Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era

¹ Oil on canvas, L. J. M. Daguerre, in Collection of Gerard Levy and Françoise Lepage, Paris. Reproduced in Panoramania! by Ralph Hyde (London: Trefoil Publications / Barbican Art Gallery 1988), catalogue item No.99 on p.119 with colour illustration on p. 168.
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² This suggestion has been made by Arthur Gill, and also by Richard Altick who includes, in The Shows of London, a brief description of this pictorial entertainment (Gill 31; Altick 163).
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³ Details of this partnership, and indeed of everything related to Daguerre's career and to the Diorama in both Great Britain and Paris, can be found on R. D. Wood's extensive website, "The Midley History of Photography" (http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/Index.htm), which brings together much of Wood's research and published articles on the Diorama, the daguerreotype, and the early history of photography. Wood's researches show, for example, that contrary to what has often been assumed, the London Diorama was not simply an extension of Daguerre's Paris enterprise but a result of the efforts of a group of British entrepreneurs, who obtained a contract to exhibit Daguerre and Bouton's dioramas in London, and subsequently in other cities in the UK, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh. The identity of these "English gentlemen" is unknown, but one was apparently "author of one of the most popular works of the day." Some of the general information and images used here have been drawn from Wood's site, and I would like to thank him for his permission to make reference to them, as well as for helpful advice on this portion of the paper. 
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⁴ The full text of the patent, both in facsimile and transcription, can be viewed on Wood's website at http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/Index.htm.
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⁵ From H. & A. Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre. Reproduced on R. D. Wood's website at http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/diorama/Diorama_Wood_1_1.htm.
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⁶ From R. D. Wood, "The Diorama in Great Britain in the 1820s." For further diagrams of the building showing key features of its design, see Wood's on-line version of this essay at http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/Index.htm. Wood's source for this diagram is John Britton and A. Pugin, Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London. With historical and descriptive accounts of each edifice, vol. 1, plate opposite p. 70, published by J. Taylor: London, 1825.
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⁷ See a description in London, ed. Charles Knight, Vol. VI, 1844, and reprinted in Gernsheim, 38-9. The speaker, clearly moved by the accumulated effects on display, proclaims that when "the solemn service of the Catholic Church begins—beautiful, inexpressibly beautiful—one forgets creeds at such a time, and thinks only of prayer: we long to join them."
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⁸ The cosmorama consisted of rather small landscape scenes displayed conventionally in a gallery, but viewed in relief, through an arrangement of magnifying mirrors. The pleorama was a form of moving panorama shown in Breslau in 1831, in which viewers sat in a boat that rocked as though tossed by waves, while moving canvases on each side recreated the changing views of the Bay of Naples, which was thus traversed in the space of an hour (see Comment, 63). The myriorama, or "many thousand views" was, by contrast, a more personal visual device, consisting of numerous cards depicting fragments or segments of landscapes that could be arranged in infinitely different combinations.
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⁹ Innovations to the panorama itself, such as the moving panorama, also went some way to compensate for the inherent stillness of the panoramic image.
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¹⁰ A good example of this latter was Barker's inaugural Leicester Square panorama of View of the Fleet at Spithead, which simulated the sense of being at sea by disguising the viewing platform as the afterdeck of a frigate (see Comment, 24).
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¹¹ In this vein, a brief note in the Athenaeum about "The Village of Alagna" treats its apparently supernatural qualities more positively, recommending the scene as "a work of witchcraft, if it be a picture" (2 April 1836).
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¹² See for example, John Timbs's remarks on the name in his detailed account of "Diorama and Cosmorama," in his Curiosities of London of 1855. The relevant extract is accessible on Derek Wood's Diorama website, at http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/diorama/Diorama_Timbs.htm.
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¹³ As the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary states, "di" can be "the form of dia used before a vowel," where the preposition dia is "used in wds of Gk origin, and in Eng. formations modelled on them, w. the senses 'through', as diaphanous, 'across', as diameter, 'transversely' as diaheliotropic, 'apart' as diaeresis. "The preposition di is used 'in wds of Gk origin or in Eng. formations modelled on them, w. the sense 'twice, doubly', as dilemma, diphthong, dicotyledon."
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¹⁴ Another way to think about repetition here would be to consider what Didier Maleuvre says of duplication, of reproducibility in general, in his chapter on "The Interior and its Doubles" in Museum Memories: "That which I cannot seize in its particularity, I will reproduce so many times that I can do without the particularity itself, the singular In-Itself. …What it cannot seize in itself, bourgeois consciousness multiplies so as to diffuse its singularity" (Maleuvre 158). 
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¹⁵ From H. & A. Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre. Reproduced on R. D. Wood's website (http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/Diorama/Diorama_Wood_3a.htm).
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¹⁶ H. and A. Gernsheim, who helpfully cite this passage (20), also suggest E. Orme's An Essay on Transparent Prints and on Transparencies in General (London, 1807). 
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¹⁷ From H. & A. Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre. Reproduced on R. D. Wood's website (http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/Diorama/Diorama_Wood_3a.htm).
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¹⁸ More details of this kind can be found in a pamphlet description of this Diorama in the British Library (shelfmark 1359 d 6), including a dozen or more names of royal and aristocratic lineage, whose remains are to be found in the chapel.
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¹⁹ Angelo Maggi's "Poetic Stones: Roslin Chapel in Gandy's Sketchbook and Daguerre's Diorama" contains an account of this legend (as does the Times review), but also a detailed account of the extraordinary architectural features of the chapel itself. Maggi argues that Daguerre, who never saw the chapel himself, drew extensively from Gandy's detailed sketches as well as from his "Tomb of Merlin" for his Diorama picture.
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²⁰ Reproduced on R. D. Wood's website (http://www.midleykent.fsnet.co.uk/Diorama/Diorama_Wood_3a.htm).
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²¹ There is an interesting link here, in the involvement of the French émigré architect Augustus Charles Pugin in the design and construction of the London Diorama. Pugin's son, Augustus Welby, was of course a key figure in the Gothic revival of the later nineteenth century. 
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²² I refer here to the title of Gillen D'Arcy Wood's study, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
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²³ Michael Lewis, in The Gothic Revival, argues that the gothic revival of the 18th century began as a primarily literary movement, which drew its impulses from poetry and drama, and translated them into architecture—often of a flimsy kind, such as the picturesque garden folly.
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²⁴ See also his essay in Fred Botting, ed. Essays and Studies 2001: The Gothic.
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