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
1 - Moving Books in Regency London
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
Regency London, or the ‘Romantic Metropolis’, has come to be known in recent scholarship as a site of dramatic social and technological transformation. With a population exceeding one million by 1800, a figure that doubled by 1850, no European city compared to its scale or cosmopolitan scope. Describing the radical impact of this social transformation, with its attendant ‘gross and violent stimulants’, Wordsworth wrote:
For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion … the encreasing [sic] accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves .
Networked as never before by new systems of information, dwelling in increasingly confined urban spaces, distracted by novel entertainments that fed off immediate sensation, Wordsworth's Londoners are passive instruments of an insatiable undiscriminating media machine.
Nor was this an atypical response to the sheer density and disorientating accelerations of this new urban life. One of the defining characteristics of London during the Napoleonic wars, as Daniel Headrick observes, was the technological transformation of information systems, such as the telegraphic communication of news, heightening the sense of porous boundaries between nations, as well as minds, as Wordsworth's anxious reflections on the state of modern poetry suggest.
- Type
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- Information
- Moving ImagesNineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices, pp. 22 - 53Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013