confused “old ladies.” Women are superstitious fools who offer a comic foil to the masculine spectator-detective; they are unable to experience the aesthetic pleasure of virtual images because they are too busy worrying about the “solemn” dangers of dark magic, ghosts, and monsters.
Like Robert-Houdin's memoir, with its representation of childish and frightened Algerian audiences, these satires of superstition model civilized spectatorship through negative example. Their focus on female spectatorship, often but not exclusively working class, extends Brewster's presentation of disenchanted spectatorship as a practice of self-sovereignty and a form of preparation for the responsibilities of citizenship and governance. While Letters on Natural Magic is concerned with the cognitive stance required to experience the aesthetic pleasure of virtual images, its political framework turns virtual aesthetics into an expression of civilizational progress. Without ever explicitly defining the ideal virtual spectator in gender, race, or class terms—and while even insisting on the democratic potential of the pedagogy of disenchantment to transform how all spectators experience virtual images—the book nevertheless implicitly associates the capacity for the aesthetic experience of virtual images with modernity, masculinity, class privilege, and whiteness. Drawing on the eighteenth-century tradition of rational recreations, Brewster characterizes the propensity for panic and superstition as atavistic, primitive, feminized, and working class and codes panic and superstition as expressions of racialized others whose inability to experience “rational amusement” justifies enslavement and colonial violence. In this sense, Letters on Natural Magic contributed to the growing association of the pedagogy of disenchantment with the patriarchal and imperial endeavors of “Young England” while defining the British and patriarchal will to power in terms of the capacity for the playful enjoyment of seeing things that are not there. In the second half of this chapter, I turn to a novel that responds to Letters on Natural Magic. By showing how the pedagogy of disenchantment breaks down when practiced by a group of women who attend a magic show, Cranford both participates in and challenges the satires of superstition that turned on the figure of the foolish woman.
The Great Cranford Panic
Halfway through Elizabeth Gaskell's 1853 novel Cranford, Miss Matilda Jenkyns pens a letter to the narrator, her friend Mary Smith, announcing that one Signor Brunoni is slated to exhibit “his wonderful magic” in the Cranford Assembly Rooms the following week.54 An Englishman who styles himself as an Indian conjurer, “Magician to the King of Delhi, the Rajah of Oude, and the Great Lama of Thibet” (158), Signor Brunoni astonishes Miss Matty, Mary, and the other genteel ladies with his feats of prestidigitation. For these women, the magic show unleashes what the narrator calls “the great Cranford panic” (104), a period characterized by unfounded fears of despotism and ghosts connected to the mysterious conjurer and his inexplicable powers. As this brief summary suggests, Cranford simultaneously evokes and critiques the modern discourses and practices of optical magic spectatorship embodied in Letters on Natural Magic.55 The narrative arc of “the great Cranford panic,” comprising the magic show, the fears that it engenders, and the unmasking of the magician as the sick and impoverished English soldier Sam Brown, is a knowing subversion of the magic panic genre that makes explicit the patriarchal subtext of Brewster's work as well as the cartoons, essays, and stories that articulated the pedagogy of disenchantment through mockery of female magic spectators. Instead of making fun of the women for their insufficiently rational response to the magic show or portraying their panic as a moral and intellectual failing, Cranford challenges Brewster's presentation of magic as antidespotic by showing how it is deployed in the service of female submission to patriarchal control. Signor Brunoni's Cranford magic show and Robert-Houdin's Algiers magic show thus make a surprisingly apt pairing. In different ways, they both reveal how stage magic can function as an exercise of sovereignty authorized through its civilizing intent. I will make this case in two parts: first by showing how the novel mirrors Letters on Natural Magic by incorporating Brewster's optical pedagogy of disenchantment and then by concluding with an analysis of Cranford as critique.
Cranford's representation of magic spectatorship shows the discourse and procedures of the pedagogy of disenchantment in action in mid-century provincial social life. To make sense of Signor Brunoni's magic show, Gaskell's women characters—among them the narrator, Mary Smith; her close friend, Mathilda Jenkyns; a stubborn spinster named Miss Pole; and a superstitious widow, Mrs. Forrester—candidly discuss the science of apparitions, magic illusions, and physiological optics. This is all the more striking because Brunoni is not a modern optical magician but an itinerant sleight-of-hand conjurer of the old school who pulls handkerchiefs out of loaves of bread and makes canaries disappear. While the women view Signor Brunoni as a novelty, he is actually part of a class of traveling magicians who would be displaced by the rise of urban, site-specific, and technological magic entertainment beginning in the 1850s and 1860s. In other words, Brunoni represents a profession that is going extinct.
