Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520311169

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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 0-520-086+1 + (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. +. Illustration of books—Great Britain. 5. Visual perception in literature. 6. Art, British—19th century. I. Christ, Carol T. II. Jordan, JohnO. PR+68.A76V53 1995 9+-+0328 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 Z39.48-198+.

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS CONTRIBUTORS

IX XV

CAROL T. CHRIST AND JOHN O. JORDAN

Introduction

xix

SUSAN R. HORTON

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

I

GERARD CURTIS

Shared Lines: Pen and Pencil as Trace

27

JUDITH L. FISHER

Image versus Text in the Illustrated Novels of William Makepeace Thackeray

60

JENNIFER M. GREEN

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

88

vi

CONTENTS ELLEN H A N D Y

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

in

RONALD R. THOMAS

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

134

MARGARET HOMANS

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

169

LINDA M. SHIRES

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

198

JAMES ELI ADAMS

The Hero as Spectacle: Carlyle and the Persistence of Dandyism

213

RICHARD L. STEIN

Street Figures: Victorian Urban Iconography

233

SUSAN P. CASTERAS

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

264

ROBERT M. POLHEMUS

John Millais's Children: Faith and Erotics: The Woodman's Daughter (1851) MIRIAM BAILIN

Seeing Is Believing in Enoch Arden

289

313

CONTENTS

vii

AUDREY JAFFE

Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens's A Christmas Carol

327

GARRETT STEWART

Reading Figures: The Legible Image of Victorian Textuality INDEX

345 369

Illustrations

I. Johann Zahn, reflex box camera obscura, 1685 2. Sketch of Athanasius Kircher's portable camera obscura, 1671 3- Home magic lantern show, c. 1885 4- Zoetrope, c. 1920 S- Cutout zoetrope, 1896 6. "The Evils of Drink" (set of dissolving slides for use in a biunial magic lantern), c. 1880 7- George Cruikshank, "Hone and Cruikshank." Tide page to William Hone, Facetiae and Miscellanies, 1827 8. Advertisement for Elementary Drawing Copy Books, from Our Mutual Friend, no. 12 (April 1865) 9- Robert Braithwaite Martineau, Kifs Writing Lesson, 1852 IO. "Capital Strokes and Letters," from George Bickham, The Drawing and Writing Tutor, c. 1740 n . John Hemm, "George the Fourth," from Portraits ofthe Royal Family in Calligraphy, 1831 12. "Organic Formation of the Principal Elements of Speech," from Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech, 1864 13- "Writing, Book-Keeping, &c.," advertisement from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, no. 5 (August 1870) 14- Page from the Autographic Mirror, n.d. (issued weekly from i86j) 15- "Punch's Essence of Parliament," from Punch 62 (17 February 1872) 16. Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), tide page to Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 1857 17- Volume cover for Punch 26 (1854) 18. Volume cover for Illustrated London News 27 (1855) ix

17 18 19 20 21 22 4i 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

ILLUSTRATIONS

19. Volume cover for Illustrated London News 57 (1870) 20. George du Maurier, "An Edition de Luxe!" Magazine of Art, 1890 21. Staplehurst railway accident, cover of Penny Illustrated Paper 9 (24 June 1865) 22. W. M. Thackeray, The Narrator unmasked, Vanity Fair, 1848, chapter 9 23. W. M. Thackeray, Amelia and the Miss Osbornes, Vanity Fair, 1848, chapter 12 24. W. M. Thackeray, The great Lord Steyne, Vanity Fair, 1848, chapter 37 25. W. M. Thackeray, A friendly game of cards and "A Family Party at Brighton," Vanity Fair, 1848, chapter 25 26. M. Engels, "False Gesture," from Henry Siddons's adaptation of Engels's Practical Illustrations ofRhetorical Gesture and Action, 1807 27. M. Engels, "Menace," from Henry Siddons's adaptation of Engels's Practical Illustrations ofRhetorical Gesture and Actum, 1807 28. W. M. Thackeray, Going in to dinner, Vanity Fair, 1848, chapter 8 29. W. M. Thackeray, Mrs. Bute's scheme and Becky's rivals, Vanity Fair, 1848, chapter 11 30. W. M. Thackeray, "The Letter before Waterloo" and The Fool and his mirror, Vanity Fair, 1848, frontispiece and tide page 31. W. M. Thackeray, George and his beloved, Vanity Fair, 1848, chapter 13 32. W. M. Thackeray, On the hustings, The History ofPendennis, 1850, vol. 2, chapter 27 33. W. M. Thackeray, Dear Blanche, The History ofPendennis, 1850, vol. 2, chapter 34 34. W. M. Thackeray, Pen's harlequinade, The History ofPendennis, 1850, vol. 2, chapter 35 35. W. M. Thackcray, A delicate balance, Vanity Fair, 1848, chapter 37 36. P. H. Emerson, "Coming Home from the Marshes," 1886 37. P. H. Emerson, "Rowing Home the Schoof-Stuff," 1886 38. P. H. Emerson, "The Mangold Harvest," 1887 39. P. H. Emerson, "Poling the Marsh Hay," 1886 40. P. H. Emerson, "A Ruined Water Mill," 1886 41. P. H. Emerson, "Marsh Weeds," 1895 42. Thomas Annan, Close, No. 61 Saltmarket, 1868-77 43. Thomas Annan, Closes, Nos. 97and 103 Saltmarket, 1868-77 44. Thomas Annan, Close, No. 31 Saltmarket, 1868-77

53 54 55 73 74 75 76 77

77

78 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 103 104 105 106 107 108 125 126 127

ILLUSTRATIONS

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Thomas Annan, Close, No. 80 High Street, 1868-77 Thomas Annan, Close, No. 128 Saltmarket, 1868-77 Thomas Annan, High Streetfromthe College Open, 1868-77 R. T. Sperry, "Famous Detective's Thirty Years Experiences and Observations," 1892 George Cruikshank, wood engraving of Richard Beard's photographic portrait studio in London, 1842 Jacob A. Riis, "Photographing a Rogue: Inspector Byrnes Looking On," n.d. R. T. Sperry, "An Unwilling Subject—Photographing a Prisoner for the Rogue's Gallery at Police Headquarters," 1892 Honoré Daumier, "Nadar Raising Photography to the Height of Art," 1862 D. H. Friston, frontispiece to Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 1887 "Vue générale de l'appareil portatif de photographie métrique . . . de M. A. Bertillon," 1909 Francis Galton, composite photograph of "criminal type." Frontispiece for first edition of Havelock Ellis, The Criminal, 1890 "Petticoats for Ever." Broadsheet, c. 1837 "The Coronation." Broadsheet, c. 1837 "Trying It On." Woodcut, c. 1840 W. J. Linton, "God Save the Queen," from the Illustrated Book ofBritish Song, 1842. Wood engraving from a picture by H. Warren To the Queen's Private Apartments: The Queen and Prince AlbertatHome. Lithograph, c. 1844 Sir Edwin Landseer, Windsor Castle in Modem Times: Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and Victoria, Princess Royal, 1841-45 F. X. WinterhaJter, The Royal Family in 1846 Queen Victoria, sketch of Winterhalter's Royal Family in 1846 Miss Day, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Osborne, 26 July 1859 J. J. E. Mayall, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 15 May i860 J. J. E. Mayall, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 1 March 1861 Prince Alfred, photograph of Queen Victoria and her second daughter, Princess Alice, with a bust of Prince Albert, 1862

xi

128 129 130 158 159

160 161

162 163 164 165

184 185 186 187

188 189

189 190 191 192 193 194

ILLUSTRATIONS

68. Williams, photograph of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their daughter Victoria, Princess Royal, on her wedding day, 25 January 1858 69. W. P. Frith, The Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 70. Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), "A Sudden Recognition, Unexpected on Both Sides," from Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-39 71. Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), "Nicholas Starts for Yorkshire," from Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-39 72. Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), "Nicholas Hints at the Probability of His Leaving the Company," from Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-39 73. Gilbert Scott et al., Albert Memorial, 1872 74. J. H. Foley, Asia, Albert Memorial, 1872 75. John Leech, "The Pound and the Shilling," from Punch 20 (14 June 1851) 76. John Thomson, "Covent Garden Labourers," from Street Life in London, 1877 77. John Thomson, "Street Amusements and Occupations, Peking," from Illustrations of China and Its People, 1873-74 78. John Thomson, "Clapham Common Industries: 'Photography on the Commons' and 'Waiting for a Hire,"' from Street Life in London, 1877 79. J. E. Millais, The Blind Man, 1853 80. W. M. Egley, Omnibus Life in London, 1859 81. W. P. Frith, For Better, for Worse, 1881 82. Thomas Faed, From Hand to Mouth, 1879 83. E. C. Wilkinson, Spring, Piccadilly, 1887 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

