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Verlagsinformation :: Publisher's information
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.
Modules
- Module I: Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic
- Module II: Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks
- Module III: Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment
- Module IV: Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema
Period Covered
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
Editorial Board
- Bryony Dixon, The British Film Institute National Archive
- Nadja Durbach, University of Utah
- Ann Featherstone, University of Manchester
- Peter Otto, University of Melbourne
- John Plunkett, University of Exeter
- Vanessa Toulmin, University of Sheffield
- Phil Wickham, Bill Douglas Cinema Museum
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
Key Features
- Contextual essays
- Interactive chronology
- Biographies and venues glossaries
- Image gallery that can be personalised for teaching and presentations
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