Pepper’s Ghost was
a famous visual illusion which astonished the Victorian public before the
invention of cinema. It was created by John Henry Pepper and Henry Dircks and
the Ghost first appeared at the
Royal Polytechnic Institution on 24 December 1858.
The link to our
area is that John Henry Pepper lived at two addresses in Kilburn from 1856 to
about 1871.
He was born on 21 June 1821 at 7 Great Queen Street Holborn,
the son of Charles Bailey Pepper, a civil engineer. John Henry was educated at
King’s College School and then became a pupil of the chemist John Thomas Cooper
at the Russell Institution. In 1840, at age of 19 he was appointed assistant lecturer
at the Granger School of Medicine. Five years later he married Mary Ann
Benwell. They had no children of their own, but adopted Mary’s nephew William
Henry Welsh, who worked with Pepper as his assistant.
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| John Henry Pepper, c1870 |
Pepper was a
very good speaker, and in 1847 he gave his first lecture at the Royal
Polytechnic Institution, 309 Regent
Street. The following year he was appointed analytical chemist and lecturer
there.
In the summer
of 1851 the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, was held
in the specially constructed Crystal Place in Hyde Park. The brain child of
Prince Albert, it was a huge success and attracted six million visitors between
May and October. The profits were used to buy land in South Kensington and
construct the museums there.
The Exhibition created a public interest in science and
technology which Pepper was able to use to attract visitors to the Polytechnic.
It was a pioneering venue for the popularisation of science, but also a place
of popular entertainment. The one shilling admission gave access to all areas, including
demonstrations of glass blowing, to popular lectures on serious subjects, a
diving bell and burlesque entertainments including Christmas pantomimes.
The Diving Bell was made from three tons of cast iron. It
was open at the bottom and air was pumped in from tubes in the top. Then the excited
visitors were lowered into the 10,000-gallon tank of water.
There was a knocker (shown above on the left) for use in emergencies when the tank could be emptied in less than a
minute.
The lecturers like Pepper, who were given the honorary title
‘Professor’, moved between the Great Hall and the two theatres, presenting lectures
to students, directing laboratory work, and delivering popular talks to the
general audience on scientific or topical subjects.
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| The Great Hall |
In 1854 Pepper became the manager and sole lessee of the Polytechnic. He had to
generate income with a string of novel features to attract the fickle Victorian
audience. These included travelogues, model theatres, harps that seemed to play
themselves, and Signor Buono Core, ‘The Italian Salamander’, who walked through
flames in his specially made suit.
In May 1855 Queen
Victoria and Prince Albert visited the Polytechnic. During a chemical
experiment Pepper said, using his best lecturer’s voice, ‘The oxygen and
hydrogen will now have the honour of combining before your Majesty.’
He gave
popular lectures on fermentation, the detection of poisons, and the process of
how coal went from the mines to homes. Pepper was a scientist, but his appeal
to the public was as a showman and there was a little bit of Barnum in
everything he did.
Henry Dircks was a Liverpool engineer living in Blackheath.
In September 1858 he read a paper
at the British Association in Leeds about an apparatus for producing ‘special
optical illusions’. Dircks’ invention was based on the observation that under
certain circumstances, a pane of glass could both transmit and reflect light.
He approached several large London theatres with the idea but was rejected,
because the image could only be seen by a few people placed in an upper
gallery, and only by daylight.
In the autumn of 1862 Dircks showed Pepper a model of how
the effect worked. Pepper was intrigued and realised that it could be given a
more practical form by tilting the glass forwards. The audience now no longer
had to be positioned on a raised platform, and the actor playing the ghost
could be concealed under the stage.
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| How the effect worked |
Using Pepper’s modifications, the ‘Ghost’ was shown at the
Polytechnic in an illustration of Dickens’s ‘Haunted Man’ just before Christmas
in 1858 to an invited audience of literary and scientific friends. It was an
instant success and drew gasps of astonishment at the three-dimensional transparent
figure.
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| Illustration of the ‘Spectre drama' with the Ghost on the left |
Pepper advertised it to the public in January 1863 and it
quickly became a major attraction. In 15 months, it drew a quarter of a million visitors to the Polytechnic and generated
a revenue of £12,000 (worth about £1.2M today). Pepper licensed the effect to
theatres around the country, Paris and New York.
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| Poster of the Ghost at the Polytechnic |
Unfortunately, the men fell out: Dircks thought he’d been shabbily treated, and bitterly resented the lack of personal recognition as inventor. He wrote a book of 102 pages explaining the effect without ever mentioning Pepper, as a way of showing how Dircks name had disappeared. In December 1871 Dircks took out a case against Pepper in the Chancery Court, but he lost and had to pay the costs.
