The female thermometer eighteenth centur 165

154 THE FEMALE THERMOMETER of course, the technology of phantasmagoric illusion, like that of the panorama, the bioscope, stereoscopic projection, and related nineteenth-century imagereproduction techniques, provided the inspiration for early cinematography A desire to give lifelike movement to the ghostly images of the magic lantern prompted Eadweard Muybridge, for example, to construct a "Zoopraxiscope," which projected some of the world's first moving pictures in 1882.20 In the end the phantasmagoria gave way to new kinds of mechanical representation Yet amid all the technological breakthroughs and the refinements in cinematic technique, the ghost-connection, interestingly enough, never entirely disappeared Well into the twentieth century motion-picture shows continued to be advertised in the manner of the old ghost-shows, and many early films, such as Georges Melies's, featured explicitly phantasmagorical illusions In various ways the new medium of motion pictures continued to acknowledge and reflect on its "spectral" nature and origins.21 We cannot conclude this brief history of the phantasmagoria without noting one final development—the popularization of do-it-yourself magic-lantern shows in the later decades of the nineteenth century At the same time that staged phantasmagoria became more and more elaborate, the basic technology of the magic lantern became increasingly accessible to ordinary people Middle-class Victorians began purchasing magic lanterns as toys and tabletop curiosities in the middle part of the century; books like The Magic Lantern: How to Buy and How to Use It, by "A Mere Phantom" (1866), containing a section on "How to Raise a Ghost," offered simple instructions for making "Parlour or Drawing-Room Phantasmagoria."22 Promoters liked to argue that the device "charmed away" the monotony of home life and brought parents and children together "How delightful," wrote "A Mere Phantom," "is one of those gatherings! where youth, infancy, and maturity are, for different reasons, equally interested in the mimic scenes so vividly presented; infancy charmed with the rapid change of form and colour and grotesque fun, and its infectious laughter echoed by young and old."23 A less sentimental—and more evocative—response to the new technology appears, however, in the opening pages of A la recherche du temps perdu: At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go to bed and lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centered Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come; and, after the fashion of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room, thanks to which, save for the torture of going to bed, it had become quite endurable Now I no longer