What makes the magic scenes modern then is not Signor Brunoni's magic but the way the women of Cranford behave as optical spectators by interpreting the magic show through optical frameworks. Consider Miss Pole and Mrs. Forrester's debate over the existence of ghosts and witchcraft, during which the former presents evidence against the supernatural drawn from work in physiological optics, citing “indigestion, spectral illusions, optical delusions, and a great deal out of Dr. Ferriar and Dr. Hibbert besides” (99). Like Scrooge, Miss Pole's reading of Ferriar and Hibbert marks her not only as a skeptic but also as a proponent of the theories of optical disenchantment underlying modern optical media culture, the same theories that animate Brewster's work. In addition to invoking the propensity of human vision to seeing apparitions to argue that ghosts are not real, her belief that “there might be a scientific solution found for even the proceedings of the Witch of Endor” recalls Brewster's gambit of demystifying ancient magic and tales of the miraculous by attributing them to early experiments with optical technology (83). Miss Pole's sparring partner Mrs. Forrester, meanwhile, who “believed everything from ghosts to death-watches,” exemplifies the belief in ghosts that Victorian optical pedagogy sought to drive out (83). When she calls upon her maid Jenny “to give evidence of having seen a ghost with her own eyes” (99), her trust in the testimony of the senses marks her as precisely the kind of reader Brewster hoped to reach with his cautioning remark that “the eye is the principal seat of the supernatural.”
Gaskell even alludes to discourses of rational magic by including a stand-in for Letters on Natural Magic's painstaking explanations of magic tricks. Miss Pole prepares to attend the magic show by transcribing diagrams for sleight-of-hand tricks from Matty's old encyclopedia, perusing “the nouns beginning with C” for conjuring:
“Ah! I see; I comprehend perfectly,” she remarks. “A represents the ball. Put A between B and D—no! between C and F, and turn the second joint of the third finger of your left hand over the wrist of your right H. Very clear indeed! My dear Mrs. Forrester, conjuring and witchcraft are a mere affair of the alphabet.” (84)
This is a reference to the conjuring diagrams in books like Letters on Natural Magic, Rational Recreations, and The Boy's Playbook of Science. These diagrams are indeed “affair[s] of the alphabet”: they label each component of the trick with a letter that has a corresponding explanation in the text, like the diagrams in a scientific treatise, in their quest to rationalize and democratize magic as a rational and instructive home activity. Although Miss Pole lacks the specialized equipment of a natural magic treatise like Letters, she is written as a parody of one of Brewster's earnest readers. Throughout the magic show, Miss Pole will read aloud from what she calls “receipts,” or explanations of the tricks that she has copied from the encyclopedia onto scraps of paper, insisting that she could perform the magician's tricks herself “with two hours given to study the Encyclopedia and make her third finger flexible” (87).
However, just like the bad women spectators at the Royal Polytechnic Institution satirized in Punch and Household Words, Miss Pole's pedagogy of disenchantment fails to demystify the magic show, either for her companions or herself. “How he did his tricks I could not imagine,” Mary reports, “no, not even when Miss Pole pulled out her pieces of paper and began reading aloud” (87). The other women share Mary's perspective: Miss Matty and Mrs. Forrester are “mystified to the highest degree” and even the urbane Lady Glenmore, “who had seen many curious sights in Edinburgh, was very much struck with the tricks” (87). Like the “two old ladies” in “A Shilling's Worth of Science,” Miss Matty and Mrs. Forrester fear occult interference and ask Mary to see whether the rector is in attendance to ensure that “this wonderful man is sanctioned by the Church” (88). Although Miss Pole plays the role of the skeptic—she even shouts, “I don’t believe him!” when Signor Brunoni appears on stage (86)—her use of the term “receipt” to describe conjuring diagrams prefigures her failure to make sense of the magic show and her ultimate succumbing to superstition and panic. An archaic version of the word “recipe,” “receipt” here means a formula for a medicinal preparation or a dish; Miss Pole will later ask Mrs. Forrester for the “receipt” of her bread-jelly (103). Once again echoing the female spectators in “A Shilling's Worth of Science” whose only frame of reference for the lecture-demonstration on electricity is the experience of boiling water in a kettle, Miss Pole describes the masculine art of conjuring in terms drawn from the feminine arts of nursing and cooking. Thus, much like the satirical representations of female spectators at the Polytechnic, the Cranford women remain “astonished” even when the performance of magic is doubled by its own demystification (87).
