'Stanhope' viewers are optical bijoux most popular in the 1860s, when they were first mass-produced in France, although they were widely available in Britain. These small novelty items contained a microscopic photograph (microphotograph) that could only be viewed or indeed seen through a tiny cylindrical magnifying lens, which was often hidden in the design of the object. Stanhopes were developed in the context of a rich media ecology. They draw on the work of John Benjamin Dancer and Ren & eacute; Dagron in microphotography. They join kaleidoscopes, stereoscopes, and peep eggs as domestic peep media, and they stand with cosmoramas and microscopes themselves as peep practices dependent on magnification for effect. Although Dagron marketed them with hints of luxury and mystery, they were inexpensive mementoes available to purchasers for only a shilling. Stanhopes were often sold as souvenirs, fitted with microphotographs of notable places, but they could also be customized with personal images, such as photographs of friends or family members. This essay argues that Stanhopes were a uniquely affordable, adaptable, accessible, and portable way to reanimate and circulate memory and affect. They promised both secrecy and sociality. Stanhopes offer a unique perspective on Victorian tourism and souvenirs, fashion and jewelry, religious sentiment and death culture, and even erotica. With a Stanhope in hand, Victorians could readily access a hidden photographic image and stir up or share recollected love, friendship, faith, nostalgia, or desire.
This article explores the continuity, kinship, and process of substitution between supernatural spectacles and cinema in Barcelona from the second half of the nineteenth century onward. More specifically, it examines the turning-tables fad and the reception of hypnotists' shows in the city in order to understand how cinema later appealed, often in the same venues, to bodies and gazes equally eager for marvellous experiences. The filmic medium is thus approached as a late agent of the modern supernatural, although this spectatorial connection would be blurred by early popular films depicting practices of spiritism and hypnosis in a parodic or pejorative manner. Nevertheless, the entanglement between cinematic wonder and the legacies of mesmerism rested on a shared field of knowledge and practices, including parallels between scenic apparatuses and a mode of reception apparently based on contagion among spellbound audiences.
This article explores the development and circulation of itinerant cosmoramas in Northwestern Europe between the 1810s and 1860s, relating them to the vibrant fairground culture of the period. Fairs are recognized as venues for showcasing visual and optical media, including cosmorama displays. Drawing parallels with travelling entertainment like ballad singing and peep box exhibitions, this study posits that cosmoramas quickly emerged as ambulant variants of stationary 'room journeys', following established fairground circuits across Northwestern Europe. Re-examining the itinerant nature of these largely forgotten attractions, which appeared under a wide variety of names, this study elaborates on the cosmorama attraction of Carl Georg Enslen (1792-1866), a renowned artist in his time who toured extensively across Europe between 1816 and 1866. The analysis of his circulation and display strategies highlights that while fairs were major public exhibition venues, they represent only part of the broader exhibition networks and practices of itinerant cosmorama attractions.
This article examines the multilayered enactments of the visual, auditory, and dramatic features of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) through the medium of the magic lantern show in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It maps the complex processes by which the familiar story is translated into optical spectacles and reveals how they generate new interpretations. To illustrate these processes, the study analyses seven lantern versions of the story's book illustrations, especially John Leech's 'Mr. Fezziwig's Ball'. It shows how the removal of characters, shifts in perspective, and modifications to accompanying readings re-perform and transform the tale, imbuing it with authenticity and immediacy. Building on these pictorial transformations, life model slides (enabled by advances in photography) emulate the intra-iconic elements of illustrations, merge them with the extra-iconic embodied performances of models, and thereby layer these re-enactments. Artists, stage managers, photographers, and colouring assistants each contribute their own interpretations through interlocking practices, which blur the boundaries between extratextual and intratextual realms and engage audiences in immersive narrative experiences. To deliver a multimedia, multisensory experience, magic lantern performances of the fictional story were often clustered with other disparate attractions under unifying themes such as An Evening with Dickens. These optical presentations of Dickens's biography and real-world locations, together with other pictorial, musical, and theatrical performances, reinscribe the medium's polyvocal nature. By examining these performances, this article charts the iconic, photographic, and polyvocal enactments to demonstrate the evolution of the Christmas tale in Victorian and Edwardian lantern culture.
