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The Animal in the Machine: Punishment and Pleasure in Victorian Magic Lantern Shows

Long before the development of film, the magic lantern entertained and educated audiences by projecting images on glass slides through a lens with the use of a light source. Although the magic lantern was invented in the seventeenth century and in use throughout the eighteenth, it reached the height of its popularity in the nineteenth century, and nowhere was it more popular than Britain (Mannoni 264). By the second half of the nineteenth century, lanterns were mass-produced for middle-class parlors, professional lanternists performed for audiences in lecture halls and churches, and hundreds of spectators filled the Great Hall of London’s Royal Polytechnic Institute to witness phantasmagoria shows, slides with dissolving views, and foreign scenes illuminated with oxy-hydrogen gas. Despite the fact that the magic lantern was a sweeping cultural phenomenon and a common form of entertainment and instruction for the Victorians, very little scholarship on the shows themselves exists. This is due in part to the fact that the delicate glass slides are fragile, frequently misidentified and miscataloged in libraries, and, until recently, no integrated database of slide images existed. Academic research on this medium is further complicated by the constant changes in lantern practices, including the appropriation and adaptation of other media forms (including the use of photography, print media, and paintings). This “distinctive chameleonic trait” of the lantern has made it difficult to define as a specific discipline or object of study, leading to its academic marginalization (van Dooren 184). Perhaps understandably, then, scholarship on the magic lantern has focused on how it affected other types of media—for instance, literary critics Isobel Armstrong and Terry Castle have charted the influence of the magic lantern on literary works, whereas film scholars, including Laurent Mannoni and Deac Rossell, have examined the magic lantern as a precursor to cinema. This essay, however, seeks to examine the magic lantern shows themselves, and the relationship between successive images and the narratives, both textual and cultural, that underlie them. In particular, it offers a reading of comic “story” slides produced between 1860 and 1900 which feature animals as main characters. Unlike travel slides, slides for scientific lectures, or mechanical slides offering visual effects, these commercially produced story slides present the events of a narrative. Earlier in the century, professional lanternists devised their own commentary to accompany the images, but by the last third of the century, mass-produced slides were often accompanied by printed slide readings. Although nothing prevented a magic lantern lecturer from improvising a performance