The magic panic that seizes these women after Signor Brunoni's show—what the narrator refers to as “the great Cranford panic”—is not only consistent with the pedagogy of disenchantment's correlation between femininity and superstition but also reflects Brewster's concern about how optical illusions can solicit belief in their reality in audiences insufficiently knowledgeable about the science of visual perception. The “panic” is motivated by a series of strange episodes that “seemed at the time connected in our minds with” Signor Brunoni (89). At first, a series of robberies suggest “a trick fit for a conjurer” (91), while the death of Mrs. Jamieson's dog portends magical interference. “He had apparently killed a canary with only a word of command,” the narrator muses in the free indirect discourse of the Cranford woman, “his will seemed of deadly force; who knew but what he might yet be lingering in the neighborhood willing all sorts of awful things!” (94).56 The women's fears escalate until they light upon the possibility of ghosts, a turn that associates Brunoni's magic with that of optical ghost conjurers. Jenny's story about a ghost haunting the aptly named Darkness Lane alludes to this tradition of optical magic when it transposes the appearances and disappearances of sleight-of-hand magic into the conjuring of spectral apparitions and ghosts. In this context, Darkness Lane recalls not just the spooky locales of gothic fiction but also the use of what Noam Elcott calls “artificial darkness” for the technological projection of optical images.57
Even more explicitly optical is Mary's greatest fear. In the wake of the magic show, Mary is not afraid of ghosts but of ghostly virtual images produced with Brewster's favorite magical apparatus, the mirror. “If I dared to go up to my looking-glass when I was panic-stricken,” she confesses, “I should certainly turn it round, with its back towards me, for fear of seeing eyes behind me looking out of the darkness” (97). Mary's fear of disembodied “eyes looking at me, and watching me” is realized in the previous chapter, when Signor Brunoni stares out at the audience before the show through the curtain “with two odd eyes, seen through holes” (86). Mary's “pet apprehension” thus reconfigures this old-fashioned conjurer and his run-down set as a menacing technological optical illusion. When Mrs. Jamieson inspects her spectacles during the magic show “as if she thought it was something defective in them which made the legerdemain,” the gesture playfully references the capacity of glass to create illusions. By associating Signor Brunoni's old-school magic with mirrors and glass and with apparitions and ghosts, Cranford signals its investment in the modern technological and optical magic that Brewster promoted in Letters on Natural Magic. Brunoni's magic is not based in the creation of virtual images, but the response of the Cranford women makes it seem as if it were.
Cranford's representation of optical disenchantment and the demystification of magic extends to its construction of the magician himself. The character Samuel Brown is an Englishman who “learnt some tricks of an Indian juggler”—otherwise known as a conjurer or prestidigitator—during his military tour of India and now performs “Indian magic” for provincial English audiences under the moniker Signor Brunoni (109). The “great Cranford panic” subsides when the mysterious Signor Brunoni is revealed to be the impoverished Englishman Samuel Brown, who performs his tricks with the help of an improbable double: his twin brother. Thus, the demystification of the conjurer demystifies his magic. This narrative unfolding not only reproduces magic's pedagogy of disenchantment but also reflects the performativity of Victorian magic theater. Many British magicians performed as characters of their own invention, with foreign-sounding names and titles calculated to evoke cosmopolitan prestige; among them was Antonio van Zandt, a British sleight-of-hand magician and possible model for Signor Brunoni, who performed under the stage name Signor Blitz.58 Signor Brunoni more specifically captures the nineteenth-century practice of magic as racial performance. Performing Indian magic while “magnificent[ly]” clad in a turban, a guise that earns him the nickname of “the Grand Turk” (86), Brunoni evokes two traditions of racial imposture in stage magic. The first is the phenomenon of nineteenth-century European and American magicians who masqueraded as Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, or ambiguously Oriental conjurers, such as the American magician William Ellsworth Robinson, who darkened his skin with greasepaint and dressed in traditional Chinese costume to become the magician Chung Ling Soo. The second and more widespread form of imposture was white magicians’ claim to perform authentically Indian magic, from sleight-of-hand tricks popularized in England by Indian magicians such as Ramo Samee and Khia Khan Khruse to technological set pieces enhanced by trumped-up tales about the illusion's origin in India.
