Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices by Helen Groth (review)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that early moving pictures owed an enormous debt not just to visual but also to narrative predecessors. As Helen Groth puts it toward the end of her informative and stimulating Moving Images, early practitioners like Robert Paul and Cecil Hepworth realized that “the key to the new medium’s survival lay in a creative convergence of showmanship, collective memory and storytelling” (172). Now, Groth has set out to run the film backward and reveal a contrapositive: the debt owed by textual art forms to the range of “screen practices” that throughout the nineteenth century played a surprisingly pervasive and complex role in the print public sphere.

From William Wordsworth’s first disgruntled grappling with the visual phantasmagoria of Bartholomew Fair to quick-adapting journalistic texts like George Sims’s Biographs of London (1902) (the irony being that Sims borrowed “biograph,” a word that implies a textual and not a visual art form, from the moving pictures), Groth documents the various unnoticed ways in which the formal and aesthetic logic of emergent technologies of vision unsettled the guiding assumptions of the written word in its older manifestations. Moving in the same terrain recently occupied by such significant history of science works as Science in the Marketplace (2007), edited by Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, and by more culturally and aesthetically attuned works such as Isobel Armstrong’s magisterial Glassworlds (2008) and Vanessa Schwartz’s Paris-focused Spectacular Realities (1998), Groth’s work is part of an emerging and robust pre-history of the cinema.

In certain ways, Moving Images reminds me of David Lodge’s joke about the dissertation that is on “the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare.” The punchline here would read “the influence of the movies on nineteenth-century literature.” A better way to think about what Groth is after here, though, is as an unexpected, almost a secret, genealogy of the forms of thinking about visual narrative that burst out into the open in the twentieth century and have never since relinquished the public stage. Groth, though, is writing about a period in which George Henry Lewes could still sneer dismissively about mere visual trickery, and in which George Eliot could liken the sequenceless succession of magic lanterns to a fevered dream, implicitly offering her novel as an art form that could, by contrast, take ownership of the temporal dimension. Accordingly, Groth offers a nuanced exploration of various test cases of artists who found themselves or their work pegged as merely visual, sensational, or dramatic. Groth’s account of Byronic celebrity, for instance, is astute in recognizing the ways in which Lord Byron’s involvement in celebrity itself became an argument against his writing: a sort of slippery doubleness that he both deplored and embraced.

Groth also travels down forgotten or undervalued byways of British literary culture, asking which writers would not have been inclined to distance themselves from the shows and sights of London. One answer in the Romantic era lies in books about magic lanterns; in a chapter that also reads Pierce Egan’s popular True History of Tom and Jerry (1821) and Anne Taylor’s Signor Topsy Turvy’s Wonderful Magic Lantern (1810), Groth traces how Marguerite Gardiner’s The Magic Lantern; or Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis (1823) “enlists the fluid dissolve of one lantern slide into the next to materialize the associative flow of reverie inspired by her digressive wanderings through Regency London’s profuse and various attractions” (24). Not many books dared to include the magic lantern in their titles, argues Groth, but understanding Charles Dickens’s sketches as a vital part of his fictional success went along with a sense of those sketches as lantern-like in their vivid, almost magical immediacy, and their prioritization of the allure of the eye, translated into prose.

I suggested that Groth is telling a history in reverse in which the success of nineteenth-century...