Animating Flames: Recovering Fire-Gazing as a Moving-Image Technology

In nineteenth-century England, the industrialization of heat and light rendered fire-gazing increasingly obsolete. Fire-gazing is a form of flame-based reverie that typically involves a solitary viewer who perceives animated, moving images dissolving into and out of view in a wood or coal fire. When fire-gazing, the viewer may perceive arbitrary pictures, fantastic landscapes, or more familiar forms, such as the faces of friends and family. This article recovers fire-gazing as an early and more intimate animation technology by examining remediations of fire-gazing in print. After reviewing why an analysis of fire-gazing requires a joint literary and media history approach, I build from Michael Faraday’s mid-nineteenth-century theorization of flame as a moving image to argue that fire-gazing must be included in the history of animation technologies. I then demonstrate the uneasy connections that form between automatism, mechanical reproduction, and creativity in Leigh Hunt’s description of fire-gazing in his 1811 essay ‘A Day by the Fire’. The tension between conscious and unconscious modes of production culminates in a discussion of fireside scenes of (re)animation in Charles Dickens’s 'Our Mutual Friend' (1864–65), including those featuring one of his more famous fire-gazers, Lizzie Hexam. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the 1908 silent film 'Fireside Reminiscences' as an example of the continued remediations of fire-gazing beyond the nineteenth century