G. J. Pinwell, "A Seat in the Park," 1869 Gustave Dore, "Asleep under the Stars," 1872 Luke Fildes, Applicantsfor Admission to a Casual Ward, 1874 J. E. Millais, Christ in the House ofHis Parents, 1849-50 J. E. Millais, The Woodman's Daughter, 1851 J. E. Millais, My First Sermon, 1863

90. J. E. Millais, My Second Sermon, 1864 91. J. E. Millais, A Dream ofthe Past: Sirlsumbras at the Ford, 1857 92. John Tenniel, "The White Knight." Frontispiece to Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, 1871 93. J. E. Millais, Cherry Ripe, 1879 94- J- E. Millais, Bubbles, 1886 95. Mr. Meeson's will in execution, from H. Rider Haggard, Mr. Meesm's Will, 1888

195

210 253

254 255

256 257 258 259 260 261

279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 303 304 305 306 307 308

309 310 362

ILLUSTRATIONS

96. Courtroom disrobing, from H. Rider Haggard, Mr. Meeson's Will, 1888 97. Detail of Fig. 96 98. George du Maurier, page from Trilby (with drawing of Svengali's photographic portrait), 1894

Contributors

ELI A D A M S 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. J A M E S

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. M I R I A M

B A I L I N

S U S A N p. C A S T E R A S 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 ofPre-Raphaelite Studies, and elsewhere.

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 C A R O L

T.

C H R I S T

XV

CONTRIBUTORS

English Literature. She is at work on a project on death in Victorian literature. C U R T I S 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. G E R A R D

L. F I S H E R 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, tided Thackeray's "Perilous Trade."' J U D I T H

M. G R E E N 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. J E N N I F E R

H A N D Y isanart historian and critic and teaches at LaGuardia College, CUNY. Her research encompasses many aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, particularly photography. Most recendy, she organized an exhibition for the Chrysler Museum tided Pictorial Effect/Naturalistic Vision, which presented the work of two Victorian photographers, H. P. Robinson and P. H. Emerson. E L L E N

is the author of Bearing the Word: Language and Female 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. M A R G A R E T

H O M A N S

S U S A N R. H O R T O N ' 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.

CONTRIBUTORS

xvii

J A F F E , Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University, is the author of Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject ofOmniscience (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.

A U D R E Y

o. J O R D A N 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 Blading Practices, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. J O H N

R O B E R T M. P O L H E M U S is Howard H. and Jesse T. Watkins University Professor in English at Stanford University. He is the author of Erotic Faith: Being in LovefromJane Austen to D. H. Lawrence; Comic Faith: The Great TraditionfromAusten 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. L I N D A M. S H I R E S , 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. R I C H A R D L. S T E I N is the author of The Ritual ofInterpretation: The Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater (Harvard University Press, 1975) and Victoria's Tear: 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, G A R R E T T

xviii

CONTRIBUTORS

STEWART

is James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the Univer-

sity of Iowa. R O N A L D R. T H O M A S 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 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 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 aesxix

INTRODUCTION

thetic theory frequently makes the eye the preeminent organ of truth. John Raskin'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 Cmnford, 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

INTRODUCTION

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 oiModern 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.

INTRODUCTION

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 Realizations: 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. 1 1 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 recendy founded journal Word and Image shows an interest in the relationship of pictorial

INTRODUCTION

xxiii

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 The Renaissance, provides another example of a model of perception that

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INTRODUCTION

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 Eliot'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

INTRODUCTION

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 nofirsthandvisual 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 Bailing 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 consistendy 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

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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 commodity 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

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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, Dickens, more than any other nineteenthcentury writer, provides insight into the multiple aspects of the Victorian visual imagination. For their assistance at different stages in this project, we are grateful to Linda Hooper, Lark Letchworth, and Heather Julien of the University of California Dickens Project and to Barbara Lee and Betsy Wootten of Kresge College, University of California at Santa Cruz. Special thanks go to Murray Baumgarten and to Paul Alpers for their encouragement and advice.

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Notes 1. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 2. John Ruskin, Modem Painters, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904-12), 3:4.16.28. 3. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (New York: Scribner, 1899-1901), 1:104. 4. John Stuart Mill, "Tennyson's Poems," in Literary Essays, ed. Edward Alexander (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 105. 5. "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson," in The Writings ofArthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York: MLA, 1943), 186-87. 6. In Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," in Literary Criticism (New York: Library of America, 1984), 53. 7. George Eliot, Adam Bede (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 152 (chapter 27). 8. Thomas Hardy, as quoted in Ian Gregor, introduction to The Woodlanders (London: Penguin, 1981), 13. 9. See Crary, 3-19, for an account of the two arguments based in art history and the history of technology. Similar arguments can be made about literary history. 10. (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1983. 11. Some sample tides are Richard Altick, Paintings Ft'omBooks: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985); Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); Rhoda L. Flaxman, Victorian Word Pointing and Narrative: Toward the Blending of Genres (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987); Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981); Michael Irwin, Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979); George Landow, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Richard L. Stein, The Ritual ofInterpretation: The Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 197$); Herbert Sussman, Fact and Fiction: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979). 12. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Guy Debord, Society ofthe Spectacle, rev. edition (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977). 13. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972); Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Camera Lucida, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 14. Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seatde: Bay Press, 1988). This volume also contains relevant

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essays by Jonathan Crary, Rosalind Krauss, Norman Bryson, and Jacqueline Rose. 15. See especially Svetlana Alpers, The Art Of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) ; Mieke Bal, Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), and Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age ofDiderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), and Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). In her first chapter, Bal provides a useful summary of recent work and of central methodological issues in the field of word-and-image studies. 16. See, in particular, W. T. J. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), which analyzes various theoretical answers to the questions what is an image and what is the difference between images and words; and Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), which argues that the ekphrastic impulse in literary theory is companion to the semiotic desire for the natural sign. For a more distincdy post-structuralist approach to the relationship between word and image, see Françoise Meltzer, Salomé and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 17. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 194-95 (chapter 27). 18. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 186-87. 19. Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), ix.

SUSAN R.

HORTON

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

Every image ofthe fast that is not recognized, by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

Solomon Gills repeatedly insists to his nephew Wall'r that he is old-fashioned, that the world has gone past him. But in one way he is one of Dickens's most modern characters. When we first catch sight of him, he has red eyes from looking through the lenses of all those optical gadgets in his shop, eyes "as red as if they had been small suns looking at you through a fog; and a newly-awakened manner, such as he might have acquired by having stared for three or four days successively through every optical instrument in his shop, and suddenly came back to the world again, to find it green."1 Those red eyes place him in distinguished company. Three of the most prominent students of vision in the 1830s and early 1840s either went blind or permanendy damaged their sight by staring into the sun: David Brewster, inventor of the kaleidoscope and improver of the stereoscope; Joseph Plateau, who studied the persistence of vision; and Gustav Fechner, one of the founders of quantitative psychology. Sol Gills does not go blind. But Dickens, in his portrait of him, produces a verbal version of the piercing confrontation of eye and sun that art historian Jonathan Crary identifies in the late paintings of Turner.2 Placing the sun in Old Sol's eyes—his name itself a pun—Dickens then turns the reader into a spectator at this transposition. In the Dickens world this kind of play with visuality is not unusual,3 i

