autumn 2007

Reading Victorian Illusions: Dickens’s Haunted Man and Dr. Pepper’s “Ghost”

Helen Groth

In December of 1862, John Henry Pepper’s spectacular adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain (1848) at the Royal Polytechnic Institution on Regent Street transfixed

London audiences. In its initial incarnation, Pepper’s “Ghost” combined a novel form of optical illusion with Dickens’s uncanny tale of a man called Redlaw who is forced to confront the horrific consequences of his desire to be free of his past. the illusion focused on the moment in Dickens’s Haunted Man when Redlaw’s spectral double appears to grant his wish that his memory be erased, a wish accompanied by a curse that condemns all those who come in contact with him to the same fate. Confronted with the brutal consequences of his desire, Redlaw ulti-mately repents, and his punitive ghost lifts the curse.

Dickens’s tale, which was itself indebted to mid-century debates about the nature of memory and illusion, provided Pepper with a stock of ready-made images and ideas, including illustrations by John tenniel, John Leech, and others. Dickens’s insistence on the civilizing power of memory, its ability to suppress the chaos of individual desire and to foster social responsibility, nicely complemented Pepper’s own didactic use of illusion to promote rational responses to seemingly inexplicable super-

aBStRaCt: this article examines John Henry Pepper’s spectacularly successful 1862 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Christmas tale, The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain, at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London. Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which Dickens’s tale encourages readers to interrogate the epistemological bases of memory and perception, I track Pepper’s translation of the text into a popular theatrical event designed to exploit the recollective powers of an increasingly visually literate mid-nineteenth-century audience. Dickens’s and Pepper’s shared preoccupation with memory and illusion, as well as with the psychological processes that were thought to induce spectral visions, resulted in a performance that challenged viewers’ notions of agency and consciousness. a seminal chapter in the archaeology of cinema, the creation of “Pepper’s Ghost” brought popular literature into conversation with Victorian discourses as diverse as psychology, the paranormal, optics, and drama.

44 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

natural phenomena. underlying this mutual emphasis on order and continuity, however, was a fundamental anxiety about the fallibility of perception and memory in organizing stimuli into patterns that rein-forced normalizing historical continuities. this concern was not unique to Pepper and Dickens, and it indicates the immersion of both men in mid-century debates about the eye and the mind—Pepper, through his converging interests in optics and natural magic; and Dickens, through a number of literary and scientific sources and a close network of friend-ships with prominent medical figures like John Connolly and John elli-otson.1 this article examines Dickens’s and Pepper’s shared preoccupation with memory and illusion in the context of the evolving visual vernacular of the Victorian period, a vernacular characterized by active skepticism toward visual and psychological phenomena. analyzing the ways in which Dickens’s tale encourages readers to interrogate the epistemolog-ical bases of memory and perception, I track Pepper’s translation of the text into a popular theatrical event designed to exploit the recollective powers of an increasingly visually literate mid-century audience.

Haunted Men

the first illustrated edition of The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain introduced the central character Redlaw, a reclusive chemist plagued by his past, through a sequence of visual frames.2 these begin with John tenniel’s double frontispiece depicting Redlaw sitting and gazing into a fire while his spectral double mirrors his posture unseen to all but the reader (fig. 1). on the facing page, the paths to heaven and perdition are intimated by an angel and an enshrouded figure holding an innocent child between them (fig. 2). Pointing toward darkness, the child augurs of the corruption of innocence that will follow in the wake of Redlaw’s surrender to the dark forces that haunt his mind. tenniel’s third plate, which illustrates the first page of the first chapter, portrays a child reading in the foreground of another fireside scene, holding his book up to capture the illumination of the flames (fig. 3). this plate inaugurates the text’s self-reflexive study of representation: while the child reads, smoky shadows take shape, combining fantastic oriental and supernatural figures with the distorted forms of familiar domestic bodies and objects.

accompanying these images is the narrative frame Dickens provides in his first description of Redlaw. Visually self-conscious, this

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 45

autumn 2007

portrait derives from the privileged perspective that narrative form allows:

Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part laboratory,—for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily,—who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by the flick-ering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at heart like things that

Figure 1. Frontispiece, by John tenniel. In Charles Dickens, Christmas Books: A Reprint

of the First Editions, with illustrations, and an introduction, biographical and bibliographical,

by Charles Dickens the younger. London: macmillan, 1892. 324. Reprinted by permission of macquarie university Library.

46 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

knew his power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour;—who that had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too? (328)

Redlaw is portrayed in this static passage as a scientist whose consider-able intellectual powers to illuminate and inspire have turned inward, taking the form of a self-destructive melancholia that threatens to

Figure 2. title page, by John tenniel. In Charles Dickens, Christmas Books: A Reprint of

the First Editions, with illustrations, and an introduction, biographical and bibliographical, by

Charles Dickens the younger. London: macmillan, 1892. 325. Reprinted by permission of macquarie university Library.

