The magic lantern as a Gothic literary instrument

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the function of the magic lantern, a seventeenth-century scientific invention with the ability to project frightening images painted on transparent slides, as a literary device intrinsically connected to the Gothic genre. Darkness, foul weather, animated portraits, eerie apparitions, crumbling abbeys and half-demolished tombs team with physics and optics in an intricate swirl of exchanges between literature and visual technology, still relevant today. These exchanges are vividly illustrated in Girona’s spectacular Museu del Cinema – Col·lecció Tomàs Mallol.

KEYWORDS:

• Magic lantern
• Gothic
• Museu del Cinema – Col·lecció Tomàs Mallol
• ruins
• Robertson
• phantasmagoria
• fantascope
• ‘year without a summer’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The French anthology was compiled and translated by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès (Paris: F. Schoell, 1812) from the first two volumes of a five-volume German anthology entitled Gespensterbuch (1810–11, Book of Ghosts), compiled by Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun (a pen name for Friedrich Zchulze) and published in Leipzig. For the origin of the German stories see Van Woudenberg (2020).

2 I thank the Museu del Cinema – Tomàs Mallol Collection for providing me with images of items in their collection and, in particular, Montse Puigdevall Noguer for her generous assistance.

3 My translation of: ‘une petite machine d’ Optique, qui fait voir dans l’obscurité sur une muraille blanche plusieurs spectres & monstres si affreux, que celuy qui n’ en sçait pas le secret, croit que cela le fait par magie’ (n.p.).

4 Five of the eight stories in the French Fantasmagoriana were translated into English as Tales of the Dead by Sarah Elizabeth Brown Utterson and published anonymously in 1813 together with her own story, ‘The Storm’.

5 This is a much misquoted excerpt, usually mistakenly attributed to Byron himself, in a supposed conversation with the writer Thomas Medwin. Actually, it is included in William Edward West’s report of a conversation he had with Byron about the latter’s 1816 poem entitled ‘Darkness’. West himself also mistakes the year, attributing Byron’s account of the foul weather to the year 1815, instead of 1816: ‘I once asked him how he ever could have conceived such a scene as that described in his poem called ‘Darkness’. He replied that he wrote it in 1815 at Geneva, where there was a celebrated dark day, on which the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight’ (West 1826, 246–47).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Vara

Maria Vara is Special Teaching Fellow at the Department of Theory and History of Art, Athens School of Fine Arts. She holds an MA from the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) and a PhD – funded by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation – from the School of English, Aristotle University (Thessaloniki, Greece). She has taught courses on literary theory, comparative literature, European fiction, the Gothic, research skills, art and culture and art terminology. She has been secretary of the Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE, https://www.enl.auth.gr/hase/), 2014–2020. She has presented several papers at international conferences and her publications include chapters in The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe (Continuum, 2007), Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Le Gothic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Rewriting/Reprising: Plural Intertextualities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), The Letter of the Law: Literature, Justice and the Other (Peter Lang, 2013), The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Liminal Dickens (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016) and Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Her most recent publication (Humanities, 2022) is ‘“OMG JANE AUSTEN”: Austen and Memes in the Post-#MeToo Era’ (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/11/5/112).