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and that is the point. Dickens's narration regularly turns readers into watchers of characters watching one another watching, often watching one another's reflections. On the final page of Bleak House, Esther Summerson's response to her husband's question whether she ever looks in the mirror is "You know I do; you see me do it" (880). The Lammles' marital partnership in Our Mutual Friend is based on an intricate system of scheming and sparring we often watch in the mirror in which they watch each other: "Her eyes . . . caught him smirking in it. She gave the reflected image a look of the deepest disdain, and the image received it in the glass" (260). At young Paul's christening breakfast, Dombey's image is caught in the chimney glass that "reflects Dombey and his portrait at one blow" (52), and readers'firstview of Miss Tox^s room in that same novel is through the glass over the portrait in her locket, where the "deceased owner of a fishy eye . . . balance [s] the kettle holder on opposite sides of the parlour fireplace" (84). It is not Sydney Carton we see standing before the revolutionary tribunal, but his reflection in a mirror, that "throws the light down upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth's together," we are told, and the courtroom itself is represented precisely as if it were one of the dozens of rotundas in operation in mid-century London housing static or moving panoramic or dioramic shows (A Tale of Two Cities, 70-71). Extended verbal versions of Velazquez's LasMeninas, Dickens's novels are also perspectival reflections on the problematics of empirical vision far more complicated than the woodcuts and engravings meant to illustrate them. This consistent interest in visuality makes a great deal of Victorian prose "modernist" well before the visual arts, and makes "nature," as the art historian Rosalind Krauss suggests, "the second term of which the first is representation."4 Three large questions concern me here: (1) What inspired all this looking at looking? (2) How were Victorians coming to terms with their increasing interest in watching their own watching? (3) What consequences were brought about by the rationales Victorian viewers devised to justify a happy spectatorship and to come to terms with the unreliability of vision? Walter Benjamin provides my inspiration. Benjamin believed difficult times require major acts of imagination and improvisation, particularly imaginative acts in which the present moment is projected into the past and the past moment brought forward into the present so as to dissolve the deceptive distance criticism produces between the two. For Benjamin this dissolution is the crucial critical move, since the critical distance

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3

we so carefully cultivate has effectively shut us off from the lessons the past most wants to teach and the present most needs to learn. A look at scientific experiments carried out in the early nineteenth century is a good place to begin to understand the legacy of Victorian visuality. From 1820 to 1840 huge numbers of experiments were conducted on the physiology of the eye and on the processes of vision; the more that was learned about vision, the more unreliable it seemed to be. Between 1791 and 1798 Goethe wrote frequent letters to Schiller, reporting on the results of his work on the physiology of the eye. Two volumes of these letters were eventually published, entitled The Theory of Colors. They appeared in English translation in the 1830s and would, I surmise, have been brought to the attention of the average English reader through George Henry Lewes's Life and Works of Goethe, which appeared in Britain in 1855. The Theory ofColors proved so popular that it was often reprinted through the century. In it, Goethe insisted over and over that sense impressions depend solely on the sensory nerves excited, not on the external stimuli impinging on them. The Theory of Colors included explicit instructions enabling readers to experience what came to be called the persistence of vision: shift the eye back and forth from a blue circle to a yellow one, and it "sees" a green one that is not there. During the 1830s other experimenters were discovering that the retina could be made to "see" light when sufficient pressure was applied to the eyeball, that the eye would "see" light if exposed to electrical stimulation, and that a blow to the head would make a person "see" light. These experiments were not centralized in one branch of science, and the resulting findings were frequendy published in popular magazines like La Nature, a Victorian version of Popular Science, rather than in specialized journals. Once empirical science had demonstrated how easily the eye could be tricked, an explosion of optical gadgetry and optical toys was inevitable. Optical gadgetry was not invented during the nineteenth century, but until the later eighteenth century the technical means for tricking the eye had been fairly limited. One of the earliest and most popular forms of illusion-generating devices was the phantasmagoria. During medieval times shadows cast on walls with smoke and candlelight had given spectators the frisson of contact with the ghosts and phantoms of the spirit world. During the nineteenth century, these phantasmagorias experienced a resurgence in popularity, and the forms in which they existed grew more numerous. Using one of the increasingly popular magic lanterns, showmen turned a darkened room in which a transparent screen had been dropped between an audience and a lantern filled with one or another form of illuminant into a quite so-

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phisticated version of a phantasmagoria. If the slides were of the "dissolving" or "sliding" type, ghosts would appear to open and close their mouths, eyes to shift, skeletons to advance and retreat.5 "Apparently one of the ghosts has lost its way, and dropped in to be directed. Look at this phantom!" says the narrator of OurMutual Friend (148). Phantoms and apparitions materialize and dematerialize regularly throughout^. Tale of Two Cities. The Monseigneur's thoughts are described as having been produced out of a process of "vapouring" (22627), a formulation that would undoubtedly have invoked in Victorian readers the phantasmagoria's smoky gases. Descriptions replicating the phantasmagorical experience enhance Dickens's mysteries: The fire of the sun is dying. . . . shadow slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down. . . . upon my lady's picture . . . a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale, andfluttersit, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or hood, watching an opportunity to draw it over her. Higher and darker rises shadow on the wall —now a red gloom on the ceiling— now the fire is out. (Bleak House, 564) Twentieth-century interpretive strategies have turned into complexity— préfigurations of revelations, representations of the Freudian dream space —what for Dickens may have been primarily verbal representations of the phantasmagorical experience. Some of the psychic charge generated by Dickens's novels originates in his maneuvering readers so that they oscillate between recognizing that the ghosts that appear are figments of a character's overwrought imagination and discovering that seeming ghosts or phantoms are simply characters seen imperfecdy, from a distance.6 Part of Victorian readers' pleasure in these novels would have been recognizing in the verbal text their own visual experiences with optical gadgets and toys. But the responses these evocations of optical gadgetry generated were as complex and various as the gadgets themselves. The kaleidoscope had been invented by Sir David Brewster around 1815, and even this simple toy seems to have produced radically differing reactions. For Baudelaire, and later still for Proust, it suggested wonderful possibilities: "To become a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness [may be] the goal of the lover of universal life," Baudelaire muses. But for Marx and Engels, writing their German Ideology between 1845 and 1847, the kaleidoscope was a fit metaphor for the dangers of faulty perception, "a sham, a trick done with mirrors. Rather than producing anything new, it repeats a single image" and is "entirely reflections of itself."7 No short essay can explore all the optical gadgetry nineteenth-

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century viewers experienced, let alone analyze the epistemological changes its existence brought about. "People seem to think the camera will do anything," confides one of the street entertainers Henry Mayhew interviews in London Labour and the London Poor. "After their portrait is taken, we ask them if they would like to be mesmerised by the camera, and the charge is only 2d." 8 All they had to do was sit perfectly still and stare into the lens until the mesmerism took effect. After two or three minutes most subjects found that they grew dizzy, their eyes watering, and they gave up. The showman kept the 2d. The scam succeeded in no small part because subjects assumed that their own bodily frailty, not the camera, had let them down. The eyes may fail; the camera never does — a point to which I will return. L.-J.-M. Daguerre invented the static panorama in the 1820s. The multimedia diorama appeared at the same time. In the first, viewers sat in one spot while pictures rotated around them; in the second, the pictures remained stable while the two concentric rotundas of the amphitheater housing them and the audience were moved easily in a circle "by a boy and a ram engine."9 In both devices a combination of layered flat planes and movement produced the illusion of three-dimensionality. The zoetrope arrived in the 1830s, and in 1834, the stroboscope, the flicker of light and motion in each prefiguring moving pictures. The iconoscope, a vacuum-tube precursor of the television, appeared about the same time. Unless Victorian photographs lie, by 1850 every wellappointed Victorian parlor had a stereoscope or two, offering viewers an experience of what came to be called the reality effect. By century's end, enterprising manufacturers seem to have decided that threedimensional nudes were the stereoscope's best subject matter, thus proving the essentially erotic, voyeuristic connection between optical gadgetry and spectatorship that I consider later in this essay and guaranteeing the banishment of the stereoscope from genteel drawing rooms. 10 Contemporary art historians like Rosalind Krauss and Jonathan Crary argue that all these optical gadgets were more than playthings. They were embedded "in a much larger and denser organization of knowledge and of the observing subject," as Crary suggests.11 He devotes a significant portion of his Techniques of the Observer to analyzing the epistemological implications of the camera obscura, a darkened box with a small aperture to let in light, which projected images from outside onto one of the inside walls. The image produced was an exact replica (albeit inverted) of what the eye would see if it looked directly at the object being reflected. The camera obscura, then, delineated a position for the observer (inside, enclosed, private, quite literally "in the