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 47

autumn 2007

“uncombine” his own psyche just as the chemical elements may be induced to uncombine, “to give back their component parts to fire and vapour.” alienated from social responsibility, he exists in a delusional state where everyday objects take on uncanny forms, dark doubles of their prosaic functions as tools of his trade. In this state, Redlaw does not recognize the humanizing function of memory that the tale insists upon. While the story “gives voice to one of the central tenets of mid-Victorian social, psychological, and fictional discourse,” namely, that “memory, with its assurance of a continuous identity through time, functions as the grounding for social and personal morality” (Shuttle-worth 47), here memory is precisely what has plunged Redlaw into despair. Dickens’s association of memory with melancholy reflects a

Figure 3. Chapter I, by John tenniel. In Charles Dickens, Christmas Books:

A Reprint of the First Edi-

tions, with illustrations,

and an introduction, bio-

graphical and bibliographi-

cal, by Charles Dickens

the younger. London: macmillan, 1892. 327. Reprinted by permission of macquarie university Library.

48 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

growing awareness on the part of the author and Victorians more generally that the continuous self might be an illusion produced by a fallible memory’s creative reinvention of the past. What the respected physician Henry Holland termed “double-consciousness” (9) and later materialist psychologists such as G. H. Lewes and William Carpenter would speak of as “streams of consciousness” (Lewes 2: 62–65) and “unconscious cerebration” (Carpenter 541) suggested that memories of which one was normally aware might conceal a chaos of unconscious thoughts, dreams, and desires. this obscured knowledge, having carved deep grooves into the individual psyche, could make itself manifest in the right context.

according to Carpenter, the conditions of authorship were capable of providing just such a context for the emergence of buried memories. In Principles of Mental Physiology (1874), Carpenter describes the “storing up of ideas in the memory” as

the psychological expression of physical changes in the Cerebrum by which ideational states are permanently registered or recorded; so that any trace left of them, although remaining so long outside the “sphere of consciousness” as to have seemed non-existent, may be revived again in the full vividness under special condi-tions. (436)

Later in the same discussion of the “Consciousness of Personal Iden-tity,” Carpenter illustrates his explanation by citing Dickens’s accounts of the uncanny symptoms that arise from the intense concentration required by the process of writing. the act of writing, he claims, inscribes the memory with images so vivid that when recollected, they seem to emerge from lived experience:

when the Imagination has been exercised in a sustained and determinate manner,—as in the composition of a work of fiction,—its ideal creations may be reproduced with the force of actual experiences; and the sense of personal iden-tity may be projected backwards (so to speak) into the characters which the author has “evolved out of the depths of his own consciousness,”—as Dickens states to have continually been the case with himself. (455)

Carpenter likens this to the reproduction of ideas or events in dreams so real that they inspire the dreamer to ask, “Did this really happen to me, or did I dream it?” (455–56).

the sense of psychic disturbance and temporal discontinuity

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 49

autumn 2007

evoked by such false memories similarly emerges from Dickens’s literary use of illusion, which captures both the affective impact and the unconscious registration of atmosphere on the mind of the reader. Like many of his contemporaries, Dickens regarded these kinds of spectral appearances as evidence of the often-irreconcilable disjunc-tion between physical perception and mental association—transient yet recurrent perceptual and mnemonic lapses. as Fred Kaplan has explained, Dickens’s interest in the therapeutic powers of mesmerism might have provided a useful source for this evocation of the dissocia-tive hypnotic state induced by intense reverie. David Brewster, a man who would later become one of Dr. Pepper’s mentors, attempted to offer a physiological explanation for the fantastic images that occa-sionally arise from these lapses. In his popular Letters on Natural Magic (1832), he writes:

effects still more remarkable are produced in the eye when it views objects that are difficult to be seen from the small degree of light in which they happen to be illuminated. the imperfect view which we obtain of such objects forces us to fix the eye more steadily upon them; but the more exertion we make to ascertain what they are, the greater difficulties do we encounter to accomplish our object. the eye is actually thrown into a state of painful agitation, the object will swell and contract, and partly disappear, and it will again become visible when the eye has recovered from the delirium into which it has been thrown. this phenomenon may be most distinctly seen when the objects in a room are illuminated with the feeble gleam of a fire almost extinguished. (101)

Straining to distinguish between truth and illusion, the eye quivers and swells into delirium as if possessed of a mind of its own. Like Dickens, Brewster stresses the way visual distortions make the observer conscious of the imperfect interaction of mind and eye in the act of perception. Faced with an everyday occurrence—the distorting effects of firelight—the mind tries unsuccessfully to coordinate perception and recollection.

Brewster’s instructive tone encourages readers to reproduce for themselves the visual effects he describes—just as Pepper’s audiences at the Royal Polytechnic were encouraged to demystify optical phenomena through a proactive process of recollective association. not surprisingly, Dickens also demystifies optical metaphors to create a sense of collective memory in the scenes that follow his initial description of Redlaw’s fire-lit study in The Haunted Man. Here the narrator describes similar twilight

50 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

scenes taking place everywhere, as if to emphasize that optical illusion, visual distortion, and fantasy are everyday phenomena:

When twilight everywhere released the shadows, prisoned up all day, that now closed in and gathered swarms of ghosts. When they stood lowering, in corners of rooms, and frowned out from behind half-opened doors. When they had full possession of unoccupied apartments. When they danced upon the floors, and walls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers, while the fire was low, and withdrew like ebbing waters when it sprung into a blaze. When they fantastically mocked the shapes of household objects, making the nurse an ogress, the rocking horse a monster, the wondering child, half-scared and half-amused, a stranger to itself. . . . When he sat, as already mentioned gazing at the fire. When, as it rose and fell, the shadows went and came. When he took no heed of them, with his bodily eyes; but let them come or let them go, looked fixedly at the fire. You should have seen him then. (Christmas 331)

Recalling the phantasmagoric effects of a child’s magic lantern, the shadows come to life on the fire-lit walls of countless homes across england and beyond. “everyone,” as Freud would later say of “the uncanny” (1919), seems possessed by the same “dread and creeping horror” (222), yet nothing is clearly visible. Familiar “household objects” inhabit a liminal space where the eye strains to hold onto what it should be seeing. But all this is lost on Redlaw: unseen by “his bodily eyes,” these distorted impressions pass unregistered into his fevered reverie rather than fostering a civilizing sense of identification and sociability, further intensifying his dissociative tendencies.

