Visualizing Civilization
“Strangers Like Me”
Thanks to the proliferation of photographic lantern material, particularly after 1880, missionaries and their magic lanterns have become recurring features within scholarship on technology, education, and imperialism; their influence has been so pervasive that they have become part of fictional representations of early-twentieth century education as well. The musical number “Strangers Like Me” in Disney’s 1999 animated adaptation of Tarzan serves as a touchstone for the content and overt colonialism of magic lantern shows.Although the film is clearly in the realm of fiction, the scene is surprisingly accurate in its portrayal of an Edwardian magic lantern show. The projector is appropriate for the presumed location and period of the film. Its kerosene lamp would have been far more portable than the limelight apparatus favored by lantern lecturers in England and the US, and its wooden body and tin roof are stylized versions of Edwardian mahogany lanterns like this one from the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. The depiction of the slides is not quite as spot-on, for the eagle-eyed lantern enthusiast would find a couple of minor continuity errors. The accompanying slides are American standard size, slightly wider than their British counterparts— curious for a British expedition. Visually, the transitions between slides mimic the abruptness of the zoetrope, not the sideways slide of the wooden carriers most commonly used at the time. These minor errors aside, the content of Tarzan’s lantern show follows those given by missionaries sixty years earlier. Reverend Smithurst, who was sent by the Church Missionary Society to Red River, Canada in 1839, imagined giving a similar show to his Cree congregants as part of a Christmastide tea.[1] In a letter to the CMS secretary Daniel Coates, Smithurst requested slides that would create a virtual tour similar to the one in Tarzan. Smithurst’s show would include marvels of European architecture, the geological pyrotechnics of a volcanic eruption, and technological wonders like the steam packet and the train.[2] He also requested mechanical slides made by Carpenter & Westley that depicted the rotation of the planets around the sun.[3] Though Smithurst did not receive all the slides that he hoped, his wishlist speaks to the ideal lantern show that present “interesting objects which would combine instruction with amusement.”[4]
The lantern show in the film exceeds mere entertainment by changing Tarzan’s behavior. As a surrogate for “uncivilized” folk, Tarzan represents an idealized audience member who eagerly interacts with the images on screen. The visual juxtaposition between the silver-backed gorilla and the athlete creates an equally striking contrast between Tarzan’s gestures in response to the images. At first, he approaches the projected image of the silver-backed gorilla as he would a real one, carefully crawling on all fours towards the screen. Upon seeing the mustachioed man, he adopts a dramatically different posture. On the surface, Tarzan’s efforts to mimic the European figures on screen register as comic, particularly to Jane and her father, yet the framing of this scene suggests that the lantern show serves a more subversive purpose— to celebrate and reinforce European ideals of masculinity. The larger-than-life proportions of the figure on screen make Tarzan appear small, even though he would likely dwarf the athlete. Furthermore, the waltzing man and woman offer Tarzan a means of interacting with Jane through the protocols of European dance, yet his efforts to these protocols seems outlandish because the graceful waltzers are still in view as he spins Jane around the room. The montage portrays the magic lantern show as the starting point for other engagements with technology, including a telescope, a zoetrope, and a bicycle. Tarzan places the magic lantern as the primary conduit through which to introduce and reinforce European cultural ideals due to the lantern’s ability to visualize “civilization.” The film not only remediates the mechanical affordances of nineteenth-century projection equipment but also represents the colonial overtones inherent in the content of actual slides and the audio-visual presentation of this content in magic lantern shows.[5]
The “Oxyhydrogen Light of Civilization”?
