Spoken Narration
Extant Scripts
Though my focus will be on the scriptural material, the script for the sliders on natural history and the kings of England provide a deeper material archive through which to explore the sonic dimension of Williams’ lantern show, hence they merit a brief discussion here. Ever the savvy businessman, Carpenter published a script for the natural history sliders as a stand-alone volume, hoping that “even without the assistance of the lantern, the Book will prove useful as an Introduction to the systematic study of Natural History.” Though Elements of Zoology was designed to be used with or without slides, the text’s structure reflects the way that material would have been organized into sliders which contained three to four images each. The volume is organized into sections on mamalia, birds, amphibia, fishes, insects, and worms; each section is further subdivided by genus and includes a representative sample of species. The text not only appealed to readers without lanterns, but it also offered lanternists a high degree of flexibility when presenting this material in audio-visual form. As a script, the text is far too long for a single lecture, for there were fifty-five natural history sliders in total.[1] Instead, the segmented structure of the text functions like a database, allowing the lantern lecturer to draw from, adapt, and remix to a much greater degree than a standard lantern reading. Each description would take a minute or two to read aloud, giving the audience enough time to view the image but not enough to cause heat damage to the slide.[2]If read as script for the scriptural sliders, Elements of Zoology represents an early formulation of a typical Victorian lantern lecture, particularly in the ways that it oscillates between hypermediation and more immersive modes of viewing. This slider in the National Science Museum’s collection would have been presented with the following narration.
The narration for the image of the Newfoundland dog on the far left of the slider opens with a moment of hypermediation. The cue “as everyone knows” acknowledges the presence of the audience by recognizing a shared experience with different breeds of dog. However, the next sentence cues a more immersive mode of viewing by eliding the distinction between a dog and a representation of a dog, for it lacks a transition that explicitly states this is an image. The narration takes immersion one step further by deploying a strategy that I would characterize as “imaginative animation.” When projected, this image would have remained stationary until the lecturer transitioned to the next image on the slider. Though the image itself remains still, the narration introduces the possibility of movement through its description of the dog swimming, diving, and dragging sleds, inviting the audience to imagine the dog in motion. In this case, the faithful dog could also be seen as a moving image in the ways that the narration promotes affection and sentimentality. The script repeatedly praises the Newfoundland dog for its wisdom and its loyalty. These character qualities are explicitly tied to the dog’s economic value and its ability to work without supervision. The industriousness of the Canis Familiaris is made all the more pronounced through its juxtaposition with the Canis Lupus. The Wolf, pictured on the next image in the slider, was “extirpated by the Government” from Great Britain and Ireland through a tax and commutation scheme whereby citizens could “substitut[e] a certain number of wolves’ heads” for a portion of their taxes or reduce a criminal sentence. Dogs’ monetary value is couched in the language of citizenship. The Newfoundland dog is “brought” to England on the merits of its work ethic and its perceived character. Conversely, the wolf is described as native species, but its absence becomes the marker of industrious citizens. By gesturing to economics and politics through natural history, the lecture anticipates the ways that Victorian geographic lectures would combine ethnography, industrialization, and colonization.[4] The slider caters to this taste for virtual travel by describing the dog at home in Newfoundland pulling sleds and eating fish. The images of the hyena and the fennec, which close the slider, would transport audiences to Africa and the Middle East.Canis Familiaris, or The Common Dog
Of this useful animal Linnaeus enumerates thirty-four distinct varieties or breeds; of these, as everyone knows, there are innumerable mixtures. The Newfoundland dog is a large species, sometimes standing nearly three feet high. These dogs are remarkable for their sagacity and attachment to their masters; they swim well, and dive with ease. The breed was originally brought from the country which they bear the name where their great strength and sagacity render them extremely useful. Three of four of them yoked to a sledge will draw two or three hundred weight of wood for some miles without any person to guide them, and having delivered their load will return immediately to the woods, where they are fed with fish, &c.[3]
The complex negotiation between these different strategies of immersion and hypermediation is not found in the narration that accompanies the sliders on the kings of England. Carpenter and Westley did not publish a lecture reading for these sliders, though they did draw heavily from Thomas Cadell’s 1796 edition of David Hume’s History of England for the engravings. This evocation of print in the visual elements of this lecture suggests that portions of Hume could function as a surrogate script. However, Hume’s lengthy volumes would need significant editorial interventions in order to condensate a monarch’s reign into one to two minutes of narration. Carpenter and Westley’s catalog offers one possible strategy for doing this: heroic couplets.
The text suggests that Carpenter and Westley imagined a juvenile audience for this set. Although the text appears to be the manufacturer’s own design, the couplets are taken from another source: A Compendious History of Britain. Each entry in the compendium is accompanied by a full body illustration of a monarch, often holding a shield and a scepter or sword, in addition to a quatrain that summarizes the pages to follow.RICHARD II
Began to Reign 1377; Died 1399.