It is this profound alienation from the present that summons the ghost:

as the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took by slow degrees,—or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process—not to be traced by any human sense,—an awful likeness of himself! Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into his terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without sound. this, then, was the Something that had passed and gone already. this was the dread companion of the haunted man! (341–42)

the specter is an externalization of what are later described as the “banished recollections” underlying the “inter-twisted chain of feel-ings and associations” haunting Redlaw’s conscious thought (346).

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 51

autumn 2007

emanating from the darkest recesses of his mind, the specter material-izes, by an “unreal, unsubstantial process,” that part of Redlaw’s psyche that eludes the reach of his will. Redlaw’s ghost is thus a terrifying embodiment of the fragmentation of his psyche—a figure that ulti-mately forces him to recognize the distortive moral effects of his narcis-sistic dwelling on past wrongs.

this potentially therapeutic application of illusion again echoes contemporary writing about double consciousness, especially when a dream-like state is induced by recurring memories. John addington Symonds describes the unhealthy conditions that can result in instances of ghostly double consciousness in two public lectures, Sleep and Dreams (1851), delivered three years after the publication of The Haunted Man:

a friend present to our sight produces an image more vivid than any we can at any time call up by an act of memory. Just think what confusion would arise if remem-bered sensations and present sensations were of equal vividness. the real and the unreal would be intermingled. . . . one person is really present, and the light reflected from his body produces a certain impression on the retina. Which again excites in our brain, and through it, in our mind, an image which is so vivid as to make us believe instinctively, what is really the case, that he stands before us. But the analogous sensation which the person of another individual, who may be no longer living, once excited in our minds, is at the same time revived; and yet we do not think the latter individual present, though he is perceived by what is called the mental eye. the image is distinct, but is far less vivid than the former, and indeed than any other object of present sensation, so that the living and the dead are kept separate. this is the state of the case in the healthy condition of the mind and its organ. But the occurrence of disease may alter this relation between present and remembered sensations. the latter may become equally vivid with the former. the person subject to such disorder believes persons to be before him who are not really so, because the images in his mind have, under morbid action, become unnaturally vivid, have acquired the same liveliness as present perceptions, and though revived only in his mind, are projected into the sphere of vision. this is the rationale of apparitions, ghosts and spectral illusions. (10–11)

a healthy memory distinguishes between present external objects and illusory manifestations of the past. But in its very vividness, an unhealthy memory like Redlaw’s allows the real and the unreal, the present and the past, the internal and the external, to blur. although Symonds, like Dickens, transforms this interplay into a salutary lesson for his audience, its dangers can easily be imagined.

52 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

John Leech’s illustration of the appearance of Redlaw’s specter (which echoes but varies slightly from tenniel’s frontispiece) rein-forces the phenomenon of double consciousness that Dickens’s text describes (fig. 4). the specter behind the chair rests his head on his hand and gazes into the fire, mirroring Redlaw’s melancholic reverie. the only difference between them is the specter’s bemused expres-sion, the signal that he is what Symonds calls “non ego,” a separate consciousness beyond the will of the mind he haunts (10). Dickens reveals the meaning of this smile on the facing page, where he describes Redlaw and his ghost struggling over the same memories, the former alternating between resistance and mesmerized submission as the ghost repeats the history of Redlaw’s treacherous betrayal by a friend who stole the woman he loved and, in the process, broke the heart of his now-dead sister. this traumatic dialogue culminates in Redlaw’s unraveling as past and present are radically severed by the “bloodless hand” of his double (343). unsurprisingly, this dramatic scene is one

Figure 4. “Redlaw and the Phantom,” by John Leech. In Charles Dickens, Christmas Books:

A Reprint of the First Edi-

tions, with illustrations,

and an introduction, bio-

graphical and bibliographi-

cal, by Charles Dickens

the younger. London: macmillan, 1892. 342. Reprinted by permission of macquarie university Library.

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 53

autumn 2007

that Pepper would also choose to recreate on stage, revealing not only an entrepreneurial dramatic sense but a shared fascination with ques-tions of perception and the mind. not the least of these remains unan-swered by Pepper throughout his theatrical rendition of The Haunted Man: what ontological status does the ghost have? “Some people have said since, that [Redlaw] only thought what has been herein set down; others, that he read it in the fire, one winter night about twilight time; others, that the Ghost was but the representation of his own gloomy thoughts” (Christmas 411).

