Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no.…
"Chambers''s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no.…" by R. Chambers (Secundus) is a Victorian-era periodical issue—a wide-ranging miscellany of popular essays, reportage, and fiction from the late 19th century. The number surveys theatrical stagecraft, crime and smuggling lore, industrial advances, agricultural trials, current scientific notes, and closes with poetry and editorial notices. The contents open with a vivid tour of backstage mechanics—from multi-level trapwork and lightning scene-changes to
ingenious illusions in Parisian spectacles, sea-and-fire effects, and the craft behind them. A serialized melodrama reaches its climax with a fatal riverside struggle, a widow’s heartbreak, and a quiet country wedding, before closing on reconciliations and new vows. A long feature on diamond-smuggling traces ruses from Poe-like “hiding in plain sight” to hollow teeth, baby rattles, rosary beads, and carrier pigeons, then turns to theft and reset at Kimberley and the saga of the Orloff diamond. “Doubleworks,” an Athlone barracks tale, recounts a night alarm when a half-witted hanger-on, locked in the dead-house, terrifies a sentry and loses his reason. Industry pieces highlight the Baku oil “spouters,” bulk transport and fuel uses, and their challenge to American oil and Scottish shale; and review Scotland’s past and present experiments in tobacco-growing. “The Month” gathers notes on Japanese sulphur baths, house-fire risks from bad flues, Pasteur’s hydrophobia results, petroleum engines, waste dye liquors turned to ink, a hardy golden carp, safer electric lamps, a global photographic star map, technical training, small-arms trials, dynamite cruisers, microphones for water leaks, new steam-valves, and a Scottish petroleum spring. Occasional notes touch infant feeding with finely milled farinaceous additions to milk, wood-pulp building ornaments, and long-distance electric power; a closing lyric, “Sweet Day of Days,” offers a gentle reverie. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 156, vol. III, December 25, 1886
Original Publication
Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1853.
Credits
Susan Skinner, Eric Hutton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
