ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Sidney Dickinson (1851-1919), an American journalist and critic credited in Australian art history with championing the local Impressionist painters, and an enormously popular magic lantern lecturer and a writer on paranormal experiences. Dickinson’s fascinating career has never before been thoroughly documented in either the United States or Australia. His biography and writings throw new light on US-Australian relations in the late nineteenth century; the availability, use and marketing of projection technologies; and the often close connections between those technologies and interest in (or creation of) apparitions. Dickinson was in Australia from 1888 to 1893, having lectured his way from Boston to Sydney, via San Francisco and Hawaii. He presented his ‘Kosmotechnika’ in Sydney and Melbourne, and then so successfully in New Zealand that the government commissioned him to make a four-month promotional lecture tour around Australia. The presentations attracted thousands and the dissolving views made from photographs and his own sketches were greeted with outbursts of applause. His wife Marion Miller Dickinson operated the limelight apparatus, networked with the Antipodean great and good, held séances and saw ghosts.
