MM #28: Visual Glossary
Mabel glosses over the panorama and planchette
I recently noticed that I’ve started two whole newsletters on Substack with a variation of the phrase: “If you’ve been living under a rock” (one about the artist Mary Sully and the other about the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre). I humbly ask for your forgiveness, because I have to do it again…
IF YOU LIVE UNDER A ROCK, AND ONLY IF YOU LIVE UNDER A ROCK, PERHAPS YOU DON’T KNOW THAT MANDYLION HAS TWO NEW BOOKS COMING OUT ON MARCH 18!
Madeline and I couldn’t be more thrilled about the release of One or Two and The Morgesons. The product of countless months of love and labor—these books join the Mandylion canon of obscure, overlooked, and excellent nineteenth-century novels. H.D. Everett’s One or Two (1907) is a metaphysical thriller following Frances Bethune on her occult journey to lose weight. Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons (1862) is a brutally frank bildungsroman narrated by Cassandra Morgeson, a heartbreaker who sends men to their deaths and is obsessed with her sister Veronica. Preorder your copies now on our website, or shop at your local bookstore on March 18! We are now proudly distributed by Artbook, which means our books will be in stores all around the country…and perhaps the world!
Elizabeth Stoddard was born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts in 1823, the daughter of Wilson Barstow, a shipbuilder who constructed the whaler that Herman Melville sailed to the Pacific. The arc of Stoddard’s life followed that of her heroine. Cassandra is also a daughter of coastal Massachusetts. Her life is shaped by the ebb and flow of her father’s fortunes in a mercurial business. She and her sister Veronica watch for ships returning from whaling journeys, counting how many sailors survived the high seas. While Cassandra’s profound sibling relationship is with Veronica, Stoddard’s was with her brother Wilson. She left Massachusetts in her twenties, following Wilson to New York. From the Big Apple, he hatched a plan to head west to California. By that point, Elizabeth was already entangled with Richard Henry Stoddard, a poet less famous today for his writing and more for the company he kept. Richard referred Melville for a job in the U.S. Customs House, after having secured a position there by referral of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Though devoted to her brother, Elizabeth stayed in New York and became enmeshed in Richard’s literary world.
Our edition of The Morgesons features a preface written by Stoddard in 1901. Reflecting on her debut novel forty years after its publication, Stoddard describes her emergence as a writer with wry reverence. Of her childhood in a New England whaling town, Stoddard notes that she knew little of writing or writers. It was not until she moved to New York that she came “to live among those who made books.” In explaining her journey from what she calls “profound ignorance” to professional writer, Stoddard references two of my favorite nineteenth-century technologies: panoramas and planchettes. Looking back on her childhood, Stoddard wonders how she thought about the world before “literature and the literary life”: “Where then was the panorama of my stories and novels stored, that was unrolled in my new sphere?” She then writes of the mystical forces that compelled her to start writing:
“One day when my husband was sitting at the receipt of customs, for he had obtained a modest appointment, I sat by a little desk, where my portfolio lay open. A pen was near, which I took up, and it began to write, wildly like “Planchette” upon her board, or like a kitten clutching a ball of yarn fearfully.”
When you pick up your copy of The Morgesons next month, you’ll find numbers hovering in the margins. The numbers guide you to the back of the book, where you’ll find something called the Visual Glossary. A new feature of Mandylion editions, the Visual Glossary is a compendium of unique images tethered to the novel’s text that illustrate the visual, material, and affective context of the novel.
The Visual Glossary targets both our most literary readers, those who might be less familiar with nineteenth-century material culture—as well as our visual learners, who are liable to skip careful reading in lieu of studying the Visual Glossary in search of a collaged gestalt image of the book. In short, the Visual Glossary is for everyone, and embodies some of the core tenets of Mandylion Press: to make books that are visual and material objects that inspire readers to think about the past in literary, art historical, and human contexts. I am so excited for you to get your hands on these books so you can read and see what they are all about. Ahead of that, I thought it would be fun to offer a preview of The Morgesons’ visual glossary, which includes an image of both the panorama (first row, left) and planchette (third row, left).
The panorama was invented in the late eighteenth-century by Robert Barker (1739-1806), an Irish painter who displayed his vast landscape paintings in the round, providing people with 360-degree views of the sites he depicted. Panoramas became a major visual spectacle of the nineteenth century, allowing observers for the first time to enter into the space of a painting. Rather than standing statically before a frame, panorama-visitors summited viewing platforms upon which they could take in a breathtaking view that would normally only be available to someone who had climbed a mountain or visited a remote wilderness or distant metropolis. Stephan Oettermann writes in The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1997) that panoramas represented a growing cultural interest in
“achieving a cool and level-headed view of things, a view unclouded either by subjectivity or physical frailty… The panorama is both a part of this process of transforming human vision and a product of it; as an art form, it is a response to a way of seeing that its viewers are already presumed to have, while at the same time it instructs them how to see in this manner” (13).
Panoramas were displayed in purpose-built structures equipped with viewing platforms and strategic lighting that added to the lifelike quality of the paintings. The image in the Visual Glossary is of London’s Rotunda, designed by Scottish architect Robert Mitchell and built in Leicester Square to display Barker’s panoramas.
