After the Terror, Passing Scenes

This chapter investigates the situated meanings of Robertson's phantasmagoria: as a “philosophical collection” of artistic and scientific illusions; an urban attraction that incorporated local sites and recollections into its structures; and an apparatus of historical thought. It was crucial that Robertson's show unfolded in stages, as a discontinuous journey through practices of excursion, instruction, and theatricality. First, participants navigated urban space and religious architecture, finding paths from surrounding streets into the ravaged convent. Next, they perused an exhibition of optical illusions and experimental physics. Robertson itemized components of his show and suggested that threads of necromancy unite them, sustaining tension between archaic magic and enlightened science while implying their kinship. For historian David Jones such acts of cultural retrieval are definitive for Gothic genres, which innovate by reviving buried content and produce potent “trans-medial” fusions for the purposes of cultural commentary.