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dark"), a position Crary argues became "a precondition for knowing the outer world." The dark isolated center where the viewer sat came to constitute the single definable point from which the world could be logically deduced and re-presented.12 In fact from its earliest appearance the camera obscura had existed in two quite different forms: as a darkened room, in which a spectator sat, and as a handheld version (see Figs, i, 2). Still, the connections Crary makes between the vantage point the camera obscura requires and nineteenth-century urgings toward "right seeing," and between right seeing and right thinking, are visible everywhere in Victorian prose. "The right thing in the right place is beautiful; the right thing in the right place is Truth," proclaimed the nineteenth-century photographer P. H. Emerson.13 Clearly, the twin discoveries that the eye could be tricked and that anything could easily be distorted when presented through different lenses or by positioning the viewer in a different spot can be seen to be the simplest explanation for the urgent advocacy in so much Victorian writing of "right seeing" and "right perspective." These twin discoveries are also the simplest explanation for the frequent warnings against those illusory perspectives that might trick us into wrong thinking. Marx and Engels in The German Ideology: The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the lifeprocess of definite individuals .. . not as they may appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they really are. . . . Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. — real, active men. . . . If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-processes as the inversion ofobjects on the retina does from their physical life-process. . . . The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises [emphasis added].14 Writing of events in 1852 in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx notes "the Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties. . . .the thunderfromthe platform, the sheet lightning of the dailypress... all has vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom his enemies do not make out to be a sorcerer."15 One of the most popular slipping slides for phantasmagorical spectacles throughout the nineteenth century was of ships foundering in a storm at sea, often accompanied by such "sheet lightning."16 Like the phantasmagorical spectacles to which Marx alludes here, experiences with the camera obscura were nothing new. The device had

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been described as early as the tenth century by Alhazen (abu-'Ali alHasan ibn-al-Haytham).17 But its popularity surged after 1815, and in whatever form people encountered it, it too changed the way they saw. There was the camera obscura with a handle inside that the spectator could turn, swiveling the mirror attached to it and thereby reflecting images from all quarters outside the box. "You could watch it all," notes Olive Cook, "without yourself being seen, and because the people and objects in the picture are so curiously diminished and so strangely lifted from their actual surroundings into the picture rectangle they take on a significance which they do not have when seen normally by the naked eye." 18 Traveling coaches were built with lenses in the top. With the blinds on the windows completely drawn they became camera obscuras on wheels,19 allowing the passenger inside to enjoy what must have been a deliriously panoptical spectatorship, something Dickens may well have had in mind early in A Tale of Two Cities as the Monseigneur watches the spectacles of want and hunger outside in splendid detachment as his carriage rolls on to his country estate. Camera obscuras reflected actual objects back at the observer — though upside down. But the magic lantern substituted a reflected image for a direct one, and wherever one looks in Victorian writings, one sees writers struggling to resist not only the seductive appeal of reflections but also an increasing reliance on reflections for a sense of selfidentity. One major evidence of Teufelsdrockh's dark night of the soul in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus is his recognition that he has become a kind of reflection junkie: " H o w . . . could I believe in my strength, when there was as yet no mirror to see it in?" 20 Every child in the playground yelling, "Watch me! Watch me!" to her caregiver is Teufelsdrockh's inheritor. For us moderns, heirs to a century's worth of experiencing the self not just as viewer but as viewed, it seems that increasingly the fully experienced experience must be a mediated one. Late-twentieth-century intellectuals have legitimately made much of the Foucauldian surveillance practiced by the colonizer on the colonized; the gaze of males on females, of dominant on subaltern. But were there space here to bring forward all the instances in Victorian prose in which "private" identity seems to require a public audience for its production —Dombey's, Teufelsdrockh's, Sidney Carton's —another piece of our epistemological inheritance from the nineteenth century would become clear. If some of the forms of camera obscuras and magic lanterns Crary discusses did not appear or change during the nineteenth century as dramatically as he suggests, one dramatic change did occur. In earlier centuries phantasmagoria and magic lantern show spectators had

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been manipulated from "outside," by a showman. But spectators at nineteenth-century magic lantern shows could see the mechanical device, often being seated on the same side of the screen as the magic lantern, so that part of their enjoyment was the making of the spectacle itself. The Boston Globe wood engraving from circa 1885 (Fig. 3) shows people producing their own magic lantern show, for instance. One contemporary advertisement for a magic lantern designed for home use promised that "Everything necessary is provided and the whole apparatus can be set up without interfering with the furniture or fixtures."21 In her memoirs Harriet Martineau recollects the magic lantern of her childhood: "I used to see it cleaned by daylight and to handle all its parts, understanding its whole structure; yet such was my terror of the white circle on the wall, and of the moving slides, that to speak the truth, the first apparition always brought on bowel-complaint."22 While "handling] all its parts," one could have the extraordinary experience not only of seeing the world through the lenses of optical gadgets and toys but also of being a spectator occupying two places at once: the double experience of having an experience and of watching that experience from the outside, exacdy what we moderns parody when we catch ourselves watching ourselves watching, experiencing ourselves experiencing, and ask, "Are we having fun yet?" Rosalind Krauss talks about the "beat" or "throb" of this inside/outside ("I'm in this experience; I'm watching this experience") as it is replicated by the slats of the zoetrope.23 Crary suggests that the Victorians were caught between two models of vision: that of the empirical sciences, which were proving the eye of the observer unreliable and subjective, and that of the various romanticisms and early modernisms, which posited the observer as an active, autonomous producer of his or her own visual experience.24 Predictably, the share of contradictory models created some unease, and the insistence of people like Darwin that one trust the empirical precisely when it was proving itself unreliable led to some interesting interventions. John Ruskin argued against any mediation between the eye and the object it rests upon. But he argued for what he called "the innocence of the eye" even as his writings worked to persuade others to see, not with their own "innocent" eyes at all, but through those wonderfully elaborate rhetorical lenses he was perpetually fashioning for them. Matthew Arnold, by lodging our critical responsibility in our "see[ing] the object as in itself it really is," in his "Function of Criticism at the Present Time" — despite Victorians' increasing uncertainty of the visual as a grounding for truth — can be understood as advocating the Kantian sub-

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lime: he insisted, that is, on an essence hidden behind appearances. If appearances lie, if the visual is not to be trusted, one needs a proper guide telling one what one ought to assume is "there" in what is seen. That proper guide of course is reason, and reason requires the surrender of both imagination and empirical vision. This trajectory can be followed unbroken to today's debates over the canon, and the appeal of the argument that one needs to be taught to rely on others to tell one where to look, and what to see, becomes altogether explicable.25 But a post-Kantian subjectivity was already around as Arnold was writing. Marx and Engels begin The German Ideology by attacking "Young-Hegelians" like Carlyle (and presumably Arnold) because "the phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands." 26 Marx and Engels do not so much deny the existence of an essence behind appearances, unavailable to empirical vision, as make identifying that "essence" our most urgent work. Personal interpretation of what the eye sees takes precedence over reason because it constitutes our best means to grasp the material conditions of our lives: "The 'essence' of fresh water fish is the river. But it ceases to be its essence when the river is made to serve industry, and dye from tanners flows into it." 27 The specters or phantoms of the phantasmagoria become Marx and Engels's subject as well: "It is self-evident that 'spectres'... are merely the idealistic expression of conceptions. . . . The image of very empirical fetters and limitations." 28 That the empirical might actually constitute "fetters" is echoed in The Griindrisse, in which Marx chides Mill for not seeing as clearly as he might precisely because he is looking too close and has "lost his way in eclectic, syncretic compendiums." 29 Nine years after Arnold published his "Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Pater would insist in his preface to The Renaissance that "the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is." Later still, Wilde would address this same Kantian struggle in his Dorian Gray. "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances," Lord Henry notes, adding that "the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."30 Recognizing the violence implicated in all calls to the sublime, he confesses, "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable."31 As mid- and late-Victorian prose writers struggled to come to terms with the fallibility of the visual as grounding for the true, the Victorian public were attending optical shows in droves, were regularly inviting street lanternists into their parlors and drawing rooms for party entertainments, or were renting or buying gadgetry of their own. Richard Altick's Shows of London is the best of the many surveys of the public

