Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices
- 1 Moving Books in Regency London
- 2 Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media
- 3 Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott
- 4 Reading Habits and Magic Lanterns: Dickens and Dr Pepper's Ghost
- 5 Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice
- 6 Flickering Effects: George Robert Sims and the Psychology of the Moving Image
- 7 Literary Porjections and Residual Media: Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices
- 1 Moving Books in Regency London
- 2 Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media
- 3 Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott
- 4 Reading Habits and Magic Lanterns: Dickens and Dr Pepper's Ghost
- 5 Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice
- 6 Flickering Effects: George Robert Sims and the Psychology of the Moving Image
- 7 Literary Porjections and Residual Media: Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In late 1895 the American author and critic Brander Matthews (1852–1929) published a short story in Scribner's Magazine entitled ‘The Kinetoscope of Time’. It tells the tale of a man who enters a strangely illuminated building on a deserted street in an unnamed city. Compelled down a darkened hallway by a mysterious force, he draws aside a velvet curtain at its end and finds himself in a large circular space. Only four kinetoscopes, Edison's popular pre-cinematic viewing device, furnish the room. Cued by a legend that appears fleetingly above one of the kinetoscopes, he looks through the eye piece and views a series of dance sequences from familiar historical and literary sources: Salome, Esmeralda's dances from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pearl dancing before her cursed mother Hester in Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter and Topsy dancing from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. At the end of this sequence the narrator looks up, then follows another mysterious legend to a second kineto-scope where he views a sequence of military scenes drawn from fiction and history: the fight between Hector and Achilles, the tale of Saladin and the Knight of the Leopard from Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust and Custer's Last Stand. In both instances he remarks upon the proleptic nature of his viewing experience. He seems to know what he is about to see and the manner in which it will be projected before he has even looked into the viewer.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Moving ImagesNineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices, pp. 1 - 21Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013