Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (41 page)

Bullock did not have a monopoly on the craze. A Waterloo Museum was set up in Pall Mall, a Waterloo Exhibition in St James’s Street; by 1824 these were joined by Waterloo Rooms, almost next door to the Waterloo Museum (the Rooms had the Emperor’s horse, Marengo: a big draw). At the Egyptian Hall again, long after Bullock had sold his lease, a display of a model of the Battle of Waterloo was popular. The army had commissioned it from an ex-officer, who went to enormous lengths to produce a minutely accurate representation, including living for some time near the battlefield itself, and interviewing officers repeatedly for information on troop movements. In 1838 his model was unveiled: it covered 40 square metres, and was scaled at about 1:600 with 190 minute figures of soldiers and horses, which could be examined with the magnifying glasses carefully chained to the display table - even the different types of crops in the fields were indicated by different coloured silks and wools.

Napoleana cropped up in the most peculiar places, in ‘high’ as well as ‘low’ art forms. A serious collector like Sir John Soane had Napoleonic bits and pieces on display in his museum, mixed in with his classical statues, Flaxman neoclassical drawings, Chinese ceramics and Hogarth pictures.
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Johann Maelzel, a German automata-maker, worked with Beethoven in 1813 to produce music for his ‘Panharmonicon’, which mimicked the sounds of various orchestral instruments. The resulting piece was entitled
Wellington’s Victory
(it was later renamed the ‘Battle’ Symphony), but the two men fell out before it could be performed. In 1818 Maelzel and the Panharmonicon - now called the Orchestrion - arrived for several years’ successful touring in Britain.
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In 1815 a production of
Richard III
advertised that in Act V, at Bosworth Field, ‘Mr Cooke will (accoutred in a real) French cuirass, stripped from a cuirassier, on the field of battle at Waterloo, and which bears the indenture of
several musket shots and sabre cuts go thro’ the evolutions of the attack and defence, with a sword in each hand!’
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Many theatres staged more straightforward representations of some aspect of Napoleon’s career: in 1831 at the Surrey Theatre there was
Napoleon, or, The Victim of Ambition
, and in the same week Covent Garden produced a ‘Grand Historical and Military Spectacle’ entitled
Napoleon Buonaparte, Captain of Artillery, General and First Consul, Emperor and Exile.
In the first six months of that year alone there were at least five versions of Napoleon’s life story on stage, most of them showing Napoleon as the hero.
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The Surrey production of
Napoleon; or, The Victim of Ambition
accommodated the Napoleon craze and added in the new fad for dioramas, with depictions of the retreat from Moscow and Waterloo. Panoramas were still drawing the crowds, but they were last week’s novelty. The dioramas at the Surrey were probably not real dioramas (see below), but only moving panoramas, which had begun to appear in theatres in the 1820s, and consisted of a panorama that was unrolled across the back of the stage to give the illusion of actors moving through a constantly changing landscape.
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The first moving panorama appeared in 1820 in the pantomime
Harlequin and Friar Bacon, or, The Brazen Head
, at Covent Garden, where the lovers ‘crossed’ to Ireland in a model boat while behind them a panorama was unrolled in the opposite direction, showing a variety of seascapes that culminated in a view of Dublin harbour. Drury Lane fought back with
Giovanni in Ireland
the following year, advertising a ‘moving Panoramic view of the coast of Milford Haven’. In 1822 another pantomime,
Harlequin and the Ogress
, had a royal party embarking for Scotland while behind them the panorama scrolled along the banks of the Thames from Greenwich to the Nore.
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Away from the theatre, panoramas were being merged with lighting and movement to create dioramas. The diorama had been invented in Paris by Louis Daguerre, an assistant to a panorama painter, and later the inventor of the daguerreotype, one of the earliest photographic processes. The diorama gave a new three-dimensionality to a previously flat image, and with rapid changes of lighting created an illusion of movement.
In the early days audiences had to sit in a purpose-built theatre, facing an opening that looked like a picture frame. Behind this frame there was in fact a perspective tunnel, although the audience could not see it. The picture at the far end of the tunnel was painted in translucent and opaque paints, which were lit by different light sources; a system of pulleys opened and closed screens, curtains and shutters to modify the light on the image and produce a short (quarter-hour) ‘performance’. The entire room was then rotated on its axis (hence the need for the purpose-built theatre) to face a second tunnel and set of frames, and a new image replaced the first for a second quarter of an hour. The images were mostly landscapes, cathedrals, ruins and so on - like the panoramas, but initially without the historical and topical images to which the public had grown accustomed.