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shows. And nearly any good study of the prehistory of photography and motion pictures considers optical gadgetry for home use. There were biscuit tins with slats in their sides that, when emptied, became a zoetropic wheel. Newspapers frequently contained a pattern readers could cut out, fasten into a circle, and turn into a zoetrope. Milton Bradley was producing zoetropes by 1870 (see Figs. 4, 5).32 Those of course were for home use. As for public spectacles, Olive Cook notes that as many theaters housing dioramas or panoramas existed in London one hundred twenty years ago . . . as there are movie theatres today. In Leicester Square, the Strand, at Regent's Park; on Regent, Oxford, Saint James, and King Streets; at Hyde Park Corner, Waterloo Place, the Haymarket, Piccadilly, Adelaide Street. The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and Drury Lane all included dioramas in their repertoire. Play productions included entre-acte showings of such things as the "Moving Diorama of the Polar Expedition" just as newsreels used to be shown, or previews are, at movie theatres today.33 There was the Betaniorama, the Cyclorama, the Europerama, the Cosmorama, the Giorama, the Pleorama, the Kalorama, Kineorama, Poecilorama, Neorama, Nausorama, Octorama, Physiorama, Typorama, Udorama, and Uranorama. These were popular not just in England. In Le Pere Goriot a group of young artists speak a species of dialect Balzac calls rama that soon "infects" everyone around them: "La recente invention du Diorama, qui portait l'illusion de l'optique à un plus haut degré que dans les Panoramas, avait amené dans quelques ateliers de peinture la plaisanterie de parler en rama, espèce de charge qu'un jeune peintre, habitué de la pension Vauquer, y avait inoculée. 'Eh bien! monsieurre Poiret . . . comment va cette petite santérama?" Soon, Vautrin notes, "Il fait un fameux froitorama,'" to which Bianchon responds, "Pourquoi dites-vous froitoramai il y a ime faute, c'estfroidorama." Their banter is interrupted only by the arrival of a fine "brotherama."34 Dickens's novels contain specific references to moving panoramas and dioramas and to peepshows, for instance, the Battle of Waterloo Peep Show in Our Mutual Friend, which could be transformed to show another battle if the showman simply altered the shape of the Duke of Wellington's nose —a bit of information Dickens may have lifted directly from one of the interviews with street performers in Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. But other references are less obvious. Young David Copperfield leaves the theater at Covent Garden after seeing a production ofJulius Caesar, "revolving the glorious vision all the way." Modern readers may assume that "revolving" just describes

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his turning an idea around in his head, but Davy immediately confesses, "I was so filled with the play, and with the past—for it was, in a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier life moving along" (286). Olive Cook notes that from 1826 to 1850 "many exquisitely painted transparencies" appeared.35 Exacdy which "shining transparency" Dickens has in mind here is impossible to tell. During his lifetime he would have had access to the "Opening of the Thames Tunnel" peepshow; "The Great Exhibition of 1851" peepshow; "The Coronation of Queen Victoria" peepshow; "The View of London" panorama of 1829, continuously shown until 1875, which simulated the view from the dome of St. Paul's while it was being repaired; the "Ruins in a Fog" topographical diorama in Regent's Park (1827); and the "Mount Etna" panorama in Regent's Park, which continued to be shown until 1855. This last was particularly affecting since it involved not only sophisticated lighting effects but also the simulated effect of spewing lava.36 Dickens may have been remembering the gigantic transparent pictures by Daguerre first exhibited in the Eidophusikon: magical extravaganzas, combining effects of sound, music, and motion, that were exhibited under changing light in a cylindrical room with a single opening in the wall like a theater proscenium, the room itself slowly turning, moving the spectators from one part of the picture to another, giving the impression the images were animated. In its earliest years, around 1830, the Eidophusikon had exhibited topographical or architectural scenes ("The Valley of the Sarnen in Canton Unterwalden, Switzerland," or "The Interior of Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral"); somewhat later, batde pieces ("The Fall of Sebastopol," "The Battle of Solferino," and "The Burning of Moscow") became popular; and as late as 1890 scenes such as "The Battle of Waterloo" and full-size panoramas and dioramas commemorating outstanding social or historical events, like the "Crowning of Queen Victoria," showing the queen marching stately up the aisle to her coronation, were still being shown. The popularity of such entertainments ended when the structures housing them disappeared, nearly always and inevitably because the lamp or gas jet illumination needed for the shows sent the buildings up in flames.37 So many of these buildings disappeared and so many of these "magic transparencies" disintegrated after i860 that we can easily overlook how often and how literally Dickens describes the experience of panorama, diorama, and magic lantern show. Insofar as we do, we miss some of his comedy. If most transparencies represented edifying scenes, Davy's seeing his young life as an appropriate subject for one of them accentu-

12

SUSAN R. HORTON

ates his entirely illusory sense of his own self-importance —as it also suggests his seeing himself as a spectator at his own life, something to which I will return shortly. We might also miss the poignancy of Dickens's description of Mrs. Gradgrind in Hard Times, "look[ing] (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of a small female figure, without enough light behind it" (16), and the especial poignancy of her death, when "the light that had always been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out" (200). In Our Mutual Friend, as Silas Wegg examines the human and animal miscellany in Mr. Venus's bottle and bone shop, the reader might recognize Dickens's replication of the experience of attending a static panoramic spectacle. Wegg, like the spectator at such a panorama, turns his head around and sees "humans warious. Bones, warious. Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto . . . Cats. Articulated English baby . . . Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Dried cuticle, warious. Oh dear me! That's the general panoramic view." As early as the late eighteenth century the enterprising Belgian showman Etienne Gaspard Robertson had mounted his magic lantern on a trolley with rails. By placing it behind a translucent screen, he produced images that could be made larger or smaller and figures that appeared to "come forward" (as the magic lantern was moved forward on its trolley) and "retired" (as it was moved back). Mayhew's interviews with traveling showmen in London Labour and the London Poor suggest midnineteenth-century street showmen took their shows indoors at night and during cold weather, and Dickens's description of Venus and Wegg holding "the candle as all these heterogeneous objects seemed to come forward obediently when they were named, and then retire again" (8182) turns them into showmen of exactly this type. But if human beings make culture —all those optical gadgets, the panoramic shows they made possible, and the nineteenth-century novels and essays that allude to them — culture also produces human beings. The optical gadgets Victorians produced made particular beings of them. Like movies in the twentieth century, optical gadgetry in the nineteenth was a commercial activity. N o one forced Victorians to pay to experience the magic lantern slides of itinerant street lanternists or to buy magic lanterns; to visit the Rotunda of London to experience static or moving dioramas or panoramas; to hire psychics to frighten them with phantasmagorias projected on their parlor walls; or to buy zoetropes and phenakistoscopes, any more than anyone forces us today to line up for tickets to the latest Terminator. As Christian Metz notes in his Lacanian study The Imaginary Sijjnifier, the optical gadget industry includes not just the

