Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination

By Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan

Nineteenth-century British culture frequently represented the eye as the preeminent organ of truth. These essays explore the relationship between the verbal and the visual in the Victorian imagination. They range broadly over topics that include the relationship of optical devices to the visual imagination, the role of photography in changing the conception of evidence and truth, the changing partnership between illustrator and novelist, and the ways in which literary texts represent the visual. Together they begin to construct a history of seeing in the Victorian period. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9780520311169

Book preview

Victorian Literature and the

Victorian Visual Imagination

Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination

Edited by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1995 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Victorian literature and the Victorian visual imagination / edited by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-08641-4 (alk. paper). —ISBN 0-520-20022-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism.

2. Art and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century.

3. English literature—19th century—Illustrations. 4. Illustration of books—Great Britain. 5. Visual perception in literature.

6. Art, British—19th century. I. Christ, Carol T. II. Jordan,

John O.

PR468.A76V53 1995 94-40328

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Contents

Contents

Illustrations

Contributors

INTRODUCTION

Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves

Shared Lines Pen und Pencil as Trace

Image versus Text in the Illustrated Novels of William Makepeace Thackeray

The Right Thing in the Right Place P H. Emerson and the Picturesque Photograph

Dust Piles and Damp Pavements Excrement, Repression, and the Victorian City in Photography and Literature

Making Darkness Visible Capturing the Criminal and Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction

Victoria’s Sovereign Obedience Portraits of the Queen as Wife and Mother

The Author as Spectacle and Commodity Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Hardy

The Hero as Spectacle Carlyle and the Persistence ofDandyism

Street Figures Victorian Urban Iconography

Seeing the Unseen Pictorial Problematics and Victorian Images of Class, Poverty, and Urban Life

John Millais’s Children Faith and Erotics: The Woodman’s Daughter (1851) children and their subjectivity that can be seen to have world-historical resonance.

Seeing Is Believing in Enoch Arden

Spectacular Sympathy Visuality and Ideology in Dickenses A Christmas Carol

Reading Figures The Legible Image of Victorian Textuality

Index

Illustrations

1. Johann Zahn, reflex box camera obscura, 1685 17

2. Sketch of Athanasius Kircher’s portable camera obscura, 18

1671

3. Home magic lantern show, c. 1885 19

4. Zoetrope, c. 1920 20

5. Cutout zoetrope, 1896 21

6. The Evils of Drink (set of dissolving slides for use in a 22

biunial magic lantern), c. 1880

7. George Cruikshank, Hone and Cruikshank. Title page 41

to William Hone, Facetiae and Miscellanies, 1827

8. Advertisement for Elementary Drawing Copy Books, from 42

Our Mutual Friend, no. 12 (April 1865)

9. Robert Braithwaite Martineau, Kifs Writing Lesson, 1852 43

10. Capital Strokes and Letters, from George Bickham, The 44

Drawing and Writing Tutor, c. 1740

11. John Hemm, George the Fourth, from Portraits of the 45

Boyal Family in Calligraphy, 1831

12. Organic Formation of the Principal Elements of Speech, 46

from Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech, 1864

13. Writing, Book-Keeping, &c., advertisement from The 47

Mystery ofEdwin Drood, no. 5 (August 1870)

14. Page from the Autographic Mirror, n.d. (issued weekly 48

from 1865)

15. Punch’s Essence of Parliament, from Punch 62 (17 Febru- 49

ary 1872)

16. Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), title page to Charles Dickens, 50

Little Dorrit, 1857

17. Volume cover for Punch 26 (1854) 51

18. Volume cover for Illustrated London News 27 (1855) 52

ix

19. Volume cover for Illustrated London News 57 (1870) 53

20. George du Maurier, An Edition de Luxe! Magazine of 54

Art, 1890

21. Staplehurst railway accident, cover of Penny Illustrated 55

Paper 9 (24 June 1865)

