The True History of the Ghost;

Notes

First and only contemporary edition, this copy inscribed by the author on the title; "Mr. John Bailey, July 25 1893, With the Author's kind regards, J.H. Pepper". Pepper (1821-1900) was born in Great Queen Street in Westminster and educated at King's College School, becoming a pupil of the chemist John Thomas Cooper. In 1847 he gave his first lecture at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, which had been founded in 1838 as a place "where the Public, at little expense, may acquire practical knowledge of the various arts and branches of science connected with manufacturers, mining operations and rural economy". A theatre was added to the institution in 1848 to accommodate Pepper's brilliant lectures and displays of optical effects, which together with his "unpretentious manuals of popular science" (ODNB) established a world-wide reputation as a popular educator.

The present volume represents his exposition of the stage illusion which came to be known as "Pepper's Ghost", where by employing a "blue room", "plate glass and strong illuminants" (Brooker, The Temple of Minerva, p.111), a spectral image of an actor can be projected before an audience. The basis of the effect had "been recognised since antiquity and already described in Giambattista della Porta's Magia Naturalis" (ibid.) It had been brought into practical form by the engineer Henry Dircks - "The Dircksian Phantasmagoria" - but perfected by Pepper, the illusion was first "exhibited on 24 December 1862, in illustration of Dickens's Haunted Man" (ODNB). Michael Faraday attended the performance three times before finally admitting defeat and asking Pepper for the "key"; "Very few persons could understand how the ghost was produced, although many persons wrote about and explained it; even the distinguished philosopher, Michael Faraday, when I took him behind the scenes, said, with his usual love of truth: 'Do you know, Mr. Pepper, I really don't understand it'. I then took his hand, and put it on one of the huge glass plates, when he said, 'Ah! now I comprehend it'" (p.35 of the present work). The apparatus was patented in 1863 in the joint names of Pepper and Dircks, but the two men later fell out, Dircks feeling, perhaps with some justification, that Pepper was "hogging the limelight".

Uncommon, relatively well-represented institutionally, but just two copies recorded at auction, neither of them inscribed.