Phantasmagoria
or, things eerie, moving,
and mystical in the
Georgian/Regency night.
The first ghostly apparition: Paris, 1798
An eerie
spectre of light shot through the darkness, crossed the room, and fully materialized
in a shimmering cloud of smoke near the centre. As the image grew larger and moved
closer, the onlookers gasped in horror. It was the figure of Marat--suspended
in mid-air. His eyes moved slowly from side to side, viewing the frightened countenances
of everyone in the room. Then his mouth opened--and he began to speak. The crowd
sat trembling and speechless. Some quickly covered their eyes, while others crossed
themselves in fearful reverence. Then several terrified spectators bolted from
the room. Had Marat come back from the dead to seek vengeance? Would he identify
a killer among them? Was it all just their imagination--or was it a trick?
In reality, it was a bit of both. The ghostly figure of Marat had been conjured
up by a Phantasmagoria machine; the first optical instrument to bring pictures
closer to life by adding the revolutionary element of motion. It had its beginnings
in France in 1798, and was a further development of the Magic Lantern show of
painted slides invented by Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century.
The Magic Lantern was highly valued for its production of supernatural effects, and Etienne Gaspard Robert, a professor of physics, created an improved version with moving slides, further enhancing the effects by projecting the images onto thick clouds of smoke. Adjustable lenses and a moveable carriage allowed the images to be increased or decreased in size, and any quantity or variety of ghostly apparitions could be painted on glass “sliders,” doubled up, and cleverly manipulated by the operator in the unknowing darkness to obtain the dramatic vision of moving eyes or mouths. The effects were further brought to life through the art of ventriloquism.
Performing under the stage name of Robertson, the professor used these moving images to send chills through audiences by calling up the ghosts of such French revolutionary heroes and celebrities as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Marat; presenting their spectres with phantom voices in eerily shimmering clouds of smoke. The astonishment of onlookers must have reverberated throughout every arondissement in Paris, as the Phantasmagoria show conjured up a chilling reminder of the recent upheavals.
It was a dark and stormy night.
The
power of the Robertson’s Phantasmagoria show relied on the popular belief
that the forces of darkness and sorcery were responsible for projecting images
where none had previously been. He used this to great effect in his first performance
at Pavilion de L’Echiquier in 1798, where the interior was trimmed in full ‘Radcliffian’
decor. An observer describes the scene:
“The members of the public
having been ushered into the most lugubrious of rooms, at the moment the spectacle
is to begin, the lights are suddenly extinguished and one is plunged for an hour
and a half into frightful and profound darkness; it’s the nature of the thing;
one should not be able to make anything out in the imaginary region of the dead.
In an instant, two turnings of a key lock the door: nothing could be more natural
than one should be deprived of one’s liberty while seated in the tomb, or in the
hereafter of Acheron, among shadows.”
The stage being set, Robertson poured two glasses of blood on a lighted brazier, followed by a bottle of vitriol, twelve drops of aqua fortis, and two numbers of the journal Hommes-Libres. Suddenly, there arose from the smoke a hideous phantom in a red bonnet, armed with a dagger. The ghostly spectre was immediately recognized as Marat, and when one onlooker tried to embrace the image it made a frightful grimace and disappeared, while several other patrons ran from the room in terror.
Other chilling apparitions of this Phantasmagoria show included the image of The Three Graces turning into skeletons, ‘The Nightmare’ by Fuseli, The Witch of Endor, The Head of Medusa, and The Agony of Uglino. These, and familiar single phantasms, were interspersed among the bloody spectres of French ‘revolutionaries,’ and the performance was concluded by Robertson’s haunting admonition: “I have shown you the most occult things natural philosophy has to offer, effects that seemed supernatural to the ages of credulity, but now you see the only real horror...see what is in store for all of you, what each of you will become one day: remember the Phantasmagoria.”
As if those words weren’t chilling enough, Robertson then lit a torch in a crypt, which suddenly illuminated the skeleton of a young woman on a pedestal, and left the spectators in a complete state of astonishment and horror.
Boo!
Monsieur.
