wwii CONTRIBUTORS STEWART is James O, Freedman Professor of Letters at the Univer- sity of Towa. RONALD R THOMAS. is Associate Professor of English and (Chairman of the Department at Ttinity College in Hartford, Connecti- cut, Among his publications are Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fi tions ofthe 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 Mel- Jon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard University. INTRODUCTION Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan Jonathan Crary, in his book Techniques ofthe Observe, de- scribes a reorganization of vision in the nineteenth century, a change that created @ new model of the observer, embodied in aesthetic, cul- tural, and scientific practices." Identifying a number of new optical de- vices invented near the beginning of the century, Crary argues that they indicate a profound change in ideas of seeing central ro the construction ‘of modemity. Crary concentrates his analysis on devices that create opti cal 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, Jater developments of the phenakistoscope; the kaleidoscope; the dio- rama; 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’ lista 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 sup- ports Crary’s claim that an analysis of vision gives crucial insight intoxx INTRODUCTION thetic theory frequently makes the eye the preeminent organ of truth. John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, with its detailed descriptions of clouds, ‘water, rocks, at, and trees, provides the most encyclopedic example of the authority many writers vested in the eye. “Hundreds of people can tall 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.”? 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,”* 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-Raphadlites 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.”* In his re ‘view of Tennyson's first volume of poems, Arthur Hlenry 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 out tracing them to their causes because just such was the effect, even so boundless and so bewildering, produced on their imagi- nations by the teal appearance of Nature.”* A character in Mrs. Gaskell’s Coanford, enthusiastically praising the visual accuracy of Tennyson’s po- etry, 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 cen- tral 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 ob- serve a rose through a dragonfly’s wings. Furthermore, there is a close parmership between poetry and painting. “Ut pictura pocsis” could stand as a motto not only for Rossett’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 ninetcenth-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. IFit 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 ne nee RAIIE SHITE saITESAIATAAMIRAL RARE INTRODUCTION xxi with life; itis here that he competes with his brother the painter in his attempt fo 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 spectace.* ‘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 cating 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-fuced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips.”” That Eliot's novel only partially embodies the aesthetic ideal she de- sctibes here does not lessen the significance of the visual analogue she chooses. Or we can turn to Hardy, who finds in the 1880s in impression- ist 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... che principle is, a8 1 understand it, that what you carry away with you from a scene is the truc feature to grasp.”* Beyond finding analogues to their work in paint- ing, novelists formed. actual partnerships with illustrators. Dickens's ‘work with Phiz and Cruikshank and Thackeray’ design of his own ilus- ‘tations 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 al 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 modemism.? Often the same writer can be used to support cither 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 of Mad- «ern Painters in defense of Turner. Similarly, George Eliot repeatedly rep- resents 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.wai —-BNTRODUCTION Jonathan Crary argues that the optical devices he describes show a new suibjective model of the observer emerging in the early nineteenth cen- tury, 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 ninetcenth century, one that would try to understand the relationship of what seem to be differ- ent 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 Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England.!® Whereas Crary bases his argument on op- tics, Meisel identifies formal similarities between fiction, painting, and drama, which CaPaOSS HEAT and PERE a, he arpies, COM aE non pineisenti-cennury sale, This syle, according to Meisel, = according to Meisel, ie a teat and Ur MSstavod nove scenes a a once Fivtie rks that precee and flow and symbolize thelr meaning POTTED the exception of Mesel no Site he tied to ave 2 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 pictur- aquest it could go on" Bue few writes have atempted to fink these fields of inquiry to develop a comprehensive account. ‘The time is now ripe for such an attempt. The development of inter- disciplinary scholarship has created useful models for moving across different felds of inquiry and discourse. Influential theoretical formula- tons by Lacan (on th ae), ovens (on sures), and Debord (on spectacle) have given new impetus to the study of vision and vi- suality in a variety of cultural and historical contexts, including literary studies.2 The groundbreaking work of Roland Barthes on popular cul: ture and on photography has encouraged others to read visual images as “texts,” using the tools of semiotics and ideological critique." Psy- ‘hounaljis eaiim, fm theory, and media sie have al con ‘uted 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." Practitioners of the “new art history” draw readily on literary theory as well as on literary texts in developing their arguments, while the recently founded jour: INTRODUCTION xa 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 decon- structing, the opposition between objective and subjective, mimesis and imaginary construction. ‘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 wwe have organized the volume around topics central to an analysis of visuality and the Victorian imagination the relationship of optical de- vices 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 Vietoriar. 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 per ception. 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 Midilemarch provides a good example of such an accom modation: ‘An cminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly ffamitare by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant litde fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel ‘made to be rubbed by 2 housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it alighted 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 flatering ilusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.” Pater’s impressionism, most powerfully articulated in the conclusion to "The Renaiaance provides another example ofa model of perception thar