Multilayered enactments of A Christmas Carol in magic lantern shows

This article examines the multilayered enactments of the visual, auditory, and dramatic features of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) through the medium of the magic lantern show in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It maps the complex processes by which the familiar story is translated into optical spectacles and reveals how they generate new interpretations. To illustrate these processes, the study analyses seven lantern versions of the story’s book illustrations, especially John Leech’s ‘Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball’. It shows how the removal of characters, shifts in perspective, and modifications to accompanying readings re-perform and transform the tale, imbuing it with authenticity and immediacy. Building on these pictorial transformations, life model slides (enabled by advances in photography) emulate the intra-iconic elements of illustrations, merge them with the extra-iconic embodied performances of models, and thereby layer these re-enactments. Artists, stage managers, photographers, and colouring assistants each contribute their own interpretations through interlocking practices, which blur the boundaries between extratextual and intratextual realms and engage audiences in immersive narrative experiences. To deliver a multimedia, multisensory experience, magic lantern performances of the fictional story were often clustered with other disparate attractions under unifying themes such as An Evening with Dickens. These optical presentations of Dickens’s biography and real-world locations, together with other pictorial, musical, and theatrical performances, reinscribe the medium’s polyvocal nature. By examining these performances, this article charts the iconic, photographic, and polyvocal enactments to demonstrate the evolution of the Christmas tale in Victorian and Edwardian lantern culture.