22. W. M. Thackeray, The Narrator unmasked, Vanity Fair, 73

1848, chapter 9

23. W. M. Thackeray, Amelia and the Miss Osbornes, Vanity 74

Fair, 1848, chapter 12

24. W. M. Thackeray, The great Lord Steyne, Vanity Fair, 75

1848, chapter 37

25. W. M. Thackeray, A friendly game of cards and "A Family 76

Party at Brighton," Vanity Fair, 1848, chapter 25

26. M. Engels, False Gesture, from Henry Siddons’s adapta- 77

tion of Engels’s Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, 1807

27. M. Engels, Menace, from Henry Siddons’s adaptation 77

of Engels’s Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and

Action, 1807

28. W. M. Thackeray, Going in to dinner, Vanity Fair, 1848, 78

chapter 8

29. W. M. Thackeray, Mrs. Bute’s scheme and Becky’s rivals, 78

Vanity Fair, 1848, chapter 11

30. W. M. Thackeray, The Letter before Waterloo and The 79

Fool and his mirror, Vanity Fair, 1848, frontispiece and tide page

31. W. M. Thackeray, George and his beloved, Vanity Fair, 80

1848, chapter 13

32. W. M. Thackeray, On the hustings, The History of Pen- 81

dennis, 1850, vol. 2, chapter 27

33. W. M. Thackeray, Dear Blanche, The History of Pendennis, 82

1850, vol. 2, chapter 34

34. W. M. Thackeray, Pen’s harlequinade, The History of Pen- 83

dennis, 1850, vol. 2, chapter 35

35. W. M. Thackeray, A delicate balance, Vanity Fair, 1848, 84

chapter 37

36. P. H. Emerson, Coming Home from the Marshes, 1886 103

37. P. H. Emerson, Rowing Home the Schoof-Stuff, 1886 104

38. P. H. Emerson, The Mangold Harvest, 1887 105

39. P. H. Emerson, Poling the Marsh Hay, 1886 106

40. P. H. Emerson, A Ruined Water Mill, 1886 107

41. P. H. Emerson, Marsh Weeds, 1895 108

42. Thomas Annan, Close, No. 61 Saltmarket, 1868-77 125

43. Thomas Annan, Closes, Nos. 97 and 103 Saltmarket, 1868-77 126

44. Thomas Annan, Close, No. 31 Saltmarket, 1868-77 127

45. Thomas Annan, Close, No. 80 High Street, 1868-77 128

46. Thomas Annan, Close, No. 128 Sultmarket, 1868-77 129

47. Thomas Annan, High Street from the College Open, 1868-77 130

48. R. T. Sperry, "Famous Detective’s Thirty Years Experi- 158

enees and Observations," 1892

49. George Cruikshank, wood engraving of Richard Beard’s 159

photographic portrait studio in London, 1842

50. Jacob A. Riis, "Photographing a Rogue: Inspector 160

Byrnes Looking On," n.d.

51. R. T. Sperry, "An Unwilling Subject—Photographing a 161

Prisoner for the Rogue’s Gallery at Police Headquarters," 1892

52. Honore Daumier, "Nadar Raising Photography to the 162

Height of Art," 1862

53. D. H. Fristen, frontispiece to Arthur Conan Doyle, A 163

Study in Scarlet, 1887

54. "Vue genérale de l’appareil portatif de photographie me- 164

trique … de M. A. Bertillon," 1909

55. Francis Galton, composite photograph of criminal type. 165

Frontispiece for first edition of Havelock Ellis, The Criminal, 1890

56. Petticoats for Ever. Broadsheet, c. 1837 184

57. The Coronation. Broadsheet, c. 1837 185

58. Trying It On. Woodcut, c. 1840 186

59. W. J. Linton, God Save the Queen, from the Illustrated 187

Book of British Song, 1842. Wood engraving from a picture by H. Warren

60. To the Queens Private Apartments: The Queen and Prince Al- 188

bert at Home. Lithograph, c. 1844

61. Sir Edwin Landseer, Windsor Castle in Modern Times: 189

Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and Victoria, Princess Roy al, 1841-45