The Diorama, near Regent’s Park, opened in 1823,
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and within a very short period of time dioramas could be found around the country. In 1825 the annual fair at Bristol advertised a diorama ‘for a short time in a spacious building purposely erected in St James’s Church Yards…with a turning saloon as at the Regent’s Park, London’. In the same year, further dioramas opened in Liverpool and in Manchester.
²³
These last two were possibly licensed by the patent-holder (the one at Bristol almost certainly was not), but very swiftly a diorama simply came to mean a
trompe-l’œil
picture that was altered by dramatic lighting; within a decade the word was used in advertisements to mean any panoramic view.

The most popular dioramas and panoramas were topical, and it became a race to ‘capture’ a big event before the competition. The Battle of Navarino, fought on 20 October 1827, was recreated in a panorama the following month. When the Houses of Parliament burned down on 16 October 1834, one panorama of the fire was painted and open to the public a week later; a second one appeared only six weeks after that, and within two months of the fire the Cosmorama Rooms in Regent Street advertised a diorama of a ‘Grand Tableaux, of the Interiors of the Houses of Lords & Commons, As They Appeared Previous to Their Destruction

by Fire, with a Correct Moonlight View, of the Exteriors…from the River Thames, And a Splendid Representation of the Conflagration with Dioramic & Mechanical Effect. Also a View of the Ruins, as Visited by their Majesties.’

News events and catastrophes were popular in various genres. In 1820 Géricault’s 1819 painting of dead and dying shipwreck survivors,
The Raft of the Medusa
, was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, to great success. (For more on art exhibitions, see Chapter 10.) It was followed shortly by a panorama entitled ‘Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Wreck of the Medusa French Frigate and the Fatal Raft’, which was shown first in Edinburgh, and then in Dublin when Géricault’s painting was exhibited
there.
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Dublin spurned the painting for the panorama, however: admission charges for the painting had to be dropped from 1
s.
8
d.
to 10
d.
, and even then few visitors bothered to attend, while the Marine Peristrephic Panorama packed them in three times a day.

Another type of novelty appeared in 1834, when the Baker Street Bazaar advertised its ‘Padorama’: just under 1,000 square metres of that technological marvel, the railway. The image depicted was ‘the most interesting parts of the country traversed by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway…[Mechanical scale-models of the] Locomotive Engines [will run in front of the panorama and]…give a more correct idea of the mode of transit on this great work of art and science than can be conveyed by any description, however elaborate. Every one of our juvenile friends ought in particular to see it, as it is very instructive for youth.’
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The Baker Street Bazaar, in its passion for instruction, was not breaking new ground. The hero in
Evelina
in 1778 had condemned Cox’s Museum because, although the mechanical ability behind the displays was remarkable, ‘I am sorry it is turned to no better account; but its purport is so frivolous, so very remote from all aim at instruction or utility, that the sight of so fine a shew only leaves a regret on the mind, that so much work, and so much ingenuity, should not be better bestowed.’
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Many agreed with this desire for ‘instruction or utility’, and a great many shows therefore slanted their promotion away from the presentation of spectacle.

One way of making entertainments acceptable to the more seriousminded was to claim a scientific basis for them, as did Dr Katterfelto, who lectured at Spring Gardens, in the same place as Cox’s. (Spring Gardens was where Admiralty Arch, in London, has since been built,
but a small pedestrian turning carries the name still.) Dr Katterfelto, advertising himself as ‘the greatest philosopher in this kingdom since Sir Isaac Newton’, lectured on ‘mathematics, optics, magnetism, electricity, chemistry, pneumatics, hydraulics, hydrostatics’, as well as, more mysteriously, ‘proetics’, ‘stynacraphy’ and ‘caprimancy’. Despite the latter subjects, his lectures were not entirely bogus. He exhibited a solar microscope, although he could not resist claiming the invention as his own (in fact an early model had been presented to the Royal Society over forty years before), or selling Dr Bato’s Remedy to destroy the ‘insects’ that could be seen through it. Other lecturers presented ‘Philosophical Recreations’, which were in reality conjuring tricks, or optical illusions, or performances of mind-reading; there were even demonstrations of ‘Philosophical Fireworks’, which were fireworks displays that were prefaced by short lectures on chemistry, or the history of gunpowder. Magic lanterns, which otherwise would be classed as entertainment, were educational if they explained ‘all the Phenomena of the heavenly bodies, and give the most interesting and comprehensive View of the sublime works of the Creator’.

