A spooky show down at the library
IT was the kind of thing, you can imagine, that made a chill run through you even on a warm summer’s day.
That strange juxtaposition of the familiar and the disconcerting, and worth every penny of three bob – for the best seats – you hope.
This is a smashing scrap out of the history of the old library in Ocean Road in Shields.
As mentioned yesterday, this Saturday is National Libraries Day and, among other events, there’s to be a display, Chapters: Aspects of the History of our Local Libraries, at South Shields Library to mark the occasion.
The poster here goes back to the era when the first floor of the Ocean Road premises was a public hall, which eventually closed in 1897 to make way for the reference library and museum that many older readers will probably still be able to remember.
The hall, with a platform across the east end and a gallery across the west end, was the venue for numerous events, among them political meetings, lectures, balls, public teas and entertainments. In the summer of 1880, as you see here, it hosted Gompertz’s Spectroscope and Spectral Opera Company. Its speciality was illusions created by what was known as Pepper’s Ghost.
This was a technique used in theatres and in some magic tricks, whereby plate glass and special lighting techniques could be made to make objects seem to appear or disappear, or seem transparent.
John Pepper, a chemist, was a lecturer at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in London.
He had developed his ‘ghost’ from the ideas of inventor Henry Dircks, who had conceived the technique for use in the popular Victorian entertainment, the phantasmagoria.
Pepper reportedly first showed the effect during a scene in Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man.
It doesn’t appear to have been a cheap entertainment: three shillings, today, would be more than £7.
But as “carriages” were at “5.10pm and 10.10pm” – isn’t that lovely? – you seem to have got a good two hours-worth of entertainment for your money.
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Thursday 17 May 2012
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