We can therefore see how Cranford narrativizes the optical pedagogy of disenchantment theorized by David Brewster. A group of credulous women are consumed by panic and fear when a foreigner performs supernatural acts. Thrown off by the patently weird and incoherent combination of his Turkish dress, Italian name, fake French-sounding accent, and Indian conjuring tricks, the women at once accuse him of being a practitioner of dark arts, a savage “Mussulman,” and a “French spy” preparing to launch a fresh wave of the Anglo-French Wars. When the foreigner is revealed to be a white Englishman, the supernatural occurrences become comprehensible as illusions and tricks and “somehow, we all forgot to be afraid” (103). Brewster warned that belief in ghosts would make the British vulnerable to becoming “the dupe of preconcerted imposture—the slave of [their] own ignorance—the prostrate vassal of power and superstition.”59 Cranford seems to enact these consequences satirically by portraying Matty and her friends as “dupe[d]” and “[en]slave[d]” by ignorance; like the Punch cartoon of the angry woman spectator disrupting the projection microscope demonstration with her fear that the “brutes” will break out of water and attack, their superstition takes the form of unfounded fears of an assault on Britain by foreign enemies. Now that the panic engendered by Signor Brunoni's “first coming in his Turkish dress” has been replaced with sympathy upon “his second coming—pale and feeble,” Miss Pole's “receipts” for Signor Brunoni's performance give way to the actual medicinal receipts with which she and the other women nurse Sam Brown back to health. Disenchantment restores the boundaries of whiteness and Britishness, the sovereignty of nation and empire over the racial other, and traditional gender roles as the women return to their rightful place as caregivers of men.
A Trick Fit for a Conjurer
If we stay with Cranford a little longer, there is more to find. To say that it simply reproduces Brewster's pedagogy of disenchantment is to overlook the novel's subtler but no less important critique of disenchanted spectatorship. In a previous publication, I made the case that Cranford's representation of magic is metafictional.60 Rather than portraying magic panic as a symptom of undisciplined female minds, Cranford introduces stage magic among a set of tropes for how fiction can construct the real—tropes that include quixotic readers, trickster storytellers, and the serialized novels of Charles Dickens. I called my essay “In Defense of Credulous Women” because it pointed to the ways that the novel models a salutary phenomenology of reading through female credulity, including through the reflexive twinning of the narrator, Mary, with Signor Brunoni, as two slippery figures who construct perceptual experience through parallel forms of sleight of hand. To illustrate the case I made in my article, let me return momentarily to a scene we have already discussed: Miss Pole's study of conjuring diagrams in the encyclopedia. Miss Pole's claim that “conjuring is a mere affair of the alphabet” is undermined by her inability to keep the alphabet straight, a cognitive failure that is underscored when her transcriptions of the diagrams do not actually help her understand how Signor Brunoni's magic tricks work. However, the breakdown of Miss Pole's practices of skepticism—and their transformation into an excess of credulity—also constitutes a metafictional reflection on the novel. As Hilary Schor has noted, Miss Pole's remark on conjuring integrates magic into the novel's broader concern with “affair[s] of the alphabet” like reading, writing and storytelling.61
To understand what Cranford has to say about the relationship between conjuring and fiction as two alphabetic affairs, we must begin with the fact that Miss Pole's theory of conjuring does not hold up. Although it is technically explicable through diagrams, Gaskell refuses to validate her statement that it can be reduced to them—that it is “mere[ly]” alphabetic. Reading her receipts during the show does not actually rationalize Signor Brunoni's magic, neither for Miss Pole nor her friends. Even when the performance is doubled by its own demystification, simultaneously exhibited and explained, the women remain “astonished.” One explanation for the women's astonishment is that they are simply too stupid to be educated. Another is that the perceptual power of the magic trick is greater than the sum of its parts in rules, apparatus, and manual dexterity, even when those component parts are shamelessly exposed. My article argued the latter. It proposed that Cranford views both magic and fiction as affairs of the alphabet only up to a point. Both are illusory media that ultimately transcend the alphabet by coming to feel and seem real, independent of the tools and techniques that create them.
