Underground Palaces and Castles in the Air: The Realms and Ruins of the Arabian Nights

Chapter 2 explores the use of the Arabian Nights as a familiar cultural narrative through which the burgeoning practices of archaeology, geology, geography and ethnography might be communicated. In this period, the imaginary voyage and adventures of the Arabian Nights, known since childhood, profoundly interacted with actual voyages above and below the ground, providing a narrative template for approaching new experiences that was already familiar to British readers. At the same time, this narrative strategy infused those emergent sciences with an enduring form of magic, or magical thinking, in the adult world, which informed processes of thinking about the physical laws of nature, the elements that comprise the globe, and new technological developments of the period. The magical possibilities and treasures of the Arabian Nights held an irresistible fascination for Western readers, who did not want to relinquish fully to the emergent discipline of science the potential meanings and possibilities of Eastern exploration.

‘For a time their world made mine’: Childhood Encounters with the Arabian Nights

This chapter focuses on acts of reading, and on the nature and circumstances of childhood encounters with the Arabian Nights in Britain, both as a collection of narratives and as a series of objects such as books, pictures, and toy theatres. Despite their association with the innocent joys of childhood throughout the nineteenth century, the tales of the Arabian Nights were neither written nor designed for children. It was their abiding attraction to children that led to their designation as children’s literature, and also to their continued use as metaphors for adult fantasies and constructions of childhood. As the time and space of childhood were increasingly associated with the time and space of these Oriental tales, the Arabian Nights came to operate not only as a souvenir of childhood, but as metonymic of childhood itself: exciting, unpredictable, and culturally and temporally other.

Introduction

Opening with an examination of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century modernity, the introduction argues that, faced with profound structural shifts, commentators of the period frequently deployed the language of magic and the Arabian Nights in order to communicate and make sense of their new, urban, industrial environments. Outlining the history of the arrival of the Arabian Nights in Europe and its remarkable propensity to proliferate, it establishes the temporal and structural openness of this story collection, which invites diverse application in multiple locations. In the case of nineteenth-century Britain, it argues, the tales were used to reflect and refract new materials and ideas, offering different ways for British readers to interpret and to frame their experiences. While engaging with questions of imperialism and Orientalism, the introduction draws recent scholarship on thing theory into the history of reading practices, in order to register the potentially transformative powers of reading in the context of the emotional, psychological and material relationships forged with the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century Britain. Alongside the more familiar narrative of its prevalence as material with which to manage the Orient, it points to moments of exchange, immersion and receptivity to the realm of the other, and to narratives shared and adapted across cultures.

Magic and Machines at the Great Exhibition

Chapter 4 turns to the accumulation of goods at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was frequently understood as another theatrical manifestation of the Arabian Nights, within the ‘fairy-tale’ Crystal Palace in the heart of Britain. A new and innovative architectural form, the palace and its contents challenged the viewer’s vision, judgement, and sense of scale to such an extent that recourse was made to the language of magic in an effort to represent its unfamiliar effects. The palace and the objects it contained had apparently materialised like the stuff of dreams. Within this transformative space, the magnificence of Britain’s industrial resources became truly apparent only by way of comparison, by the jostling together of old and new, of fictional and material, and of machinery and magic. Here, an anxious meta-narrative emerged about the nature of modern production and consumption. Casting those products originating from India, China and elsewhere within a framework of magic and the Arabian Nights was, this chapter argues, a part of the rhetoric of British modernity, which made the comparison between nations and their wares more palatable by insisting that supposedly ‘inferior’ nations had employed the agency of magic. Such a narrative generated wonder both for the beautiful, often hand-crafted productions that had supposedly been wrought by magic, and of the advancements of British civilisation, which had apparently gained, through science, all the powers of Aladdin’s lamp.

Epilogue: A New Arabian Nights

The brief epilogue to this volume offers some concluding thoughts on the process by which the Arabian Nights was absorbed into British literature and culture. It then identifies the emergence of a new vision of these tales in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, which celebrated the transformation of the magical metropolis into a dynamic space of magic and mystery that supposedly far excelled its Eastern counterparts. The increasing permeability of national boundaries, coupled with an increasingly global commodity culture in late-Victorian London, intensified fantasies of the modern city as a place of adventure, with a now internalised, potent Oriental presence. In many ways, this centre of commerce, industry and science became that fantastic, unpredictable and ever-alluring space of a new Arabian Nights.

The Magical Metropolis

This chapter turns to the science of stagecraft, and to the endless recreations and adaptations of the wonders, magic, and treasures of the Arabian Nights that took place within the shows culture of nineteenth-century Britain. These authorless, ownerless tales presented ideal theatrical opportunities to display the rich landscapes, domestic interiors and dazzling treasures of the East within the public spaces of Britain. In so doing, they facilitated a kind of ‘virtual’ tourism, whereby audiences might participate in the adventurer’s narrative of discovery, infiltration, exploration, and safe return, without ever leaving England. At the same time, however, such performances fostered a self-reflective, inward movement, as an imaginative destination of childhood became a physical space that might be stepped into, examined and explored. Performances of the Arabian Nights had a disturbing capacity to evoke and to disrupt childhood memories, as they were reliant upon a substantial amount of labour and technical expertise in order to realise fully the workings of magic and the apparently spontaneous eruption of the supernatural on stage. As a vehicle for exploring the material and technological limits of nineteenth-century stagecraft, the wonder and enchantment of the Arabian Nights thus became inextricably intertwined with the wonder of machinery and technical ingenuity, as new techniques were developed for representing fantasy and manufacturing magic.