Abstract
The “dissolving view” was one of the nineteenth century’s most popular entertainments, succeeding the phantasmagoria as the pre-eminent magic lantern show. As with its predecessor, the dissolving view became a significant cultural figure, acting as metaphor for instability, ahistorical change, temporal repetition, and revolution. This chapter uncovers the role of the metaphorical dissolving view in historical representation, with a detailed discussion of paintings by J.M.W. Turner and Charles Dickens’ historical novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859), alongside texts by Thomas Carlyle, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others drawn from the periodical press.
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- 1.
John Eagles, “Exhibitions – Royal Academy,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1842, 26.
- 2.
John Eagles, “Exhibitions,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Aug 1843, 188.
- 3.
Rebecca Helen, “‘Three Days or more…’ Turner’s Varnishing Day practice and the physical evidence,” The British Art Journal 15, no. 2 (2014), 52–53. Helen’s article re-evaluates contemporary claims against the physical evidence from the paintings, concluding that many accounts were exaggerated.
- 4.
Some of the major criticisms can be found, with useful reference to John Ruskin’s response, in Edward Tyas Cook, “Introduction,” The Works of John Ruskin, Volume 3: Modern Painters I, ed. Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), xxiv–xxv.
- 5.
Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 102–103.
- 6.
Joss Marsh, “Dickensian ‘Dissolving Views’: The Magic Lantern, Visual Story-Telling, and the Victorian Technological Imagination,” Comparative Critical Studies, 6, 3 (2009), 334–335.
- 7.
See Isobel Armstrong, 143. Armstrong provides an excellent account of dissolving views (336–407). For a detailed history of magic lanterns and the Polytechnic, see Jeremy Brooker, The Temple of Minerva: Magic and the Magic Lantern at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, London, 1837–1901 (London: The Magic Lantern Society, 2013). As Brooker points out, whilst comparisons were often made with the kaleidoscope, “chromotropes [chromatropes] offer constant and unchanging geometric designs quite unlike the random combinations that characterise the kaleidoscope” (55). Perhaps for this reason, the psychological metaphors did not tend to follow the chromatrope as they did the kaleidoscope.
- 8.
Anon. “The Theatres,” Illustrated London News, 3 Jan. 1863, 19.
- 9.
Brooker, The Temple of Minerva, 55–56. According to Brooker, events were not usually directly presented but images that related to them were used—geographical images, for instance.
- 10.
Anon. “The Bohenian Girl – Royal Adelaide Gallery,” The Times, 18 January 1844.
- 11.
See During, Modern Enchantments, 102–103; 143–146.
- 12.
Anon. “The Farm,” Illustrated London News, 30 April 1859, 426.
- 13.
For examples, see Anon. “The observations of an intelligent foreigner…” The Times, 17 Nov. 1845, 4; Anon. “Sketches in Parliament,” Illustrated London News, 19 June 1858, 598; Anon. “Sketches in Parliament,” Illustrated London News, 12 May 1860, 450; Anon. “Sketches in Parliament,” Illustrated London News, 30 May 1863, 603.
- 14.
J. Ewing Ritchie, About London (London: William Tinsley, 1860) Chap. xx, http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications/aboutlondon.htm.
- 15.
Anon. “Literature,” Morning Post, 28 June 1844, 6.
- 16.
Anon. “Literature,” Morning Post, 28 June 1844, 6.
- 17.
Meisel gives a helpful, if brief, discussion of Turner and the dissolving view in Realizations, 185–186.
- 18.
Eagles, “Exhibitions,” 193.
- 19.
Anon. “A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris in 1865,” Daily News, 31 May 1865.
- 20.
Anon. “A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris in 1865.”
- 21.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the history of the phrase “bird’s-eye view” roughly coincides with that of the panorama, with its first recorded appearance in 1782. Articles offering “bird’s-eye views” of cities, subjects, and events are common in the newspapers of the nineteenth century and closely relate to the panorama. Part of the appeal of the elevated view for these kinds of articles is its visual containment and apparent mastery of its subjects. See, for example, the anonymously authored articles: “A Bird’s-Eye View of the City of Algiers,” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 27 June 1830; “A Bird’s-Eye View of Naples,” Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée, 1 January 1835; “Bird’s-Eye View of London, taken from the top of the Duke of York’s Column,” Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety, 28 April 1838; “Bird’s Eye View in 1843,” Belfast Newsletter, 27 October 1843; “Miss Martineau’s Bird’s-Eye View of Cairo,” The Lady’s Newspaper, 20 May 1848; “Bird’s-Eye View of Cronstadt,” Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 5 August 1854; “Bird’s-Eye View of Turin,” The Lady’s Newspaper, 28 May 1859.
- 22.
George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 3rd Series, vol. 1 (Boston, Mass.: Houghton, Osgood, and Company, 1879), 153.
- 23.
Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, vol. 1, 153.
- 24.
Michel de Certeau, “Psychoanalysis and its History,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi, forward by Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 4.
- 25.
de Certeau, “Psychoanalysis and its History,” 4.
- 26.
de Certeau, “Psychoanalysis and its History,” 4.
- 27.
This has similarities with the politics of focus analysed by Lindsay Smith in The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth-Century Photography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Smith examines the problematic relations between photographic focus, painting style, and “the authority of a geometric model of documentary” (which are all aligned, in some way, with concepts of objectivity) (13).
- 28.
Isobel Armstrong provides a valuable examination of these kinds of temporal and visual movements and the attendant forms of “mediation” (between image and after-image, as well as the temporal “nows”). See Armstrong, 378–383.