Cranford thus takes aim at the culture of rational recreations and valorizes the novel in one fell swoop. Its portrayal of female magic spectatorship illustrates the aesthetic experience of wonder with which Brewster associated virtual images, in which “even those who know the deception . . . are not a little surprised at its effects,” while challenging his claim that the scientific and technological analysis of magic has the meaningful pedagogical force that he insists on. At the same time, Cranford reflects on itself as a form of entertainment like magic by proposing that its illusory and mystifying effects on a reader's perception has its origin in, but is irreducible to, the rationalist atomization of dictionaries and encyclopedias. On the grounds of its metafictional exploration of literary aesthetics, I argued that Cranford can be read as a subversion of the pedagogy of disenchantment. The susceptibility of Gaskell's women characters to believing what they see and the states of confusion and panic that erupt as a result of that susceptibility express what Gaskell understands as the shared capacity of magic and fiction to produce new forms of aesthetic pleasure that emerge through rather than against a cultural logic of disenchantment. Cranford's credulous women allow the novel to explore the pleasures of believing in the reality of an illusion that reading novels and spectating at magic shows both provide, pleasures for which diagrams, treatises on optics, and satires of superstition fail to account.
In the final pages of this chapter, I would like to turn to another way that the novel critiques magic's pedagogy of disenchantment. If the novel defends credulous women, it is also ambivalent about the figure of the magician and his capacity to inspire credulity. While “A Shilling's Worth of Science” and “Microscopy for the Million” view female magic panic as a punch line, Cranford reflects on how and why the patriarchal underpinning of the normative model of disenchanted spectatorship turns women into jokes. In doing so, it both affirms and challenges the political framework for Brewster's virtual aesthetics. “When knowledge was the property of only one caste,” Brewster wrote in Letters on Natural Magic, “it was by no means difficult to employ it in the subjugation of a great mass of society.”62 Speaking of the use of optical illusions by elites as a demonstration of divine authority, Brewster offers a variation on the classic Enlightenment argument that the democratization of knowledge is a defense against despotism. Cranford replies that knowledge—in the form of the scientific principles and practices endorsed by Brewster—remains the property of only one caste: men. Like Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who wrote that women were “rendered weak and wretched” by “a false system of education,” Gaskell insists that female superstition is not a natural state but the artificial product of women's exclusion from the realms of intellectual advancement.63
This is vividly rendered through the return of Matty's long-lost brother Peter Jenkyns to Cranford. A storyteller and trickster, Peter is Sam Brown's double. Like the conjurer, Peter has lately arrived from India. His arrival is a result of the magic show; it is Mary's discovery of his whereabouts during a conversation with Mrs. Brown, the magician's wife, that leads to her tracking him down. Characterized by his disappearance and reappearance in Cranford, both equally sudden and mysterious, Peter is almost like an incarnate magic trick—one of optical conjuring's virtual images made flesh. At the same time, the novel marks Peter as a purveyor of oral magic tricks—“paradigm[s] of the imperial adventure tale” that exploit what Patrick Brantlinger has called the construction of India as “a realm of imaginative license . . . a place where the fantastic becomes possible.”64 He tells stories that are “more wonderful . . . than Sinbad the sailor” and “as good as an Arabian night any evening” (152). Matty's word for Peter's lifelong propensity for playing tricks, “hoaxing,” derives etymologically from “hocus pocus” and positions Peter's stories about shooting cherubs in the Himalayas as verbal prestidigitation that takes in listeners by exploiting their gullibility.