Recollected Illusions

Dr. Pepper’s “Ghost” is one of the most famous pre-cinematic adaptations of Dickens’s work; histories of early cinema frequently note that it inspired the Lumière Brothers to choose the Polytechnic for the first english exhibition of their cinematography (mannoni 264–88). Initially inspired by The Haunted Man, Pepper and his collab-orator Henry Dircks possessed, as Dickens did, an archive of natural magical and scientific literature: Samuel Hibbert’s widely read Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions (1824), Samuel Warren’s Diary of a Late Physician (1832–38), and David Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic, all of which explored the relationship between illusion and “the recol-lected images of the mind” (Hibbert iii).3 Pepper and Dircks were pragmatic readers who combined fanlike admiration of Dickens’s ghost stories with savvy technological entrepreneurialism. they also shared Dickens’s assessment of earlier, worthy (but dull) Polytechnic programs:

the Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street, where an infinite variety of inge-nious models are exhibited and explained . . . is a great public benefit and a wonderful place, but we think a people formed entirely in their hours of leisure by Polytechnic institutions would be an uncomfortable community. (“amusements” 14–15)

By the late 1850s, however, the Polytechnic had become a far more entertaining and imaginative place (During 145). orchestrated primarily by Pepper, this change—which roused the criticism of the Polytechnic’s more high-minded supporters—was primarily a prag-matic response to market pressures when the Institution was in danger

54 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

of financial ruin. Pepper encouraged patrons to linger in the exhibi-tion hall after paying their shilling entry fee to marvel at the mechan-ical devices and models that filled the room, including the legendary diving bell and optical gadgetry ranging from the more traditional cosmorama to kaleidoscopes, stereoscopes, and photographic cameras. But the main attraction took place in the lecture hall beyond, where increasingly fantastic magic lantern spectaculars were performed by Pepper, Henry Langdon Childe, George Buckland, and others three times a day.4 the program in the hall was ever-changing and included adaptations of A Christmas Carol, the “Gabriel Grubb” sequence from Pickwick Papers, The Cricket on the Hearth, as well as Alice in Wonderland, thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, tennyson’s Elaine, and many others. the highlight of the annual program was the spectacular Christmas season, during which Pepper’s “Ghost” made its first appearance in 1862 (“Polytechnic”). In that show, Pepper and Dircks resurrected The Haunted Man, extending Dickens’s preoccupation with memory and illusion by making his text a spectral presence behind their own perfor-mance and relying upon the collective memory of their audiences.

Figure 5. “arrangement with a glass sheet and mirror,” in adolphe Ganot, Natural

History for General Readers. ed. and trans. e. atkinson. London: Longmans, 1872. Re-produced in John Henry Pepper, The True History of Pepper’s Ghost. 1890. Facsimile ed. London: Projection Box, 1996. ii. Reprinted by permission of macquarie university Library.

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 55

autumn 2007

Inspired by Dickens and by tenniel’s and Leech’s illustrations, Pepper used a combination of painted backdrops, lighting effects, and mirrors to construct his theatrical magic. the lecture script wove an anti-spiritualist message through Dickens’s story, at the same time instructing the audience about optical effects more generally. Pepper and Dircks were keen to maintain the visual dynamic of Dickens’s text and did so by dramatically enlarging its most spectacular aspects. In all of this, however, they never obscured the questions Dickens’s tale raised about the mutually reinforcing fallibility of memory and perception. these were made immediate by the show’s central illusion: a simple but spectacular three-dimensional specter that appeared to walk through solid objects before fading away (fig. 5) (Wilkie 72). It was produced by a specially designed magic lantern concealed beneath the stage that projected a strong light onto an actor positioned before a sheet of glass that extended from pit to ceiling between the audience and the stage. a moving image of the concealed actor would then appear superimposed on a second actor onstage above, so that when the latter enacted Redlaw’s feverish desire for amnesia, his spectral double came to life (fig. 6).

Figure 6. “Diagram of Pepper’s Illusion,” in private collection. Reproduced by permis-sion of mervyn Heard Collection.

56 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

Dircks’s account in The Ghost! (1863) of his role in reworking Dickens’s tale to suit the demands of the magic lantern lecture format provides the clearest contemporary description of what audiences would have seen:

a student is seen sitting at a table spread over with books, papers and instruments. after a while he rises and walks about the chamber. In this there is nothing remark-able. But the audience is perplexed by a different circumstance: they see a man rising from his seat and see him walking about, but they also see that he still sits

immovably in his chair—so that evidently there are two persons instead of one, for, although alike in dress, stature, and person, their actions are different. they cross and recross; they alternately take the same seat; while one reads, the other is perhaps walking; and yet they appear very sullen and sulky, for they take no notice of each other, until one, after pushing down a pile of books, passes off by walking through the furniture and walls. (65)

this vignette distils Dickens’s whole tale into a single illusionistic scenario. Like tenniel and Leech, Pepper and Dircks present the illu-sion as a symptom of Redlaw’s dissociative reverie. Surrounded by schol-arly paraphernalia, he remains mesmerized “immovably in his chair,” while his ghostly double wanders the stage. Dircks’s mention of the “sullen and sulky” demeanor of both man and ghost also suggests that the staged illusion drew inspiration from Leech’s depiction of Redlaw’s misan-thropic pose as well as that illustrator’s portrayal of the specter, who stands slightly removed, his lip curled. the ambiguity surrounding the mutual awareness of man and ghost indicates that Pepper understood Redlaw’s specter to be a perceptual aberration induced by a diseased memory. this would account for the anti-spiritualist emphasis of Pepper’s lecture, and calls to mind Dickens’s recurring refrain throughout the tale: to “keep one’s memory green” (411), vivid and enliv-ened by healthy social interaction, rather than distorted by melancholic narcissism.