62. F. X. Winterhalter, The Royal Family in 1846 189

63. Queen Victoria, sketch of Winterhalter’s Royal Family in 190

1846

64. Miss Day, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Al- 191

bert, Osborne, 26 July 1859

65. J. J. E. Mayall, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince 192

Albert, 15 May 1860

66. J. J. E. Mayall, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince 193

Albert, 1 March 1861

67. Prince Alfred, photograph of Queen Victoria and her sec- 194

ond daughter, Princess Alice, with a bust of Prince Albert, 1862

68. Williams, photograph of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, 195

and their daughter Victoria, Princess Royal, on her wedding day, 25 January 1858

69. W. P. Frith, The Private View at the Poyal Academy, 1881 210

70. Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), "A Sudden Recognition, Unex- 253

pected on Both Sides," from Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-39

71. Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), Nicholas Starts for Yorkshire, 254

from Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-39

72. Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), "Nicholas Hints at the Probabil- 255

ity of His Leaving the Company," from Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-39

73. Gilbert Scott et al., Albert Memorial, 1872 256

74. J. H. Foley, Asia, Albert Memorial, 1872 257

75. John Leech, The Pound and the Shilling, from Punch 20 258

(14 June 1851)

76. John Thomson, Covent Garden Labourers, from Street 259

Life in London, 1877

77. John Thomson, "Street Amusements and Occupations, Pe- 260

king," from Illustrations of China and Its People, 1873-74

78. John Thomson, "Clapham Common Industries: ‘Photog- 261

raphy on the Commons’ and Waiting for a Hire,’ from Street Life in London, 1877

79. J. E. Millais, The Blind Man, 1853 279

80. W. M. Egley, Omnibus Life in London, 1859 280

81. W. P. Frith, For Better, for Worse, 1881 281

82. Thomas Faed, From Hand to Mouth, 1879 282

83. E. C. Wilkinson, Spring, Piccadilly, 1887 283

84. G. J. Pinwell, A Seat in the Park, 1869 284

85. Gustave Doré, Asleep under the Stars, 1872 285

86. Luke Fildes, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward, 1874 286

87. J. E. Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents, 1849-50 303

88. J. E. Millais, The Woodman’s Daughter, 1851 304

89. J. E. Millais, My First Sermon, 1863 305

90. J. E. Millais, My Second Sermon, 1864 306

91. J. E. Millais, A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford, 307

1857

92. John Tenniel, The White Knight. Frontispiece to Lewis 308

Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, 1871

93. J. E. Millais, Cherry Pipe, 1879 309

94. J. E. Millais, Bubbles, 1886 310

95. Mr. Meeson’s will in execution, from H. Rider Haggard, 362

Mr. Meeson’s Will, 1888

96. Courtroom disrobing, from H. Rider Haggard, Mr. Mee- 363

son’s Will, 1888

97. Detail of Fig. 96 364

98. George du Maurier, page from Trilby (with drawing of 365

Svengali’s photographic portrait), 1894

Contributors

JAMES ELI ADAMS is Assistant Professor of English and Victorian Studies at Indiana University and co-editor of Victorian Studies. He has published a number of articles on Victorian literature and culture and is completing a book entitled Bold against Himself: Rhetorics of Victorian Masculinity.

MIRIAM BAILIN is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. Her Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being III was published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. She is working on a literary and cultural history of Victorian pathos.

SUSAN P. CASTERAS is Curator of Paintings at the Yale Center for British Art and has organized many exhibitions of Victorian art, including A Struggle for Fame: Victorian Women Artists and Authors; Pocket Cathedrals: Pre-Raphaelite Book Illustrations; Victorian Childhood; and Richard Redgrave. A member of the History of Art faculty at Yale, she has published extensively in the field of Victorian art, including books entitled English Pre-Raphaelitism and its European Contexts, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art, and English Pre-Raphaelitism and Its Reception in America in the Nineteenth Century as well as numerous articles and essays in Victorian Studies, the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and elsewhere.