While a fictionalized representation of magic lantern shows, Tarzan parallels scholarly arguments about Victorian screen culture, missionary activity, and Britain’s colonial expansion. The lantern shows of Livingstone and Williams have been discussed briefly in a wide range of critical work, including museum exhibition guides, biographies, histories of photography, and studies of the Victorian missionary movement. Published eyewitness accounts of Victorian magic lantern shows tend to appear as anecdotal evidence to support longstanding critical conversations about missionaries as agents of imperialism. These discussions often center on a phrase attributed to Livingstone, who reputedly referred to his projector as “the oxyhydrogen light of civilization.” By offering an editorial history of this phrase, I survey previous scholarship on evangelistic lantern shows, particularly as extensions of Britain’s civilizing mission, and expose the need for increased attention to unpublished sources like letters, journals, and diaries within discussions of missionaries and their place in global history.The phrase “the oxyhydrogen light of civilization” appears in a letter from Livingstone to William Thompson, a missionary who was also working in South Africa. Livingstone wrote the letter upon his return to Linyanti after completing the western leg of his coast-to-coast expedition. Dated September 13th, 1855, it follows the most active period of lantern use. Despite the fact that Livingstone was giving regular lantern shows at this time, the letter does not mention his lantern specifically. Instead, he offers a compliment to Thompson for a recent change in trade policies:
In the letter, limelight functions as a metaphor for cultural enlightenment, echoing the ways that lantern shows educated and reformed their audiences. Livingstone’s metaphor relies on an intimate knowledge of lantern light sources. Oxyhydrogen light, more commonly known as limelight, required steady streams of oxygen and hydrogen gas. When ignited, they heated a one-inch piece of limestone to the point of incandescence, producing a light source far more luminous than the oil lamp used by Livingstone in his lantern. An unobstructed and steady stream of oxygen and hydrogen (i.e. a full jet) would create the brightest illumination. The implication is that promoting stronger trade with the interior would weaken Portugues slave trading networks.Your policy to the Bechuanas and Griquas shews minds enlightened by the full jet of the oxyhydrogen light of modern civilization.[6]
The additions made by Livingstone himself further complicate our understanding of the letter as an expression of his thoughts on African culture. These changes are visible in the original letter in the School of Oriental and African Studies Special Collections in London and its digital counterpart hosted by Livingstone Online.
Livingstone added—and then deleted—what appears to be an “a” before “modern.” While it may seem a bit of a stretch to tease meaning out of a deleted “a,” the “a” offers one of many moments through which to study Livingstone’s careful negotiation of local cultures in light of their increasing economic ties with Britain. Livingstone’s editorial decision to add then delete the “a” is consistent with his complex, and often conflicting, views of Africans in his journals, field diaries, and letters. In his introduction to the critical edition of Livingstone’s Manuscripts in South Africa, Jared MacDonald has foregrounded differences in content and tone between Livingstone’s diaries and his letters to British manufacturers, government officials, and missionary society secretaries. He acknowledges that Livingstone’s widely-circulated writings diminish the contributions of Africans to his expedition. In this case, Livingstone’s oscillation between “modern civilization,” “a modern civilization,” and “[deleted a] modern civilization” crystallizes how Livingstone negotiated different attitudes towards local and indigenous cultures. The final turn to “modern civilization” suggests a more paternalistic attitude that there’s only one form of modern civilization—the assumption being that it’s a British one. But before settling on this view, Livingstone entertains the possibility of a distinctly South African mode of modernization.
Livingstone’s stance toward colonial economic policy in this letter resonates with the careful political negotiation of Williams and Crowthers. Livingstone believed that missionaries would be successful only after trade had dramatically shifted cultural views on slavery, and his expression of that sentiment in this letter is consistent with his other writings on the subject. His letter to Thompson uses limelight as a metaphor for a new policy that limited the sale of ammunition, ultimately diverting ivory out of the hands of Arab slave traders and into the hands of English merchants. Williams, too, was deeply aware of competing political powers in his sphere of influence. His vitriolic critique of Catholic missionaries coincides with mounting tensions between various European traders, including the (Catholic) French. Furthermore, the islands that Williams visited had been irrevocably shaped by contact with unscrupulous traders (British included)— like Livingstone’s South Africa, the unregulated sale of ammunition to locals had fueled intercultural warfare, not just between Polynesians and Europeans but also among the Polynesians themselves. Samuel Crowther was also deeply attuned to the political upheaval caused by British intervention. His lantern show before King Pepple in Bonny, Nigeria not only reinforced the authority of a king who had been brought to power by the British, but Crowther also tried to soothe the mounting tensions between sub-factions within the king’s kingdom.
Isaac Schapera’s edition volume of Livingstone’s letters adds essential contextual information, but it masks additions by Schapera and by Livingstone. First, Schapera makes Livingstone’s rather oblique reference to economic policy explicit by adding “free trade” in parenthesis. This phrase adds clarity, but it does not appear in the original letter, nor is in included in the quotations of this sentence that persist in critical work on Livingstone. Second, Livingstone’s momentary shuttling back and forth between competing conceptions of civilization is eliminated.
