3-028-124 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Scene from "Ages Ago," at the Gallery of Illustration, 1870. The new entertainment...does much credit both to Mr. and Mrs. German Reed, and to Mr. W. S. Gilbert, the author...There is but one scene...It is of a picture gallery in an old castle, called Glen Cockaleekie, now in possession of Sir Ebenezer Tare, a rich tallow-chandler, who is troubled on account of the attentions paid to his daughter by a young gentleman of good family, but poor. The old housekeeper, however, has taken the lovers under her protection, and endeavours to possess them with the superstitions by which she is herself so powerfully influenced...the castle's first tenant bound himself to a fiend by a contract requiring that the castle should have a legitimate owner but once in a hundred years. The time has now arrived...and that very night it is expected...the supernatural work begins. The pictures on the walls become animated in their frames, and the persons they represent descend and become the performers in a living drama...Becoming rivals for the lady, they fight; when Dame Cherry Maybud descends, and reproves Lord Carnaby for wishing to marry his grandmother...Ultimately the portraits return to their frames, and the love affair...is amicably settled'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.