In his account of the illusion, The True History of the Ghost; and all About Metempsychosis (1890), Pepper compares his lecture to George Cruikshank’s skeptical pamphlet, A Discovery Concerning Ghosts; with a rap at the “spirit-rappers” (1863). In typical self-aggrandizing style, Pepper overstates his performance’s impact, claiming that he needed to be escorted home after the show, so sensational was it. He describes the first scene of the illusion as particularly popular:

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 57

autumn 2007

the ghost illusion was first shown in what was called the small theatre of the Royal Polytechnic, but as the audience increased so rapidly it was removed by the following easter and shown on a grander scale in the large theatre of the Institu-tion, and where the dissolving views were usually exhibited. the late mr. o’Connor, of the Haymarket, painted the first scene used, representing the laboratory of “the Haunted man,” which Christmas Story the late Charles Dickens, by his special written permission, allowed me to use for the illustration of the Ghost illusion. the ghost scene ran for fifteen months, and helped realise, in a very short time, the sum of twelve thousand pounds, not counting what I received for granting licenses to use the Ghost, and also the sums realised during many successive years as new ghost stories were brought out. (12)5

Pepper’s description of o’Connor’s painted backdrop suggests that he was inspired both by Dickens’s phantasmagoric account of Redlaw’s “drugs and instruments and books” and by Leech’s more detailed illus-tration of the crowded bookshelves that line the walls of the study, filled with skulls, books, various scientific instruments, and bottles containing mysterious artifacts. as Pepper notes, the ghost illusion had a long afterlife in various theatrical and later fairground attrac-tions, but none had the same impact as his own adaptation.6

Both accounts by Pepper and Dircks indicate their desire to confront audiences with an illusion that required active deciphering. their intentions were successfully realized, according to contemporary accounts: the Illustrated London News enthusiastically reported that Pepper’s “Strange Lecture” caused “phantoms to appear at will, such as to produce the fullest impression of their reality [while] at the same time a real body will pass through them” (“Polytechnic”). Pepper’s lecture undoubtedly compounded the thrill of this initial visual impact. Like many other Polytechnic Lecturers, Pepper was somewhat of a celebrity in the 1860s, and his obituarist edmund H. Wilkie reports that his lectures were an engaging mixture of conversational fluency and carefully scripted erudition (72).

Dircks confirms the public notoriety of the illusion in his version of events, even though he resented it becoming synonymous with Pepper’s name. He claims that the illusion resonated with “the public mind” by summoning associations with a shared archive of dreams, “fancies,” specter dramas, and ghost stories:

an invention of so large a scale [as Pepper’s “Ghost”] being expensive to adopt, could have no success unless it captivated the public mind. and, in this respect,

58 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

considering its imperfections to the present time of its exhibition, “the Ghost” has never failed to draw crowded, admiring audiences. It was the absolute realiza-tion of all that ever had been dreamt, or ever had occupied frenzied fancies, or formed the staple conceits of dramatists and romancers. (23)

Dircks then goes on to explain the manner in which viewers of the illu-sion seemed to draw on recollections of their past experiences to process the spectacle. He continues:

We first see and then exercise our mental faculties. In forming judgments we bring to bear on the subject all our experience, reading, study, and power of inves-tigation. If the offered mystery has its equal in some jugglery we have seen, then doubt steps in; or, if we have seen a scientific experiment closely allied to alleged mystery, doubt again interposes; and so on, step by step, we compare the unknown subject with what is known bearing any collateral quality. (23)

according to this logic, an illusion, no matter how elaborately conceived and executed, will only succeed if it can be consciously related to a previous experience stored in the memory. Dircks makes a distinction here between illusions that form part of an avowed narrative sequence and those designed to produce cognitive or perceptual aberrations. In the case of the latter, the spectator must bring to bear associative and analytical powers to demystify and contextualize the unknown. this inductive approach echoes John F. W. Herschel’s ascription of illusion to a flaw in the mind or memory, an error in logic rather than percep-tion: “though we are never deceived in the sensible impression made by external objects on us, yet in forming our judgments of them we are greatly at the mercy of circumstances, which either modify the impres-sion actually received, or combine them with adjuncts which have become habitually associated with different judgments” (83). thus, memory is profoundly unreliable and subjective, much like Dickens’s portrayal of Redlaw’s selective recall and the distortions of present perceptions that it produces. Hermann von Helmholtz called the sequencing of events that Herschel’s explanation implies the “gram-matical relations” or syntax into which the mind translates a series of images or visual events (3: 23). It is this perceptual syntax that enabled individuals like the viewers of Pepper’s illusion to train their minds to recognize and normalize mysterious anomalous visual stimuli.

