Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices
- 1 Moving Books in Regency London
- 2 Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media
- 3 Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott
- 4 Reading Habits and Magic Lanterns: Dickens and Dr Pepper's Ghost
- 5 Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice
- 6 Flickering Effects: George Robert Sims and the Psychology of the Moving Image
- 7 Literary Porjections and Residual Media: Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices
- 1 Moving Books in Regency London
- 2 Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media
- 3 Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott
- 4 Reading Habits and Magic Lanterns: Dickens and Dr Pepper's Ghost
- 5 Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice
- 6 Flickering Effects: George Robert Sims and the Psychology of the Moving Image
- 7 Literary Porjections and Residual Media: Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Looking back at the popular craze that followed in the wake of his invention of the kaleidoscope in 1816, David Brewster portrayed a city consumed by a new type of moving image:
You can have no conception of the effect which the instrument excited in London; all that you have heard falls infinitely short of the reality. No book and no instrument in the memory of man ever produced such a singular effect. They are exhibited publicly on the streets for a penny, and I had the pleasure of paying this sum yesterday; these are about two feet long and a foot wide. Infants are seen carrying them in their hands, the coachmen on their boxes are busy using them, and thousands of poor people make their bread by making and selling them.
Melancholic indignation pervades Brewster's accounts of the scenes of frenzied consumption that begin each new edition of his kaleidoscope treatise, culminating in the final edition revised for publication in 1858. In the first edition of the treatise, Brewster casts himself as a traumatised witness paralysed by the marketplace's sublime indifference to the provenance of ‘this inexplicably wonderful toy’. Falling prey to the avarice of London and Paris instrument makers, Brewster mournfully speculates that ‘no fewer than two hundred thousand’ of these cheap, flawed instruments were sold in London and Paris in the first three months of 1817 (7).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Moving ImagesNineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices, pp. 78 - 99Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013