Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901)

Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 2015, Vol. 42(2) 124–145 ! The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1748372716654919 nctf.sagepub.com Bob Hasenfratz Abstract The Death of Poor Joe (1901), rediscovered in 2012 at the BFI, is the earliest known cinematic adaptation of a Dickens novel, focusing on a pivotal scene from Bleak House– the death of Jo the crossing guard. However, it is easy to see how this short film could have gone misidentified for so long, since G. A. Smith’s film radically rewrites Jo’s death scene as it appears in the novel, changing some of the key players and the setting. This article argues that G. A. Smith and Laura Bayley Smith, who plays Joe, were greatly influenced by prior theatrical adaptations of Bleak House, particularly Jo, a vehicle for the actress Jennie Lee, and that an understanding of the earliest literary adaptations on film must rest on a broad familiarity with nineteenth-century theatrical practice. Early film adaptations show next to no concern for fidelity to their literary sources but instead turn to theatrical and visual culture for inspiration. Keywords Film adaptation, nineteenth-century theatrical adaptations, early film, Dickens, Dickens adaptations, Bleak House, Death of Poor Joe, nineteenth-century visual culture The chances of recovering early films grow dimmer and dimmer every year, so when the BBC announced ‘Earliest Charles Dickens Film Uncovered’ in March 2012, genuine excitement circulated not only in academic circles but also in the popular press.1 The story is of course more complicated, and perhaps ever so slightly less exciting, than the headline implies. First of all, Death of Poor Joe, as the body of the article makes clear, is the earliest surviving Dickens film, based on a melodramatic scene in Bleak House. In fact, The Death of Nancy Sikes (1897) and Mr Bumble the Beadle (1898) are the first and second Dickens adaptations that we Corresponding author: Bob Hasenfratz Email: [email protected] Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 125 know about (both from Oliver Twist), though they do not survive. Second, Death of Poor Joe (released in March 1901) is a mere six months older than the next surviving Dickens film from that era, Scrooge, Or Marley’s Ghost (November 1901). Finally, the footage turned up not in an old trunk or an abandoned projection room, but in the BFI archive itself, where curator Bryony Dixon made the discovery that it had been misidentified after arriving as a donation to the BFI in the 1950s; she also identifies the actor playing Joe as Laura Bayley Smith, the wife and collaborator of Brighton-based film pioneer George Albert Smith, whose films were much influenced by Laura Bayley Smith’s theatrical career and talents.2 Despite this slightly more complicated history, Dixon’s discovery is a truly exciting one and sheds much needed light on early film history and adaptation studies. Death of Poor Joe, with a running time of about a minute, opens on an empty street scene: a wall and gate in front of a church, painted on a backdrop, but with lively handfuls of snow filtering down from stage left. A man in a top hat and overcoat enters from the right of the frame, scanning the wall with a lantern, the bright beam of which is visible on the wall. Shortly after he crosses the scene and exits on the other side, Poor Joe enters from the right in rags carrying a broom and starts to sweep. When the watchman doubles back and re-enters the frame, Joe makes pleading gestures and faints, the watchman catching him in his arms as both sink to the ground. The watchman then shines his lantern directly onto Joe’s face while Joe puts his hands together to pray and then shortly thereafter expires. The watchman holds up Joe’s limp arm as if to confirm his death, and the film ends. Clearly, the makers of Poor Joe seem to have focused very little on remaining true to the death of Jo as it appeared originally in Bleak House, a circumstance that may have made it difficult to identify in the first place. In fact, the film compresses several incidents from Dickens’s vast narrative into one scene, which depicts Joe’s final interactions with a kind of policeman or night watchman who is roaming the streets. This watchman must in some way represent Mr Bucket, one of the first professional detectives in literature, searching for Jo: in chapter 22 of the novel, Mr Snagsby takes Mr Bucket to the slum called ‘Tom-All-Alone’s’ to find Jo, who is wanted in court to testify about his dead friend and benefactor. Borrowing a ‘bull’s eye’ or lantern from the constable, Bucket searches for the boy and finds one called ‘Toughy’ who turns out to be Jo: Mr Bucket throws his light into the doorway, and says to Mr Snagsby, ‘Now, what do you say to Toughy? Will he do?’ ‘That’s Jo’, says Mr Snagsby. Jo stands amazed in the disc of light, like a ragged figure in a magic lanthorn, trembling to think that he has offended against the law in not having moved on far enough (314). Dickens underscores the desperate pathos of this moment in a kind of freeze-frame. D. W. Griffith, of course, famously claimed that key visual elements of Dickens’s narrative style directly inspired him to invent montage, and it is tempting 126 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42(2) to link Dickens’s invocation of the magic lantern here to the history of cinema or pre-cinema.3 Just as likely, though, he was thinking about the stage and its limelight or a lecture hall with its magic lantern shows.4 In the film, Joe is transfixed by the beam not at the moment of discovery, but later during his death as the watchman turns his light on him, Joe expiring in his arms. This use of the lantern and its will-o-the-wisp-like circle of light does very loosely adapt the earlier discovery scene from the book. Finally, in the novel, Jo dies in a corner of George’s Shooting Gallery attended only by Allan Woodcourt, a kindly doctor who teaches him to say a prayer, the Lord’s prayer, which Jo cannot manage to finish before dying (chapter 47). The film, by contrast, transfers the setting of Joe’s death to the gate before the graveyard (near the Chancery) and merges Woodcourt with Bucket. The end of the film clearly represents Joe praying as he folds his hands together and ‘Bucket’ points his beam of light onto the face of the poor, dying waif. In the novel, Jo with his dying breath asks to be buried in the graveyard depicted in the film and frets that someone will have to get the key to unlock the gates (649). So, again, the film takes up and adapts creatively another element of the novel (the imagined journey to the grave) by shifting the scene to a street in front of the graveyard itself. Clearly, Death