Richard, from valiant sire and grandsire sprung,
Prov’d weak, perverse and rash; for he was young:
Yet brave, from rebels did defend his throne,
And, when despos’d, lost not his life alone.[5]
As a script for a lantern lecture, the heroic couplet lends a sense of gravitas to the slides. To a Victorian audience, this form of verse would have felt dated, for the heroic couplet had its heyday a century before. As an educational lecture, the brevity of the couplets present English history at breakneck speed. The pacing of this narration suggests that it was geared toward an audience familiar with the content, perhaps children studying English history. If this is the case, the heroic couplets would have functioned as a mnemonic device that helped children remember the more salient points of a given monarch’s reign.
The texts describe above are best understood as the kind of narration proscribed by the manufacturer, but there is evidence to suggest that lecturers edited these or even created their own. Anne Laura Clarke, an American lantern lecturer who used Carpenter and Westley’s sliders on ancient costume, heavily annotated her copy of the manufacturer’s catalogue. From these notes, Granville Ganter suggests that she drew heavily from Alexander Adam’s Roman Antiquities to offer a more robust account of the lena seen in Carpenter and Westley’s sliders.[6] This practice continued throughout the lantern’s history. As Ludwig Vogl-Beinek has shown, marginalia on scripts accompanying a late-nineteenth-century lantern adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol indicates that performances given with this script encouraged audiences to donate to organizations feeding the poor by emphasizing the poverty of the figures on screen.[7] These materials suggest that such editorial practices were common place.
Though no formal script for the scriptural set survives, Carpenter and Westley’s catalog presents the titles of each image alongside a scriptural reference. The verses refer to the moment depicted in the slide, though some of the references suggest that the lecturer would need to read longer passages of scripture in order to arrive at the moment depicted in the scene. For example, Luke 2:22 accompanies the image of Christ brought to the temple. It reads:
The verse listed in the catalog makes no mention of Simeon, but he is clearly visible in the engraving holding Jesus. His reaction to seeing the Christ is described in Luke 2:25-35. In my analysis of Williams’ slides on the life of Christ, I assume that Williams would have drawn from the passages surrounding the verse mentioned in the catalog to formulate his narration. There are other extant lectures that draw exclusively from scripture, including a late Victorian Good Friday lantern show.[8] Given the scope of Williams slides, it would have been difficult to present a sequence of bible stories without describing their connecting logic. I suggest that Williams probably added transitions between images in order to signal the passage of time or to describe the theological significance of the vignette on screen. Other missionaries, including David Livingstone, adopted this approach; Livingstone used image of Isaac on the altar to explain that Abraham “was the first of a race to whom God had given the Bible we now held, and that among his children our Savior appeared.”[9] Such an introduction would have framed images from the life of Christ as the fulfillment of the covenant of works. Since Williams’ account of the lantern show omits any mention of these transitions, I will focus my analysis of his narration on the scriptural passages depicted in the slides.And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord.
English, Rarotongan, Samoan?
The textual ephemera surrounding Williams lantern show reveals another avenue for possible revisions made to the proscribed text. The context of the lantern show suggests that the narration for the show was not in English but in Samoan. Though this possibility is not explicitly mentioned in Williams’ letter to his son, Williams’ Samoan journals and his work as a translator support this claim.The absence of any textual clues as to the language spoken during the magic lantern show is characteristic of Williams’ other writings. For example, his description of his first encounter with Faueā on Tongatapu suggests that Williams often omitted details about which language was spoken in conversations with Pacific Islanders. In A narrative of missionary enterprises in the South Sea Islands, Williams describes how Tongans characterized Faueā as a Christian who was “decidedly friendly to the lotu.”[10] Williams’ inclusion of the Rarotongan term “lotu,” or religion, could be read as a strategic deployment of a pan-Polynesian term in order to evoke a sense of virtual travel for an English readership. Evoking the exotic setting of this conversation through lotu locates this encounter more soundly on Rarotongan soil, even though the exchanges between Williams, Faueā, and his Tongan friends are being described in English. I would suggest that this moment also registers as an instance of code switching.[11] Because Williams was so accustomed to describing Christianity as a “lotu” to a Polynesian audience, the Polynesian word slips in to his English prose when he describes conversations that he was having in Tongan. Williams felt most confident in his ability to speak Tahitian, but by 1832, he had enough exposure to other Polynesian languages to recognize systematic vowel and consonant shifts, describe the differences between grammar structures, and create basic vocabulary lists. His 1832 journal concludes with a comparison of 36 words in Tahitian, Hawaiian, a dialect of Marquesan, Austral, Cook Islands Māori, Samoan, Tongan, New Zealand Māori, and Fijian. [12] (He probably relied on other missionaries for Hawaiian and Marquesan.) In addition to conversational Tongan, Williams also spoke fluent āori Kūki 'Āirani, also known as Cook Islands Māori, from Rarotonga, which is linguistically similar to the Māori spoken in New Zealand. His proficiency with Polynesian languages is evidenced by his translation of Paul’s letter to the Galatians into Rarotongan, which he co-authored with fellow LMS missionary Charles Pitman, printed on Huahine in 1828. This epistle was followed by a translation of the New Testament into Rarotongan by Williams, Pitman and Aaron Buzzacot in 1836. [13]
His fluency in Rarotongan and Reo Tahiti (Tahitian) provided a platform from which to study other Polynesian languages. Though he only spent a total of two months on Samoa, Williams appears to have learned enough Samoan to start writing hymns in the local language during his second trip to the island in 1832.[14] Richard M. Moyle’s translations of these Samoan hymns indicate that his sense of the Samoan was mostly accurate.[15] According to Moyle, Williams’ journals also suggest that the missionaries, particularly the Raitean teachers that preceded Williams, were already having a profound impact on the Samoan language.[16] In light of this closing gap between Samoan and Tahitian, and considering Williams’ eagerness to study Polynesian languages, it’s likely that his proficiency speaking Samoan was strong enough by 1839 that he could give the narration to his lantern show in the local language. As one of the translators for the Rarotongan New Testament, Williams was well prepared to describe the life of Christ in a Polynesian language, and he probably used this text to frame his translation of the scripture passages mentioned in Carpenter and Westley’s catalog into Samoan for his magic lantern show.