It was not long before the supernatural clouds of the Phantasmagoria
and its ghosts drifted across the channel toward England; and the first show under
that name was exhibited in London, sometime in late 1801 or 1802, by a French
showman named Paul de Philipstal. He had rented the downstairs room at the Lyceum,
and immediately set the spines of English gentlemen and ladies tingling with his
ghostly repertoire.
De Philipstal enhanced the mysterious effect by projecting his stacked and painted slides onto a transparent screen, which was more controllable than the smokescreen used in France. Sir David Brewster attended and later described one of de Philipstal’s Phantasmagoria performances:
“The small theatre of exhibition was lighted only by one hanging lamp, the flame of which was drawn up into an opaque chimney or shade when the performance began. In this 'darkness visible' the curtain rose and displayed a cave with skeletons and other terrific figures in relief upon its walls. The flickering light was then drawn up beneath its shroud, and the spectators in total darkness found themselves in the middle of thunder and lightning. A thin transparent screen had, unknown to the spectators, been let down after the disappearance of the light, and upon it the flashes of lightning and all the subsequent appearances were represented. This screen being half-way between the spectators and the cave which was first shown, and being itself invisible, prevented the observers from having any idea of the real distance of the figures, and gave them the entire character of aerial pictures. The thunder and lightning were followed by the figures of ghosts, skeletons, and known individuals, whose eyes and mouth were made to move by the shifting of combined sliders. After the first figure had been exhibited for a short time, it began to grow less and less, as if removed to a great distance, and at last vanished in a small cloud of light. Out of this same cloud the germ of another figure began to appear, and gradually larger and larger, and approached the spectators till it attained its perfect development. In this manner, the head of Dr. Franklin was transformed into a skull; figures which retired with the freshness of life came back in the form of skeletons, and the retiring skeletons returned in the drapery of flesh and blood.
The exhibition of these transmutations was followed by spectres, skeletons, and terrific figures, which, instead of vanishing as before, suddenly advanced upon the spectators, becoming larger as they approached them, and finally vanished by appearing to sink into the ground. The effect of this part of the exhibition was naturally the most impressive. The spectators were not only surprised but agitated, and many of them were of the opinion that they could have touched the figures.”
It’s so...uh...Gothic.
The Phantasmagoria show’s success was fueled by the popularity of Gothic
novels, which had taken hold of England at the time and, perhaps, even promoted
them. Readers of The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, &c.,
could now see in ghostly apparition, what their minds could only imagine before--and
the frightening effect was multiplied one-hundredfold right before their eyes.
The ghostly shapes floated mysteriously before the spectators, seemingly close
enough to touch,--then flitted about their heads in a luminous dance macabre--before
speaking their mournful words or frightful warnings and sinking into the ground
at their feet.
Entrepreneurial spirits went hand-in-hand with ghostly ones as supernatural shows sprang up all over London. Jack Bologna, a famous comedian and harlequin, may have been the first to put on a phantasmagoric style show using just a Magic Lantern in 1796. He subsequently managed a full-featured Phantasmagoria show at the Lyceum, which had gained the informal name of “Phantascopic Theater.” Bologna advertised his newly styled show as being “upon the same elegant plan of Mr. de Philipstal,” and featured ghostly scenes and personalities more in keeping with the English taste, since the war with France was again gaining full swing.
The Lyceum
As early as 1803, a Phantasmagoria show modeled upon de Philipstal’s was exhibited at Bartholomew Fair, drawing enormous crowds; and by 1804 a German conjurer named Moritz opened a Phantasmagoria and magic show at the King’s Arms in Change Alley, Cornhill. Moritz enjoyed a great deal of success with his show and in 1807 he moved it to the Temple of Apollo in the Strand, where he featured ghostly representations of the raising of Samuel by The Witch of Endor, Macbeth and the Ghost of Banquo, the ghost scene from Hamlet, and the transformation of Louis XVI into a skeleton.
I’m Rob, and I’ll be your ghost this evening.
These preternatural
excursions attracted both male and female spectators, and at an early date the
exhibitions took on a club-like atmosphere, as witnessed by the spiel of one Phantasmagoria
showman quoted in the European Magazine in 1803:
“Ladies and gentlemen,
Hin the hurly hages of hignorance, there wasn’t no such thing as a Phantasmagorium;
it is a quite spick span new invention, never invented before. Here you will see,
Ladies and Gentlemen, your friends and relations, dead and alive, present or absent,
above or below. You’ll excuse my descending into particulars. Never mind; we’ll
put ye in spirits, I warrant ye, and keep ye in them too; proof spirits for Ladies,
and choice spirits for the Gentlemen. I should have no objection to a drop of
brandy myself.”