of Poor Joe condenses and blends several scenes from the novel in a radical way and has much to reveal about how early filmmakers went about adapting literary source material. This article, in fact, argues that two of the most common assumptions about literary adaptations on film have relatively little to contribute to our understanding of Death of Poor Joe and other adaptations from roughly the first decade of film history. First, probably because of the short running times of early films and the initial lack of title cards (which first appeared around 19035), producers and audiences had next to no concern for fidelity to a literary text. How could they with such short running times? Instead, the earliest adaptations tend to focus exclusively on the most melodramatic moment from a literary classic that had wide currency on the stage or in other popular entertainments.6 Second, the claim that early film makers turned to high literature as a way of gaining cultural legitimacy for their art is generally meaningless until the middle of the nickelodeon era (well past 1905).7 Instead of comparing early shorts like The Death of Nancy Sikes (1897) or Death of Poor Joe (1901) to later products of the ‘uplift’ movement meant to counteract the seedy reputation of the store-front theatres with literary respectability, it perhaps makes more sense to compare them to boxing films like the Leonard-Cushing Fight (1894)8 that reconstructed key moments from the biggest boxing matches. Like them, the earliest adaptations tend to be re-stagings of memorable events from popular theatre and entertainment and thus participate in a documentary impulse as much as a literary one. These adaptations can be understood in some ways as re-staged ‘actualities’ that have a complex connection with popular performances and events.9 It is not entirely clear what kind of help the emerging field of adaptation studies can provide in understanding a film like Death of Poor Joe. Many theorists and practitioners in this discipline, which sits somewhat uncomfortably between film studies on the one hand and literary criticism on the other, have not shown a very Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 127 lively interest in historicising adaptation practices but instead tend to dwell on single text to film adaptations, reading them closely for the way narratological phenomena like point of view, metaphor, and tone, cross over from the medium of literary form to the visual grammar of cinema. More recently, adaptation scholars such as Robert Stam have focused on intertexts as a way of avoiding the dreaded bogeyman of ‘fidelity’. His model, adapted from Genette’s concept of transtextuality, demolishes the impulse to investigate adaptations for their faithfulness to an original by viewing ‘copies’ as co-equal intertexts that stand in no necessary hierarchical relationship to an original: ‘Filmic adaptations, then, are caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin.’10 In this democratic ecosystem of intertexts, the original is just one more intertext among others, and as often as not, Stam suggests, a film adaptation stands in just as interesting a relation to other films and adaptations as to the original literary text. This methodology has several advantages to offer anyone studying early cinema, one of the most powerful being that it dismisses the long-held prejudice that film adaptation is a parasitic art form dependent on a literary original, but more importantly that it offers much more scope for a diachronic understanding of adaptation and its chains of related intertexts. I would like to take Stam’s concept of intertexts one step further, though, in attempting to get a sense of the broader range of versions that lead to the creation of Death of Poor Joe. Clearly, Dickens’s novel was one such intertext, impossible to ignore, but I want to suggest two others that had a disproportionate influence on many early adaptations, including Death of Poor Joe: theatrical performances and book illustrations. As will be clear in a moment, these two sorts of intertexts are not as unrelated as they might at first appear to be, since the late nineteenth-century theatre itself drew great inspiration from popular visual culture, including book illustration. While it is certainly true that film historians have paid a certain amount of attention to influences on early cinema from theatre history and popular visual culture, my intent here is to test these claims on the level of micro-history. Starting with Eisenstein, most students of literary adaptation in film have clearly looked to the novel11 as the master literary form in direct dialogue with movies. But in an important article published in the late 1980s, Rick Altman pointedly criticised film scholars for their lack of real interest in the theatrical origins of early film adaptations: By and large, critics have ignored the influence of theatrical adaptations. Eisenstein provides information on the stage source of Griffith’s Cricket on the Hearth, yet he never attributes any importance to the existence of a theatrical intermediary. Many other critics follow precisely the same logic; they identify the dramatic version from which the film author directly borrowed, but assume that little is to be gained by comparing the film to an ephemeral and undistinguished stage adaptation. More often, critics blithely postulate a direct connection between a film and the 128 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42(2) novel from which it is ostensibly drawn, when even minimal research clearly identifies a dramatic adaptation as an important direct source for the film . . . It is easy enough to demonstrate the debt that early cinema owes to theatrical adaptations.12 It would be wonderful to report that Altman’s call to dig deeply into theatrical history as a way of understanding early cinema had inspired a wave of new research, but on the whole adaptation studies have remained doggedly focused on the text to film case study.13 Theatre historian David Mayer has famously descried the way that film historians tend to view the nineteenth-century stage as an exhausted and feeble institution that bequeaths its cultural energy to film before expiring on its deathbed. He argues forcefully that we should discard this assumption and dig deeply into the complex relationship between theatre history and early film.14 In Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film, Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs highlight the fact that ‘Professional film historians today . . . have largely ceased to speak of a theatrically dominated early cinema.’ Instead, the ‘strongest arguments for a continuity between theatre and early cinema have in fact been made not by film historians but by theatre historians’ like David Mayer and Stephen Johnson.15 Though this charge may land on some historians of the high silent film, it fails to do justice to the work on early cinema by scholars like Charles Musser, Elaine Bowser, Tom Gunning, and Andre Gaudreault, who have effectively situated early film in the rich ecosystem of late Victorian popular entertainment, including the Vaudeville and Music Hall stages, store-front theatres, carnivals, side-shows, etc. And yet, Altman and Mayer’s call to take theatrical culture seriously and trace specific adaptations through their stage intermediaries, however ‘ephemeral and undistinguished’, has yet to be taken up very seriously on the level of the individual film, perhaps another symptom of the largely ahistorical focus of many scholars of adaptation.16 A great many early films are so directly connected to prior stage adaptations of literary sources that they might be best thought of as adaptations of adaptations and in some cases, adaptations of adaptations of adaptations, in short, cinematic palimpsests. Another more effective way to view the proliferation of versions is to consider them, following Stam’s lead, as chains of intertexts bound together in a complex historical and cultural network. To return to Death of Poor Joe – it is impossible to understand the film outside the plethora of adaptations of Bleak House for the nineteenth-century stage. At first, the choice to depict Jo’s death of all events in this epic, sprawling novel may seem odd or haphazard, but perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the majority of theatrical adaptations of Bleak House, given the nearly impossible challenge of reducing a 900-page novel to a performance of about two hours, reshaped the novel to put Jo at its centre.17 The first adaptation of the novel for the stage appears to have been created for the English actress Jennie Lee by playwright J. P. Burnett, whom she subsequently married. The play was called simply Jo and was staged in Liverpool in 1875.18 After the transfer of this production made a splash in London, George Lander wrote a rival adaptation, entitled Bleak House, or, Poor ‘Jo’ in 1876. His version ends with Jo’s death before the gate of the cemetery, with Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 129 Plate 1. Jennie Lee as Jo in Bleak House, circa 1875. London, National Portrait Gallery. kindly Mr Snagsby teaching him to pray and Mr Bucket looking on in agony: ‘I can’t bear this.’19 Other adaptations put Jo and his death at their centre, but all were probably copying or attempting to rival Burnett’s play. See, for example, Eliza Thorne’s Bleak House, or, Poor Jo (1876), H. Davenport’s Jo the Waif (1876), Richard H. Cox’s Joe, the Waif of the Streets (1876), Poor Jo (1878), James Mortimer’s Move On, or, the Crossing Sweeper (performed 1883), Move On, or, Joe the Outcast (performed 1892), as well as Oswald Brand’s Bleak House: Events in the Life of Jo (performed 1903). A few adaptations like John Palgrave Simpson’s Lady Dedlock’s Secret (1874) or Henry Randle and Fanny Janauschek’s Lady Dedlock and Hortense (1874) focalise the narrative through a different character and plot line, resulting in some interesting generic shifts, but the vast majority tell the story through Jo’s sufferings. The leading part of Jo was almost always taken by actresses, making the choice of Laura Bayley Smith and not a child actor for the role of Joe immediately understandable: Jennie Lee (1876 onwards, see Plate 1), Clara Dillon (1876), Mary Cary (1876), Miss Woodyer (1878), Kessie Wood (1881), Lavinia Shannon (1887), Nelly Howitt (1882), Lizzie Chambers (1899), Kate Brand (1903), etc. Of all these performers, Jennie Lee (1848–930) was clearly the most iconic: the role had 130 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42(2) been written for her and she played it thousands of times in Britain, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, etc., throughout her long career, beginning when she was twenty-seven and ending well into her eighties, when she played Jo for the last time as part of a hospital benefit.20 She originally commissioned the play from Burnett for herself in 1875, and he himself often played the role of Mr Buckett in the 1870s and 1880s. Jennie Lee’s Jo became famous for its controlled but powerful pathos that, according to newspaper reports, could reduce audiences to tears. The reviewer of the original performance complained that Jo alone sustains the play, the other characters and incidents seeming haphazard: Jo, himself, is more carefully and consistently dealt with. His life in its picturesque and its pathetic sides—in its tatters and neglect, its hopelessness, even in its comic incidents such as they are—is felt apparently capable of holding the interest of a house, when it is well presented as to appearance and action by the actress charged with it. The result— thanks in great measure to the undeniable cleverness of Miss Jennie Lee—is not generally disappointing.21 The London Reader, reviewing a revival at the Globe later that year noted that ‘Miss Jennie Lee once again gives us her matchless embodiment of [Jo] with such power that there is hardly a dry eye among the spectators.’22 In 1896, a reviewer in Fun magazine waxed nostalgic at seeing the Lee/Burnett production: We are here introduced to Poor Jo, played by Miss Jennie Lee. I have not forgotten her impersonation of this character, in which she originally appeared upon the first production of the piece. She plays the part as truly and unaffectedly as she did then. Dickens was a masterhand in the portrayal of poverty, and Miss Jennie Lee can interpret its miseries in their fullest integrity. She makes us laugh and weep, alternately, as she pleases.23 Clearly even after twenty years, the production had not lost its power to affect audiences. By the time G. A. Smith and L. B. Smith made the Death of Poor Jo in 1901, Burnett’s version of the play was getting on to being thirty years old. The reviewer in Fun, cited above, notes with some sadness that plays like Jo were old fashioned even by 1896: ‘This style of drama, although true to nature, is disappearing as quickly as the period for which it was written. Tempora mutantur.’24 In fact, to judge by reviews and advertisements, Jo was rarely staged in its entirety around the turn of the century, but a few key scenes had become staple features in variety shows, mainly benefit performances, and amateur theatricals. In March 1900, Jennie Lee and her daughter Katie Lee, appeared in a scene from Jo ‘in aid of the sick and wounded of the famous Fifth Fusiliers’,25 and an advertisement for this event, performed in Queen’s Hall, shows that the programme consisted of a mixture of songs, recitations, and dance numbers.26 Later that