”Pageantitis”: Visualising Frank Lascelles’ 1907 Oxford Historical Pageant

Sugg Ryan, Deborah (2007) ”Pageantitis”: Visualising Frank Lascelles’ 1907 Oxford Historical Pageant. Visual Culture in Britain, 8 (2). pp. 63-82. ISSN 1471-4787

Abstract / Summary

This article challenges the existing historiography of the emerging interdisciplinary field of twentieth century pageant scholarship and also contributes to knowledge and understanding of twentieth century visual culture. Drawing on a range of primary sources and the author’s previous published original research, it argues that existing scholarship of twentieth century historical pageants has overlooked the importance and influence of the pageant master Frank Lascelles by focusing on his rival Louis Napoleon Parker and failing to question the championing of the latter by the Edwardian pageant scholar Robert Withington.

The article also investigates and substantiates the significant impact of Lascelles’ pageants and their distinct visual sensibility on the American pageant movement, which has hitherto been neglected by pageant scholars (most notably David Glassberg, author of the only contemporary monograph on the subject) who have tended to have written from within the disciplinary fields of English Literature and Drama. The article also locates, for the first time, the early twentieth century pageant movement within a wide range of visual popular culture practices and, also for the first time, considers their relationship with early film and the ‘cinema of attractions’.

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