A rare broadside advertising a dynamic dramatisation of Sir William Parry’s 1824-25 expedition to the Arctic in HMS Hecla and Fury.
Whilst the left-hand side of the playbill comprises a running order of the evening’s entertainments, opening with “Otway’s Tragedy of Venice Preserved” and followed by a “new grand comic pantomime, called Harlequin, and Cock Robin: or Vulcan & Venus”, the right-hand column offers a detailed explanation of the headline event: Roberts’ Moving Diorama. The thirteen-point description opens at Deptford, with a gratuitous inclusion of the prison ship Discovery (previously used by George Vancouver), via Greenwich and Gravesend to the Nore. The next scene sees the the Hecla and Fury off Cape Farewell, then in the Hudson’s Bay, where the attraction features “Esquimaux Indians with their sledges”. After Baffin Bay the ships are “surrounded by Ice-Bergs off Melville Island”, naturally followed by the “Total loss of the Fury”, when in July 1825 the ship was crushed against the Nunavut shore of Prince Regent Inlet, at a spot which became known as Fury Beach. The final point on the list sees the “arrival of the Hecla in the Bay of Jeddo, (Capital of the Japan Islands,) from the Terrace of the Emperor’s Palace.” Whilst the other scenes do hold true to the facts of the expedition, this stop in Japan is pure fantasy. It’s possible that from a theatrical standpoint, the temptation to insert a visually dynamic finale in the bay of Tokyo was simply too great.
The artist behind the spectacle, David Roberts RA (1796-1854) was a renowned theatre set painter in the 1830s, who had only recently turned his hand to panoramas. He would in the decade which followed travel extensively through the Near and Middle East, and is best remembered for his grand suite of 247 lithographs, The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia (1842-49).
The panorama would have been mounted on an enormous spool device, allowing for the contiguous painted strip of scenes to be in motion as the narrative unfolded. This would in some cases be accompanied by live actors or a narrator, as well as dramatic use of stage lighting. The fashion for such trompe-lœil staging technology is attributed to the innovations of French photography pioneer L.J.M. Daguerre. His 1822 Paris diorama employed cleverly arranged transparent layers of paintings which could be lit in such a way as to create varying illusions of depth. The public were captivated by such pre-cursors to the moving picture, and “the clamour for realism in stagecraft had become an obsession; pure spectacle threatened to thrust drama from the boards as mechanical tricks and optical illusions vied with actors for public approbation” so much so that “even the two patent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, in an effort to attract the patronage of an audience which had lost interest in the legitimate theatre, padded their programs with moving dioramas” (Stempel, 555).
Parry’s narrative of this expedition Journal of a Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific was published in 1826, the illustrations to which which may well have served to inspire Roberts in his development of this panorama. We have traced two other broadsides advertising this production at the Theatre Royal, dated 26th and 30th December (held at NLS and Libraries and Archives Canada), indicating it was in situ for at least a month, perhaps the icy vistas serving as a seasonal winter offering. The Arctic was at the forefront of the London public’s mind once again in 1829 when Sir John Ross embarked for the north from the Thames in the steamer Victory. In 1834 Robert Burford would develop an even grander polar panorama of Ross’s own voyage in his panopticon theatre at Leicester Square.
OCLC finds one copy only at Dartmouth.
Stempel, D., “Browning’s Sordello: The Art of the Makers-See” in PMLA Vol 80, No. 5, (Dec 1969), pp. 554-561.
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