misplaced nostalgia – Pathetic Fallacy

Hang in there

Note: this is another companion essay to an episode of podcast, Sophomore Lit. Maybe listen to it before reading this?

Shortly after recording the most recent Sophomore Lit episode about Robert Westall’s young adult novel The Watch House (1977), guest host Ross Cleaver pointed me towards an online discussion about a magic lantern series called Our Life Boat Men. While most of the eight-slide series features scenes of rescues involving life boats, there is one slide that depicts a rescue using a rope line and pulley, the technique that Westall describes in his book.

“The Pulley.” Slide no. 7 from the series *Our Life-Boat Men*, W. Butcher & Sons, c. 1901.
Image from Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums.

Magic lanterns were a form of image projector popular in the 19th and early 20th century. The ability of curved glass to bend light was known from antiquity, with the earliest written reference appearing in Aristophanes’ The Clouds. Reading-stones (rounded glass magnifiers) and even spectacles were used in medieval times. But modern lenses as we know them started in the 17th and 18th century with the development of the telescope and the microscope. By the 19th century optics had become precise enough to sharply focus projected light. This development, along with increasingly bright light sources, such as gas and limelight, led to the commercial production and popularity of magic lanterns.

Butcher & Sons “Primus” magic lantern, c. 1890.

These projectors used glass slides that came in a variety of sizes upon which were the images to be projected. The first slides were hand-painted, but later, photographic techniques allowed for mass replication. At first, publishing companies mechanically transferred black line images to the slides, most commonly using decals; colors (if any) still had to be added by hand. But at the end of the 19th century chromolithography and semi-transparent inks made possible printing uniform editions of magic lantern slides, albeit with often imperfect registration of colors, as is evident from “The Pulley.”

The series Our Life-Boat Men was sold as a part of London-based W. Butcher & Son’s Junior Lecturer’s Series. While the slides themselves are undated, a 1901 advertisement lists Our Life-Boat Men as one of six “new” lithographic sets produced to be used with their Primus line of lanterns. Butcher & Sons aimed at a market of well-to-do home users, and their chromolithographic slides were relatively inexpensive when compared to ones designed for theatrical use—and yes, in the 19th century people did pay admission for the privilege of viewing still projections in darkened rooms.

Butcher and Sons — Advertisement for W. Butcher & Sons in *The Optical Magic Lantern Journal* and Photographic Enlarger, November 1901.

In Westall’s book, the book’s protagonist Anne is told of the techniques employed by the Victorian life-savers who used to work at the titular watch house. The port of the novel’s fictional town of Garmouth (based upon Westall’s hometown of Tynemouth) is bounded on its sides by shallows covered with mounds of rock, and in bad weather ships could beach themselves only a few hundred feet from shore. The watch house volunteers would shoot ropes to the ships using rockets and survivors could be drawn ashore using pulleys. As I mention on the podcast, when I read these passages—describing rescues carried out in the 1850’s—I was incredulous. It didn’t seem possible, especially with 19th-century rockets, to fire with such accuracy while dragging 20 pounds of rope (or more). But apparently this was a widely-used technique. The Shipwreck Centre & Maritime Museum of displays examples of the apparatuses that were employed.

RA Fig 2 — The Boxer rocket, developed in 1855, was a two-stage rescue rocket.
Image by Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In the slide “The Pulley” the intrepid hero is riding in a lifebuoy that is hitched to a hoist trolley—if something goes wrong, at least he has a flotation device. In his arms he appears to be holding a child wrapped in a tattered red blanket. The rescuer is lightly dressed for such cold weather, although he wears a sou’wester oilskin hat, which is standard rough weather maritime gear. There are narrative details that make me wonder. Why is the man barefoot? Is that standard practice, or did he loose his boots in the operation? He appears to have a strand of kelp trailing from one foot. Does this mean he’s grazing the water? Is he in danger of submerging? Come to think of it, how can the rope be staying that taut? Wouldn’t it dip with the weight of the passengers?

But mostly: Why can’t I stop obsessing over random bits of forgotten culture?

Safe & non-toxic

Back in the days when Halloween was primarily a night for kids to knock on doors to get stray change and popcorn balls; back before the holiday morphed into an excuse for young adults to dress as sexy versions of 90’s cartoons and get their slutty drink on; that is, back in the 70s, store-bought costumes were crap. They consisted of thin vacuum-formed plastic masks and silkscreened bodysuits which were made of a mystery fabric that was not quite muslin, not quite plastic, but 100% flammable. Eventually even this material was deemed too costly to produce and the suits were made entirely from vinyl, lending them all the drape of a deflated beach ball. These were the ubiquitous licensed character costumes made by Ben Cooper, inc., which, defying all reason, are highly collectable today. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

Ben Cooper brand costumes: bring them up the next time a Gen-Xer complains about how everything was better back when.

