Abstract

ABSTRACT:

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the lantern industry was adopting more formal exhibition, manufacture, and distribution strategies. Venues such as the Royal Polytechnic Institution presented large-scale lantern entertainments to sophisticated metropolitan audiences and intersected with a broader entertainment landscape. This essay demonstrates some of the stylistic responses to the formalizing lantern industry in the large-entertainment format, focusing on the 1875 production Gabriel Grub and the Grim Goblin to consider what stylistic and storytelling techniques were utilized to negotiate various institutional and public attitudes. The Polytechnic’s lantern entertainments in the later years of its existence tended toward increasing internal coherence within fantastic fictional productions. This coincided with the final years of the large institutional entertainment, where the earlier educational format of public institutions ceded to large-scale spectacle before collapsing entirely and being absorbed into the variegated small-format entertainments of the final few decades of the nineteenth century.

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