same year, Lee appeared with another daughter, Joan Burnett, in a scene from Jo as part of a benefit for the Omnibus Men’s Superanuation Fund.27 Amateurs also turned Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 131 to the play shortly after Jennie Lee made it famous: a professional actor, Mrs Richards, directed amateurs in a production of Jo in Wrexham in 187728 to benefit Mrs White’s Orphan House, and a Mr and Mrs Clarance played a scene ‘from Charles Dickens’ ‘‘‘Bleak House’’ called ‘‘Poor Joe’s last move’’’ in a ‘high class amateur dramatic entertainment they had organized and staged in the New Town Hall, Consett, County Durham.’29 It may be no coincidence that another early Dickens film, Bumble the Beadle, Courting the Workhouse Matron (1896, R. W. Paul) was also associated with amateur theatricals. Frank Emsen had turned the episode of Bumble, the parish beadle, and his budding romance with Mrs Corney into a short play entitled Bumble’s Courtship in 1874,30 and it is presumably this version that saw a number of performances in amateur circles. It was staged at the Portsmouth School Festival in 1892. It also was part of a mixed programme of concerts and theatricals performed by the St Rule Lady’s Club of Dundee in 1900.31 That same year, it formed part of an elaborate charity event staged by the St James parish in Bury St Edmunds, one including tableaux vivant of famous advertisements as well as another short play, Lady Fortune.32 Though it would be risky to venture too much on the evidence of so few films, one gets the impression that early Dickens adaptations in Britain, Death of Poor Joe and Bumble the Beadle, gain a certain respectability not necessarily from their literary connection to Dickens but more from the fact that their theatrical predecessors were performed so often at charity events by amateurs of an apparently very respectable social standing. The films based on them arguably retain some sort of connection to concerns with the relief of the poor and middle-class respectability, as incompatible as these two could sometimes be. The earliest Dickens film produced in America, The Death of Nancy Sikes (1897, Mutoscope), by contrast, records a performance of a scene from Oliver Twist by the famous burlesque acting team of Mabel Fenton and Charles Ross. Nancy’s death had been played many times before on the vaudeville and burlesque stages in America and was apparently well known for its brute sensationalism. One reviewer called Ross and Fenton’s performance of this scene in Chicago ‘crude’ but ‘forceful, hideously realistic’.33 In any case, I can find no instance of an early literary adaptation made in America that has any plausible association with benefit performances or amateur theatre, a connection that may be a distinct phenomenon of British film culture. As will be clear by now, I think Death of Poor Joe must stand in some relation to one of the staged versions of Bleak House, none of which except the Lander adaptation was ever published. In his version, as in Smith’s Death of Poor Joe, the final scene takes place at the churchyard: ‘Scene V. The Churchyard—Lights down to suit double lime-light, which is on from beginning to end of scene—Jo’s music.’34 Jo enters with Snagsby, and Bucket soon turns up, with no mention of a search or a lantern.35 A crowd of ‘poorly-dressed people’ gather round this group. When Jo collapses, he falls into the arms of both Snagsby and Bucket, just as Joe does into ‘Bucket’s’ in the film. The stage direction reads, ‘falls weak and staggers. They catch him in their arms, and kneel with him, and bring him down.’36 The curtain 132 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42(2) falls after Jo’s death, which comes after he recites the third line of the Lord’s prayer which Snagsby teaches him. Some details obviously parallel those in the film closely, especially the way Jo falls into the arms of his helpers. But others, including the number of characters, and the lack of a search, clearly do not. Since Jennie Lee’s benefit performances of scenes from Jo took place around the time of the making of Death of Poor Joe, it is tempting to think that the film might rely on the J. P. Burnett adaptation (written for Jennie Lee). As with the Lander adaptation, though, a number of details in the Burnett version may discourage this notion since the death scene takes place somewhere near the Tom-All-Alone’s slum, not the church-yard, with Joe creeping out from under an arch and resting on a post. The stage directions read, ‘Joe’s tremulo—Moon rising from L[eft]. A pause. Joe crawls out from under Arch . . . He evinces great weakness, reaches Post in C[enter]. rests on it.’37 Here too a sympathetic crowd gathers around the characters. Bucket sends for coffee and bread while Snagsby compulsively slips money into Jo’s hand as he gets weaker and weaker. Other details parallel the film version, however: before Jo creeps out from under the arch, Bucket searches for him and sends others as well: It’s getting late; and I’ve little time to spare you fellows (to loafers) go round the bylanes and look for Joe and I’ll reward the one that finds him. (All hurry off at different places . . .) You go round that way and meet me here. I’ll find him if he is to be found (exit).38 Jo’s final moment in the play is also rather close to Joe’s in the film: Bucket softly tends to the dying Jo, getting him to repeat the Lord’s prayer. He dies at the line ‘Art in Heaven’. The directions read, ‘Moonlight has fallen on his face—he pauses—smiles—mutters gladly. I’m movin on. falls back dead in Bucket’s arms. Music swells out forte. Slow Drop. Finis.’39 On the basis of the evidence, it is very difficult to decide which of the two versions or whether indeed elements of both (or neither) might have influenced Smith and Bayley in the making of Death of Poor Joe. There is of course always the possibility that they relied on one of the many other unprinted versions traced by Bolton. I think it likely on the whole that Smith and Bayley had the Jennie Lee version very much in mind since it was so much in the news around the time they made the film, but shied away from using it directly. The Burnett adaptation, after all, was unpublished and very much in the hands of Jennie Lee. Copying it directly may not have been legally or artistically advisable.40 The filmmakers quite possibly combined elements of the Lander and Burnett settings to create a fresh version of their own, one that takes a prominent element in these two theatrical versions, i.e., lighting, and transforms it into a cinematic ‘trick’. The exact source or combination of sources is not as important as understanding the theatrical ecosystem that gave birth to the film. In both theatrical versions, music and, more important for our purposes here, lighting, seem to be central to producing the effect of pathos that the play aims for. In the Lander play, the stage directions indicate that the lights are kept low to Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 133 accommodate the ‘double lime-light . . . which is on from beginning to end of scene.’41 And in the Burnett adaptation, moonlight illuminates Jo’s face at the moment of his death. A comic anecdote reported in several newspapers hints heavily at the importance of the limelight in Jennie Lee’s performance of this very scene as well: The Actress and the Limelight-Man Concerning Jennie Lee, the popular ‘Poor Jo’ of the stage, this story is told. Miss Lee was playing ‘Jo’ in Scotland. She was in the midst of the long and harrowing deathscene of poor ‘Jo.’ The stage was darkened and the limelight illumined the pale features of the death-stricken boy. People were sobbing all over the house. Suddenly, to her consternation, Miss Lee heard the limelight-man addressing her in a brawny Scotch whisper, audible to half the house: ‘Dee quick, Miss Lee—dee quick’, he roared, softly; ‘the limelight’s gin oot!’ She did die quick, but it was for the purpose of making a speech to that limelight-man which he said he would never forget.42 Death of Poor Joe certainly seems to echo the theatrical technology of limelight, finding a way, though, of rendering it part of the film’s diegesis by making ‘Bucket’s’ lantern its source. There is a precedent for such an integrated effect in Lander’s play: Bucket carries a lantern in the scene in which he and Esther are following the trail of the doomed Lady Dedlock (he reads her letter by lantern light). When they finally discover her dying, the stage directions indicate that Bucket ‘Perceives Lady D. Goes to her. Holds lantern near her face. Recognizes her.’43 It is impossible to know for sure, but this moment in Lander’s Bleak House may have suggested the trick effect of the lantern light to Smith and Bayley. In capturing it on film and transposing it to Joe’s dying face – if the Lander version was indeed part of the inspiration – they used a bit of theatrical technology to create a cinematic special effect: indeed, Death of Poor Joe is as much a trick film as it is a record of theatrical melodrama, not far removed from other re-staged actualities like boxing matches. It represents a kind of trick film, however, that does not make use of stop motion, double exposure, or splicing. In fact, it looks as if Smith used a rounded mirror to reflect strong sunlight onto the stage, mimicking the circle of light coming from the lantern (see Plate 2). This effect was clearly inspired by theatrical practice. Scholars of early trick films like Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault have shown that the illusion of the single shot in many early trick films is just that, a carefully staged illusion and that these films are actually multi-shot movies that make use of editing.44 As important as this insight is, however, it seems to me right to acknowledge Death of Poor Joe as a kind of trick film even though it uses techniques that are not exclusively ‘filmic’. In some senses, the current conception of the trick film is invested in prizing early film away from theatrical technologies and conventions with the goal of establishing film as an independent art with its native store of technical achievements, while at the same time attempting to imbed film practice in a tradition of ‘spectacle’ in popular entertainment, creating what Gunning and Gaudreault call the ‘cinema of attractions’.45 As foundational as this analysis has been, films like Death of Poor Joe clearly aimed to harness the 134 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42(2) Plate 2. Death of Poor Joe, 1901. Detail, British Film Institute. technologies of the late Victorian theatre rather directly without cinematic tricks. This claim does not negate Smith’s status as a genuine pioneer in the creation of the trick film as Gunning and Gaudreault have established it. He certainly was: Santa Claus (1898), for example, employs both double exposure and stop-action disappearance as do other Smith films like The Haunted Castle (1897), Photographing a Ghost (1898), The Haunted Picture Gallery (1899), and Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903), which stars Laura Bayley Smith. Walter Booth appears to have used essentially stage technology to represent the eruption of Pompeii in The Last Days of Pompeii (1898), a loose adaptation of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel of the same title made for R. W. Paul. Although the film does not survive, Paul’s catalogue copy reads as follows: This scene is taken from ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’. It represents the interior of a Greek house, in which Ione is seated with Nydia, the blind girl. Her lover Glaucus, enters, and presents a Greek dancer, who executes some graceful movements. While the dance is in progress, Vesuvius is seen in eruption; the slaves rush forward in alarm, and Nydia leads out her companions. The entire house is shaken to its foundations; the volcano throws out lava, which rushes over the house, of which the pillars and walls fall in, making a complete wreck. Code word—Pompeii Length 65 feet Price 49s.46 The film departs radically from the novel, in which Vesuvius erupts while a mob is chasing the unmasked villain Arbaces in the arena, and which contains no scene like the one described here, though Arbaces does try to corrupt Ione’s brother with a sensuous evening of poetry and erotic dancing. Judging by the still photo and the description in the catalogue, it would appear that Booth used conventional stage Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 135 Plate 3. The Last Days of Pompeii, 1898. Still photograph from Animatograph Films: Robt. W Paul (London, 1903). http://www.cineressources.net/consultationPdf/web/o000/280.pdf. techniques, an exploding pyrotechnic volcano and falling columns to achieve the effect of the eruption (see Plate 3). In his catalogue of Animatograph Films, Paul lists The Last Days of Pompeii in a section labelled ‘Sensational Films’, a category that includes A Railway Collision (1900), a dramatic crash of two trains filmed with miniatures, and Diving for Treasure (1900), an undersea scene with sailors in diving suits recovering a treasure from a wrecked ship.47 All three films aim to create realistic illusions of disasters or their aftermaths. It is true that Paul does not advertise The Last Days of Pompeii under the label ‘Novel Trick and Effects Films’, which lists The Magic Sword (1902) and The Cheese Mites (1903), but both categories share the desire to create astounding illusions and may not represent distinct genres. Paul’s ‘Sensational’ films tend to accomplish their visual trickery by non-filmic means, however. In the understandable desire to appreciate the peculiarly cinematic innovations of early cinema, it is easy to forget that even wildly creative pioneers like George Melies also used stage technologies alongside his innovative trick photography. The forging and firing of the gun in A Trip to the Moon (1902), for example, use standard theatrical pyrotechnics and painted backdrops along side of photographic trick effects. *** The second intertext that exerted a strong influence on Death of Poor Joe is popular visual culture, mainly in the form of book illustration, specifically illustrations of Bleak House by Hablot K. Browne, who went by the pen name Phiz. Death of Poor Joe, like many early literary adaptations on film, relies heavily on prior visualisations of literary narrative from popular culture. Filmmakers of the first decade of film history seem to have gravitated to sources that had a long 136 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42(2) Plate 4. Grand Revival of Oliver Twist after Cruikshank, 1883. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. tradition of paratextual illustration or theatrical adaptation. In fact, very few literary adaptations from the first decade of cinema history were fully independent of prior visualisations, either on the stage or in book illustrations or in both. In this dependence on popular visualisations, filmmakers took their cue from stage productions, which also had a tendency to choose literary source material that had been richly illustrated. In the 1880s, for example, a production of Oliver Twist staged at the Third Avenue Theatre in New York, modelled its sets and costumes after Cruikshank’s famous illustrations for the novel, describing the show as a ‘Grand Revival of OLIVER TWIST after Cruikshank’ (see Plate 4). It is probably no coincidence that the scene depicted in Bumble the Beadle, Courting the Workhouse Matron was one of Cruikshank’s most popular illustrations from Oliver Twist, entitled ‘Mr Bumble and Mrs Corney Taking Tea’.48 This illustration and its popular reproductions may have gone a long way in suggesting the subject to playwright Frank Emsen. Prior visualisations of Ross and Fenton’s scene The Death of Nancy Sykes are even more complex. Dickens and Cruikshank chose not to illustrate the brutal murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist, though other artists did attempt to give a sense of its power. In 1886, F. W. Pailthorpe, for example, published a set of watercolour illustrations of Oliver Twist that included the scene (Plate 5).49 Even this illustrator had no desire to depict the moment of the actual murder itself, preferring to capture the melodramatic moment before the final blow, with Nancy on her knees pleading. The background to Pailthorpe’s illustration, like others of this scene, consists of a fairly non-descript domestic scene with simple Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 137 Plate 5. F. W. Pailthorpe, Death of Nancy, 1886. http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/ pailthorpe/38.html. furniture and a door. It seems pretty unlikely on the whole that Ross and Fenton knew anything about Pailthorpe’s illustration, though it is possible. The Death of Nancy Sykes does not survive, but three still frames of it appear in the Photo Catalogue of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.,50 giving a good sense of the frantic action of the scene as well as its theatrical feel (see Plate 6): the unmoving camera frame imitates the proscenium space of the theatre, and the painted set resembles many late Victorian domestic backdrops for the stage. Intriguingly, the stage backdrop of The Death of Nancy Sykes shows more than a passing likeness to a drawing of the scene from the 1870s that was used as a stock poster for Oliver Twist productions (see Plate 7).51 The correspondence is not exact, but both scenes have a window in the centre, the door at the right of the frame and a bed to the left. These similarities may be coincidental, of course, but the drawing, more than either the movie stills or Pailthorpe’s illustration, shows a signature feature of most theatrical productions of the scene, the dragging of Nancy about the stage by her hair. In this case, the drawing represents not so much the action of the novel but a generic performance of it on the stage, further complicating the visual predecessors of Ross and Fenton’s scene. Even though the poster may not be a direct visual source for The Death of Nancy Sykes, it participates in a complex popular visual culture that contributed to and represented stage practice. To understand this visual culture, we would do well to trace not only the influence of book illustrators and illustrations themselves, but independent prints and posters as well, since they contribute to the kind of visual culture I am suggesting as an ‘intertext’ for Death of Poor Joe. 138 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42(2) Plate 6. Entry for The Death of Nancy Sykes, from the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. Photo Catalogue. https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/24582/. Death of Poor Joe participates in a similar dynamic: it clearly echoes certain details of Phiz’s illustration of the novel entitled ‘Consecrated Ground’, which depicts Joe and Lady Dedlock at the gate to the churchyard near the Chancery (see Plate 8). The painted backdrop in Death of Poor Joe quotes the shape of the gate with its lantern, but flips the scene around to show a view from the opposite Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 139 Plate 7. Oliver Twist, Stock Poster, ca. 1870s. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Plate 8. Consecrated Ground by Phiz, 1853. http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/ bleakhouse/11.html. 140 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42(2) Plate 9. Death of Poor Joe, 1901, detail: ‘Bucket’ shines his lantern on the face of the dying Joe. British Film Institute. Plate 10. Night in Town by Oscar Gustave Rejlander, 1860. Bath, The Royal Photographic Society. Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 141 Plate 11. Miss Kate Claxton as Louise in The Two Orphans, photographed by Napoleon Sarony, 1875. Green-Wood Archives: http://www.green-wood.com/2014/carte-de-visite-ofactress-kate-claxton-by-napoleon-sarony-1875/. direction, from the street looking into the graveyard, with the church looming just beyond the wall (see Plate 9). Judging by the moving shadows of trees on the painted set, it was filmed outdoors in daylight, most probably in Brighton,52 Smith’s base of operations. The photograph of the actress Jennie Lee as Poor Jo also reflects Phiz’s illustration, with different framing (see Plate 1 above), demonstrating how deeply theatrical staging was imbedded in a complex matrix of popular visual culture. Lee’s placement on steps, her clothing and her evocative posture were in their turn almost certainly inspired by a famous photograph of a street urchin by Oscar Gustave Rejlander entitled A Night in Town, but also known as Poor Jo or Homeless (Plate 10).53 This popular photograph was inspired by an actual scene Rejlander saw on his frequent walks in the East End of London, though he recreated the scene later in his nearby studio with a model. A Night in Town came to be associated in the popular imagination with Dickens’s Jo, the crossing sweeper and 142 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42(2) clearly contributed to Jennie Lee’s persona as Jo. A Night in Town and sentimental photos like it of the London poor clearly influenced Victorian theatrical melodrama. Kate Claxton, the American stage actress who became famous in her role as blind Louise in The Two Orphans (first staged in New York in 1874), for example, was photographed much like ‘Jo’ in Rejlander’s photograph. Napoleon Sarony, a photographer who made a name for himself by recreating memorable scenes from prominent stage productions, shot a picture of Kate Claxton dressed in rags and in a melodramatic pose on the snowy steps of monumental doorway, a scene from The Two Orphans. (see Plate 11).54 Early filmmakers clearly learned to turn to book illustration and popular visual culture directly from theatrical practice, though they did not often attempt to reproduce either stage performances or their popular iconography with any great exactitude, but used them, like literary sources themselves, as springboards for reinvention. In conclusion, the recently rediscovered Death of Poor Joe demonstrates how closely early film was interwoven with theatrical culture as well as the popular visual culture which often inspired it. In Death of Poor Joe, G. A. Smith created a film which depends fundamentally on contemporary theatrical productions of Dickens’s novel in their radical compression and rearrangement of scenes and particularly their use of stage lighting. Similarly, Laura Bayley Smith’s portrayal of ‘Jo’ cannot be understood properly without an eye to Jennie Lee’s iconic performance: Bayley Smith clearly sought to harness the power and pathos of Lee’s Jo. In short, Death of Poor Joe, along with other early literary adaptations in the first decade of the cinema, cannot be properly understood without placing them in the theatrical culture and practice of the late nineteenth century. Notes 1. See ‘Earliest Charles Dickens film uncovered’, BBC News, 8 March 2012. http:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17298021. 2. The Dictionary of National Biography summarises Laura Bayley Smith’s contribution to G. A. Smith’s cinema this way: Smith’s films in the years 1897–903 were largely comedies and adaptations of popular fairy tales and stories. His work within these genres was influenced by his wife, Laura Eugenia (b. 1863/4), daughter of William Bullivant Bayley, a saddler. They had married in Ramsgate on 13 June 1888. Her life in popular theatre before 1897, particularly in pantomime and comic revues, provided Smith with an experienced actress who understood visual comedy and the interests of seaside audiences. Laura Bayley would star in many of Smith’s most important films, including Let me Dream Again and Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903). No other actress appears as frequently in British films of this period. See Frank Gray, ‘Smith, George Albert [1864–1959]’, in H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., L. Goldman (ed.), January 2011, http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/42132 (accessed 5 February 2013)). 3. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’, in Jay Leyda (ed. and trans.), Film Forum: Essays in Film Theory (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 195–255. Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 143 4. Sue Zemka traces stage and film productions of the death of Nancy from Oliver Twist directly back to Dickens own melodramatic reading of this scene on the lecture circuit: ‘The Death of Nancy ‘‘Sikes’’, 1838-1912’, Representations, 110 (2010), 29–57 at 40–1. 5. See Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction. 3rd ed. (Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 2010), p. 33. Charles Musser shows that titles were first projected as slides by exhibitors, and that Biograph was one of the first companies to copyright a film, The Moonshiner (1904) with intertitles: see ‘The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907’ (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 375. 6. Early filmmakers were much influenced by theatrical adaptation of popular fairy tales. In his article ‘The Magic Sword: Genealogy of an English Trick Film’, Ian Christie links R. W. Paul’s film to popularity of fairy and magic shows at Maskelyne’s theatre, ‘Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly’, the English equivalent of the Melies’s Theatre RobertHoudin. See Film History 16 (2004), 163–71. 7. One early exception is Walter Dando and William Dickson’s film, King John (1899), which seems to have been made at least in part to quell the outrage over the racy film Studio Troubles (aka, Wicked Willie), which the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company released earlier in the year. In her book on Shakespeare on silent film, Judith Buchanan comments as follows: It would be wrong-headed to suggest that King John might have been made as a direct result of the bad publicity generated by Studio Troubles. The BMBC were churning out far too many other films in this period—several a week in the summer months—to justify drawing a direct causal link between any two. However, it was certainly hoped that the mere fact of a Shakespeare film would function as a sanitizing and legitimizing influence on the questionable reputation of the industry as a whole and the BMBC in particular. (Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), pp. 59–60.) 8. See Dan Streible’s, Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing Matches and Early Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 30–3. 9. Streible, Fight Pictures, p. 68. 10. Robert Stam, ‘Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation’, in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 1–52 at 31. 11. See the classic study, George Bluestone’s, Novels into Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), now seriously out-dated. 12. Rick Altman, ‘Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), 321–59, 324. 