To the List,
The kaleidoscopes mentioned here recently turned up twice in my List-inspired reading of the past few days.
I re-read Marina Warner's comments on Hogg's Confessions in her truly wonderful Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, and was delighted by this footnote:
In an article 'Nature's Magic Lantern' Hogg reviews his own experience of meteorological illusions, and he discussed them with Sir David Brewster, the physician, inventor of the kaleidoscope and even more significantly, of the theory that led to stereoscopic photography. (note 22, p 246)
The Dr Brewster information was welcome as was the promise of "meteorological illusions" in Hogg's novel and other writings (cf PF's parahelia). I was also encouraged to learn that Hogg's publisher was The Cresset Press, as the possible source of that object in the Garh story.
Dr Brewster and his kaleidoscope turned up again in a book I turned to in search of anamorphoses (satisfactorily), Devices of Wonder, from the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Barbara Maria Stafford and Fraces Terpak, Getty 2001).
The main thrust of this note is to draw attention to these two books that will please any Nabokovian (it is nearly gift time, you know).
Carolyn