With people getting their spirits by the eyeful and bottleful, I can’t help but wondering if this was where the 2-drink minimum originated.
Judging by the fact that audiences were comprised of both ladies and gentlemen, Phantasmagoria shows had become respectable entertainment. After spending years in their underground haunts, the shows came out of the basement, so to speak, and shared billing with an endless variety of other exhibitions. Henry Crabb Robinson, visiting the Royal Mechanical and Optical Exhibition in Catherine Street in 1812, saw a “gratifying show of spectres...,” along with the performance of waxen puppets, and shortly after wrote:
“In an age in which the process was familiar but not known to the people, it must have been very easy to raise spirits from the dead apparently by means of a good likeness, for the eyes &c. may be easily made to move...”
Riding the crest of Gothic vogue, Phantasmagoria-related performances enjoyed a period of high social popularity in London between 1803, when Gillray the cartoonist satirized the Peace of Amiens in a Phantasmagoria scene, and 1816, when Thomas Rowlandson used it as one of the plates in his Grand Master or Adventure of Qui Hi in Hindoostan. Even Lord Byron was impressed enough by phantasmagoric imagery to use it figuratively in The Vision of Judgment:
"
The man was a phantasmagoria in
Himself--he was so volatile and thin."
Stage fright
Phantasmagoria shows were adept
at scaring up plenty of business on their own, but it took an innovative stage
producer to fully adapt their power to the legitimate theatre. At the Adelphi
in 1826, the Phantasmagoria machine was first used to enhance a production
of The Flying Dutchman. During the opening performance, on a totally darkened
stage, the phantom ship--announced by a rolling clap of thunder--magically appeared
and floated through the air in a ghostly ballet. The effect was instantly haunting
and mesmerizing.
After running its course in the city, the Phantasmagoria show continued beaming its phantoms and ghostly spectres at local fairs where it sent chills through audiences well into the 1830’s. At the Bartholomew Fair in 1833, De Berar’s “Optikali Illusio” featured a series of Phantasmagoria pictures which included ‘Death on a Pale Horse’ enhanced by a luminous skeleton; plus other fearful subjects that shivered the marrow of onlookers.
By the mid 19th century the Phantasmagoria show had become a spectre of its former self, and Sir David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope and improver of the stereoscope) created a more complex apparatus of mirrors and lenses capable of projecting the illuminated image of a human being “in place of chalkyill-drawn figures.” He envisioned “phantasms of the most perfect deliniation, clothed in real drapery, and displaying all the movements of life.”
These phantasms were to materialize with astonishing effect at the show of Pepper’s Ghost, exhibited at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London during the 1860’s. Ghostlike actors and actresses were reflected from below the stage, and seemed to mingle in wraithlike form with those on stage. One startled viewer wrote:
“The apparitions not only moved about the stage, looking as tangible as the actors who passed through them, and from those who proffered embrace or threatened attack they vanished in an instant, but spoke or sang with voices of unmistakable reality.”
This dramatic improvement in ghostly apparitions relegated the Phantasmagoria machine to the dusty closet of history, where its supernatural effects lay dormant until awakened by the light of scholarly studies. Its proprietors and spectators are now ghosts of the past who converse and cavort together in their own ethereal mist--without a 2-drink minimum.
~ Robert Whitworth
N.B. For those of you who may be interested, the Library of the University of Michigan has a surviving program of a Fantasmagorie de Robertson performed at the Cour des Capuchines in the early 19th century.
Title: Fantasmagorie de Robertson,
Cour des Capucines, près
la place Vendôme. Tous les jours à
sept houres.
Library: University of Michigan
Authors: Robertson, E. G.
1763-1831. (Etienne Gaspard)
Published: [Paris? 1800?]
Description: 7
p. 22 cm.
Subjects: Mirrors
Notes: Caption title.
Holdings:
Library:
University of Michigan
Location: BUHR - Ask at any library
Call No: Q
105 .R65