From here, the phrase often appears uncited in critical approaches to David Livingstone specifically and magic lantern shows more broadly. Manuscripts, like the original “oxyhydrogen light of civilization” letter, offer platforms through which to expand and nuance our understanding of missionaries and their role in Britain’s colonization efforts. But the mechanics of print and manuscript materials have obfuscated the origins of the phrase, leading to misquotations in critical work. Previous scholarship has relied heavily on published accounts of missionary efforts, often to the exclusion of contradictory material in unedited and unpublished records. By privileging published narratives of missionary work, scholars reproduce the view of magic lantern shows that missionaries wanted their readership to see. Published accounts often excise moments of miscommunication and misunderstanding, creating a narrative that is overly celebratory of the missionaries’ efforts. This in turn lead to assumptions about the magic lantern as an efficacious educational tool, the reverberations of which can be seen in Disney’s Tarzan.Your policy to the Bechuanas and Griquas shews minds enlightened by the full jet of the oxyhydrogen light of modern civilization (free trade).[7]
Jack Thompson’s Light on Darkness? (2012), a groundbreaking work on missionary photography, offers the most extensive study of Livingstone’s lantern show to date.[8] In his chapter on lantern shows specifically, Thompson observes that magic lantern shows were responsible for disseminating photographic material internationally, particularly as part of the abolitionist movement in England and in the United States. Thompson’s inclusion of Livingstone in this book is somewhat curious, for the project as a whole focuses on photographic material produced by missionaries, and Livingstone neither used nor produced photographs. However, “the oxyhydrogen light of civilization” frames Thompson’s more extended analysis of the Harris’ photographic lantern show “Congo Atrocities” which extended Livingstone’s critique of non-British colonial powers in Africa. For Thompson, the lantern functions as the light of civilization in both African and British contexts in the ways that the show calls for social justice and moral reform in response to the figures on screen. Given the extensive archive that Thompson draws from to discuss the visual and aural content of the Harris’ show, it is surprising that he does not cite Livingstone’s letters, journals, or published work. Instead, he references two other historians, Steve Humphries and Donald Simpson, and notes that “the oxyhydrogen light of civilization” is left uncited in these texts.[9] Due to this uncertainty, Thompson removed the phrase from his later critical work on Livingstone’s lantern.[10]
Unlike Thompson, other scholars have marshalled this phrase without acknowledging that the source is unknown, and in doing so, interpret it as an expression of Livingstone’s stance toward the use of magic lanterns for educational purposes. David Livingstone and the Victorian Visual Encounter with Africa, the 1996 exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, not only displayed the lantern among other relics of Livingstone’s consular days, but also included the phrase in the exhibition’s accompanying book.[11] Quite notably, this portion of the text was written by Tim Jeal, whose monolithic biography Livingstone was among the first to challenge the Victorian tendency to lionize missionary work.[12] In both his biography and his piece for the exhibition, Jeal’s approach to Livingstone’s expeditions foregrounds the explorer’s flaws. When read in this light, Livingstone’s positioning of the lantern as the “oxyhydrogen light of civilization” registers as propaganda, an overly-celebratory portrayal of his evangelistic efforts and his unflagging commitment to colonialism. Similarly, James R. Ryan points to Livingstone as a forerunner of the kinds of educational lantern shows produced by the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC) following its formation in 1902.[13] The phrase serves as useful shorthand for the overt colonialism in the photographic material and lantern lecture scripts circulated by COVIC. Likewise, Ann C. Colley gestures to Livingstone in her brief assessment of Williams’ lantern shows. For her, this phrase anchors the use of the lantern in the South Pacific as part of global trends in missionary magic lantern shows. Colley then compares the overt colonial overtones of these earlier shows to the ones given by Stevenson and his colleagues while traveling in the South Pacific in 1889.[14]
Seeing the lantern through as a “civilizing” influence coincides neatly with broader trends in colonial historiography. That is to say, cultural historians and literary critics have often interpreted missionaries as agents of imperial expansion due to the frequent conflation of conversion to Christianity and industrialization within nineteenth-century evangelical rhetoric. Catherine Hall and Susan Thorne, for example, describe how missionaries contributed to racialized and paternalistic views of colonized subjects through the periodical press. They argue that accounts of missionary work offered virtual encounters with exotic “Others” who inhabited the periphery of the empire, ultimately reshaping English working class identity.[15] Such an approach is consistent with the critiques offered by Jeal and Ryan of missionary activity. When taken at face value, I agree that characterizing the lantern as “the oxyhydrogen light of civilization” would explicitly implicate it within Britain’s civilizing mission. To exhibit the lantern was not only to display instructional material but to offer visual regimes for the reification of British ideals, morality, and systems of production. Thus, magic lantern shows must be placed inside a constellation of governmental, economic, and religious systems designed to expand Britain’s imperial power.