In framing the cognitive interplay between memory and illu-sion, Dircks acknowledges Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic, which

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 59

autumn 2007

insistently extolled the therapeutic virtues of systematic, logical demys-tification—the principle means by which viewers might bring specters and other ghostly apparitions back under the rationalizing control of the healthy mind:

When a spectre haunts the couch of the sick, or follows the susceptible vision of the invalid, a consciousness of indisposition divests the apparition of much of its terror, while its invisibility to surrounding friends soon stamps it with the impress of a false perception. the spectres of the conjurer, too, however skilfully they may be raised, quickly lose their supernatural character, and even the most ignorant beholder regards the modern magician as but an ordinary man, who borrows from the sciences the best working implements of his art. But when, in the midst of solitude, and in situations where the mind is undisturbed by sublunary cares, we see our own image delineated in the air, and mimicking in gigantic perspective the tiny movements of humanity;—when we see troops in military array performing their evolutions on the very face of an almost inaccessible precipice, . . . when distant objects, concealed by the roundness of the earth, and beyond the cogni-zance of the telescope, are actually transferred over the intervening convexity and presented in distinct and magnified outline to our accurate examination;—when such varied and striking phantasms are seen also by all around us, and therefore appear in the character of real phenomena of nature, our impressions of super-natural agency can only be removed by a distinct and satisfactory knowledge of the causes which gave them birth. (215–16)

this passage resonates strongly with Dickens’s tale, both in its emphasis on the contingency of illusion and in the obvious relish Brewster takes in describing the various causes and effects of visual phenomena. Brewster never doubts that illusions, no matter how extraordinary, have rational causes. and yet underlying this confidence, there is a persistent anxiety about the fragility of the mind, its susceptibility, especially in moments of intense isolation, to see its “own image delin-eated in the air” in the manner of Redlaw’s ghost, “mimicking in gigantic perspective the tiny movements of humanity.”

Pepper, even more than Dircks, was influenced by Brewster’s demystifying ethos—a fact that seems contrary to his career as an avowed illusionist but reveals all the more pointedly the role memory was thought to play in making sense of illusions. Like Brewster, Pepper published many popular books addressing the growing interest in “useful knowl-edge,” including The Boy’s Playbook of Science (1860) and Popular Lectures for Young People and Half Hours with Alchemists (1855). In the former, he reveals the mysteries of the technology behind the Polytechnic illusions in a

60 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

discussion of “Light, optics and optical Instruments” which is illustrated by an engraving of “the Interior of the optical Box at the Polytechnic—looking towards the screen” (255). this helpful behind-the-scenes glimpse allowed Polytechnic audiences to rationalize the mystery of Pepper’s Ghost via the lens of past knowledge in the manner Dircks describes above. more generally, Pepper’s explanation of his own spectacular illu-sion suggests that an emerging and rapidly expanding visual vernacular fostered skeptical curiosity which worked profitably in concert with, rather than against, visual and textual illusions.7 It is in this spirit that Pepper also turned to Dickens, whose public readings provided a powerful example of the performative translation of familiar literary texts into spectacular events of collective identification and recollection. to quote the contemporary eyewitness account of Dickens’s admiring friend Charles Kent,

Densely packed from floor to ceiling, these audiences were habitually wont to hang in breathless expectation upon every inflection of the author-reader’s voice, upon every glance of his eye,—the words he was about to speak being so thor-oughly well remembered by the majority before their utterance that, often, the rippling of a smile over a thousand faces simultaneously anticipated the laughter which an instant afterwards greeted the words themselves when they were articu-lated. (20)

Kent provides a vivid image of an audience who knew their Dickens by heart, who were so familiar with the twists and turns of plot, character, and description that they preemptively responded with knowing plea-sure. Pepper and Dircks attempted to replicate this dynamic by weaving their illusions into one of Dickens’s familiar narratives. Doing so was undoubtedly astute. as the early filmmaker Cecil Hepworth (a habitué of the Polytechnic during Pepper’s heyday) remarked, most pre-cine-matic spectacles failed because they did not integrate their visual effects into a compelling narrative their audiences knew from memory and did not, as a result, keep viewers engaged beyond the first moment of wonder and delight (205).

as if aware of and eager to avoid this possibility, Pepper reworked his original script in 1863 to include more extensive readings from The Haunted Man, and the run of the show was extended well beyond the Christmas season. In the initial Christmas program for December of 1862, the performance was divided into three main segments. the first segment showcased a version of Cinderella,

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 61

autumn 2007

performed with dissolving views and dioramic and shadow effects. this was followed by “the remarkable illustration of mr. Charles Dick-ens’s idea of ‘tHe HaunteD man,’ in a new and curious illusion, devised by Henry Dircks, esq., and other singular experiments [which] will be included in the new Philosophical entertainment by Professor J. H. PePPeR entitled a StRanGe LeCtuRe” (London). Finally, Valentine Vox, the “Celebrated Ventriloquist,” closed the show. this format, however, was substantially altered after 1 June 1863, during the Whitsun Holiday entertainments. From this point on, the program and advertising bills began with Pepper’s illusion, which included an extended reading from Dickens’s tale, promoted thus: “Great addi-tions to and new experiments in Professor Pepper’s Lecture on optical Illusions. Professor Pepper will (by the kind permission of the author) read and illustrate a portion of mr. Charles Dickens’s tale of tHe HaunteD man anD tHe GHoSt will actually appear to walk across the new Platform arranged in the Large theatre” (London).8 Perhaps Pepper hoped to create his own illusionistic version of Dick-ens’s extraordinarily popular public readings.9 If this was his intention, he met with more success than Dickens himself, who tried and failed to adapt The Haunted Man into a reading script (Collins 103).