Of course, there were kids and parents who wished to avoid paying a whopping three bucks for commercially-produced outfits that were only marginally recognizable (owing to the fact that they had the characters’ names emblazoned on their chests). For the non-conformists, costumes of hoboes, pirates, ghosts, and mummies were good options because you could make them out of last year’s ratty clothes and sheets and felt and other bits of stuff lying around (toilet paper was often involved). But for the true weirdos, those who aspired to be something scary or gross for Halloween, there was only one game in town, and that was the Imagineering line of makeup and prosthetics. They were cheep, funky, grungy, and surprisingly effective, especially when it came to making gaping wounds and the like, and I loved them so much.

Instead of selling full costumes of specific characters, the Imagineering line consisted of theatrical building blocks you could mix and match. There were evil teeth and fake fingers. There was fake blood and tooth blackout. And there were small pallets of ingenious stage makeup, such as Scar Stuf™, a mixture of beeswax and cotton fibers that seemed like it couldn’t possibly work but which did in fact produce startlingly realistic scars, wounds, and other abrasions.

For much of my childhood I was limited to the pointy teeth and fake blood. I was not particularly flush as a kid, and while most items in the Imagineering line ran 50-75 cents, that was still a lot for me. Until one October—maybe ’78 or ’79—when I finally had some income of my own from delivering The Peoria Journal Star (afternoon edition). That year I finally splurged on a pair of Evil Eyes, the prosthetic eyes that GLOWED IN THE DARK. In light they were just a couple of ovals of plastic but in complete darkness, they were Fire from the Very Depths of Hhell. To maximize the glow effect, I would hold the plastic eyes under my reading lamp—a gooseneck 75 watt lamp clipped to the headboard of my top-level bunk bed—for about five minutes. Then I would run to the darkest place in the house (mostly under a blanket in my closet) and stare in horror at the glowing orbs until they faded into blackness. Of course, like all glow-in-the-dark toys, the magic was over far too soon, and the best effect could only be achieved by holding the eyes a long time as close as I could to the incandescent bulb, which was blisteringly hot. To save my fingertips, I took to placing the eyes on my bed and bending the lamp down as close as I could. One day I decided I would get the best glow ever by bringing the lamp down so that the hood touched my quilt and the bulb pressed against the eyes, shutting the precious lumens in entirely. Pleased with this set-up, I went off to get a snack before I would take the eyes into the dark.

Two hours later, my mother came into the living room where I was sitting reading and asked if I smelled something funny. My father also was alarmed. We walked down the hall and it became apparent that thin black smoke was coming out of my bedroom door. When we entered there was a cloudy, oily plume coming from under my lamp, which was still directly on my quilt. My father grabbed a sock to push away the lamp, which had deformed from the heat. We were greeted with a massive billow of inky miasma; and underneath, a soupy, sticky mess of plastic making tendrils from the bulb to the quilt, which now had a smoldering hole in one block. My shocked parents asked me what on Earth I had been doing and I was at a loss to explain myself. Secretly, all I could think of was if there were a way to block out the windows because holy hell, those goopy, melted eyes would’ve glowed like the sun.

The stream of warm impermanence

Strangely enough for a podcaster whose whole deal is revisiting high school assigned reading, very little of the plot of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) sticks in my memory. I know it involved a lot of wandering through the seedier parts of New York City, and that there was a lot of stuff about how phony adults are. There is one passage, though, that I remember clearly and think about often: a section where the novel’s runaway teen protagonist, Holden Caulfield, reflects on the enduring appeal of visits to the American Museum of Natural History. In particular, he describes the life-sized dioramas that—in his mind, at least—never change:

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they’re pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’s be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

In this passage, Holden is seemingly describing an actual diorama that was on display in the AMNH when Salinger wrote the book: a depiction of an Inuit woman ice fishing¹. The scene has been preserved in a guidebook photograph from 1911:

But in spite of Holden’s prediction of the display lasting “a hundred thousand” visits, just four years after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye the AMNH had replaced that diorama with another, reflecting the changing ethnography of the time:

“Polar Eskimo” installation at the American Museum of Natural History, 1955

Today, of course, neither of these dioramas are still installed, and the term “Eskimo” is considered both overly vague and possibly offensive. Arctic natives are now referred to by their nation names of Innuit or Yupik.

Exonyms aside, in this passage Holden expresses a common assumption: that museums are by definition static, fixed in time, and that the objects they display are and will always be definitive. For some, like Holden, this seeming changelessness is a source of comfort. Others may find the idea petrifying or morbid. For example, Bruce Dickinson of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden has criticized Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, claiming “Rock and roll music does not belong in a mausoleum […] It’s a living, breathing thing, and if you put it in a museum, then it’s dead.”