Some of these lectures were of real technological import: in 1804 an enterprise that was to change the entire nation was presented as an entertainment at the Lyceum Theatre, when Friedrich Albert Winsor gave lectures on the power of gas to illuminate. In 1808 Richard Trevithick, the engineer who produced the first steam locomotive, attempted to publicize his new locomotive, the Catch-me-who-can, by staging a ‘Steam Circus’ in front of what is now Euston station and giving rides to passers-by.
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At the Egyptian Hall in 1824 ‘The Egg in Labour’, which sounded like a magic act, was in fact a ‘steam egg-hatchery’, or incubator for chicks: ‘Cantelo’s Patent Hydro-Incubator…Chickens Always Hatching! Machines and Chickens Constantly on Sale!’ They were also constantly on view - between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. visitors could watch the chicks hatch, and examine bottles that held specimens of chickens at various stages in their development.

In 1832 the Adelaide Gallery - or, to give it its formal title, the National Gallery of Practical Science, Blending Instruction with Amusement - opened in the Lowther Arcade, a passage off the Strand that was well known for shopping and other entertainment. In 1839 it was the first place to display a photograph, illegally to begin with, but then with the permission of Louis Daguerre, who licensed a photographer to set
up a studio on the premises. This was so popular that in 1844 he expanded into the next-door building. In 1847 he had a second branch in Regent’s Park, tellingly at the Colosseum, which housed panoramas, and by the mid-1850s his ‘Temple of Photography’ was established on Regent Street, the home of upper-class shopping, making the perfect link between education, technology and entertainment.

Photographs could be taken away and studied at leisure.
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This was another way of taking entertainment and taming it, moving it from the street into the home and therefore domesticating it. Many children’s toys followed this pattern, being based on public entertainments, but enjoyed safely away from the crowds. The Panorama of Europe: A New Game appeared in 1815, and had a map of Europe on which various routes had to be traced out. Other toys relied on public entertainments that were less educational, less satisfactory to the more serious, evangelical middle classes in particular. But by domesticating the public element, and disguising its origins with references to other, more educational, shows, the toys became welcome in many homes where theatre and magic displays were frowned on. A Geographical Panorama was not actually a panorama at all, but a toy theatre; another toy theatre claimed its educational credentials by calling itself a diorama. Home ‘panoramas’ were really magic-lantern versions of images taken from current panoramas, but they were even better, because ‘by the magical power of this little instrument, [they are] brought in all their reality and beauty, to our own homes and firesides’, said the
Art-Journal.
The privatization of the show was important in the success of these toys.

Separate lectures in new locations away from the shows and exhibition halls were similarly aimed at those who were inclined to distrust ‘entertainment’ alone. One of the founders of the Adelaide Gallery helped to set up the Polytechnic Institution, which was dedicated to the encouragement of invention and technology, and the education of the working classes. Yet soon after it opened in 1838, its educational and scientific demonstrations and lectures had been diluted and were in practice already indistinguishable from the entertainments of the town - ‘Dissolving Views’ were dioramas by another name, and its science
lectures were equally reliant on popular entertainment. Yet the Polytechnic’s reputation for rational recreation kept it secure. In Thackeray’s 1853-5 novel
The Newcomes
(with its careful subtitle, ‘Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family’), Lady Newcome says that when her children are home from school, ‘I send them to the Polytechnic with Professor Hickson, who kindly explains to them some of the marvels of science and the wonders of machinery. I send them to the picture galleries and the British Museum. I go with them myself to the delightful lectures at the [Royal] Institution in Albemarle Street. I do not desire that they should attend theatrical exhibitions.’
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But they would really be attending ‘theatrical exhibitions’ in all but name. John Henry Pepper, ‘chemical professor to the establishment’ from 1848, lectured on chemical reactions by using as an example the case of Dr William Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner.
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He was soon even more famous as the creator of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, a theatrical effect that produced the illusion of ghostly transparent figures moving onstage. In 1862 he staged a Christmas Eve production of Dickens’s ‘The Haunted Man’ in a lecture hall at the Polytechnic. A student at his desk was suddenly transfixed by the vision of a glowing skeleton which appeared and disappeared before the audience’s amazed eyes. Pepper had planned this as a prelude to a lecture on optics, but the tumultuous applause persuaded him to keep the ‘ghost’ a theatrical secret, and Pepper’s Ghost drew a quarter of a million visitors to the Polytechnic in the next fifteen months, as well as making spectral appearances in theatres across the country, suitably licensed by Pepper.
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