Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices
- 1 Moving Books in Regency London
- 2 Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media
- 3 Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott
- 4 Reading Habits and Magic Lanterns: Dickens and Dr Pepper's Ghost
- 5 Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice
- 6 Flickering Effects: George Robert Sims and the Psychology of the Moving Image
- 7 Literary Porjections and Residual Media: Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices
- 1 Moving Books in Regency London
- 2 Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media
- 3 Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott
- 4 Reading Habits and Magic Lanterns: Dickens and Dr Pepper's Ghost
- 5 Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice
- 6 Flickering Effects: George Robert Sims and the Psychology of the Moving Image
- 7 Literary Porjections and Residual Media: Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1837 Robert Burford presented a new panorama of Mont Blanc at the Leicester Square Panorama. Exploiting the Byronic associations with Mont Blanc, the accompanying guide included appropriately suggestive fragments from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Manfred (1817). Burford simply assumed an homology between Byron's iconic scenes and his own panoramic images, although only a few years earlier he had framed the relationship between the panorama and the verbal arts in more competitive terms:
Travellers speak of [the Niagara Falls] in terms of admiration and delight, and acknowledge that they surpass in sublimity [sic] every description which the power of language can afford; a Panorama alone offers a scale of sufficient magnitude to exhibit at one view (which is indispensable) the various parts of this wonderful scene, and to convey an adequate idea of the matchless extent, prodigious power, and awful appearance, of this stupendous phenomenon.
Competitive gestures aside, Burford was too much of an entrepreneur not to realise that Byron's language had the potential to extend the scope of his panoramic vision into the public's collective fascination with the scandals and romance of the poet's life. As a reviewer remarked of the third canto of Childe Harold when it was published in 1816:
Indeed it is the real romance of [Byron's] life, immeasurably more than the fabled one of his pen, which the public expects to find in his pages, and which not so much engages its sympathy, as piques its curiosity, and feeds thought and conversation.[…]
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- Moving ImagesNineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices, pp. 54 - 77Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013