Like Signor Brunoni, Peter is in the business of tricking women. Although Mary acknowledges that because “I had vibrated all my life between Drumble and Cranford, I thought it was quite possible that all Mr. Peter's stories might be true although wonderful” (152), she later confirms her suspicion that “he was making fun of me” (150). Peter's stories of shooting cherubs in the Himalayas succeed in impressing his female audience by taking advantage of the gender inequity between his knowledge and experience and that of his listeners. While Peter can move across continents, Mary and Matty are so immobile they cannot even read a globe let alone traverse one. Their ascription of “equators and tropics, and such mystical circles” as “very imaginary lines indeed” and “the signs of the Zodiac . . . [as] so many remnants of the Black Art” (129) collapses the masculine realm of science with feminized superstition, echoing Miss Pole's attempts to rationalize the magic show through her “receipts.” The entire world beyond Cranford—the world beyond the direct experience of the women—is in the hands of men like Peter and Signor Brunoni to create.
Peter's tall tales extend the novel's theme of magic tricks and credulous women spectators while laying bare the epistemic violence of disenchanted magic culture. The similarity between Peter and Brunoni is admittedly more structural than it is temperamental. Unlike Sam Brown, a desperately poor man trying to make a living plying his trade, Peter enjoys tricking women for his own gratification and his stories are, in Wendy Carse's words, “at least partially motivated by a basic contempt for the others’ supposed gullibility.”65 The conjurer does not design magic tricks that will cause harm to his female audience while appealing to men, even if that is the result of his performance: the narrator takes pains to note that the rector is all “broad smiles” at the magic show and his retinue of schoolboys are “in chinks of laughing” (88), able to enjoy the tricks with the kind of disenchanted pleasure for which Brewster advocated and which is not accessible to the women. Peter deliberately edits his stories when speaking to the rector, who would be more likely to see through his lies: “I don’t think the ladies of Cranford would have considered him such a wonderful traveler,” Mary observes, “if they had only heard him talk in the quiet way he did to him” (152). Even taking into consideration this difference in disposition and intent, however, Peter and Signor Brunoni wield epistemic power over women in similar ways. Consider that Mary's scrutiny of Peter's stories is prefigured in her response to the conjurer. Earlier in this discussion, I referenced Mary's fear of “eyes looking at me, and watching me” and proposed that this description reconfigures Signor Brunoni's hidden presence before the magic show, when he looks at the audience from behind the curtain “with two odd eyes, seen through holes.” The fact that his eyes are visible to Mary is, on one hand, a sign of how ramshackle the magic show is, with a makeshift strung-up curtain in place of the posh, site-specific theatrical magic that was dominant in the 1850s, with stages designed for the conjurer's precise needs. On the other hand, Mary's description of the magician's disembodied eyes registers the spectatorial and relational dynamics underlying magic illusions: the way the magician controls what and how the viewer sees through visual manipulation, just as Peter controls what and how his listeners know.
In fact, Mary's fear—her own personal contribution to “the great Cranford panic”—is an astute recognition of the way visual magic subverts the apparent power dynamic implicit in the spectatorial situation. While the women believe they are the ones watching the spectacle of the conjurer's illusions, the illusions succeed based on the conjurer's ability to watch his audience covertly. In the magic show, to look is to risk an abdication of one's sovereignty over oneself, to be susceptible to the remotely controlling presence of the conjurer whose tricks and illusions signify the manipulation and distortion of one's perceptions.66 Before the show, when Mary describes the curtain first as “obstinate” and then as “tantalizing,” she takes it as a figure for the whole apparatus of the conjurer and his illusions: a dazzling surface that doubles as an occlusion. The curtain represents the epistemological boundary that splits off mysterious phenomena from their source. In Mary's formulation, it is the curtain that “would stare at me with two odd eyes”—the curtain that controls what she can and cannot see, simultaneously forcing her to look and making it impossible for her to know. The conjurer becomes a curtain with eyes, a concealment that watches. When Mary later accounts for her fear of being watched by someone she cannot see—of seeing only the fact that she is being watched—the novel subverts the trope of magic panic as foolish female behavior by taking seriously the potential for gender violence built into magic's visual art of perceptual manipulation.
