User:Adcmyb/Henry Dircks

Study of Nature in Poetry
Dirck's studied natural poetry, writing many critical essays on various hymns and religious poems in his books Nature-study, and Naturalistic Poetry in 1869 and 1872 respectively. He dedicated Nature-Study to the "poet, philosopher, and statesman," Richard Monckton.

Dirck's wrote that these study's of poems are to progress the study of nature, quoting Mark Akenside, "Give me to learn each secret cause; Let numbers, figures. Nature's laws, Reveal'd before me stand: Then to great Nature's scenes apply, And, round the globe, and thro' the sky, Disclose her working hand." He later defines nature in his book Nature-Study as anything "distinguished from Art, includes the entire Creation, animate and inanimate."

In Naturalistic Poetry, Dirck's writes a series of four essays studying psalms and hymns written in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. In Nature-Study, he again discusses mostly religious poetry, exploring the poems individually, and deciphering them. He concludes his book by discussing the perfection, creativity, and beauty of nature.

Pepper's Ghost
Popular science lecturer John Henry Pepper saw the concept and replicated it on a larger scale, taking out a joint patent with Dircks. Pepper debuted his creation with a Christmas Eve production of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's play A Strange Story in 1862. This debut was to a small audience of press members held at the Polytechnic. Written permission from Charles Dickens was later given to display his play The Haunted Man to exhibit the ghost illusion. This exhibit was ran for fifteen months.

Some reports have suggested that, at the time, Pepper claimed to have developed the technique after reading the 1831 book Recreative Memoirs by famed showman Étienne-Gaspard Robert even after Dircks signed over all financial rights. Dirck's published his book The ghost as produced in the Spectra Drama describing how the idea came to him and how Pepper produced it. Either way, the effect became known as "Pepper's ghost" and this name was used by those who replicated the technique. Because of this Dircks became increasingly convinced that his invention had been stolen from him, believing that a conspiracy had been perpetrated against him at first by the Polytechnic and then latterly by the newspapers and advertisers who omitted his name.