“Depuis que ce petit article a paru dans les journaux anglais, notre ami, M. Pepper, est venu installer à Paris, au théâtre impérial du Châtelet, le mystérieux appareil avec lequel il réalise ses apparitions fantastiques. De son côté, M. Robin a inauguré, samedi dernier, dans la salle déjà si fréquentée du faubourg du Temple, ses représentations de spectres vivants impalpables. L’attention publique étant ainsi vivement excitée, il nous semble que le moment est venu de rappeler l’article suivant inséré par nous dans le Cosmos de 1858, tome XIII, p. 563, et qui ne fut pas assez remarqué, parce que le moment n’était sans doute pas venu:—

“‘Fantômes optiques.—MM. Dircks et Pepper ont inventé une charmante disposition optique à l’aide de laquelle il fait apparaître des spectres et produit des illusions singulières. Il partage en deux compartiments, par une large glace sans tain, comme on en fait beaucoup aujourd’hui, la salle dans laquelle la scène doit se jouer. Dans le premier compartiment, en avant, il place les acteurs dont on ne devra voir que les images, destinées à représenter les spectres ou revenants; dans le second compartiment, à droite, il installe les acteurs qui devront être vus en personne; les spectateurs sont installés dans l’obscurité, au-dessus du premier compartiment en avant. Dans cette disposition, évidemment, si la scène commence, les spectateurs verront directement, à travers la glace, les acteurs du second compartiment; ils verront par réflexion seulement, ou dans leurs images formées au sein du premier compartiment et mêlés aux acteurs vus en personne, les acteurs situés au-dessous d’eux, dans le premier compartiment. Ces images refléchies, beaucoup moins lumineuses, feront l’effet d’ombres vivantes, d’êtres revenus de l’autre monde; on pourra les faire avancer, rétrograder, sortir ou rentrer à travers les murs, en faisant varier la distance à la glace des acteurs qu’elles représentent, et l’on obtiendra des effets vraiment extraordinaires. C’est assurément une excellente idée.’

“C’est bien aussi là le secret de ces photographes spirites dont l’Amérique a eu l’initiative et qui ont tant fait de bruit.”

And now Mr. Dircks, who had hitherto been most friendly to me, began to be otherwise, and to write me offensive letters, which I forbear to publish. Every morning and evening at the Royal Polytechnic I mentioned his name as a co-inventor. The daily programme always contained his name, and I can appeal to numbers who know me well that I have never attempted to borrow other people’s honours from them, and if a discovery was made always gave to the person making it full credit for the same. It is certain that Dircks’ apparatus was comparatively useless and that he knew nothing of the use of my double stage, and in fact the Solicitor-General, Sir Roundell Palmer, declined to grant a patent on Dircks’ crude idea, as it was only when he understood the great improvement made by the use of the double stage and the employment of the electric light that he granted (as stated in the copy of the advertisement) at the third hearing the Ghost Patent which the Lord Chancellor subsequently ordered to be sealed after great opposition made by several Music Hall proprietors. It is a very curious fact that the original model which Horne, Thornthwaite and Wood sent me was stolen by some person, who in my absence gave a fictitious verbal order as if from the firm named, and I never saw it again. The thief could not, however, have derived much benefit from the robbery, as the model was more likely to lead the possessor in the wrong than the right direction. I suppose the model went to America or Australia, as my imitators in those countries mostly made a terrible fiasco of the ghost when they first attempted to show it.

The following notice by a newspaper, of which unfortunately the name was cut off and lost, gives a very fair criticism on the ghost and its inventors:—

THE PATENT GHOST.

“Modern researches in Spiritualism have led to one practical result—the discovery of a ghost. Not of an ordinary old-fashioned ghost, appearing in the midnight hour to people with a weak digestion, haunting graveyards and old country mansions, and inspiring romance-writers into the mischief of three-volume novels; but of a well-behaved, steady, regular, and respectable ghost, going through a prescribed round of duties, punctual to the minute—a Patent Ghost, in fact. This admirable ghost is the offspring of two fathers, of a learned member of the Society of Civil Engineers, Henry Dircks, Esq., and of Professor Pepper, of the Polytechnic. To Mr. Dircks belongs the honour of having invented him, or, as the disciples of Hegel would express it, evolved him from out of the depths of his own consciousness; and Professor Pepper has the merit of having improved him considerably, fitting him for the intercourse of mundane society, and even educating him for the stage. After having bowed to the public at the Polytechnic Institution, he some weeks ago made his début upon the boards of the Britannia Theatre, in a new and highly original drama, entitled, ‘The Widow and Orphans,—Faith, Hope, and Charity,’ in which piece he continues to present himself nightly to crowded audiences with the greatest imaginable success.

“Possibly, all Britons do not know where the Britannia Theatre is situated, and it may not be necessary, therefore, to state that it has its place in the metropolitan suburb of Hoxton, inhabited chiefly by toy-makers and doll-dressers, and marked under the letter N by the Postmaster-General. Sceptics may smile at the idea of a Patent Ghost making his first appearance in a neighbourhood so little fashionable, and so far removed from the residence of Master Home, commander-in-chief of spirits and mediums, and solicitor-general of demons, ghosts, and shadows of the universe. It is no mere accident; for it appears that there are good spiritual reasons why the ghost should have come out at Hoxton and nowhere else. Here, in this toy-making quarter, there lived, about a hundred years ago, a worthy citizen and officer of the Lord Mayor, Mr. Francis Bancroft, who was haunted all his life long with the one great idea that his body was predestined to arise visibly from the dead, and to wander over British earth in the shape of a tangible ghost. So deeply impressed was he with this belief that, while walking in the flesh, his chief object was to take measures towards insuring his safe and speedy resurrection. With considerable faith in the celebrated maxim of Luther’s active Roman antagonist, indulgence-selling Monk Tetzel:

citizen Bancroft took great care, during his mortal career, to accumulate a respectable amount of cash with the object of forming a bribe for the guardians of his body. Accordingly, in his will he left the sum of twenty-eight thousand pounds for the establishment of schools and almshouses, with this proviso, that his body should be ‘preserved within a shew glass’ in the church.”