JOYCE AND LANTERN CULTURE

As well as being the ancestor of modern projection technologies, the magic lantern was a major strand of Victorian cinematicity. As the Encyclopaedia of the Magic Lantern summarises,

Indeed the cinematograph was, as Steve Humphries and Doug Lear put it, ‘only the most sophisticated and successful of a host of late Victorian inventions’ related to the magic lantern. The ways in which it both anticipated and prepared the ground for cinema are manifold. When Joyce grew up, the lantern was in its heyday as a public medium and ‘almost as common in middle-class homes as television sets are today’. Moreover, in Ireland, as the Rocketts argue, venues and modes of film exhibition, as well as rental practices for titles and equipment, also followed pre-existing patterns set by lanternism (MLP&MPS, pp. 255–6). For two hundred years, Irish audiences had already experienced ‘a great variety of mass-produced visual representations, both “real” and “magical”’ (MLP&MPS, p. 20).

Although the actual extent of Joyce's experience of lantern shows is uncertain, he was clearly aware of them. The lantern had a venerable history in Dublin. William Molyneux of Trinity College published one of the first illustrated descriptions of its workings in his 1692 textbook, Dioptricka Nova. Molyneux described typical slides as ‘Frightful and Ludicrous … the more to divert the spectators’, anticipating Joyce's critique of it as an instrument for manipulation. By the 1860s Dublin boasted a large cluster of suppliers, slide-makers and distributors around ‘the fashionable – middle-class – consumer centre of Grafton Street’, linked to concerns in London and on the Continent (MLP&MPS, p. 61). One of the most prominent, Robinsons, through an attached ‘Polytechnic Museum’, clearly had both commercial and scientific aspirations similar to the Royal Polytechnic's for ‘educating the eye’ (MLP&MPS, p. 63). A highlight of Dublin's social calendar was the national Photographic Society's Annual Lantern Exhibition at the Royal College of Science (MLP&MPS, p. 65).