Conflicting Reports
The eagle-eyed reader of the Quarterly Token would have spotted a significant discrepancy between this illustration and the accompanying prose. Dandeson Crowther is pictured standing beside a tin improved phantasmagoria lantern. This type of lantern remained a perennial favorite among missionaries like John Williams and David Livingstone who traveled widely because it was light as well as durable. However, the lantern in the illustration would not have been able to create the visual effect described in Crowther’s letter: the dissolving view. This effect softened the transition between slides by slowly displacing one image with another. To do this, the lantern needed two objectives to project the first and second images simultaneously. The earliest biunials featured two side-by-side lanterns with a piece of metal in between, like this example from a London-based lantern manufacturer.
As the shutter moved horizontally from side to side, it would gradually decrease light emanating from one objective and increasing the other. The popularity of this effect among British audiences not only increased the demand for biunial lanterns but required more powerful projectors to accommodate larger audiences. The phantasmagoria lantern was designed for back-projection, meaning that it worked best within ten feet of the screen. To address this limitation, manufacturers made two significant changes to the lantern’s design: first, they designed their lanterns to accommodate the oxygen and hydrogen tubes of a limelight apparatus. These were fed through the back of the lantern into its body so that the ignited gas heated a small piece of lime to incandescence. With this form of lighting, projectionists could rely on a shutter system, but they could also diminish the amount of gas illuminating each objective. The second change that they made to the lantern’s design was to elongate the objective so that it could project images onto a screen thirty to fifty feet away from the screen.[1] Since they were typically made from brass, the objective was too heavy to attach to japanned tin without warping the lantern’s body. Mahogany offered a far more stable platform for the new objective, but this made the lantern even heavier than before. The wooden body of the lantern also made it easier to stack objectives vertically rather than horizontally, creating the mahogany behemoths that would dominate the lantern lecture scene.
Click here and scroll down the page to see a 360 degree photograph of a Butcher and Sons triunial mahogany lantern with its original oxyhydrogen tubing, now part of the National Media Museum’s collection (Bradford, England).
The mahogany lantern would not appear until the 1880s, meaning that Dandeson likely relied on the tin, side-by-side dissolving view apparatus. The illustration in the juvenile magazine not only eliminates the dissolving mechanism but it also reduces the number of lanterns to one.
An even more astute reader of the Quarterly Token would notice that the image of the capture of Thomas King was not described by Dandeson Crowther but by the editor. This omission is characteristic of all published accounts of the Crowthers’ lantern shows, for the periodicals avoid references to the kinds of images that they showed. Although it seems like it should be the most specific, the letter describing this series of shows in Lagos is actually the most vague, for it contains no details about what subjects were presented.[2] A subsequent report by Bishop Crowther indicates that scriptural material was part of a series of lantern shows in Bonny, spanning February 12th through the 14th, 1867. Like Williams and Livingstone, the lantern lecture described scenes from the Old and New Testament, including the judgement of Solomon, the birth of Christ, the visit of the wisemen, and Christ’s presentation in the temple.[3]
Dandeson’s letters attest to the successes of the shows, for
The demand was so great that Dandeson and his brother Samuel painted their own slides for a second series of lantern shows in Lagos.[5] These exhibitions of the dissolving view took place in January 1868, and they represent one of the first adaptations of CMS missionary activity for the big screen. The slides supplemented a lecture on “the capture and rescue of the Bishop on the Niger,” a harrowing episode from the elder Crowther’s most recent travels. In October of the previous year, the Bishop had been held hostage by a local chief who demanded £1,000 in exchange for his release. The consul sent Mr. Fell, who rather than pay the ransom took Bishop Crowther back by force. Crowther escaped safely, but Mr. Fell was killed by a poison arrow trying to return to the boat.[6] Dandeson and Samuel (the younger) designed these slides with a wider audience in mind. In the letter, Dandeson expressed that he would send the slides by next mail to England, where he requested that “proper copies be made of these slides & a set sent to us for our use here.” Though no versions of this set have survived, the lantern lecture became part of a core collection of lantern lectures for loan to Sunday Schools and auxiliary branches of the missionary society. The first advertisement for lectures on the Niger Mission, Sierra Leone, Lagos, and other West African mission stations appeared in the Gleaner, a CMS periodical, in September 1882.[7]The people are anxious to have more exhibitions but I must use my slides with prudence. The 2nd show was a repetition of the first.[4]