This paper examines the emergence of cosmoramas in Spain during the 1830s as a key element in the formation of new modes of spectatorship, developing in parallel to the consolidation of the liberal society under the reign of Isabel II (1833-1868). It traces the proliferation of such spectacles through an analysis of newspaper advertisements and archival materials related to cosmorama shows held in Madrid and Barcelona. Initially, itinerant performances dominated the scene. However, by the late 1830s, permanent venues operated by local figures gained prominence, such as the Galer & iacute;a Topogr & aacute;fica in Madrid and the optical shows organized by Felipe Maglia and Francesc Dalmau in Barcelona. Central to this analysis is a material case study of the cosmorama dispositif based on the uniquely surviving example preserved in the Museu del Cinema in Girona. This new form of entertainment ensured spatial separation and order through its very dispositif. Unlike earlier optical boxes, cosmoramas invited viewers to physically move from lens to lens, simulating the act of traveling through the images themselves. The aim of this study is to investigate how cosmoramas shaped the visual landscape, redefining agents, networks, and social spaces in both major cities.
This article examines the parallel usage of the 'Sick Man of Europe' metaphor and its extension, the 'Sick Man of Asia', as monikers for the Ottoman Empire and China, respectively, in the Euro-American illustrated press between 1876 and 1909. Often referenced, this phenomenon is little analyzed. Political cartoons published in popular periodicals portrayed the Ottoman Empire and China as 'sick men', supplementing a prolific textual construction of parity between the Ottoman Empire and China. These directly compared the Ottoman Empire and China and utilized similar motifs of Orientalization and weakness to discuss individual states. While this metaphor illustrated the condescending attitude of Western observers towards each empire's 'decline', its visual flexibility also facilitated the portrayal of 'recovery' following perceived political and military accomplishments. The intimate link between metaphors of sickness and metaphors for partitioning the Ottoman and Chinese states is established, and the thematic characteristics of, commonalities, and differences between British, American, and French cartoons portraying the metaphorical partitions of the Ottoman Empire and China are systematically examined in this light. Finally, it is shown that the designation of the Ottoman Empire and China as 'sick men' was internalized by Ottoman and Chinese constitutionalist reformers who themselves perpetuated discourses of Ottoman and Chinese weaknesses, respectively, in the domestic publication of reformist cartoons. These demonstrate an inchoate reciprocal admiration between Ottoman and Chinese reformists, the latter of which were particularly cognizant of the usage of the 'sick man' metaphor to describe both states.
This article examines the place of the cosmorama in public life in postrevolutionary Latin America. It argues that, as both a social practice and a recurring rhetorical figure, the cosmorama served to imagine and configure collective social actors during a time marked by what Hilda S & aacute;bato has called 'republican experimentation', when the new nations of the region struggled to identify and define the pueblo, or people, in order to secure legitimacy. Cosmoramas began appearing with regularity during the early 1830s, and the advertisements in local print media consistently promoted these spectacles with a cosmopolitan discourse that imagined a rapprochement between Latin America and the societies of the north Atlantic. Examining how letrados, or men of letters, such as the Chilean Mariano Ega & ntilde;a and the Venezuelan Sim & oacute;n Rodr & iacute;guez incorporated references to the cosmorama in their writings indicates how they regarded its techniques of exhibition, namely the ordered, collective viewing of select landscapes, as potentially productive in the service of a republican pedagogy for (in)forming citizens. Last, an analysis of the frontispiece of the costumbrista anthology Los cubanos pintados por s & iacute; mismos, which depicts a crowd gathering around a tutilimundi, or portable peepshow box, reinforces the linkages between spectacle and literature, reading and seeing. In synthesis, the cosmorama helped shape the experience of political modernity in Latin America.
