‘Dissolving Spectators: Lantern History and the Royal Polytechnic Institution’

Abstract

There appear to be very few descriptions and drawings of lantern slides projected at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, compared with accounts and depictions of other kinds of magic lantern show. This paper asks firstly why this is so, and then goes on to ask what kind of historiography we need to reconstruct the events based on a paucity of evidence and what we might learn about the Royal Polytechnic's lantern spectaculars through this historiography.