Though asking me to choose my favorite room at the Met is like asking me to choose which of my (nonexistent) children I love the most, I tend to respond to this FAQ by naming John Vanderlyn’s panorama of the gardens of Versailles. Housed in an out-of-the-way round room in the American Wing, the Vanderlyn panorama allows you to literally step into the nineteenth century. John Vanderlyn (1775-1852) was a minor painter from Kingston, New York who traveled to France in 1814. Stationing himself in the center of Versailles’s gardens, Vanderlyn used a camera obscura to create exact sketches of what he saw. Upon his return to the United States, Vanderlyn created a 165-foot-wide painting that meticulously transcribes the view of Versailles visible from the edge of the Parterre d’Eau: the Latona Fountain, the seemingly infinite Grand Canal, and the facade of the Hall of Mirrors. Vanderlyn displayed the Versailles panorama at New York’s Rotunda. A product of Vanderlyn’s collaboration with New York City government officials, the Rotunda was one of the first buildings built specifically for the display of art in the city. Though panoramas would come to be associated with other forms of mass entertainment like the circus and fair, Vanderlyn believed that panoramic paintings were the high art medium of the future and would elevate the study and appreciation of the arts in the United States. Despite the artist’s faith in his mission, the Rotunda was a financial failure. In its first year, ticket sales yielded $1,240, while Vanderlyn had spent $2,000 to create the painting. In 1820, Vanderlyn traveled the panorama to Philadelphia, thus beginning the painting’s peripatetic trajectory: from city to city for temporary displays until the 1850s, and then to storage first in a barn, and then in the attic of the Ulster County Courthouse. In the 1950s, the Met acquired the panorama, though it was not fully restored until the 1980s. Conservators spent years piecing together the panorama, which had been slashed into more manageable panels, and removed a century’s worth of grime from its surface. We are all the proud inheritors of their work. I love this thing!! Here’s me pointing out to my dad how Vanderlyn painted himself into the panorama:
Elizabeth Stoddard’s reference to the panorama attests to the optical technology’s domination of the nineteenth-century imagination. Stoddard was born just a few years after Vanderlyn took his Versailles panorama on tour around the United States. Writing at the end of her life at the turn of the century, Stoddard utilized the panorama as a metaphor for understanding her own mind. Where then was the panorama of my stories and novels stored, that was unrolled in my new sphere? The history of Vanderlyn’s Versailles panorama proves just how difficult it is to roll and unroll a panorama painting. I love the material realness of her phrasing, and I love the way that contemporary technology informs how we understand the world. People often refer to memories as being stored in filing cabinets somewhere in their minds. Filing cabinets were invented at the end of the nineteenth century, as Craig Robertson covers in this essay in Places Journal, so the concept of the mental filing cabinet might not have been on Stoddard’s radar in 1901. That’s okay, because I much prefer a mental panorama.
Stoddard further embeds herself in her time when she writes, later in the preface, “A pen was near, which I took up, and it began to write, wildly like “Planchette” upon her board.” As my friends may know, my mother gave me a Ouija board for my 29th birthday. Ouija boards always come equipped with a planchette, a heart-shaped device with a viewing window that communicates messages as paranormal forces (or your hands) move it across a board printed with letters and numbers. This version of the planchette is actually a later evolution of the device. In the mid-nineteenth century, the planchette was introduced to the world with a slot for a pencil. The Visual Glossary features the title page of Revelations of the Great Modern Mystery, Planchette, and Theories Respecting It (1868), published by G.W. Cottrell.
The author explains, “The earliest known of Planchette was in the monasteries of France, soon after the celebrated ‘Rochester Knockings,’ in the year of 1848.” The Rochester Knockings refers to the Fox Sisters. In 1848, eleven-year old Catherine (Kate) and fifteen-year old Margaretta (Maggie) Fox began claiming that spirits communicated with them by rapping against the walls and furniture of their parents’ home in Hydesville, New York. In the aftermath of these wild claims, the younger sisters were sent to stay with their older sister Leah in Rochester, a well-established hotbed of religious fanaticism and experimentation. People in Rochester latched onto the Fox sisters’ claims, which helped give birth to the Spiritualist movement. Kate and Maggie, managed by Leah, began successful careers as spiritual mediums (in the 1880s, Maggie claimed that the rappings were a hoax). Planchettes were a favored instrument of the Spiritualist movement, as they helped articulate the thin boundary between the human and spirit worlds.
Stoddard’s reference to the planchette contextualizes The Morgesons in its historical moment, as well as captures the mystical quality that makes the novel so special. Though I acknowledge that the book is clearly the product of Stoddard’s hard work and genius, there is also something divine and strange about it, as if it really could have been written by spirits via a planchette board.
I could go on telling miniature histories inspired by each image in the Visual Glossary, but I’ll conclude here. When you receive your books next month, I hope they inspire you to look closely, and to think deeply about each word and image. The Morgesons and One or Two overflow with nineteenth-century histories to tell, discover, and share, all of which have the potential to unlock profound truths about our own time. Plus, they’re fun and cute and don’t forget to preorder your copies now. Xo!
i’m sure that Elizabeth’s radar wasn’t working yet for finding new fangled filing cabinets in 1901 as mental metaphors outpace us
will pre order asap