If Williams was not adept enough to do this, there are several people mentioned in his writings that could have served as translators. The most likely candidates include Faueā who served as an unofficial emissary on Williams’ behalf. Archibald Murray or George Barden, the two missionaries stationed on Tutulia, could have translated from English to Samoan. Papeiha and Vahapata, the two Raiatean teachers, might have had difficulty pronouncing Samoan s and nasal consonants.[17] During his 1830 visit, Williams engaged the services of John Wright, a European who lived on as a beachcomber on Savai’i, but it’s unclear if he was still in the Samoan islands when Williams returned in 1839.[18]
[1] The opening “Advertisement,” which functions as a preface to Elements of Zoology, indicates that the natural history lecture set originally consisted of 18 sliders, but had grown to fifty-five by 1823. See Elements of zoology: being a concise account of the animal kingdom according to the system of Linnaeus. London: Carpenter & Westley, 1823. Item no. 42984. Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, Exeter. 15 January 2018.
[2] This database structure would not be replicated until 1910 when the Keystone View Company, an American lantern slide producer, created a cabinet of photographic lantern slides. The material covered by this set of 560 plus slides included virtual global tours, complete with architectural marvels, ethnographic asides on native dress, and the extraction of local natural resources. Each slide was accompanied by a card that contained a 1-2 minute narration. There is a complete example of this set in the Kent Museum of the Moving Image’s collection.
[3] Elements of Zoology. pp. 29-30. Click here for a transcription of the script for all images on this slide.
[4] See James R. Ryan’s description of the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee’s lantern lectures in Picturing Empire. pp. 186-193.
[5] A Companion to the Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern. London: Carpenter & Westley, 1850. General Reference Collection 8715.aa.50. British Library. Photographed 26 June 2018 by Kalani Craig. p.18.
[6] Ganter, Granville. “Mistress of Her Art: Anne Laura Clarke, Traveling Lecturer of the 1820s”. The New England Quarterly, 87:4 (December 2014) doi: 10.1162/TNEQ_a_00418. p. 730.
[7] Vogl-Bienek, Ludwig. Lichtspiele im Schatten der Armut: Historiche Projektionskunst und Soziale Frage. Stroemfeld, 2016. pp. 126-132.
[8] The Good Friday story: in the words of the holy scripture for lantern reading. Item no. 36794. Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter, Exeter. 15 January 2018. This handwritten lecture also includes hymns, indicating that the script scaffolds a service of song.
[9] Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. London: John Murray, 1857. Print. p. 322.
[11] In liguistics, “Code-switching” refers to when a person alternates between two or more languages deliberately or subconsciously.
[12] The Samoan Journals of John Williams 1830 and 1832. Richard M. Moyle, editor. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1984. pp. 84, 268-273.
[13] Te epistole a Paula, i to Galatia; kiritiia ei tuatua rarotonga. John Williams and Charles Pitman, translators. Huahine: Charles Barff, 1828. X PL6421.B5. Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California. Te Korero-motu ou a to tatou atu e te ora a Jesu Mesia : kiritiia i te reo Rarotonga. Lonedona: I neneiia no te. John Williams, Charles Pitman and Aaron Buzacott, translators. CWML F171 EB84.542 /73479. Council for World Mission Archive, School of Oriental and African Studies Library, London, England. This is an 1841 reprint of the 1836 edition.
[14] The lyrics for Disney’s Moana (2016) are in Samoan and Tokelauan, a closely related language.
[15] The Samoan Journals of John Williams 1830 and 1832. pp. 120-121.
[16] Williams spelling of Boki, a Samoan, suggests that the shift from k to t was already underway. See The Samoan Journals of John Williams 1830 and 1832, p. 149n.
[17] The Samoan Journals of John Williams 1830 and 1832. p. 84.
[18] The Samoan Journals of John Williams 1830 and 1832. pp. 84-85.