Accounting for Mary's critical response to both Peter and the conjurer demands that we see the credulity of the Cranford women in a different light. Rather than reading their experience of the magic show as an attack on their town by unspecified foreigners and ghosts and thus as a sign of their lack of intellectual fitness and inability to participate in the rationalizing and civilizing work of disenchantment, we can understand it like Mary's fear of eyes, as a displaced anxiety about patriarchal domination—a fear that finds expression in, even if it far exceeds, the experience of magic spectatorship. If the women really are being watched by curtains, then their belief in spectral male eyes invading the privacy of their all-female domestic spaces and a spate of robberies in which “houses and shops were entered by holes made in the walls, the bricks being silently carried away in the dead of night” begins to seem less farfetched (90). When Miss Matty asserts that this “trick was fit for a conjurer” and laments that his magic can circumvent “locks and bolts, and bells to the windows,” she, like Mary, reckons with the spectral despotism of patriarchal power, at once everywhere and nowhere, invading even the homes of single women living in a town where “all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women” (3).
Read in this way, the final chapter of Cranford becomes newly troubling. In “Peace to Cranford,” the rift between the sisters-in-law Mrs. Jamieson and Lady Glenmire after the latter's marriage to a country doctor is repaired by Peter when he “bribe[s]” Mrs. Jamieson to join them in attending another magic show that he has organized to patronize “my poor conjurer” (158). “Peace to Cranford” is effected through a combination of Peter's “wonderful stories”—tricks that he plays on Mrs. Jamieson and that he considers integral to “propitiating her”—and Signor Brunoni's magic (158). If we understand storytelling and magic to be constitutive of the kind of reasoned, democratic, and civilizing aesthetic pleasure that Brewster promotes in Letters on Natural Magic, we might consider this a happy ending, one in which imaginative entertainment is critical to the maintenance of social bonds and to the integrity of the nation. If we take seriously Mary's objections to Peter's stories and Signor Brunoni's magic as expressions of covert surveillance, social discipline, and perceptual control, then the novel ends with a reintegration of patriarchy as a kind of occupying force in this community of women. An occupying force perhaps not so unlike the French in Algeria, who also turned to a series of two magic shows in the belief than perceptual tricks would encourage cognitive and political dependence on colonial rule. Signor Brunoni is no Robert-Houdin, the affable Peter's stories are not a form of violent colonial conquest, Mrs. Jamieson's cold shoulder toward her sister-in-law is not an anticolonial uprising, and the genteel and thriving women of Cranford are not stand-ins for colonized North Africans. Yet the gender and racial representations of magic panic that we find in Cranford and in Robert-Houdin's memoir both hinge on the idea of conjuring as a selective act of despotism in the service of Western civilizational gains—despotism that purports to promote scientific rationality while securing British imperial and patriarchal rule. In this regard, both the real case study of Robert-Houdin in Algeria and the fictional case study of Signor Brunoni in Cranford make apparent the role of disenchanted magic in conceptualizing sovereignty and civilization in the mid-nineteenth century.
Rather than reading Cranford as another representation of foolish spectators victimized by their own credulity, like those that we see in Letters on Natural Magic, Robert-Houdin's account of his Algerian audiences in Confidences d’un prestidigitateur, and the comic sketches in Household Words and Punch, I have asked us to consider this novel as a critical investigation of the pedagogy of disenchantment—one that employs the trope of foolish women in order to help us understand the racial, colonial, and gender implications of the movement for rational magic spectatorship. If Cranford offers a defense of credulous women, it also mounts a defense of magic panic. The women's magic panic is not the result of their failure to employ the demystifying scientific procedures that Brewster outlines in Letters on Natural Magic but an indictment of what the novel presents as rational magic's reinstantiation of an authoritarian relation between conjurer and spectators, even as it insists that it is eradicating the despotic uses of magic. Cranford presents magic panic not as superstition but as community resistance to patriarchal control.
The following two chapters of the book continue to explore how showmen, scientific popularizers, and novelists theorize virtual aesthetics through imperial frames. One way that we see this is in the imaginary of optical technology as a means of making remote times and places experientially proximate. In chapter 2, I show how the travel writer Edward William Lane popularized an Egyptian magic trick known as “the mirror of ink” and turned it into an imaginary virtual medium that enabled a new kind of imperial gaze that H. G. Wells called “real vision at a distance.” Building on my reading of Cranford's metafictional uses of magic, I turn to the work of George Eliot to argue that she theorizes the novel as a technology for producing virtual images and experiences.