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  • Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909 by Kevin Rockett and Emer Rockett
  • John Plunkett (bio)
Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909, by Kevin Rockett and Emer Rockett; pp. 403. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011, £50.00, $74.50.

Kevin Rockett and Emer Rockett’s book is a richly researched, engaging, and occasionally frustrating picture of visual and optical entertainments in Ireland, ranging from the first phantasmagoria shows in the 1790s to the establishment of the first purpose-built cinemas. This book studies picture-going within the world of exhibitions, lectures, performances, demonstrations, fairs, conversaziones, bazaars, and soirées. The presence of visual and optical media at these events made them a driving force in the entwined growth of popular entertainment, rational recreation, and civic culture.

This book is part of the spatial turn in which scholars, most especially in the history of science and film studies, have begun to elaborate the variegated strata, networks, and spaces of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exhibitions. A number of recent studies have created more detailed accounts of venues, audience experiences and composition, and the business and performance practices of showmen. The complex, historical picture of popular exhibitions now emerging alternately fleshes out and problematises previous theoretical narratives concerning spectacle, the politics of display, popular culture, showmanship, and class and leisure.

The authors build on recent work influenced by the idea that the site of an exhibition helped determine not only how it took place, but the meanings it produced and the experience of its audience. Places are obviously never just physical spaces but the product of social meanings, economics, and demography. Popular entertainments varied significantly depending on the characteristics of the particular town or city in which they occurred. Similarly the strategies and meaning of a performance were inflected by the venue and event; and both venue and event shaped the expectations and knowledges that audiences brought to the display or performance. As the authors demonstrate, micro-historical accounts can give a level of detail that challenges dominant historiographical maps.

Spatial approaches have been particularly productive in analysing nineteenth-century popular science events and early film because they were staged and communicated in so many different ways. A key element of this work has been its exploration of the provision of lectures, demonstrations, classes, and exhibitions in British provincial towns and cities. In addition to confirming just how pervasive these spectacles were, this work has produced a much more complex historical narrative than that of a simple migration of metropolitan exhibition forms to the provinces. [End Page 175]

Given the considerable ambition of the project, aiming to provide a synoptic picture of over a century of exhibitions while detailing the disparate urban and rural areas of Ireland, it is no surprise that it is collaborative. Perhaps more remarkable given its own length is that it is a companion volume to the equally weighty Film Exhibition and Distribution In Ireland, 1909–2010 (2011). It was only in beginning to research this latter volume that the continuities between cinema and previous moving- and projected-image entertainment became clear. The book is inspired by the argument that “the eclipsing of pre-twentieth century popular (visual) entertainment within scholarship necessarily negatively impacts upon how all cultural forms, and indeed all aspects of society, are understood historically,” and that this amnesia has had a particular impact upon cinema (11).

Individual chapters centre upon the panorama, phantasmagoria and magic lantern, tableaux vivants, and early film. The strongest parts of the analysis are those that draw out the nuances of the specific Irish political and social contexts by describing the roles of local audiences and showmen, and their interactions with both home-grown exhibitions and those touring from mainland Britain. Popular shows had to address the sensibilities of local audiences. When the first phantasmagoria was shown in Dublin, St. Patrick was one of the ghosts to appear. In a different vein, given Irish nationalist sympathies, the exhibition of imperialist panoramas celebrating British maritime and military power always had the potential to have a different meaning in Dublin than in Manchester or Bristol, especially as some were exhibited in...

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