In addition to these homemade slides, Dandeson had “received the slides that Mr. Harry kindly sent me from Mr. Newton.”[8] Formally founded in 1858 (but probably in operation as early as 1853), Newton and Company would replace Carpenter and Westley as England’s leading slide manufacturers. Part of their success stemmed from the material that they produced for missionary societies.[9] During this period of lantern slide production, Newton made copperplate printed and hand painted slides that rivaled the Superior Scriptural Subjects in their level of craftsmanship. The topics or genre of slides are not mentioned explicitly here. The slides not only advanced the Crowthers’ fundraising efforts, but they also represented a momentary truce in the mounting tensions between the Crowthers and Henry Townsend, a missionary of European descent who was stationed in Abeokuta on the Ogun River in what’s now Nigeria. Townsend, the “Mr. Harry” of the letter, was one of the most vocal critics of Samuel Crowther, for he could not conceive of a church structure without European leadership. In a letter to Venn, Townsend wrote that
Townsend’s views aligned with those of the British consul John Beecroft who had been a leading force in annexing Lagos as a crown colony in 1861 under the auspices of eradicating slavery. The CMS had a vested interest in reinforcing England’s authority in Nigeria, for expanding trade supported continued missionary efforts. Townsend saw himself as one of the “commanding minds” who, by virtue of being white, deserved a leadership position in the expanding West African mission. Samuel Crowther’s success and growing prestige in Nigeria added an extra measure of venom to his attacks. Ever the consummate administrator, Venn had promoted reconciliation between Townsend and the younger Crowther while they were both in England. Townsend had to flee Abeokuta in 1867 just before the Egba riots that expelled missionaries from this region of Nigeria for fifteen years.[11] Townsend sent the slides from England while he was recovering from this defeat.The white merchant and civilization will go hand in hand with missionary work, and foreign elements must be mixed up with the native, especially in such changes as are effected by a religion introduced by foreigners. The change of religion in a country is a revolution of the most extensive kind and the commanding minds that introduce those changes must and do become leaders. It is the law of nature and not contrary to the laws of God, and efforts to subvert such laws must produce extensive evils.[10]
There was one other type of slide that the Crowthers included in their shows, and it demonstrated the extent that Africans became part of the “revolution of the most extensive kind.” Bishop Crowthers devotes the most narrative attention to a comic mechanical slide. Although these were commonly features of Victorian magic lantern shows, they rarely appear in missionary account due to their exclusively entertaining purpose. As I will demonstrate in the following section, the humor showcased the Crowthers’ fluent English, for it derived from a visual pun.
[1] For a table of objective length and projected image height ratios, see Bausch & Lomb’s Balopticons and Accessories: Apparatus for Every Known Form of Optical Projection Including Most Complete and Diversified Methods for Scientific Demonstration, Baush & Lomb Optical Co., 1917, available via https://archive.org/details/BauschLombProjectionApparatusImages/page/n21. p. 18.
[2] Instead of focusing on the lantern show’s content, Dandeson offers more details about his ticketing strategies. To reduce overcrowding, they admitted fewer people on the second evening, but this meant that he raised less money for the new churches.
[3] “Letter to Henry Venn, 27 February 1867,” Church Missionary Society Archive, University of Birmingham Special Collections, CMS/B/OMS/C A3/O4 226, 10 May 2017, pp. 9-10.
[4] “Letter to Henry Venn, 8 November 1866,” Church Missionary Society Archive, University of Birmingham Special Collections, CMS/B/OMS/C A3/O13 3, 10 May 2017. p. 3.
[5] Some of Dandeson’s watercolor sketches have survived in the Church Missionary Society Archive. See CMS/B/OMS/C A3 O4 248-249.
[6] J.F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, Longmans, 1965, pp.168-9.
[7] Church Missionary Gleaner, issue 105, volume 9, September 1883, available through Adam Matthew, Marlborough, Church Missionary Society Periodicals, http://www.churchmissionarysociety.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/CMS_OX_Gleaner_1882_09, p. 112.
[8] “Letter to Henry Venn, 15 February 1868,” Church Missionary Society Archive, University of Birmingham Special Collections, CMS/B/OMS/C A3/O13 4, 10 May 2017. p. 3.
[9] See Encyclopedia of the Lantern, David Robinson, Stephen Herbert and Richard Crangle, editors, Magic Lantern Society, 2001, pp. 209-210.
[10] “Letter to Henry Venn, 18 October 1858,” Church Missionary Society Archive, University of Birmingham Special Collections, CMS/B/OMS/C A2/085, quoted in Christian Missions in Nigeria, p. 187.
[11] Christian Missions in Nigeria, p. 193, 201.
