1902

[Frog Country]

Anonymous cartoon from Illustrated Chips (22 February 1902): 12.

All characters in this bizarre cartoon are frogs except the little girl Dolly at top centre, because she is the person whose fantasy this is. The caption reads: “Little Dolly Daydream had pork and beans for supper the other night, and directly she shut her eyes she found herself in dreamland. Now you needn’t think they’re not up-to-date in Frog Country, because they are: and when they took her to their National Sporting Club to see a boxing match for the championship of the duckpond she didn’t like it a little bit. And when she woke up suddenly, to find herself in her own tiny little bed, wasn’t she just glad! No more pork and beans at night-time for Dolly.” Although this is very much a fantasy boxing match, the event is being recorded by devices with authentic names: a “Biograph”, a “Cinematograph”, a “Phonograph” and even a “Kromskop” (a genuine camera for colour photography). The cartoonist was also being quite correct in having the devices present at the fight, because, by 1902, several real boxing matches had been filmed, such as the Jeffries-Sharkey world heavyweight championship of 1899.¹⁹ The comic in which this cartoon appeared, Illustrated Chips, was one of several such comic papers published at this time in Britain, appealing to a juvenile readership.

Biographs of Babylon

Foreword by G.R. Sims from his collection of short stories, Biographs of Babylon: Life-Pictures of London’s Moving Scenes (London: Chatto & Windus, 1902).

George Robert Sims was a prolific journalist, dramatist and writer of short stories. In 1897 Sims wrote one of the first stories about the cinema, “Our Detective Story”, and he would become increasingly interested in cinema in ensuing years.²⁰ Although only one of the 15 stories in Biographs of Babylon is about motion pictures as such (and that one, “The Side-Show Pianiste”, merely takes up the theme in passing), the book is in a deeper and more fundamental sense about cinema, as Sims explains in his brief Foreword reprinted below. All the stories are meant to be like films, he says, in the sense of being observational, with characters’ lives caught in full flow, as if by some all-seeing lens. The stories are also of interest in themselves: set in London, some in Soho and theatreland, they are ironic, brief, and with neat and intriguing plots.²¹ Interestingly, in this same year, 1902, a Dutch author, G. Van Hulzen, published a collection of stories with a similarly film-related title, Cinematograaf, and a similar justification for the metaphor: he explains in his prologue that he will present aspects of “real life” to his readers much like the “vibrating images” of the moving pictures.²² Back in 1897 a British writer had published a novel, A Social Cinematographe, with much the same justification for her cinema-related title, claiming that the work was “a series of pictures” of her characters’ comings and goings. Also in 1897, a French writer stated that his novel, Le Cinématographe du Mariage, was meant to be akin to a show of film clips, explaining this in a preface significantly titled “Boniment”, connoting a film show lecture. Finally, writing a few years after Sims, an Italian author used a similar metaphor in the title of a collection of half a dozen of his stories, calling the volume Cinematografie dal Vero.²³ Thus, here we have early examples of the cinema impacting literature: the reverse of the usually-assumed direction of influence.

There are strange human dramas, harrowing human tragedies, enacted daily beneath the roofs of the Great City. The actors, shut in by the four walls that the playwright removes, play their parts unseen by the world without. The tale of the tragedy is heard in the market-place only when the terrible dénouement has been reached.

There are scenes passing daily around us, scenes in which comedy and tragedy alike have their share; and no hint...