13. There are of course some exceptions to this rule. Simone Murray’s recent study, for example, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2012), abandons the isolated case study to look at the evolving interaction between the publishing and film industries. 14. David Mayer, ‘Learning to See in the Dark’, Nineteenth Century Theatre, 25:2 (1997), 92–114. His 2009 study, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D.W. Griffith and the American Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009) traces the close connections between Griffith’s stage and cinematic career. 15. Ben Brewer and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 5. 144 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42(2) 16. See Greg Semenza and Bob Hasenfratz, The History of British Literature on Film, 18952015 (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015). This volume, part of a series entitled World Literatures on Film, analyses cinematic adaptations from within film history. 17. H Philip Bolton has carefully traced and catalogued the major stage adaptations of the novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: see his article, ‘Bleak House and the Playhouse’, Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983), 81–116. For an early performance history of Bleak House on the stage, see also S J Adair Fitz-Gerald’s, Dickens and the Drama (London: Chapman & Hall, 1910), pp. 246–55. 18. Michael R Pitts, Famous Movie Detectives III (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), p. 81. 19. George Lander, Bleak House; or, Poor ‘Jo’. 1873; Rpt. Dicks Standard Plays 388 (London: John Dicks, 1883), p. 22. 20. Bolton, ‘Bleak House and the Playhouse’, p. 104. 21. The Academy, 26 February 1876, p. 203. 22. London Reader, 7 October 1876, p. 532. 23. ‘Waftings from the Wings’, Fun, 19 May 1896, p. 195. 24. ‘Waftings from the Wings’, Fun, p. 196. 25. Era, 3 March 1900, 3206. 26. Era, 24 February 1900, 3205. 27. Era, 17 November 1900, 3243. 28. Wrexham Advertiser, Saturday, 4 February 1899, p. 3. ‘This play was cleverly done, and as the amateurs had to be treated with care, Mrs Richards had much delicate work to do.’ On the topic of how professional and amateur performers interacted, see Eileen Curley’s ‘‘‘A Most Dreadful Position’’: Amateur Reputations in a Professional World’, Performing Arts Resources 28 (2011), 160–68. 29. Northern Echo, 15 March 1900, 9367. 30. Emsen’s play, first written in 1874, was published in the USA in the 1880s in The New York Drama, a collection ‘adapted to The Home Circle, Private Theatricals, and the American Stage’. 31. ‘‘‘Bumble’s Courtship’’, a dialogue taken part in by Mr Jackson and Mr Thorne, proved a decided hit, and was loudly applauded.’ Dundee Courier, 12 February 1899, p. 6. 32. Bury and Norwich Post, 15 January 1900, p. 6. 33. Daily Inter Ocean, 8 July 1896, vol. 25, issue 136, p. 3. 34. Lander, Bleak House, 22. 35. See below for a discussion of the lantern that Bucket carries in an earlier scene. 36. Ibid. 37. J P Burnett, Bleak House: A Drama in Three Acts. MS. London, British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 53162B, p. 85. 38. Burnett, Bleak House, p. 85. 39. Burnett, Bleak House, p. 89. 40. The title page of Burnett’s manuscript, dated February 1876, is marked prominently ‘Property of Miss Jennie Lee’. Burnett, Bleak House, p. 2. 41. Lander, Bleak House, p. 22. 42. Newcastle Weekly Courant, 6 January 1900, p. 1. 43. Lander, Bleak House, p. 21. 44. Tom Gunning, ‘‘‘Primitive’’ Cinema: A Frame-Up? Or, the Trick’s on Us’, in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (eds), Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative (London: BFI, Rethinking Early Cinematic Adaptations: Death of Poor Joe (1901) 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 145 1990), pp. 95–103 and André Gaudreault, ‘Theatricality, Narrativity, Trickality’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 15 (1987), 112–19. More recently, Matthew Solomon has placed trick films in the orbit of magic shows and theatrical illusions: Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). Gunning, for example, rejects the idea that ‘the single shot functions as a reproduction of the theatrical proscenium. . . This understanding oversimplifies the traditions from which early cinema derives’ (97). These include magic lantern shows and other popular entertainments. For a recent reconsideration of the ‘cinema of attractions’, see Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). Catalogue of Paul’s Animatograph Films (London, 1903). This film was very probably influenced by a famous sensation scene from Henry Hamilton and Cecil Raleigh’s play, The White Heather, the Drury Lane ‘autumn drama’ for 1896, in which divers remove a treasure from a sunken ship with a fantastical fight to the death ensuing on the floor of the sea. See Michael R Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910, Routledge Library Editions: Victorian Theatre, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 2015 [1981]), p. 72. I am grateful to the reader for Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film for suggesting this connection. See also Hayley J Bradley, ‘‘‘Speaking to the eye rather than the ear’’: The Triumvirate’s Autumn Dramas at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 39:1 (Summer 2012), 26–46, at 30–1. See Richard A Vogler’s, Graphic Works of George Cruikshank (London: Dover Books, 1979), p. 154. Frederic W Pailthorpe, Twenty-One Illustrations to Oliver Twist (London: Robeson & Kerslake, 1886). The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Picture Catalog (1902). A digital copy is available via Rutgers University’s ‘The Thomas Edison Papers’: http:// edison.rutgers.edu. Reproduced in Zemka, ‘The Death of Nancy ‘‘Sikes’’, 1838-1912’, p. 34. Robert Shail, British Film Directors: A Critical Guide (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois P, 2007), pp. 196–97. See Stephanie Spencer, ‘O. G. Rejlander’s Photographs of Street Urchins’, Oxford Art Journal 7:2 (1985), 17–24. Spenser shows that Rejlander’s photograph is not really a direct documentation of the conditions of the poor but was staged and posed in a studio. She suggests that among influences, Rejlander drew on the depictions of beggars in the paintings of Murillo and popular illustrations in publications like Punch. See http://www.green-wood.com/2014/carte-de-visite-of-actress-kate-claxton-by-napoleon-sarony-1875/. Bob Hasenfratz is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and is a scholar of medieval literature as well as film history. He co-authored (with Greg Semenza) The History of British Literature on Film, 1895–2015 (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015) and serves as co-editor of Bloomsbury’s series World Literatures on Film.