研究人员与学生将会对这一资源非常喜爱。它描绘了1779－1930年间在美国、不列颠与欧洲的大众娱乐，向人们展示了这个世界是如何紧密互联的。其内容涉及“感觉、魔幻与唯灵论”，并以两个资源为基础内容：（1）感受超自然：英国Harry Price魔幻文学图书馆收藏的珍稀印刷资源；（2）Harry Ransom人文科学研究中心Houdini收藏中的魔幻剪贴薄的历史与相关资料。墨尔本大学的彼得?奥多博士撰写了详细的介绍论文，介绍了收藏的内容并对可以获得研究成果的领域进行了建议。
This innovative portal invites readers into the darkened halls, small backrooms and travelling venues that hosted everything from spectacular shows and bawdy burlesque, to the world of magic and spiritualist séances.
The Victorian Popular Culture portal is an essential resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This resource contains a wide range of source material relating to popular entertainment in America, Britain and Europe in the period from 1779 to 1930, and shows how interconnected these worlds were. As well as fascinating primary source material in the form of objects, printed books, ephemera, posters, photographs and playbills, the resource includes a number of tools to support teaching and research.
Period Covered
- 1779 - 1930
Highlights
- Rare books; periodicals aimed at industry and fans; hundreds of titles from the scarce popular series ‘Dicks’ Standard Plays’; posters and playbills; visual ephemera; and the marvellous archives of May Moore Duprez, the American music hall star who topped international bills with her ‘Jolly Little Dutch Girl’ act
- Strongly visual in focus, featuring hundreds of posters, postcards, photographs, cabinet cards and illustrations. There are also handbills, pamphlets, manuscripts, printed ephemera and memorabilia. Rare books, children’s literature and memoirs of celebrity showpeople complete the wide-ranging selection
- Remarkable video clips of original archive footage from the earliest days of cinema, from the renowned archival collections of the BFI National Archive
- Material from the unique Harry Houdini Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, comprising a number of his fascinating scrapbooks, packed with details concerning the stagecraft of performers such as Houdin, Maskelyne and Dr Merlin, as well as providing insights into his disputes with Arthur Conan Doyle and leading spiritualists
Source Archives
- Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter
- British Film Institute
- British Library
- Chetham's Library, Manchester
- Harry Price Library of Magical Literature
- Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas
- Malcolm Morley Theatre Library at Senate House, University of London
- May Moore Duprez Archive
- National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield
- The National Archives, UK
- Vauxhall Gardens Collection, Lambeth Archives
Material Types
- Rare books
- Moving images
- Periodicals
- Playbills and handbills
- Posters
- Prints
- Scrapbooks
- Photographs
- Programmes
- Pamphlets
- Ephemera such as ticket stubs, postcards, newspaper cuttings
- Songbooks
Subjects
- Stage magic and conjuring
- Levitation, escapology and illusion
- Card tricks and parlour magic
- Animal magnetism, mesmerism and hypnosis
- Psychic phenomena and parapsychology
- Séances, spirit writing and ghost hunting
- American and British circuses, including Barnum and Bailey; Adam Forepaugh; Sells-Floto and Ringling Bros
- Astley's Amphitheatre
- Freakshows
- General Tom Thumb
- Wild West shows, including Buffalo Bill
- Dime museums
- Barnum's American Museum
- Carnivals
- Fairgrounds
- Travelling shows and provincial entertainments
- Music hall, variety and vaudeville – from business and pleasure perspectives
- Pantomime
- Theatre, both legitimate and illegitimate (including periodicals aimed at industry and fans; rare books; and a huge range of the very scarce popular series ‘Dick’s Standard Plays’)
- Pleasure gardens, including Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens and Belle Vue Zoological Gardens, Manchester
- Public spectacles such as firework displays and ballooning
- Scientific and ‘educational’ exhibitions, including the Royal Polytechnic Institution, the Royal Panopticon and the Royal Aquarium
- Visual delights such as magic lantern shows and dioramas
- Early visual entertainment such as shadow play, optical illusions, metamorphic pictures and protean views
- Panoramas and dioramas
- Optical or philosophical toys
- Peepshows
- Magic lanterns and image projection
- Pioneers of cinema: Thomas Alva Edison, the Lumière Brothers, and Eadweard Muybridge
Early inventions such as the cinematograph, phonograph and zoopraxiscope - Emerging film industry
- The first film stars
- Original film footage from 1894-1926