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Shining Lights: Magic Lanterns and the Missionary Movement, 1839—1868

Archiving Williams' Letter

The letter describing William's lantern show would not have been preserved in the London Missionary Society Archives had it not been for Mrs. K. Frith from Clacton-on-Sea, who wrote a letter to the LMS secretary on Jan 29th, 1938 inquiring if they were interested in purchasing a letter written by John Williams. How it came into Mrs. Frith’s possession is a mystery. Personal correspondence, like the letter that Williams wrote to his son Samuel, are not typically part of missionary society archives, since the secretaries could preserve only that which was sent to the home office. The secretary who received Mrs. Frith’s letter was interested and offered £10 for it. Since there is no mention of the letter’s content in Mrs. Frith’s initial query, it appears that the secretary wanted to purchase it solely on the basis of the author’s celebrity. It’s complete serendipity that it just so happens to be the letter with an account of his lantern shows.

The letter is not filed with Williams’ official correspondence, but in personal papers and acquisitions— separate subsection of the archive. Although the letter has been transcribed, there is not a summary of the letter’s content in the special collections finding aids or the online catalogue. This stands in contrast to the other letters written by LMS missionaries to the home office, for summaries in the receipt book and the more abbreviated descriptions in the digital catalogue document references to magic lanterns in correspondence with the secretary. Perhaps this is the reason why the letter has not been discussed in other critical work on Williams.

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The Material Archive
Henry Anelay's watercolor portrait of John Williams anticipates the centrality of Polynesian objects in the material archive through which to study Williams' missionary voyages. Painted in England following Williams' 1838 furlough and subsequently circulated as a lithograph, it depicts Williams on a ship standing next to an assortment of ceremonial weapons bristling with shark-tooth edges, delicate feathered fan-handles, intricately carved religious objects, and a staff-god swathed in barkcloth. His finger gestures downward to the central object of the group, a fisherman's god who has been toppled over and robbed of his manhood. The play of light and shadow across the ship's deck celebrates Williams' missionary efforts by offering a visual analog for spiritual enlightenment. Anelay shrouds the idols in darkness while Williams seems to project light, bringing physical illumination as well as insight. The path unfolding at Williams' feet gestures to his continued work to be a “shining light” in the South Pacific, and his gaze overlooks the objects strewn about the deck to focus on the voyage ahead. Following his first missionary tour, Williams returned triumphantly to London in 1834 with these objects in tow. The items in the painting joined the ranks of idols in the LMS missionary museum and traveled the country to raise funds for continued missionary work. Anelay's watercolor is so meticulously detailed that many of the objects can be correlated to artifacts formerly in the London Missionary Society's museum and currently held by the British Museum.

The need for curiosities to populate the LMS' touring exhibition explains the preference for and preservation of Polynesian artifacts instead of European-made objects from Williams' expedition.[1] Items like the magic lantern would have seemed mundane or quotidian to a Victorian audience; hence, it was not common to preserve objects like these as “relics” of famous missionaries until Livingstone's death in Africa. Williams' lantern and its accompanying slides most likely stayed in the South Pacific where they were used until they were broken, discarded, destroyed, or forgotten. While the mechanical components of Williams' lantern shows have been lost, traces of them remain in the textual record. Williams wrote an account of his lantern shows in a letter to his twelve-year-old son, dated February 7th, 1839.[2] An edited version of the letter appears in his memoirs published posthumously in 1843, and the published version most often appears in media histories of the South Seas, most notably Anne Colley's analysis of magic lantern shows given and observed by Robert Louis Stevenson.[3] Both versions of the letter describe the content of the lantern show in detail.

The account of the lantern show in Williams' original letter seems to have been an afterthought. Prior to this passage, he describes the missionaries' efforts to promote literacy among the islanders, but he interrupts his train of thought to describe the “prodigious interest” generated by the lantern.
...Thousands of the people can read, but I must tell you a little about Rarotonga; before however I do this, I must inform you of the prodigious interest the exhibition of the magic lantern produces. [extra space] At the Natural History slides, exhibiting birds, beasts, &c. they were highly delighted. The Kings of England afforded them still greater pleasure, but the scripture pieces are those which excite the deepest interest. The first time [page break] I exhibited, it was at Mr. Murray's station, and then the birth of Christ, Simeon taking Christ in his arms, and the flight into Egypt, and indeed all that had reference to the Saviour excited prodigious interest: but when the plate of the Crucifixion was shown, there was a general sobbing; their feelings were overcome, and they gave vent to them by weeping. I took care to inform them that it was only a representation. This is a very valuable present and I shall ever feel obliged to good Mr. Walker for it.
The plates of the Martyrs have given the people a dread of Popery. You will be sorry to hear there are a great many priests about trying to get a footing in the different Islands. I hope and pray they may not succeed.
Instead of providing an account of missionary work on Rarotonga or of the island itself, the letter concludes with a more social portrait of island life; Williams passes along warm greetings from the Rarotongans and from other missionaries, native and non. Bracketing the description of the lantern show in this way makes it feel out-of-place in his narrative. On the surface, the transition from literacy training to lantern show to the local community seems jarring. As Richard M. Moyle has noted in his introduction to an edited volume of Williams’ journals, Williams’ style reflects the fact that he had little formal education (p 19). Though not apparent in this passage, Williams’ prose often contains misspellings and non-sequiturs. The account of the lantern show in this letter seems especially out-of-place because he appears to be describing people and events in two islands that were more than 800 miles apart, for Mr. Murray’s station was on Tutulia. Formally, the lantern show functions as a pivotal moment in the letter in that it redirects Williams' attention from educational efforts to his local context. Reading his account in light of the preceding and proceeding passages suggests an implicit (and perhaps subconscious) connection between Williams' instructional efforts, the local contexts in which this work took place, and the magic lantern show as a catalyst for bringing these two facets of his missionary work together.