CAROL T. CHRIST is Professor of English and Provost and Dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry and Victorian and Modern Poetics and the editor, with George Ford, of the Victorian section of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. She is at work on a project on death in Victorian literature.

GERARD CURTIS isa Ph.D. candidate at the University of Essex and lectures in art history at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College (Memorial University), Newfoundland. He is the author of "Ford Madox Brown’s Work: An Iconographical Analysis and Dickens in the Visual Market." Currently he is researching the relationship of image to word in Victorian culture.

JUDITH L. FISHER is Associate Professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of Annotations to the Art Criticism of William Makepeace Thackeray and co-editor of When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare: Essays in Nineteenth-Century British and American Theater. She has recently finished a study of language and perception in Thackeray’s art criticism and fiction, titled Thackeray’s Perilous Trade.

JENNIFER M. GREEN is Assistant Professor of English at George Washington University. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Narrative Technique, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorians Institute Journal, and Victorian Studies, among others. She is completing a book on photography and representation.

ELLEN HANDY is an art historian and critic and teaches at LaGuardia College, CUNY. Her research encompasses many aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, particularly photography. Most recently, she organized an exhibition for the Chrysler Museum titled Pictorial Effect/Naturalistic Vision, which presented the work of two Victorian photographers, H. P. Robinson and P. H. Emerson.

MARGARET HOMANS is the author of Bearing the Word: Language and Temale Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (1986) and of essays on nineteenth-century literature and on contemporary feminist theory. The essay in this volume is part of a book project on Queen Victoria and Victorian culture.

SUSAN R. HORTON’S Difficult Women, Artful Lives: Olive Schreiner and Isak Dinesen, In and Out of Africa is scheduled to appear in the fall of 1995 from the Johns Hopkins University Press. Her previous publications include Interpreting Interpreting, The Reader in the Dickens World, Thinking through Writing, and various essays on literary theory, literacy, and Dickens. A past president of the Dickens Society, she is Professor and former Chair of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

AUDREY JAFFE, Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University, is the author of Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (University of California Press, 1991) and of essays on Victorian literature. She is at work on a book about sympathy and representation in nineteenth-century British literature and culture.

JOHN o. JORDAN is Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published articles on several Victorian writers, including Dickens, as well as essays on modern African literature and Picasso. He is co-editor, with Robert L. Patten, of Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

ROBERT M. POLHEMUS is Howard H. and Jesse T. Watkins University Professor in English at Stanford University. He is the author of Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence; Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce; The Changing World of Anthony Trollope, and, most recently, an author and co-editor of Critical Reconstruction: The Relationship of Fiction and Life. He is at work on a book about parent-child relationships in fiction, faith in the child, and representations of children in literature and art.

LINDAM, SHIRES, Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University, is the author of numerous essays on Victorian literature and of British Poetry of the Second World War (1985), co-author of Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (1988), and editor of Rewriting the Victorians (1992). A1993-94 Guggenheim Fellow, she is currently writing a book on careers in the Victorian literary marketplace and editing the new Penguin edition of The Trumpet Major.

RICHARD L. STEIN is the author of The Ritual ofLnterpreta- tion: The Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater (Harvard University Press, 1975) and Victoria'sTear: English Literature and Culture, 1837-1838 (Oxford University Press, 1987) along with other writing on nineteenth-century British literature and the fine arts. He is working on a study of Victorian iconography. He has been a member of the faculty at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently Professor and Head of the Department of English at the University of Oregon.

Author most recently of Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext and of numerous articles on Victorian fiction and film, GARRETT STEWART is James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa.

RONALD R. THOMAS is Associate Professor of English and Chairman of the Department at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Among his publications are Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious (Cornell University Press, 1990) and a number of articles on the novel, including studies of Dickens, Collins, Stevenson, and Beckett. He is currently writing Private Eyes and Public Enemies: The Science and Politics of Identity in American and British Detective Fiction) a book investigating the genre’s involvement with emerging technologies of criminal identification in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to teaching at the University of Chicago, he has been a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard University.