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gadgetry itself and those who run or sell it, but also "the mental machinery . . . which spectators 'accustomed to' fit] have internalized historically and which has adapted them to the consumption" of the images produced by it.38 Victorians were paying to see the world differently and to experience the joys of spectatorship; and what they were paying for was undoubtedly changing them. They were experiencing, for one thing, as Jonathan Crary suggests, the driving of a wedge between the real and the optical; between seeing and believing. The mystery plots of nineteenth-century detective novels, Wilkie Collins's magnificent Moonstone (1868) and Woman in White (1859-60), for instance, rely on readers' accepting without question the fallibility of empirical vision. In The Moonstone, Rachel Verinder really "sees" Franklin Blake steal the moonstone from her sitting room; Gooseberry really "sees" Mr. Luker pass off the diamond in the bank to a swarthy sailor with a beard. They really do. But seeing produces no necessarily accurate representation of what is afoot in the world. Watching, being watched, comparing what one "thinks" one saw with what actually is, staying alert for disjunctures between the thought and the reality are activities that constitute the woof and warp of Woman in White. I looked round, and saw an undersised \sic\ man in black on the door-step of a house, which, as well as I could judge, stood next to Mrs. Catherick's place of abode —next to it, on the side nearest to me. The man did not hesitate a moment about the direction he should take. . . . I waited where I was, to ascertain whether his object was to come to close quarters and speak. . . . To my surprise he passed on rapidly, . . . without even looking up in my face as he went by. This was such a complete inversion of the course of proceeding which I had every reason to expect on his part, that my curiosity . . . was aroused, and I determined on my side to keep him cautiously in view, . . . without caring whether he saw me or not, I walked after him. He never looked back.39 Despite all this minute attention to the empirical, neither Walter Hartright nor anyone else ever sees what is so obvious about Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie. Seeing is not necessarily believing; and the optical is not necessarily the real. Similarly, in some of our most interesting contemporary courtroom trials video footage that might seem irrefutable proof of guilt or innocence can be proved to be anything but. Any good defense lawyer, any good prosecuting attorney, knows that a jury can be convinced that what it sees is not what is. No spectators are entirely comfortable knowing that the eye is fallible—or seeing themselves as spectators. Spectators need what Metz

SUSAN R. HORTON

calls a sanctioning construction, something that makes it "all right" to be just a spectator; a genealogy of such constructions can itself be easily constructed. People in the Middle Ages enjoyed their ghosts and specters conjured with mirrors, clouds of vapor, and noises of thunder produced by the rattling of tin — like those produced by wandering tregetours like those in Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale" — and they too required a sanctioning construction. Medieval spectacles were presided over by priests and magicians. Many of the earliest optical devices were invented by clerics who were also scientists. Athanasius Kircher, who invented the magic lantern around 1640, was a Jesuit priest, and the earliest showmen were often priests or conjurers.40 They depicted scenes like "the devil rising up to tempt Adam and Eve" or "Noah at the Flood." The spectacles were said to illustrate the work of the Devil, and watching them was supposed to make the viewer fear the Devil's sorcery. Many of the glass transparencies surviving from early-nineteenthcentury phantasmagorias and magic lanterns depict biblical scenes or scenes designed to teach a moral lesson: the Prodigal Son, Death seizing a miser, Noah's Ark, and "the Evils of Drink," a dissolving slide showing a beautifully dressed woman being transformed into a horrible skeleton (Fig. 6).« But between 1820 and 1840 less edifying scenes became subjects for popular viewing: a rampaging bull; Napoleon in retreat from Moscow.42 As the subjects for spectacles changed, the sanctioning construction did as well. Science became the new "god," blessing spectatorship in the Victorian age. Nineteenth-century performances were almost always preceded by a brief lecture by the lanternist or projectionist on the wonders of the technology and science that made the performance possible. The hated "Mr. Barlow" of Dickens's essay of that name from The Uncommercial Traveller is the obsessive teacher, who can ruin even a beautiful night sky because he cannot resist turning it, and everything else, into "a cold shower-bath of explanations and experiments." Mr. Barlow is reported to have "invested largely in the moving panorama trade," and Dickens owns that "on various occasions" he had identified Barlow "in the dark with a long wand in his hand, holding forth in his old way." Barlow's obsession with turning everything into a science lesson is precisely why Dickens professes to "systematically shun pictorial entertainment on rollers" (341). E. P. Thompson's history of the rise of Methodism and other Evangelical religions among the Victorian working class suggests to me that optical spectacles might have become one of the few acceptable forms of entertainment. Even the strictest of Evangelicals allowed for—indeed required —"the earnest pursuit of useful

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information."43 You could watch those magic lantern shows with an easy conscience if what was "really" happening was that you were being educated in and edified by the wonders of modern technology.44 A last look at Victorian visuality turns the lens on vis. The Victorian woman who "saw" both a dissolving slide of the evils of drink and her own arm holding the magic lantern "showing" the scene could feel both morally edified and detached, "exonerated" for her guilty spectatorship — she might also feel, perhaps, an erotic tingle — while watching the clothes dissolve before her eyes on the victim of drink and the skeleton appear. She also "really" "saw" her own distance from the scene she "saw." Craig Owens suggests that the modern world did not result from the replacement of a medieval world "picture" with a modern world "picture," but was a consequence of "the world becoming] a picture at all,"45 And in The Painting of Modern Life T. J. Clark discusses the nineteenth century's obsession with making both money and the extreme lack of it visible: "The city and social life in general was presented as . . . a separate something made to be looked at —an image, a pantomime, a panorama."46 Dickens wanted to make poverty, the confusing city, and its masses of homeless wanderers visible to Victorian readers. But his pictures were being read by an audience identifying themselves increasingly—in part because of their experience with optical gadgetry —as spectators, ever more comfortably experiencing themselves as simultaneously "inside" and "outside" their own and others' experiences: that is, "inside" and "outside" sympathy. Readers interpolate or read themselves into the signs they are shown, Althusser tells us.47 But we do like to watch. Whether we are watching starving Somalians on TV or dissolving magic lantern slides illustrating the evils of drink, our spectatorship and voyeurism always have to vie with, and struggle toward, sympathy. This is not to say we have become indifferent to suffering. But we have had a century's practice inuring ourselves to others' sufferings and a century's worth of sanctioning constructions that make it difficult for us to resist seeing them as spectacle. A year ago my colleague Linda Dittmar brought to campus the Cuban director Sergio Giral's powerful film The Other Francisco. The film begins with a Cuban playwright reading aloud from the script of a play he has written. This play-within-thefilm is a highly idealized history of a slave's suicide, a suicide prompted by the slave's despair over the rape of his lover by the plantation owner's son. But this narrative is broken off, and a new voice enters the film. This new voice confronts the viewer with a more accurate representation of the slave's history. This history is far more horrific, punctuated

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SUSAN R. HORTON

by horrendous abuse: beatings, torture, the chopping off of various appendages with a cutlass. It was clear after the showing of this film that all of us spectators had been powerfully affected by the brutality in the film. Our hesitant attempts at discussion after a long and awkward silence were revealing; what they revealed, I believe, was our late twentieth century's sanctioning construction. Some of us began by wondering whether the machete in the film might not be "a phallic symbol." If the medieval viewer's sanctioning construction, making comfortable spectatorship possible, was the edification and moral instruction provided by the phantasmagorical spectacle of God or the Devil, and a Victorian viewer's was the edification of science and technology, the unwary modern viewer can now be comforted by the late-twentiethcentury sanctioning construction: the allegorizing tendency (and all interpretation, as Northrop Frye told us many years ago in his Anatomy of Criticism, is an act of allegory) that enables us as spectators to avoid, as far as possible, both discomfort and guilt: to "see" in the slaveowner's cutlass a phallic symbol and in police beating a black man, a man resisting arrest.

Fig. i. Johann Zahn, camera obscura portabilis (reflex box camera obscura), 1685. Courtesy of the Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

17

Fig. 2. Sketch of Athanasius Kircher's portable camera obscura from the second edition ofArs Magna Lucis et Umbrae, 1671. Courtesy of the Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

18

Fig. 3. Wood engraving of a home magic lantern show, c. 1885. From the collection of Richard Balzer. Photograph by David M. Seifer.

