The Wonders of Wordsworth Donisthorpe: Cinematic Pioneer and Victorian Renaissance Man

What a fascinating specimen was Wordsworth Donisthorpe (1847-1914). He was a man of too many parts to name. We’ll naturally lead with talk of his work as a pioneer of cinema, but he was also a barrister, political philosopher, explorer, author, and co-founder of the British Chess Association among other things.

His father George Edmund Donisthorpe had invented mechanisms used in wool-combing machines, and owned several mills. His mother was a great-niece of the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth Donisthorpe went up to Trinity College, Cambridge and qualified as a barrister. His knowledge of the law would inform his future path, though he would never practice per se. There was talk of his taking over one of his father’s mills with a cousin, but nothing came of it.

Instead, Donisthorpe became something of a Victorian Renaissance man, often working in collaboration with a cousin William Carr Crofts (1846-1894). Inspired by the wool carding machines that their fathers had invented, Donisthorpe and Crofts developed what they called a kinesigraph, first patented in 1876, then revived with working devices patented in 1889. In 1890 they took the only footage of their experiments to survive, a shot of traffic moving around Trafalgar Square. Donisthorpe tried to move heaven and earth to raise money (including a blackmail scheme) to continue to develop their device but to little avail. When Crofts died in 1894, so did the kinesigraph. And rather, sensibly, I might add, for very shortly afterward the Lumiere Brothers and Edison solved the problem of motion pictures to the satisfaction of history.

Which was more than alright for the entrepreneurial Donisthorpe, for he had more than a few irons in the fire. While his kinesigraph didn’t make it across the finish line in time, Donnisthorpe proved an energetic political thinker and activist, whose beliefs were at the radical end of the Victorian spectrum, most closely aligned with libertarianism and anarchism. Croft’s sister Ellen was married to Charles Darwin’s son the botanist Francis Darwin (1848-1925). Donisthorpe and Croft founded the short-lived Political Evolution Society, dedicated to the principles of laissez-faire (and surely under the heady influence of Herbert Spencer) in 1873. His early books included Principles of Plutology (1876) and The Claims of Labour, or, Serfdom, Wagedom, and Freedom (1880). In 1882 he joined the newly formed Liberty and Property Defence League (LPDL) becoming the editor of their periodical Jus: A Weekly Organ of Individualism, and publishing the pamphlet Empire and Liberty, a Lecture on the Principles of Local Government (1886) under their auspices, This was followed by Labour Capitalization (1887) and Individualism: A System of Politics (1889). At around this time, he left the LPDL to resume work on his motion picture device.

In 1893 Donisthorpe became a founding member and President of The Legitimation League, which was dedicated to securing rights for children born out of wedlock. He left the organization in 1897 when it evolved (quite naturally, upon reflection) into a free love society. Meantime he had written Love and Law: An Essay on Marriage (1893) and Law in a Free State (1895). Donisthorpe’s public objections to free love apparently didn’t extend to his private life. At some point he separated from his first wife Ann Marie Anderson, and took up with a common-law successor named Edith Georgina Fleming, and they had a child out of wedlock. There were also four older children by his first wife.

Donisthorpe travelled widely in Africa. He wrote a book inspired by his experiences steaming around the Mediterranean called Down the Streams of Civilization (1898). His last book Uropa (1913) was a project in the Shavian line — he designed an entirely new language, with its own system of speech and writing. Such projects can be regarded as whimsical at best; no one’s ever going to adopt them. I devised my own alphabet when I was 13, but if I ever to start to write in it, you can go ahead and book me into the nutty farm.

For all that, we save for last what is perhaps Donisthorpe’s most lasting legacy: he helped popularize the game of chess. In 1885 he co-founded the the British Chess Association and the British Chess Club, later to be replaced in 1904 by the British Chess Federation.

Great articles on Donisthorpe and his kinesigraph here:

Public Domain Review (wonderfully in-depth article on his device and the blackmail drama)

The Race to Cinema (includes a terrific re-creation of a working model of the lost device)

Who’s Who in Victorian Cinema (the author of that article, Stephen Herbert, has also written the book Industry, Liberty, and a Vision: Wordsworth Donisthorpe’s Kinesigraph

For more on early cinema please check out: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube — now also available on audiobook.