INTRODUCTION

Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan

Jonathan Crary, in his book Techniques of the Observer, describes a reorganization of vision in the nineteenth century, a change that created a new model of the observer, embodied in aesthetic, cultural, and scientific practices.¹ Identifying a number of new optical devices invented near the beginning of the century, Crary argues that they indicate a profound change in ideas of seeing central to the construction of modernity. Crary concentrates his analysis on devices that create optical illusions: the thaumatrope, in which a card having on its opposite faces different designs is whirled rapidly to combine the designs in a single picture; the phenakistoscope, in which a disk with figures on it representing different stages of motion is whirled rapidly to create the impression of actual motion; the zoetrope and the stroboscope, later developments of the phenakistoscope; the kaleidoscope; the diorama; and the stereoscope, which combines pictures taken from two points of view to create a single image with the illusion of solidity or depth. One can add to Crary’s list a number of other nineteenth-century optical inventions that projected, recorded, or magnified images: the camera lucida, which projects the image of an object on a plane surface; the graphic telescope, which adds magnification to the operation of the camera lucida; the photographic camera; the binocular telescope; the binocular microscope; the stereopticon, a nineteenth-century precursor to the slide projector; and the kinetoscope, an early motion picture projector.

Much in the standard literary history of the nineteenth century supports Crary’s claim that an analysis of vision gives crucial insight into the way the Victorians constructed experience. Nineteenth-century aes- thetic theory frequently makes the eye the preeminent organ of truth. John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, with its detailed descriptions of clouds, water, rocks, air, and trees, provides the most encyclopedic example of the authority many writers vested in the eye. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion —all in one.² In The Hero as Poet, Carlyle writes, "Poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing.³ Likewise in The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, Arnold describes the ideal in all branches of knowledge: to see the object as in itself it really is." The effort of the Pre-Raphaelites to represent religious subjects with minute attention to visual detail reflects a similar faith in seeing.

Poetic theory, accordingly, emphasized what John Stuart Mill called the poet’s power of painting a picture to the inward eye.⁴ In his review of Tennyson’s first volume of poems, Arthur Henry Hallam defines the picturesque poet, whose poetry is a sort of magic, producing a number of impressions, too multiplied, too minute, and too diversified to allow of our tracing them to their causes because just such was the effect, even so boundless and so bewildering, produced on their imaginations by the real appearance of Nature.⁵ A character in Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, enthusiastically praising the visual accuracy of Tennyson’s poetry, says it was Tennyson who taught him that ash buds are black in the beginning of March. As Tennyson’s legendary fidelity to visual detail suggests, word painting, or what Hallam terms the picturesque, is central to nineteenth-century poetic style. Biographical evidence abounds of poets’ quests for visual experience—Wordsworth’s hiking tours, Hopkins’s journals, Tennyson’s falling to his knees in the grass to observe a rose through a dragonfly’s wings. Furthermore, there is a close partnership between poetry and painting. Ut pictura poesis could stand as a motto not only for Rossetti’s paired sonnets and pictures but also for the large body of Victorian poetry about paintings.

The visual experience important to the poetics and poetry of the nineteenth century was also valued in the novel. In The Art of Fiction Henry James provides what could stand as a summary statement of the nineteenth-century novel’s attempt to picture what it represents:

The air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel —the merit on which all its other merits … helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. … It is here in very truth that he competes with life; it is here that he competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the color, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle.⁶

Similar moments, in which the novelist defines his or her art in terms of painting, occur in the works of many nineteenth-century writers. George Eliot’s famous chapter in Adam Bede in which she compares her art to Dutch painting provides an example — the pictures of an old woman, bending over her flower pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning wheel, and her stone jug or the village wedding, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips.⁷ That Eliot’s novel only partially embodies the aesthetic ideal she describes here does not lessen the significance of the visual analogue she chooses. Or we can turn to Hardy, who finds in the 1880s in impressionist painting a model to which he aspires in his fiction. He writes in his journal, The impressionist school is strong. It is even more suggestive in the direction of literature than in that of art… the principle is, as I understand it, that what you carry away with you from a scene is the true feature to grasp.⁸ Beyond finding analogues to their work in painting, novelists formed actual partnerships with illustrators. Dickens’s work with Phiz and Cruikshank and Thackeray’s design of his own illustrations demonstrate the closeness between verbal and visual art in the nineteenth-century novel.