The proximity of this passage to increasing literacy on Rarotonga casts the lantern show as an extension of the missionaries' instructional efforts. Williams' careful description of the slides reinforces the overtly educational nature of the show. In this respect, Williams' magic lantern shows in Samoa parallel ones that were given in Britain, particularly those seen at Sunday School soirées, for a typical Victorian show would pair natural history slides with Biblical material or stories of moral reform. The key difference lay in the absence of any comic material. Williams' omission of humorous slides also stands in contrast to other magic lantern shows that included a comic slide or two.[4] Although Williams emphasized the value of the lantern as an instructional aid, perhaps a more accurate description of its function would be a provocateur of curiosity. His repetition of “prodigious interest” (and its variation “deep interest”) throughout his account masks the absence of a concrete learning outcome. Indeed, the islanders' newfound “dread of Popery” seems to be the only marker of education via the lantern show. Williams' increasing attention to the audience over the course of his letter suggests a second, and perhaps more subliminal, force shaping the content of his lantern shows— his South Pacific context. Williams' social milieu as described in the letter spans European protestants (Thomas Walker, Archibald Murray), perceived rivals (the Catholic missionaries), and Pacific islanders.

Williams places the lantern and slides in the middle of this constellation of cultural forces. The formal function of projection equipment in the letter parallels the centrality of Polynesian artifacts in Anelay's portrait. Much like his watercolor counterpart, Williams' focus is on the terminus of the illuminated path— in this case, the projected image— but he gestures to objects that function as vehicles for spiritual enlightenment. Williams' narrative pools around the apparati that created his lantern show, for each image is described as a “slide,” “piece,” or “plate.” In fact, the only moment in which Williams elides the mechanisms which created the projected images is in his description of the Kings of England slides. And like the feathered fans and staff gods, the objects represented in the letter would enter exhibitionary culture as curiosities. Williams' shorthand for the lantern show— “the exhibition of the magic lantern”— conflates the presentation of projected images with the display of the apparatus itself. Unlike his portrait, the letter captures the interest generated by these objects for his Samoan audiences.

Anelay's watercolor not only serves as a visual analog to the narrative strategies of Williams' letter, but the portrait also animates object-oriented histories of Williams' missionary work. David Shaw King has used the painting to frame his history of Polynesia. By comparing details in the painting to catalog records for the LMS and to objects currently held by the British Museum, he offers an account of early missionary work in Polynesia that also addresses indigenous religious practices. This approach resonates with broader trends in histories of missionary work to foreground the contributions of locals to records of missionary travels. King's study of the Analay watercolor offers a methodological model for survey of surviving lantern slides that I will now perform. Like King, I have chosen a central text, Williams' letter to his son, to identify the content of Williams' lantern show and to delineate with more specificity his South Seas context.
[1] For a more extended discussion of the LMS Missionary Museum, its formation, and its exhibition history, see Chris Wingfield’s “‘Scarcely more than a Christian trophy case’? The global collections of the London Missionary Society Museum (1814—1910)” Journal of the History of Collections vol. 29 no. 1 (2017). pp. 109-128; and Rosemary Seton’s “Reconstructing the museum of the London Missionary Society.” Material Religion. vol. 8, issue 1 (2015) pp.98-102. Polynesians also sent goods to be sold for the benefit of the LMS. See S.A. Hall’s ‘Property to seek lost souls’? The ‘social lives’ of contributions made in the South Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century and their representation in missionary publications. 2016. Utrecht University, Masters thesis. Utrecht University Repository, https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/338940.

[2] John Williams. Letter to Samuel Williams, 7 February 1839. CWM/LMS/Personal Papers/ South Seas Personal/Box 2. Council for World Mission Archive, School of Oriental and African Studies Library, London, England. 30 June 2016.

[3] See Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. p 100-101. Vanessa Smith briefly discusses the lantern show as it appears in Williams’ biography in Literary Culture and the Pacific: nineteenth-century textual encounters Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp 59-61. I perform a more in-depth comparison of their analysis in “ Imagination, Perception, and Presence”.

[4] Ann Colley describes comic mechanical slides in late Victorian lantern shows in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination, pp 101-104. Humorous material, particularly visual puns, would be a key feature of the lantern show given by Samuel and Dandeson Crowther.
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