early reviews of “Pepper’s Ghost” suggest that the association with Dickens was always powerful. Claiming enthusiastically that Pepper’s show was the most wonderful series of “optical illusions ever placed before the public,” a critic in The Times in December of 1862 remarked that

the spectres and illusions are thrown upon the stage in such a perfect embodi-ment of real substance, that it is not till the Haunted Man walks through their appar-ently solid forms that the audience can believe in their being optical illusions at all. even then it is almost difficult to imagine that the whole is not a wonderful trick, for people cling to the old saying, that seeing is believing, and if ever mere optical delusions assumed a perfect and tangible form they do so in this strange lecture. Why did not the medium and spirit rappers get hold of this invention before it was made public? the illusions might fail to convince, but at least they would have left all seekers after spiritual revelations in a sore state of puzzle and uncertainty, as they most certainly do now at the Polytechnic. (qtd. in Dircks 6)

this review captures the excitement inspired by the revelatory powers of Pepper and Dircks’s invention. the reviewer playfully considers the broader cultural implications of new technology with the power to give uncanny visual form to a perennial epistemological question—the role

62 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

the eye plays in the psychology of belief. a clear picture of the Poly-technic audience, puzzled and uncertain, also emerges. unlike the dupes of spiritualist charlatans, their eyes have been trained according to the Polytechnic ethos, which, conforming to Henry Brougham’s principles for the diffusion of useful knowledge, privileged logic over belief (1–10). an early Polytechnic publication outlined the Institute’s foundational vision for the education of eye and mind:

the education of the eye is, undeniably, the most important object in elementary instruction. a child will pass many years before he can be made thoroughly to understand, by unassisted description, the cause of motion in a Steam engine. . . . In like manner, the powers of Galvanism, the properties of electricity, the mysteries of Chemistry, the laws of mechanics, the theory of Light, the developments of the microscope, the wonders of optics, the construction of Ships, with various other matters in Science and art, are made palpable by exhibition; and thus instruction is rapidly and pleasurably communicated in awakening curiosity, excitement, and attention, and by such means leaving a durable impression. (Royal 5–6)

Read in this context, the “sore state of puzzle and uncertainty” suffered by Pepper’s audiences suggests the novelty of the illusion itself, which challenges “the durable impression” of how things usually work, forcing viewers into the laboring assimilation of present anomalies with familiar logical and narrative sequences. Dickens’s tale was primary among those familiar sequences. Dircks remarks that the Polytechnic audiences knew “more about optics than some very clever men even 100 years ago,” but they also knew their Dickens (31). to quote Dircks’s account of his initial pitch to the Polytechnic managers, “among a long list of pieces which I had arranged in 1858, I usually directed attention to one which I proposed, calling it ‘Charles Dickens, esq.’s Haunted man,’ from his well-known Christmas piece of that name, conceiving that it would command a double interest” (65).

Reincarnated as Pepper’s Ghost, Dickens’s haunted man thus becomes a catalyst for active epistemological speculation, technolog-ical curiosity, and literary nostalgia. Dickens’s psychological framing of the illusions produced by a diseased memory unmoored from social responsibility haunts Pepper and Dircks’s synecdochic adaptation, serving as a familiar basis for the creation of a new form of visual enter-tainment and narrative temporality. In their mutual preoccupation with time and the psychological effects of the self-consciously staged production of illusion, both Dickens and Pepper foreshadow what

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 63

autumn 2007

mary ann Doane evocatively describes as early cinema’s “hyperbolic recourse to the figures of life, death, immortality and infinity” (3).

Macquarie University

NOTES

I would like to thank the australian Research Council for funding this research. a range of archives have also provided access to research material and much needed assistance: the university of Westminster archive, the Bill Douglas Centre, the univer-sity of exeter, and the British Library. For advice and assistance in preparing this article, I wish to thank the Department of english, macquarie university, michele Pierson, David ellison, and the Victorian Studies referees.

1Shuttleworth recounts the influence of Connolly on Dickens’s writing, and particularly on The Haunted Man, in “‘the malady of thought’” 46–59.

2the first edition of the tale, illustrated by John tenniel and John Leech, was published as The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time. Refer-ences in this article are to Dickens, Christmas Books 323–412.

3Warren’s three-volume collection of diary passages includes an account of a haunted student like Redlaw, albeit with a very different set of neuroses. In this case, the law student becomes consumed by the idea that he has seen a specter with flaming eyes after returning from a particularly stressful day at court. Warren struggles to convince his patient of the meaning of this spectral visitant, in part by encouraging him to remember and reinterpret his homoerotic dreams of the specter running into his arms and holding him in a prolonged embrace (1–48).

4Humphries outlines the central role of the Polytechnic in the further popu-larizing of the magic lantern at the nexus of popular education and entertainment at this time (21–23).

5Pepper’s claim that he received Dickens’s permission to use the Christmas story seems to be inaccurate; nothing in the latter’s correspondence substantiates this.

6Randall Williams’s popular walk-up version of the ghost show in the 1890s did lead to his “Grand Phantascopical exhibition” at the World’s Fair in Islington in 1896, which included the first fairground cinema show (Heard 3).