This brief account of nineteenth-century visual culture establishes its importance; the meaning of all its prominent features is far harder to assess. Two very different accounts have been given of the history of the visual imagination in the century. One has stressed the predominance of realist modes of representation, culminating in photography and, in the twentieth century, the cinema. The other has emphasized a break with realism, an increasingly subjective organization of vision leading to modernism.⁹ Often the same writer can be used to support either model. Ruskin’s minute cataloguing of the truth of rocks and trees and his many declarations of the necessity of accurate vision seem to place him squarely in the objectivist camp, yet he erects the argument ofModem Painters in defense of Turner. Similarly, George Eliot repeatedly represents herself as a scientist mirroring the reality she depicts, yet she represents perception as necessarily individual and subjective. Likewise the optical inventions of the century do not support a single model.

Jonathan Crary argues that the optical devices he describes show a new subjective model of the observer emerging in the early nineteenth century, but the photograph, the binocular telescope, and microscope seem to tell a different story, in which optical inventions extend our powers of objective observation.

A comprehensive study of visuality in the nineteenth century, one that would try to understand the relationship of what seem to be different constructions of the observer, has yet to be written. The only two books that attempt a comprehensive argument are Crary’s account and Martin Meisel’s Realizatwns: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England.¹⁰ Whereas Crary bases his argument on optics, Meisel identifies formal similarities between fiction, painting, and drama, which cut across medium and genre and, he argues, constitute a common nineteenth-century style. This style, according to Meisel, unites pictorialism with narrative to create richly detailed scenes in painting, in theater, and in the illustrated novel, scenes that at once imply the stories that precede and follow and symbolize their meaning.

With the exception of Meisel, no critic has tried to give a general account of visuality in nineteenth-century British art and literature. There are, of course, hundreds of studies that illuminate various aspects of the nineteenth-century visual imagination —studies of the image or description in individual writers or groups of writers, studies of painting or photography, book illustration, the sister arts, landscape, the picturesque—the list could go on.¹¹ But few writers have attempted to link these fields of inquiry to develop a comprehensive account.

The time is now ripe for such an attempt. The development of interdisciplinary scholarship has created useful models for moving across different fields of inquiry and discourse. Influential theoretical formulations by Lacan (on the gaze), Foucault (on surveillance), and Debord (on spectacle) have given new impetus to the study of vision and visuality in a variety of cultural and historical contexts, including literary studies.¹² The groundbreaking work of Roland Barthes on popular culture and on photography has encouraged others to read visual images as texts, using the tools of semiotics and ideological critique.¹³ Psychoanalysis, feminism, film theory, and media studies have all contributed to our understanding of what Martin Jay calls the scopic regimes of modernity, a phrase he uses to designate the contested terrain of visual theories and practices since the Renaissance.¹⁴ Practitioners of the new art history draw readily on literary theory as well as on literary texts in developing their arguments,¹⁵ while the recently founded journal Word and Image shows an interest in the relationship of pictorial and verbal representation. Furthermore, post-structuralist criticism has motivated a concern with analyzing the representational status of the image in literature and in literary theory, complicating, even deconstructing, the opposition between objective and subjective, mimesis and imaginary construction.¹⁶

The essays we have collected for this volume concern the relationship between the verbal and the visual in the nineteenth-century British imagination. We have limited our compass to the Victorian period, and we have organized the volume around topics central to an analysis of visuality and the Victorian imagination —the relationship of optical devices to the visual imagination, the role of photography in changing the conception of evidence and of truth, the changing partnership between illustrator and novelist, the ways in which literary texts represent the visual. Each of the essays either addresses a particular relationship of the Victorian visual imagination to Victorian literature or shows how the visual is consequential for studies of Victorian writing. Together they begin to construct a history of seeing and writing in the Victorian period.

