This chapter offers a survey of a full century of Gothic entertainments, including shows such as the phantasmagoria, Pepper’s Ghost, the magic theatre, and theatrical séances, as well as macabre shows in penny gaffs, fairgrounds and the first screening venues for early films. In relation to this variety of entertainments, it argues for an open definition of Gothic, pointing out that it was the adaptability of Gothic registers that proved so productive for nineteenth-century showmen and women, allowing them routinely to attract audiences at all sorts of venues and as tastes changed across the decades. Drawing on a wide range of primary research in newspapers, the chapter also reconsiders the relationship between these patterns of ‘Gothic showmanship’, and the mass media spectacles delivered by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century magic- lantern shows and early film. Such media demonstrated continuities with Gothic shows of the preceding century, but also with the eclecticism of late twentieth and twenty-first-century Gothic mass media, suggesting a long trajectory for patterns of Gothic showmanship that is worthy of further consideration.

The connection between science, showmanship and popular display was enduringly compelling for nineteenth-century audiences in Britain. Writing in 1872, in the Leisure Hour, John Timbs remembered some of the most popular of the scientific exhibitions that had taken place in London during the preceding fifty years. The electric eel employed by Faraday was, in fact, one of several that would be exhibited at the Adelaide Gallery of Practical Science on the Strand – this time for just one shilling – where feeding time proved to be an especially attractive performance once it was realized that the fishes captured their prey by discharging an electric shock. Faraday's experiment and more general zoological accounts of the acquisition, careful nursing and behaviour of the eel were reported widely, not least by Timbs himself, who, as founding editor of the Year-Book of Facts in Science and Art, had given the fish star-billing on the frontispiece of the 1840 edition.