In March 1872
after a disagreement with the governing body of the Polytechnic over his
autonomy, Pepper resigned and transferred the exhibit to the Egyptian Hall,
Piccadilly, but he lost money. To
recoup his loses, from 1874 to 1878, Pepper travelled with the show to America
and Canada. He returned briefly to the Polytechnic and performed what he called
‘metempsychosis’ illusions, including one where he turned oranges into pots of
marmalade which were given to the audience.
In June 1879
he sailed with his wife Mary Ann and adopted nephew William, to Australia,
arriving in Melbourne on the ‘Lusitania’, on 8 July. They toured the country
with the show for several years. From 1881 to 1889, he settled as a
public analyst in Ashgrove, Brisbane.
In 1882 during a drought, he announced
that he was going to draw rain
from the clouds by means of a gigantic kite, rockets and explosions with
dynamite and cannon fire. The large crowds laughed and jeered when the numerous
attempts failed to produce rain and Pepper was upset by the public reaction. He
later opened a laboratory in Brisbane where he taught students classes in
chemistry.
In 1889 Pepper returned to England and Quintin Hogg, the businessman and philanthropist, who had
bought the Polytechnic, invited him to show the Ghost for 15 days beginning on Boxing
Day. But it failed to appeal to the public. The muted response underlined the
fact that the Polytechnic had lost its way. It could not compete on scale or
expense with the shows in the London theatres. Pepper decided to retire.
The original Polytechnic
was rebuilt in 1910 to 1912. It housed Quintin Grammar School in part of the
building from 1948 to 1969 until it moved and merged to become Quintin-Kynaston
School in St John’s Wood. In 1970 the Regent Street building became the
Polytechnic of Central London and then part of the University of Westminster
from 1992.
The homes of John Henry Pepper
In the 1851 census, Mr H. Pepper, aged 29, Professor of Chemistry
at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, is shown living at 8 Regents Park
Terrace.
By 1856 he moved to 'Morton House' in Kilburn Priory, this was
later renumbered as 136 Maida Vale. It is an interesting coincidence that
William Friese-Greene, the pioneer of cinema, also lived here from 1888 to
1891. It was demolished and replaced by a small block of flats called Friese
Greene House in April 1997.
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| 136 Maida Vale dwarfed and empty, just before demolition in 1997 |
From 1864 to at least 1871 Pepper lived at 61 Boundary Road which was renumbered as 68
(now demolished).
He later moved to ‘Ferndale’
3 Roseberry Road, Clapham Park in South
London where Mary Ann died in December 1889. She was buried in Norwood
Cemetery aged 71.
In 1897 Pepper secondly married Janet Titlow in West Ham. He
died on 25 March 1900 at ‘Ifield Villa’ 55 Colworth Road, Leytonstone and was
buried at Norwood Cemetery, aged 79.
The Ghost involved a magic lantern and slides to project the
images.
Edmund Wilkie
Wilkie was
one of the leading artists who produced hand-painted lantern slides. He made
elaborate slides with moving and dissolving effects. Born in Bethnal Green in
1857, Wilkie lived at 114 Maygrove Road in West Hampstead from about 1885 to
1912. He invested in property and by 1895 he owned a run of five properties in
the road including his own house. Wilkie moved to 70 Dyne Road Kilburn, where
he died in March 1935. He left £9,140 (worth about £625,000 today) to his son
Reginald.
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| Edmund Wilkie, 1897 |
Wilkie was
given his first magic lantern at the age of six and became fascinated. By the
time he was sixteen he was giving public shows, and from 1872 worked at the
Royal Polytechnic for Professor Pepper. He set up a retail business selling
lanterns and slides from his home in Maygrove Road. He was a strong advocate
of hand painted slides even when photography became predominantly used for
slides.
West Hampstead Lanternists
In the 1890s and early part of the 20th century several
other magic lantern users and lecturers, who were members of the National
Society of Lanternists, lived in West Hampstead. These were Harold Armytage
Sanders at 38 Pandora Road, Charles Schomberg, 10 Narcissus Road, Charles
Robinson, 41 Sumatra Road, Henry Abbott, 48 Sumatra Road, and Gustavus
Havinden, 43 Cavendish Road Kilburn.
The legacy of ‘The Ghost’
Today a variation of Pepper’s Ghost is used at The Haunted
Mansion in the Disney theme parks. The same principle is used in the TV
teleprompter which projects the script onto a screen in front of the lens.
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