Pro or con, immutability is implicit in both Holden’s and Dickinson’s words. But in fact, Museums are in constant flux. Sometimes changes are little. When I was in graduate school in Art History, the nautical artist currently known as Fitz Henry Lane was called Fitz “Hugh” Lane. While art museums everywhere (inluding the Fitz Henry Lane House) have corrected their attributions, I still find myself using the old name out of habit². Some changes are enormous changes. When I visited the AMNH myself as a young child, the Roosevelt Hall—the grand entryway from Central Park West—did not feature its current display of mounted Barosaurus and Allosaurus skeletons battling. Instead it had a series of bronze statues of Nandi warriors hunting lions³, and the dinosaurs it did have on display on the fourth floor were still walking upright and dragging their tails behind them. And, of course, the most famous dinosaur on display then was the Brontosaurus. The skeleton was one of the first excavated by Earl Douglass at the fossil deposit that would be designated Dinosaur National Monument. I had a toy Brontosaurus that we bought at the museum; it was a mainstay of my childhood, although the tail eventually got chewed away by the dog. And by me.

Marx toys *Brontosaurus* (mold from 1955). This palaeontologically incorrect toy line is, like so much of my youth, highly collectible.

But as you probably know⁴, this skeleton was in fact a frankenfossil, an Apatosaurus whose missing skull was replaced with one from a Camarasaurus. When the skeleton was re-mounted in the 1990s to reflect new beliefs about the posture of dinosaurs (no more dragging tails) it was re-labeled as an Apatosaurus. Brontosauri were, in fact, no longer considered a genus. Except in 2015 they suddenly were real again. As Ramona Flowers put it, “Dude…”

change — Bryan Lee O’Malley, *Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour (Scott Pilgrim Vol.6)*, 2010

(Warning: Politics) Recently I’ve been thinking about Holden’s dioramas a lot these days in relation to the complaints President Tump has made regarding the Smithsonian Institution’s collections and exhibitions. Putting aside issues of the legality or propriety of the Administration attempting to set policy for an institution that is supposed to be independent of any branch of government, this the culture-wars approach to museums seems to me to be related to the assumption that museums are, or should be, the caretakers of singular, true and timeless narratives.

Museums should, and do, take their role as authorities of truth—or at least, of cultural significance—seriously. Non-specialists visit these institutions in part because they trust curators to know their stuff. Visitors want to be guided through subjects they care about but of which they know little. But curators, conservators, registrars, and others who do know a lot have are also aware of how knowledge is never complete. They design exhibitions to reflect the current state of scholarship, and scholarship—in both the sciences and in the humanities—is constantly questioning and re-evaluating what we think, and asking what has been overlooked, and what assumptions got us here. Truth isn’t a matter of supporting a specific set of beliefs, and the stories we tell—even about ourselves—change the more we know. (end politics)

Nonetheless, I get what Holden is on about. As this blog has documented again and again, I’m full of misplaced nostalgia, and that can express itself as a general aversion to change. I think I have the most nostalgia for things that I wasn’t even around for the first time. As a child, I would visit Youngstown, Ohio’s Mill Creek Park. This park had a nature center that was housed in a 19th Century stone building, and within this was a display of old museum objects, including a shelf full of small animals and plants preserved in large jars of formaldehyde, with their contents written on peeling gum labels in a shaky copperplate script.

biological samples — I couldn’t find any photos of Mill Creek Park’s samples, so instead enjoy this collection of engravings of the zoological preservations of Frederik Ruysch.

These jars both fascinated and horrified me, and they gave me a lifelong love for Victorian and Edwardian museology—stiff taxidermy, dovetail jointed display cases, hang tags, and all the rest. They represent a time when knowledge consisted entirely of collecting, categorizing, and cataloguing. I don’t know if these jars are still on display, but the fear that they may no longer be has kept me from revisiting the park as an adult⁵.

photo by Kasuga Aho, licensed as CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

My favorite archaic museum exhibit, however, is Mathematica: A World of Numbers… and Beyond. Created by the wonder couple Charles and Ray Eames in 1961, one of the traveling versions of the exhibition is still somehow improbably on display at Boston’s Museum of Science in this, the year of our Lord 2025. This wonder of Mid-Century design could just as well be housed in an art museum. It drips with the charm of 1950’s typography, pastiches of Victorian broadsheet design, and cool, elegant physical objects demonstrating probability, topography, and number theory. A highlight are the “peep show” videos that accompany the exhibition. Here are a few:

Maybe it’s the sheer artfulness of this exhibition that has convinced the Museum of Science to continue to devote to a portion of limited floorspace to its presentation. It could also be that the subject of Mathematica is seen as pretty permanently fixed. But even mathematics changes, and perhaps one day this exhibition will also find its Brontosaurus.

I’m not sure what Holden would make of this essay. Like many of my posts, it sort of chugs along and then stops when I run out of things to say. I guess I hope he would understand that nothing is ever the final word—not museums, not scholarship, and certainly not blogs.

Holden says that the figure is a man, but Holden is wrong about a lot of things. ↩︎
I also still haven’t heard a convincing explanation as to why it was “Hugh” in the first place. ↩︎
These statues, by taxidermist and big game hunter Carl Akeley (or perhaps a separate set of bronze castings), are still housed in Chicago’s Field Museum. ↩︎
Being the kind of nerd that reads my blog. ↩︎
Well, that and having to travel to Youngstown. ↩︎