- 29.
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, intr. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (London: Routledge, 1994), 104.
- 30.
T.H. McAllister, Catalogue of Stereopticons, Dissolving View Apparatus, Magic Lanterns […] for sale by T. H. McAllister (New York: E. Bartow, 1867), 10.
- 31.
Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, ed. Samuel Palmer and Clarkson Stanfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 329.
- 32.
Flint links the technological inferences and self-consciousness of Dickens’ visions in Pictures from Italy with a more material “archaeological blurring of past and present” generated by the physical architecture of Rome. The overall effect is a kind of temporal disorientation in which present and past coincide. See Flint, 145–150.
- 33.
Max Nordau, Degeneration, Translated from the Second Edition of the German Work, 7th ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), 42; 21.
- 34.
Anon. “Comte,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1843.
- 35.
Thomas Carlyle, “Thoughts On History,” Fraser’s Magazine, November 1830, 416.
- 36.
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1973), 148.
- 37.
James Anthony Froude, “The Lives of the Saints,” Eclectic Review, 1852, repr. in Froude’s Essays in Literature and History, introduction by Hilaire Belloc (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1906), 131.
- 38.
James Anthony Froude, “The Science of History: A Lecture Delivered at the Royal Institution, 5 February 1864,” in Short Studies on Great Subjects, 2nd Edition (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1867), 1–26; Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1884), 5.
- 39.
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 439.
- 40.
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 439.
- 41.
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 442.
- 42.
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 457.
- 43.
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 441.
- 44.
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 440–441.
- 45.
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 439.
- 46.
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 439.
- 47.
George Eliot, “The Lifted Veil,” in George Eliot, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob, ed. and intr. by Helen Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9. Subsequent in-text page citations are to this edition.
- 48.
This idea is taken from de Certeau who draws on Freud to argue that literature is to history what theory is to science, delineating a “theoretic space, protected as is a laboratory, where the artful practices of social interaction are formulated, separated, combined, and tested.” See Michel de Certeau, “The Freudian Novel: History and Literature,” in Heterologies, 23.
- 49.
Anon. “Popular Literature,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1859, 105.
- 50.
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 5.
- 51.
Charles Dickens, “Dedication and Preface to the First Volume Edition” (1859) repr. in Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. and intr. by Richard Maxwell (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 397.
- 52.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, preface to the 1848 edition, in Rienzi, the last of the Roman tribunes (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1874, repr. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Library, 2005), xi. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ABA6394.0001.001.
- 53.
Readers seemed attuned to this effect. One review of Bulwer-Lytton’s historical romance Harold: The Last of the Saxon Kings (1848) wrote: “we scarcely know a history which teaches so well what history ought to teach, as this work of fiction.” Anon. “Novels,” Illustrated London News, 26 May 1849.
- 54.
Castle, The Female Thermometer, 140–141.
- 55.
Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol. 2, bk. 5, Chap. 9, 249.
- 56.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni (London: Chapman and Hall, 1853), 115.
- 57.
Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, 46.
- 58.
Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol. 1, bk. 1, Chap. 2, 6.
- 59.
For examples, see Samuel Bailey, “Berkeley and Idealism,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1842; James F. Ferrier, “A speculation on the senses,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, November 1843; Anon. “The Visible and the Tangible: A Metaphysical Fragment,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, May 1847; Anon. “Reid and the Philosophy of Common Sense,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August 1847. For critical discussion of these debates, see Roger Smith, “The Physiology of the Will: Mind, Body, and Psychology in the Periodical Literature, 1855–1875,” Science Serialized, 81–110.
- 60.
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 5. Subsequent in-text page citations are to this edition.
- 61.
This distinction is made clear, to some extent, by David D. Marcus’ analysis which considers the novel as an exploration of the relation between individuals and socio-historical system. David D. Marcus, “The Carlylean Vision of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’,” Studies in the Novel, 8, no. 1, (1976): 56–68.
- 62.
See Hayden White, “‘Nineteenth Century’ as Chronotope” (1987) repr. in Hayden White, The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007, ed. Robert Doran (London: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 237–246.
- 63.
In his introduction, Richard Maxwell describes such movements as historical and narrative “condensations” which distinguish this novel from Dickens’ other works. See Maxwell, introduction to A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, x–xiv.
- 64.
George Macaulay Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782–1901) (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1922), xiii.
- 65.
Lewes, “A Theory of Dreaming,” 112.
- 66.
This is a striking contrast to the “bird’s-eye views” which tended to present factually oriented descriptions of places. See Anon. “Dissolving Views,” All the Year Round, 25 August 1866.
- 67.
Nordau, Degeneration, 42.
- 68.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Frederic L. Bender (London: Norton, 1988), 54.
- 69.
John Hollingshead, “A Night at the Monument,” Household Words, 30 January 1858, 148.
- 70.
Anon. “The Magic Lantern in Church,” Evening Telegraph, 25 March 1879, 2.
- 71.
Anon. “Dissolving View Beds,” Nottinghamshire Guardian, 2 July 1880, 2.
- 72.
Anon. “Dissolving View Beds,” 2.
- 73.
Interestingly, there was at least one instance where the magic lantern was directly involved in political subversion. In 1890 Nationalist MPs who “identified themselves with the Tipperary agitation” used a barge to project lantern slides to MPs dining on the terrace of the House of Commons. See Anon. “A Political Magic Lantern,” Leicester Chronicle and the Leicestershire Mercury, 28 June 1890, 4.
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Potter, J. (2018). The Dissolving View and the Historical Imagination. In: Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89737-0_4
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