19

Fig. 4. Biscuit tin designed to be used as a zoetrope, with slides, England, c. 1920. From the collection of Richard Balzer. Photograph by David M. Seifer.

20

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Fig. 5. Cutout zoetrope from the Sunday Supplement to the Boston Herald, 1896. From the collection of Richard Balzer. Photograph by David M. Seifer.

21

Fig. 6. "The Evils of Drink," dissolving slides for use in a biunial magic lantern, c. 1880. From the collection of Richard Balzer. Photograph by David M. Seifer.

22

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Notes I owe special thanks to Betsy Wirth, slide librarian at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, for gracious and generous help with this project, and to Richard Balzer, whose privately printed catalogue of photographs of items from his private collection of optical gadgets and toys, Optical Amusements: Magic Lanterns and Other Transforming Images (Watertown, Massachusetts, 1987), first introduced me to some of the magical optical toys discussed in this essay. 1. Dombey and Son, p. 34. This and other references to Dickens's novels are to volumes in the Oxford Illustrated Edition. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 2. Jonathan Crary, "Modernizing Vision," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, vol. 2. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 34-35. 3. A staple in the discourse of recent art history, the word visuality does not refer either just to the visual or to the physiological characteristics of vision. To use the word visuality rather than the word vision is to signal an attempt to problematize the act of seeing and to turn into a field of inquiry such issues as how human beings construct and then construe both their seeing and their being seen and, in particular, the ways in which artists take as their subject the nature of seeing itself. 4. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality ofthe Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 163. 5. Richard Altick, in The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), notes that phantasmagorias opened in London as early as late 1801 or early 1802 and remained popular there for the next two decades (217-18). In Movement in Two Dimensions: A Study ofthe Animated and Projected Pictures Which Preceded the Invention of Cinematography (London: Hutchinson, 1963), Olive Cook suggests that slides like those described here were extremely popular from 1820 to 1895 (20, 88ff.). 6. In her "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie," Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 26-61, Terry Casde suggests that the phantasmagoria had been invented at precisely the moment in Western history when actual belief in ghosts was giving way to scientific rationalism. By the early nineteenth century, ghosts and specters came to be seen, not as "out there," but as "in here," in the mind, Walter Cooper Denby's Philosophy of Mystery (1841) proclaiming "only a difference in degree" between an idea and a phantom (57). In the "Natural Supernaturalism" section of Sartor Resartus Carlyle refers to the very Cock Lane ghost that Castle suggests had faded from popular belief by the 1760s, insisting nonetheless that "there are nigh a thousand-million walking the Earth openly at noontide" (Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 200). 7. Baudelaire and Marx and Engels, as quoted in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 114.

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SUSAN R. HORTON

8. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, ed. Victor Neuburg (New York: Penguin, 1985), 3439. See Altick, 165. 10. See Heimet Gernsheim, The Origins ofPhotography (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982), for numerous beautiful daguerreotypes or color slides of such nudes or seminudes from the 1850s, designed for use in stereoscopic viewers. 11. See Crary, "Modernizing Vision," 30-31. 12. See Crary, Techniques ofthe Observer, 30-34. 13. Quoted in Jennifer M. Green, "In Pursuit of Wild Models: P. J. Emerson Frames the Norfolk Broads," Dickens Project, Santa Cruz (August 1992). 14. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. S. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Professional Publishers, 1964), 11-13. 15. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 20. 16. Cook, Movement in Two Dimensions, 88. 17. Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography: From the Earliest Use of the Camera, Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 1. 18. Cook, 24. 19. Ibid., 28. 20. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 126. 21. Quoted in Cook, 77. 22. Quoted in Cook, 19. 23. Rosalind Krauss, "The Im/Pulse to See," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Foster, 58. 24. Crary, Techniques ofthe Observer, 69. 25. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology ofthe Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Barbara Claire Freeman, "The Rise of the Sublime: Sacrifice and Misogyny in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics," TaleJournal of Criticism 5, no. 3 (1991): 81-99; and Vassilis Lambropoulos, "Violence and the Liberal Imagination: The Representation of Hellenism in Matthew Arnold," in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Roudedge, 1989). Each of these critics considers how writers' invoking of the sublime sacrifices, subordinates, or, as Freeman suggests, "scapegoats" the imagination. 26. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 23. 27. Ibid., 55. 28. Ibid., 43. 29. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, ed. and trans. David McLellan (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 47. 30. Oscar Wilde, The Picture ofDorian Gray, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, intro. Vyvyan Holland (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 32. 31. Ibid., 43. 32. That Whoopi Goldberg would undoubtedly refer to the top slide of Figure 4 as an instance of "Negrobilia" should not pass unnoticed here, suggesting as it does another piece of the relation between Victorians and the visual that

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25

cries out for exploration: how representations of people of color in popular entertainments contributed to Europeans' construction of others. This topic is explored most notably by Sander Gilman in "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 204-42; reprinted in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 198j). 33. Cook, 31. 34. Honore de Balzac, Le Pere Goriot (Paris: Editions Gamier Freres, n.d.), 62-63. "As a consequence of the recent invention of the optical illusion called the Diorama, which had quite surpassed the earlier Panoramas, artists and their friends had taken to ending every word they thought fit with 'rama.' A young painter . . . had infected his fellow guests with the habit. 'Well, Monsieur-r-r Poiret, . . . how is your little healthorama?' A bit later, Vautrin observes, 'It's desperately chillyorama,' to which Bianchon retorts, 'Why do you call it coldorama? There's just a little nipporama in the air.'" 35. Cook, Movement in Two Dimensions, 89. 36. Ibid., 40. 37. See Cook, 36-46. Only one of these buildings was still standing as of 1965, Daguerre's London Diorama at Park Square East, Regent's Park, which first opened in 1823. John Nash designed its facade and Augustus Pugin the Elder its rotunda. 38. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 7. 39. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed. Julian Symons (London: Penguin, 1974), 512. See also The Moonstone, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (London: Penguin, 1966). 40. See Cook, 14-15. 41. Ibid., 81-83. Dissolving slides depicting the evils of drink designed for magic lanterns were popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Numerous collectors have a slide like the one reproduced here as Figure 6. 42. Cook, 85. 43. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 740. 44. In his Musical Memoirs, published in 1830, W. D. Parke describes a collaboration between Philip Jacob de Loutherbourg and the painter Gainsborough to produce at the Eidophusikon a performance entided "Satan Arraying His Troops." Its realistic fake storm, with thunder and lightning, made it especially popular. There was real thunder and lightning outside the theater during one performance. Olive Cook reports that "some of the spectators were terrified, believing this to be a warning sent by God against presumption. . . . But Loutherbourg was transported with pleasure. 'By God, Gainsborough,' he cried, seizing the painter by the arm, 'our thunder's best!'" (30). 45. Craig Owens (quoting Heidegger), "The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Post-Modernism," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 66.

26

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46. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art ofManet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 63. 47. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation)," in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174.

