Theatre Journal

This collection of essays, drawn from the second Visual Delights Conference held in 2002 at the University of Sheffield, covers an extensive range of topics from the visual and popular culture of the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. The result is a sampler that offers glimpses into a wide array of subjects, but not a deep analysis of any particular area. This is not necessarily a fault of the contributors, however, since conference papers, by necessity, are not as in-depth as longer essays written specifically for publication. The volume includes papers on such disparate topics as film censorship, stereoscopic viewing, the life of a traveling photographer, lantern-slide marketing campaigns, a habitat panorama, and the visual iconography of childhood death.

While all of the eighteen essays are competently written, a few stand out for their combination of insightful commentary and unique subject matter. Kaveh Askari’s essay on “Trilby’s Community of Sensation,” for example, is a particularly interesting exploration of the commercial circulation of this famous George du Maurier 1894 novel about Svengali and his unfortunate protégé, as well as the visual techniques that were used to promote Maurice Tourneur’s 1915 film adaptation of the same. By examining theatrical productions, tableau vivants, illustrations, posters, and photographs, Askari demonstrates how “mesmerism becomes a catalyst for visual tricks involving translation from one medium into another” (67). William Merrin’s essay, “Skylights Onto Infinity: The World in a Stereoscope,” provides a fascinating look at the role of the stereoscope in Victorian society and how it reflected and reasserted the separation of the public and private spheres. In addition to exploring circulation of the stereoscope in the Victorian home, Merrin also provides an interesting and concise history of stereoscopic viewing, which he traces from the discovery and development of perspective in the early 1400s to the Victorian era. For those interested in the technical aspects of early screen use, there is John Plunkett’s “Optical Recreations, Transparencies, and the Invention of the Screen,” which gives detailed accounts of how screens and transparencies were created and how they were used in such entertainments as the phantasmagoria and the diorama. Peta Tait also continues her fascinating exploration of aerial artists in “Viewing Deadly Targets for Feminine Identity: Alar, the Human Arrow,” which discusses the difficulty of trying to learn about a dynamic aerial performance when the only remaining record consists of textual descriptions and static visual resources.

Film historians will also find many interesting essays in this anthology. In “Early Political Film in Britain,” for example, Alan Burton explores the beginnings of British political cinema. Although often thought to be an interwar development, Burton argues that film was being used for propaganda purposes as early as the general elections of 1906 and 1910. Another fascinating essay on film history is Charles Musser’s “The May Irwin Kiss: Performance and the Beginnings of Cinema,” which discusses the interplay between the 1896 film The May Irwin Kiss and the stage play The Widow Jones, exploring the historiographic paradigms that this relationship animates. Helen Walasek’s “Punch and the Lantern Slide Industry” should also be of particular interest to those who study how visual iconography is used in marketing campaigns and the symbiotic effects that can occur between print publications and visual performance. In it, Walasek, former curator of the Punch Archives and Collection, examines how Punch’s proprietors used lantern-slide lectures to entice new subscribers.

In anthologies of conference papers, the writing can be very uneven from one essay to another, and this is the case here. Just as the essays mentioned above are of particularly high quality, the book also contains a few that are not so impressive. Ine van Dooren and Amy Sargeant’s “Dead Babies: Representations of Infant Mortality Before the First World War,” for example, is a litany of photographs and drawings showing childhood death, with little accompanying analysis. While this essay deals with a fascinating and unique subject and is accompanied...