While Thompson, Ryan, Jeal, Humphries, and Colley are justified in associating the lantern with Britain’s “civilizing mission,” the connection between the two does not necessarily stem from the representation of a projector in text. Instead, the lantern’s mechanical history and the use of limelight as a metaphor provides a more robust framework for situating the lantern show within Britain’s colonization efforts. Limelight’s origins as a surveyor’s tool implicate the lantern as a means of cultural regulation. First deployed by Thomas Drummond to survey Ireland in 1826, limelight facilitated tax collection through accurate maps of land-holdings, ultimately reinforcing British imperial authority. Livingstone implies that increasing trade with the British will help modernize the Africans in closest proximity to colonial outposts. More importantly, locating the original source for this phrase reveals broader challenges of studying nineteenth-century missionaries. The citation practices of previous scholars reflects the limitations of working primarily with physical sources, including the original copies of Livingstone’s writings and edited volumes of this material. Tracking down the origins of “the oxyhydrogen light of civilization” through print and manuscript sources is nearly impossible without a fully searchable copy of Livingstone’s correspondence, journals, and diaries, which is perhaps why the phrase has remained uncited for so long. The relatively recent digitization of manuscript material by Livingstone Online and of edited volumes by Google Books has expedited this process. The original letter in its manuscript, edited-for-print, and digital forms not only illuminates Livingstone’s editorial practice but also radically shifts interpretations of Livingstone and his stance towards Africans, especially those who witnessed his lantern shows. In this revisionary work, digital access to this material demonstrates the need for increased attention to physical artifacts, including manuscripts and magic lanterns, as windows through which to study nineteenth-century history.
[1] I offer a more detailed account of Reverend Smithurst’s magic lantern shows in “Reverend Smithurst’s Wishlist.” The Magic Lantern. Journal for the Magic Lantern Society of the UK. Fall 2018, p 14.
[2] Reverend Smithurst, Letter to Daniel Coats, Esq. 29 December 1845. CMS/B/OMS/C C1 063/30 p4. Church Missionary Society Archives, University of Birmingham Special Collections.
[3] Reverend Smithurst, Letter to Rev. Henry Venn, 28 November 1850. CMS/B/OMS/C C1 063/65. Church Missionary Society Archives, University of Birmingham Special Collections.
[4] Smithurst describes the lantern show as educational entertainment in his letter to Daniel Coates (29 December 1845, p4). He describes the slides that he received as “wretched daubs.” See Reverend Smithurst, Letter to Daniel Coats, Esq. 18 November 1846. CMS/B/OMS/C C1 063 p3. Church Missionary Society Archives, University of Birmingham Special Collections.
[5] Tarzan is not the only film to represent a magic lantern within an educational setting. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Professor Snape supplements his lecture on werewolves with projected images. The sequence of cave paintings, ancient Egyptian friezes, Greek vases, Roman mosaics, and Michelangelo-esque sketches parody the art-history lecture. The mechanism that he uses to project these images closely resembles German circular slides, including this example at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.
[6] Livingstone, David, 1813-1873. "Letter to William Thompson, 13 September 1855." CWM/LMS/Livingstone Wooden Box, item 88. University of London. School of Oriental and African Studies. Accessed via Livingstone Online. Adrian S. Wisnicki and Megan Ward, dirs. 2019. Web. 20 February 2019. pp 8-9. To view the letter, click this link and then remove the header.
[7] Livingstone’s Missionary Correspondence 1841-1856. Edited by Isaac Schapera, University of California Press, 1961. p 282.
[8] T. Jack Thompson. Light on Darkness?: Missionary Photography of Africa in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Eerdmans, 2012. Studies in the History of Christian Missions.
[9] Steve Humphries. Victorian Britain Through the Magic Lantern. Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, 1989. and “Missions and the Magic Lantern.” International Bulletin of Mission Research. January 1, 1997. pp. 13-15.
[10] “David Livingstone’s Magic Lantern, United Kingdom.” Trophies, Relics, and Curios? Missionary Heritage from Africa and the Pacific. Edited by Karen Jacobs, Chantal Knowles, and Chris Wingfield. Sidestone Press, 2015. pp 95-97.
[11] John M. MacKenzie, ed. David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996.
[12] Tim Jeal. Livingstone: Revised and Expanded Edition. Yale University Press, 2013.
[13] James Ryan. Picturing Empire: Photography and the visualization of the British Empire. University of Chicago Press, 1997.
[14] Ann C. Colley. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination. Ashgate, 2004.
[15] Catherine Hall. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867. University of Chicago Press, 2002. and Susan Thorne. Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England. Stanford University Press, 1999.
