W.S. Gilbert, Amateur Photographer
In his later years, William S. Gilbert’s favorite hobbies were croquet and photography.
Of course, Gilbert wasn’t the only “shutter-bug” out there. During the 1880s, when he seems to have taken up the hobby, photography had become a popular pastime. Check out this PBS documentary on the subject.
The Kodak camera was introduced in May 1888. It was easy to use – Eastman’s advertising slogan was “You press the button, we do the rest.” On the down side, it cost a then-whopping $25 (still less than a wet-plate camera).
Everyone tried out the Kodak camera – President Grover Cleveland had one. Even the Dalai Lama had one, and brought his camera with him when he left Tibet for the first time.
By 1893, W. S. Gilbert included a song about Kodak cameras in the 13th of his 14 comic operas with Sullivan, Utopia Limited. The opera’s story is about the king of a South Seas island who decides to adopt modern English ways, including turning the country into a “company limited” according to the English “Companies Act” of 1862.
One of the songs contains this deft variation on the Kodak slogan:
Then all the crowd take down our looks
In pocket memorandum books.
To diagnose
Our modest pose
The Kodaks do their best:
If evidence you would possess
Of what is maiden bashfulness
You need a button press—
And we do the rest!
He also created an amusing little Bab cartoon about photography : “Modest Maidens Captured by Kodak”
Not only that, but a sweet little short story he wrote for Christmas 1885 is all centered around a camera and a photograph: The Story of a Dry Plate. Here’s the summary of the story from the Journal for Amateur Photographers, Vol. 29 “The Photographic News,” December 24, 1885
W S. Gilbert turns photography to novel and dramatic account in the short but effective “Story of a Dry Plate” (page 868) he tells this Christmas. The nature of his tale is briefly this. A young fellow falls deeply in love with a girl on board a P and O steamer; becomes her accepted lover and having a camera with him photographs her during the voyage on a dry plate, which, as he can find no conveniently dark place for its development, puts carefully by for future manipulation. In due time the steamer arrives at the Far East, he parts with his fiancée and on returning to England after a year or two of vicissitude, is horrified to hear of her shipwreck and death. Suddenly he bethinks him of his dry plate taken long ago, and now the only link between him and his lost love.
Then, in a powerfully written passage, Mr. Gilbert describes the eager anxiety and feverish caution with which the hero of the tale proceeds to shut himself into a darkened room and to effect what seems to him well-nigh like calling the dead back to life. With true dramatic art he is made to narrate the progress of the development and how at length, as every feature he had learned to love slowly appears on the plate, the door is excitedly opened and his valet rushes in, and ere he can hotly upbraid him for the irreparable mischief he has done, tells him the happy news that his fiancée was saved by a passing vessel from the wreck and is alive and well in London waiting to receive him. The story is very brief, but as with everything W. S. Gilbert writes it is distinctly original, whilst its purely technical photographic details lead us to suppose that the author of The Mikado is himself an amateur photographer. Be this as it may, he has certainly made a very interesting sketch out of his “dry plate.”
The Victorian era saw the beginnings of many of the technological advances that we enjoy today – telephones, audio recordings, electric lights, the postal service, railroads, and as discussed above, the camera.
However, it seems that movies came a little bit later than the Victorian era—but only a few years later. Recently, the Telegraph reported that the world’s first color film was invented by Englishman Edward Turner in about 1902. Check out this wonderfully restored bit of history here.
Are you surprised to learn of these early advances? Let me know in the comments.
