The Lantern as Entertainment
When compared to other missionary narratives, his characterization of lantern shows as “amusements” or “leisure evenings” is extraordinary in that he explicitly acknowledges the lantern as an entertainment. Such an approach created opportunities for the Crowthers to capitalize on the lantern as a novelty for fundraising purposes. Because they saw the lantern primarily as divertive, they borrowed practices from theatre and other popular attractions by selling tickets to the exhibition. In both Lagos and Bonny, the Crowthers adopted an incremental pricing system that capitalized on the lantern’s novelty while also making sure that all would be able to see the lantern show’s religious content. They charged the most for the first evening’s performance. Audience members who could afford the higher ticket cost were likely men of influence who had earned their fortunes through status or trade. Like Livingstone, the Crowthers gave lantern shows before local authorities in part to strengthen African and British trade networks. On the second evening, they would decrease the price, and on the third evening, they would exhibit the dissolving view for free for the poor. Their final series of lantern shows in Lagos marks a minor revision to this system. On the first evening, so many tickets were sold that the temporary schoolroom in which the lantern show took place was overcrowded. For the second performance, the Crowthers opted to keep the price of the ticket the same, but to limit the number of seats.[2] Thus, the lantern supported the Crowthers’ continuing evangelistic efforts by offering entertainment that was amusing and instructive while also providing the funds needed to build new sites for education. The system relied on the lantern’s status as a novelty, hence the ticketing strategies of the Crowthers would not work in Britain because the lantern was somewhat quotidian. However, the Church Missionary Society would begin using the lantern show as a vehicle for generating revenue by taking up a collection at the end of the lantern show.Now and then some women came with their manillas in hand at noon, begging to be shewn the dissolving view, but these amusements must be postponed till our most important work is lessened, and another leisure evening can be better spared[1].
Bishop Crowther’s characterization of lantern shows as “leisure evenings,” as well as the episode of the boar’s head slipper, were completely scrubbed from the published accounts. The most obvious reason for these elisions is that it did not support the missionary society narrative that the lantern show was primarily an educational tool that supplemented spoken lectures with visual material. These narrative strategies were so engrained by the 1890s that published accounts of lantern shows given by Anglican missionary societies are identifiable by their avoidance of references to special effects and the vocabulary of entertainment. Though an extended analysis of late-Victorian lantern shows in Britain lies outside the scope of this project, it is worth briefly describing patterns in these accounts as a means to frame a discussion of earlier editorial practices. In a study of approximately 2,000 descriptions of magic lantern shows given between 1874 and 1903, I identified clusters of terms that were likely appear in the same account using a form of statistical analysis known as topic modeling.[3] Such an approach goes one step beyond tracking the appearance of a single word or phrase across a large corpus. I discovered that evangelistic organizations, temperance societies, and Sunday Schools all described their lantern shows as “interesting,” but the context in which this word appeared varied depending on the organization hosting the show. Temperance societies, Sunday Schools, and even educational lectures in scientific societies tended to include words like “dissolving” and “entertainment” to frame the audience’s interest in the show. Evangelistic organizations, particularly the Church Army (an Anglican missionary organization), emphasized the labor of the lanternist and the edifying content of the slides. These underlying linguistic patterns ultimately distinguished evangelistic periodicals from any other kind of published account in the collection. Anglican anxiety over the lantern as an entertainment guided the interventions made by the editors of the missionary periodicals, leading to substantial omissions in published versions of the Crowthers’ correspondence.
While some trimming was common, the extent to which the Crowthers’ letters and reports were revised points to other anxieties about African agency. By eliminating moments of African ingenuity and innovation, published accounts of the Crowthers’ missionary efforts reinscribed them within a narrative of development that paralleled the training of British Children through Sunday Schools. I argue that the magic lantern show became a particularly potent touchstone for foregrounding these affinities. In particular, the Crowthers’ lantern shows in the periodical press structured moments of recognition in juvenile readers in Britain.
[1]“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.
[2] “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.
[3] I completed this project as part of Indiana University’s Ph.D. certificate in Digital Arts and Humanities program. An early version of this study appeared in poster form at the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities’ Spring Symposium in 2018, a digital copy of which is available through IU Scholarworks. A revised and expanded version of this project will be published as an article in a forthcoming issue of Early Popular Visual Culture.