From this history, a number of conclusions emerge. Primary among them is that neither an exclusively subjective nor an exclusively objective model provides a sufficient explanation for the Victorian idea of visual perception. Rather, the Victorians were interested in the conflict, even the competition, between objective and subjective paradigms for perception. The ideas that most powerfully engaged their imagination were those such as perspectivism or impressionism that could simultaneously accommodate a uniquely subjective point of view and an objective model of how perception occurs. George Eliot’s famous image of the pier glass in Middlemarch provides a good example of such an accommodation:

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.¹⁷

Pater’s impressionism, most powerfully articulated in the conclusion to TheRenaissance, provides another example of a model of perception that combines scientific objectivism with a personally singular subjectivism. He begins his analysis by representing physical life as a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names. These elements are in perpetual motion in a set of processes, which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Human access to this world of elements and processes —the scratches on the pier glass, as it were, in Elio’s metaphor—can only come through the individual’s impression, his or her candle. Thus, Pater observes, The whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.¹⁸

The optical instruments so popular among the Victorians demonstrate a similar tension between objective and subjective models of vision. Susan Horton’s essay on optical gadgetry and on the representation of seeing in Dickens, which begins this collection, provides a rich analysis of the competition between Romantic and empirical conceptions of vision in the Victorian period. Her essay leads to the insight that optical gadgets were not arrayed on one side or the other of this conflict. She shows that for Dickens they provided a means to contemplate the conflict, indeed, to experience it. Like Eliot’s pier glass, like Pater’s impressionism, optical gadgets used science to derive a subjective spectacle.

As Horton’s essay suggests, the question of what the visible reveals fascinated and preoccupied the Victorians. A second conclusion that emerges from this collection of essays is the importance of the visible trace as evidence, both in broad empirical terms and in a narrower legal and judicial sense. We all have in our stock of Victorian images the picture of Sherlock Holmes and his magnifying glass. In his essay Making Darkness Visible, Ronald Thomas calls Holmes the essential Victorian hero who is known above all for his virtually photographic visual powers. Holmes, Thomas argues, seeks to make darkness visible … to recognize the criminal in our midst by changing the way we see and by redefining what is important for us to notice. Holmes thus also shows the tension between uniquely personal and scientifically determined observation. Such interest in the visible clue could paradoxically lead to a greater emphasis on circumstantial evidence than on an eyewitness account. In Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England, Alexander Welsh argues that plots centered on carefully managed circumstantial evidence, highly conclusive in itself and often scornful of direct testimony, constituted the most prominent form of narrative in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹⁹ Welsh’s argument might seem to contradict the importance we are attributing to the visual because circumstantial evidence does not derive from direct visual experience of the event. On the other hand, circumstantial evidence often derives from a visible trace. It thus shows the Victorians’ fascination with the way the visible could reveal events of which we have no firsthand visual knowledge.

This interest in visual knowledge in part motivated the pictorial style that Martin Meisel has so exhaustively and richly detailed. A number of essays in this collection confirm the collaboration between narrative and picture that Meisel defines as the matrix of Victorian style. Miriam Bailin’s analysis of ekphrasis in Tennyson’s Enoch Arden, Judith Fisher’s account of the uneasy partnership between image and text in Thackeray, Richard Stein’s essay on urban iconography, Susan Casteras’s examination of paintings depicting the urban poor, Robert Polhemus’s reading of John Everett Millais’s painting The Woodman’s Daughter together demonstrate how consistently the Victorians pictorialized narrative and made pictures tell a story.

