A little box of magic

Last weekend I found myself at a vintage fair in Perth's Salutation Hotel.  Horrendous Christmas music aside there was a wonderful array of stalls with all sorts of interesting things for sale.  A couple of nice vintage cameras caught my eye but lightness of wallet kept them where they were.  What I couldn't pass up however was a box of old magic lantern slides.

The magic lantern was an early type of image projector which in its simplest form consisted of a glass slide positioned between a candle and a lens.  The lantern would project a dim and fuzzy image on to a wall or sheet.  These devices built on thousands of years of experiments with projected images and paved the way for the development of photography and cinema many years later.

The Laterna Magica by Paul Sandby, 1760

As far as can be told, one of the first magic lantern demonstrations in the U.K. was witnessed on Sunday 19th August 1666 by diarist Samuel Pepys who wrote:

"Up and to my chamber, and there began to draw out fair and methodically my accounts of Tangier, in order to shew them to the Lords. But by and by comes by agreement Mr. Reeves, and after him Mr. Spong, and all day with them, both before and after dinner, till ten o’clock at night, upon opticke enquiries, he bringing me a frame he closes on, to see how the rays of light do cut one another, and in a darke room with smoake, which is very pretty. He did also bring a lanthorne with pictures in glasse, to make strange things appear on a wall, very pretty."

Three days later Pepys bought one of his own.

By the late 18th century elaborate horror shows were being staged, with devils, ghosts and wizards projected through a cloud of smoke by enterprising showmen. Come the following century small, cheap lanterns were available and the home entertainment system was born.

The slides I bought in Perth came in a sturdy wooden box with a leather strap and a brass securing arm at either end.  They seem to have been taken from at least two, possibly three, different sets.  The first set depicts a variety of scenes mainly of a gentleman riding very fast on horseback, the second some state occasion with soldiers in uniform and lavish carriages and another seemingly random slide of what appears to be a man pouring soup over his trousers.

These sets were often accompanied with some sort of reading, music, audience participation or a combination of all three.  Booklets were published with readings and direction for the showman as to which slide to project at which time.  I'd love to have an explanation of what's going on in these images, especially as several of the sets are incomplete, though I suspect in the case of the horse-riding gentleman this may be nothing more than a lengthy chase sequence.  The French Connection of its day perhaps.

The slides are all numbered, some with original figures painted on the glass, others with small stickers.  I have no idea how to go about dating them, though even in my ignorance there remains a surprising amount of enjoyment to be had from the single square slide of a dapper gent in polite company chucking his dinner over his lap.