This article explores the international journey of the Grand Optical Gallery (1828-1854), operated by Austrian showman Thomas Karl Andorfer, with a particular focus on the unique combination of optical attractions it offered, including cosmoramas, neoramas, dioramas, and a new solar microscope. It investigates the Eurocentric perspective embedded in Andorfer's exhibitions and the cultural impact of these shows, especially in Brazil, his first overseas destination. Drawing on historical press records, the article traces Andorfer's itinerary from the early fairs in Italy, where he showcased his Grand Cosmorama, through the Iberian Peninsula and Brazil, culminating on Broadway, where the Grand Optical Gallery was met with acclaim. In Brazil, Eurocentrism became especially pronounced as local audiences began to demand specific iconographic adjustments to the exhibitions. This article argues that, much like panoramas, cosmoramas were entangled with imperialist discourses from their inception, fostering an imperially oriented worldview among spectators. This mindset is starkly illustrated in Brazilian newspapers, where advertisements for cosmorama shows appeared alongside slave sale notices, revealing how such spectacles were embedded in broader colonial economies. By situating cosmoramas within this context, the article analyses how they functioned as cultural commodities that reinforced colonial identities and shaped their viewers' cultural imagination. Finally, it considers the extent to which the cosmorama, as a global phenomenon, was influenced by and responsive to local cultural contexts.
Throughout history, war has been a popular and profitable subject for representation. While these representations have generated voluminous amounts of research from various disciplines, analyses tend to focus on either texts or visuals. This introduction highlights the benefits of examining theatrical performances of war as multisensory phenomena that simultaneously address the eyes, the ears, and at times even the nose and the whole body. When studying the nineteenth-century emergence of war-as-mass-entertainment in particular - the issue includes case studies of hippodramas, early war films and corridos, a Mexican song genre - the approach has the potential to tease out contemporary tensions. Technologies' promises for 'direct' access were frustrated by technological limitations; claims to 'truth' were strained by the need for theatricalisation, propaganda, and commercialisation; and cultural mobilization efforts required an appeal to audiences' intellect, their senses and emotions. This themed issue underlines the (new) possibilities, strategies, and challenges that emerged between the 1850s and 1920s in various forms of popular mass media that sought to represent war in a multisensory manner. And it highlights how these developments were key to creating a 'modern' experience of war by making it accessible 'at a distance'.
In 1911, the association 'Koloniaal Instituut' in Amsterdam decided to sponsor a series of information films about colonial Indonesia, at the time known as the Netherlands East-Indies. In February 1912, the institute commissioned J.C. Lamster, a captain in the colonial army, to make film records of a variety of topics, traditional as well as contemporary. The assignment came with detailed instructions: a list of topics that were to be recorded true-to-life. The problems the latter requirement inevitably presented were solved in ways common at the time. But Lamster crossed a line when, for a film about the Netherlands East-Indies army, he staged reenactments of an episode of a decade and a half earlier in the long Aceh War: the Pedir expedition of 1898 and its aftermath. Firstly, I describe the military and geographic circumstances that prevented the recording of actual combat during the Aceh War and this expedition. Secondly, I sketch the way the Koloniaal Instituut positioned itself, or rather felt forced to position itself, in the Dutch film exhibition business. As well I relate how its detailed instructions revealed the institute and its filmmaker's lack of experience in filmmaking, and in faraway place at that, and how the footage that was sent back to Amsterdam was evaluated. Finally, I propose considerations why the Koloniaal Instituut, after its refusal to enter the reconstructed scenes in its first film catalogue of 1914, restored them in its subsequent catalogues of 1918 and 1923: by that time the scenes had gained an unanticipated topicality, while the screening practices the institute adopted in 1918 - with obligatory readings from preprinted texts during projection - attempted to bring the film's performance into line with the other, less controversial information films Lamster had made.
This article will discuss the trade cards (and, to a lesser extent, the poster stamps) that featured visual narratives of Robinson Crusoe and accompanied or were issued with products ranging from meat extract to chocolate. It is a literary-historical examination which focuses on advertising media to glean the impact and interpretability of the novel among young collectors at the beginning of the twentieth century. As such, it will probe the extensive life beyond the text edition of the original work in which readers would have encountered Defoe's protagonist. The article will examine the subject coverage of some of the early series (which largely consisted of six cards, but also, on occasion, after World War II, extended to far more extensive sets comprising more than 80 cards). Finally, it will consider how the series as a narrative made up of interconnected images and text cues conveyed a particular (reductive) version of Robinson Crusoe that was rooted in German abridgments and redactions of the English work.