7these observations are indebted to Pierson’s analysis in Special Effects: Still in

Search of Wonder (1–51). 8By 31 august 1863, the whole performance was more of a hybrid of earlier and

later versions but still included a reading from Dickens: “Professor Pepper’s adaptation of mr. Dircks’s original and most startling GHoSt ILLuSIon! In three scenes. First scene: Reading from Dickens’s ‘HaunteD man’ and appearance of the GHoSt and SPeCtRe of the sister. Second scene: tHe aRtISt’S StuDIo. the Ghostly visitor in the form of a Rival artist. tHe GHoSt DRInKInG a GLaSS oF WateR!! (This Illu-

sion must be seen to be believed.) the reading of the LOVE LETTER, and mysterious arrival of the Little Postman ‘CuPID’” (London). this format continues into the next year’s Christmas program as well.

64 HeLen GRotH

VICtoRIan StuDIeS

9For an insightful analysis of the politics of affect in Dickens’s public readings, see Small.

WORKS CITED

Brewster, David. Letters on Natural Magic. Addressed to Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 1832. London: William trigg, 1868.

Brougham, Henry. Practical Observations upon the Education of the People, Addressed to the

Working Class and Their Employers. London: Longmans, 1825.Carpenter, William. Principles of Mental Physiology. London: Henry S. King, 1874.Collins, Philip. Charles Dickens: The Public Readings. oxford: oxford uP, 1975.Cruikshank, George. A Discovery Concerning Ghosts; with a rap at the “spirit-rappers”.

London: Frederick arnold, 1863.Dickens, Charles. “the amusements of the People.” Household Words 1 (30 mar. 1850):

13–15.‡‡‡. Christmas Books. A Reprint of the First Editions, with illustrations, and an introduction,

biographical and bibliographical, by Charles Dickens the younger. London: macmillan, 1892. 323–412.

‡‡‡. The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time. London: Bradbury and evans, 1848.

Dircks, Henry. The Ghost! As Produced in the Spectre Drama, popularly illustrating the marvel-

lous optical illusions obtained by the apparatus called the Dircksian Phantasmagoria. London: e. and F. n. Spon, 1863.

Doane, mary ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard uP, 2002.

During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge: Harvard uP, 2002.

Freud, Sigmund. “the uncanny.” Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. ed. James Strachey. 22 vols. London: Hogarth, 1959. 17: 218–52.

Heard, mervyn. Introduction. The True History of Pepper’s Ghost. By John Henry Pepper. 1890. Facsimile ed. London: Projection Box, 1996. I–VI.

Helmholtz, Hermann von. Treatise on Physiological Optics. 1856. ed. James P. C. Southall. 3 vols. new York: Dover, 1962.

Hepworth, Cecil. Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Director. London: Phoenix House, 1951.

Herschel, John F. W. A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. 1831. Chicago: u of Chicago P, 1987.

Hibbert, Samuel. Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions; or, an Attempt to Trace such Illu-

sions to the Physical Causes. London: Whittaker, 1824.Holland, Henry. Chapters on Mental Physiology. London: Longman, Brown, Green and

Longmans, 1852.Humphries, Steve. Victorian Britain through the Magic Lantern. London: Sidgwick and

Jackson, 1989.Kaplan, Fred. Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction. Princeton: Princeton

uP, 1975.

ReaDInG VICtoRIan ILLuSIonS 65

autumn 2007

Kent, Charles. Charles Dickens as a Reader. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872.Lewes, George Henry. The Physiology of Common Life. 2 vols. edinburgh: Blackwood and

Sons, 1860. The London Polytechnic Institution Programmes of Entertainments, etc. Sep. 1861–Dec. 1878.

London, 1861–1878. British Library Collection. n. pag.mannoni, Laurent. The Great Art of Light and Shadow. Archaeology of the Cinema. trans.

Richard Crangle. exeter: u of exeter P, 2000.noakes, Richard. “Spiritualism, Science and the Supernatural in mid-Victorian

Britain.” The Victorian Supernatural. ed. nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela thurschwell. Cambridge: Cambridge uP, 2002. 23–43.

Pepper, John Henry. The Boy’s Playbook of Science, including the various manipulations and

arrangements of chemical and philosophical apparatus required for the successful perfor-

mance of scientific experiments. London: Routledge, 1860.‡‡‡. Popular Lectures for Young People and Half Hours with Alchemists. London: Sampson

& Low, 1855.‡‡‡. The True History of the Ghost; and all About Metempsychosis. London: Cassell & Co.,

1890.Pierson, michele. Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder. new York: Columbia uP, 2002.“the Polytechnic.” Illustrated London News 42.1 (3 Jan. 1863): 19.The Royal Polytechnic Institution, for the advancement of the arts and practical science; Catalogue

for 1845. new ed. London: Reynell and White at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, 1845.

Shuttleworth, Sally. “‘the malady of thought’: embodied memory in Victorian Psychology and the novel.” Memory and Memorials, 1789–1914. ed. matthew Camp-bell, Jacqueline m. Labbe, and Sally Shuttleworth. London: Routledge, 2000. 46–59.

Small, Helen. “a Pulse of 124: Charles Dickens and a Pathology of the mid-Victorian Reading Public.” The Practice and Representation of Reading in England. ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and naomi tadmor. Cambridge: Cambridge uP, 1996. 263–90.

Symonds, John addington. Sleep and Dreams; Two Lectures. London: John murray, 1851.Warren, Samuel. Diary of a Late Physician with notes and illustrations by the editor. 3 vols.

edinburgh: Blackwood, 1832–38. Wilkie, edmund H. “Professor Pepper—a memoir.” The Optical Magic Lantern Journal

and Photographic Enlarger 2 (June 1900): 72–74.