This partnership is not stable throughout the period, however. The early Victorian novel reflects a relatively homogeneous pictographic culture in which text and illustration carry equal weight. This complementary relation between text and illustration is described by two essays, by Gerard Curtis and Judith Fisher, at the beginning of our collection. By the end of the period, however, this partnership no longer existed, disrupted in part by the advent of photography, whose representational claims differed from those of painting and drawing. Curtis argues that the harmonious relationship between writing and drawing, or between pen and pencil, deteriorated gradually during the century until it was destroyed by photography, which replaced the pen illustration and wood-block print as the novel’s visual analogue for truth and communicative value. Late-Victorian fiction, as Garrett Stewart argues in the last essay of the collection, reverses the tendency of earlier writing to move from the verbal to the visual, emphasizing instead the textuality of the visual image and leaving fiction less firmly attached to its visual analogues. The pictorial style that Meisel claims as characteristic of the age has been radically altered.

As both Curtis and Stewart observe, the advent of photography plays a central role in changing the relationship between picture and text. Although we group the essays specifically on photography, it plays an important role in many of our authors’ arguments. Because the photograph seemed to offer a transparent record of the truth, it assumed a representational authority that rivaled that of text and of graphic art. Its transparency, however, was often illusory. As both Jennifer Green and Ellen Handy show in their essays, the photographer carefully composed his pictures to focus on what was important to his design and to exclude what he wished to repress. Although photography in many ways initiated and motivated a break with earlier Victorian visual culture, its tensions between objective and subjective models of vision paradoxically resemble those of that culture. The very claims that the photographer could make for the transparency of representation, however, increased his power to mythologize the elements he presented.

In its ability to construct a social mythology, photography became an important tool for mapping different social worlds. Because it claimed documentary power, photography could construct, classify, and build a relationship to images from exotic social worlds, whether those of the urban poor, foreigners, or even criminals. A number of our essayists demonstrate this use of the camera—Handy in Thomas Annan’s photographs of the Glasgow slums; Stein in Adolphe Smith’s and John Thomson’s collection of texts and photographs, Street Life in London; Green in P. H. Emerson’s photographs of the Norfolk Broads; and Thomas in police photography. As Thomas observes, the notion of the photograph as evidence and authentication allowed it to become not only a tool of social knowledge but a weapon enabling social control.

The social functions photography assumed depended in part on transformations in the media — the ease of mechanical reproduction, the prevalence of cheap printing. Readily available and easily reproduced, the photograph transformed the social function of the portrait. What had been a declaration of a socially privileged identity could become an instrument of control and detection and a product for commercial distribution. Public figures could widely distribute images and thus construct an identity in new ways. In their essays, Margaret Homans, Linda Shires, and James Adams all analyze the public figure as a spectacle. The new possibilities of being seen in photographs, often reproduced in print media, created new ways of building power and significance. Even the ideal of the sincere, unselfconscious writer, as Shires and Adams show, involved the author in a theatrical manipulation of his or her image. The author could use the media to commodify his own life in a seemingly unprecedented manner, creating images of identity as a spectacle that could be widely reproduced.

As Susan Horton observes, the nineteenth century devised rationales to legitimate spectatorship as a dominant cultural leisure-time activity. Although the interest in the spectator seems to take its motivation from the optical gadgetry that so fascinated people of the period, it had a far broader cultural importance. It was directly linked to the development of a consumer culture, but, even more important, spectatorship gave access to cultural life in general. Audrey Jaffe’s essay on A Christmas Carol shows how social sympathy emerges from the spectator’s relationship to spectacle. She argues that Dickens’s text is paradigmatic not only for the nineteenth but also for the twentieth century because of the way spectators, cast as the observers of a series of visual representations, gain access not merely to their better selves but also to a set of social relationships and values.

Jaffe’s essay, like many essays in this volume, locates in Dickens the paradigmatic writer for her argument. In part the focus on Dickens is an accident of occasion: these essays were originally papers delivered at the 1992 Dickens Conference in Santa Cruz. But Dickens’s predominance here has more to justify it than the fact of the conference. In his partnership with illustrators, in his pictorialization of narrative, in his fascination with optical gadgetry, and in his uncanny anticipation of twentieth-century cinema,