3-004-011 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Shadow Dance - drawn by H. K. Browne, 1861. Christmas entertainment - the '...means of gratifying the infant appetite for wonder...where by a simple arrangement on the illuminated calico the shadow of the card-figure can be cast and made to perform all manner of terpsichorean eccentricities. Here may you see Punch and Judy, modified in shape and Italianised into elegance, dance the most fantastic of dances, both curiously and furiously - dance, in a word, "like mad" - tossing about legs and arms in fashion preternatural, for surely no man or woman of real flesh and blood ever made so queer a use of either. Look at them! They put the goblin Puck to shame...And yet they are but shadows of pasteboard, impaled on wires, and moved briskly about by the hand of mortal...The drawing-room entertainment provided by Paterfamilias may be humble in character, but...it is equal to the proudest work of comic or tragic art'. From "Illustrated London News", 1861.