GERARD

CURTIS

Shared Lines Pen and Pencil as Trace

Tennyson, in a poetic tribute to his friend the writer and artist Edward Lear, writes: all things fair, With such a pencil, such a pen, You shadow forth to distant men, I read and felt that I was there.1 Tennyson's tribute makes an essential association between the pen and the pencil, partners in a single act, and the "trace" they leave, which provides a visible imprint of the author's imagination. George Cruikshank's joint portrait of himself and the reforming pamphleteer William Hone, done in 1827 (Fig. 7), provides another vivid image of this partnership. Hone and Cruikshank are seated at a desk in a position of mutual respect and understanding; both are in the act of scribing with pen and pencil (Cruikshank also has an engraving tool beside him). Writer and artist have equal weight in what are seen as analogous activities. In today's computer age (with the binary code as its root system) such emphasis on the drawn line seems merely fanciful; in the Victorian period, "the line," whether drawn or written, functions as a trace that constitutes the sign of meaning. This essay will examine how during the nineteenth century the textual, or written, line came to dominate while the drawn line diminished in value. By the end of the century, a number of artists felt that the basis of their partnership with writers had dissolved. They battled to reassert the value of the graphic line, a battle reflected in Cruikshank's polemic attack on William Harrison Ainsworth and Charles Dickens in The Artist and the Author (1871-72), in 27

28

GERARD CURTIS

which Cruikshank claims he was the originator of Ainsworth's Tower of London and Dickens's Oliver Twist.2 Two advertisements for elementary textbooks in the original Dickens serials demonstrate the stress the Victorian period placed on the foundational aspect of line.3 In one, Hannah Bolton's First Drawing Book (advertised in Bleak House, no. 9 [November 1852], p. 3.), drawing (or the drawn line) is seen as aiding the schoolmaster in giving "intelligent assistance to the scholar; and while training the hand [emphasis added]," it "will instruct the mind." But even more telling is the advertisement for Elementary Drawing Copy Books (Fig. 8) from Our Mutual Friend. By using this copybook series, students could learn drawing and improve their writing at the same time. The book stresses line as the essential link between writing and drawing, words and image. The book starts by instructing students to copy out the alphabet, so that they learn "the different kinds of lines by drawing Italian letters," and ends by having them draw animals and insects. In these now largely forgotten copybook exercises children, under the guidance of the "writing master," learned the structure of the line. In these copybooks, textual literacy in elementary education gave rise to visual literacy, and vice versa, through a common source in line.4 Such a linking of text and image was necessary in a period when the records of commerce depended upon the skills of fine penmanship. Advertisements throughout the century helped promote these skills, essential to banking, legal copying, domestic accounts, general accounting, communication, record keeping, and self-advancement. The Domestic CopyBookfor Girls taught the proper woman's hand for writing letters, order forms, and housekeeping accounts, while other guides, such as Business Writing and Pitman's Commercial Copy Books, taught a masculine hand for commercial work. Gilbert Malcolm Sproat noted in his 1870 text Education of the Rural Poor that the primary skill to be taught in school, above even reading and arithmetic, was writing: "good handwriting is perhaps the most immediately valuable accomplishment for middle-class boys at their start in life."5 Robert Braithwaite Martineau's painting of 1852, entided Kit's Writing Lesson (Fig. 9), visually illustrates this point, with Kit (from Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop) shown laboring over a copybook, doggedly attempting to imitate fine lettering and thus develop that prerequisite to success, an accomplished "hand."6 The first volume of The Universal Instructor; or, Self Culture for All (1880-84) carried a series of articles on penmanship, and the proper training of hand and eye in writing. It mentions that a good hand means much, and it teaches decorative penmanship. The third volume contains

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29

a number of articles on drawing. The first of these begins with the essentials of line work, grounded in geometry and the straight line. The articles progress to shading and then to color.7 The Universal Instructor thus saw both penmanship and drawing as skills necessary for selfeducation, self-culture. In turn, drawing was seen as an essential skill for mechanics, draftsmen, artisans, navigators, and engineers for use in mapmaking, topographic drawing (taught to cadets and military officers for intelligence and geographic purposes), and scientific illustration. Technical and commercial success for the empire was linked, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the skillful training of designers in drawing schools.8 Drawing was taught at workingmen's colleges, where artists like Lowes Dickinson, Rossetti, Ruskin (who had compiled a text of botanical illustrations), and Ford Madox Brown served as instructors. William Blake, whose works exemplify the conflation of drawn and written lines, and who developed a process for printing intertwined script and engravings from the same etched copper plate instead of from set type, trained in a drawing school that stressed commercial design and graphics.9 In more practical ways the links between writing and drawing were constantly reinforced in the Victorian city environment. Signwriters delineated text in public spaces, filling in the hand-formed letters with paint and fancy scrollwork. The signwriter (who became largely obsolete with shop-produced stenciled signs) demonstrated that writing was in fact a livelihood.10 In the London streets the role of the hand in writing was made public in unique ways. Henry Mayhew, in London Labour and the London Poor, recounts the life of a "Writer without Hands" who plied the streets chalking out biblical script with his stumps to earn a living. 11 The partnership of the textual and pictorial line, begun in the Penny Illustrated Magazine, culminated in the Illustrated London News, one of the great cultural achievements of the Victorian period, as Martin Meisel rightly notes.12 In its own advertisements of the period the Illustrated London News noted this accomplishment; it "wedded art unto the Press . . . / By pictured paths the eye is lead/ To places where its fruits have birth/ . . . Art by reflection brings to view all the brains inventions." The poem goes on to state that art's pencil shall "shed luster on the pen." 13 In 1844 William Andrew Chatto noted that the process of engraving, used to illustrate the news, had given the "very age and body of the time, its form and pressure."14 Chatto explains how the age has

30

GERARD CURTIS

been shaped by connecting the woodblock line to the press. The pun on "pressure" further links the two, with both characterized by the action of pressing and imprinting. John Ruskin, in his "Academy Notes, 1875," claimed that "our press illustration, in its highest ranks, far surpasses — or indeed, in that department finds no rivalship in —the schools of classical art." 15 A letter from a nineteenth-century teacher stresses the value of the drawn line as both a technical skill and an aid to develop the poetical and imaginative eye of the child in school. Having just discussed maps as an educational tool—a tool, we should note, that casually unites image and text—the teacher states: By these and other means we attempt to enrich and cultivate the minds, the hearts, the imaginations of our boys. "What!" some will say, "cultivate the imagination of peasants! What have they to do with imagination?" They have to do with it because the Almighty has bestowed it. . . . You know that we teach in our schools the elements of lineal drawing. Beside this, I encourage, by gifts of pencils and blank books, any of our boarders who has a turn for drawing, to amuse himself by sketching from nature. . . . Now I do not want to make of them artists . . . ; but I wish them to look on nature with a religious — nay, with a poetical eye.16 In the eighteenth century the unity of textual and pictorial line was the province of the writing master, as in William Chinnery's Writing and Drawing Made Easy (c. 1750) or George Bickham's Drawing and Writing Tutor; or, An alluring introduction to the study ofthose sister arts. Containing examples, both in penmanship and in drawing, etc. (Fig. 10). As Bickham's subtitle suggests, writing and drawing join the "sister arts." George Bickham and his son published a number of books on penmanship, and in their works the student learned, through repetitive exercises, skills like calligraphic striking and how to turn line into a decorative motif. Examples of nineteenth-century children's penmanship books show how calligraphic flourishes could be used to devise pictures and drawings of animals.17 Educational training in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century stressed, through such exercises, the aesthetics of a written graphic line that easily flowed between text and image. Highlighting these ties were works like John Hemm's 1831 Portraits ofthe Royal Family in Calligraphy (Fig. 11). It consisted of a series of drawn royal portraits, with the clothing, surroundings, and name formed from a swirl of calligraphic pen strokes and "strikings."18 In his Curiosities ofLiterature, Isaac Disraeli complained that writing masters (like Hemm, one assumes), through their exuberant line work, were claiming a place at the Royal Academy as artists. Like engravers

SHARED LINES

31

(who were fighting a similar battle for recognition), writing masters, according to Disraeli, believed that they ranked with the painter and sculptor,19 reflecting in their own eyes the true value of the graphic line in the nineteenth century.20 In Line and Form, Walter Crane claimed that "Line [w]as a Language," capable of expressing movement, force, action; recording natural fact; and appealing to the emotions.21 According to Crane, the forming of letters was good practice for drawing: Writing, after all, is but a simpler form of drawing, and we know that the letters of our alphabet were originally pictures or symbols. The main difference is that writing stops short with the acquisition of the purely useful power of forming letters and words, and it is seldom pursued for the sake of its beauty or artistic qualities as formerly: while drawing continually leads on to new difficulties to be conquered, to new subtleties of line.22 Crane here privileges the drawn line over the simpler written line, going on to note the essential links between them when he says that Letters can be taken as the simplest form of definition by means of line. They have been reduced through centuries of use from their primitive hieroglyphic forms to their present arbitrary and fixed types, though even these fixed types are subject to the variation produced by changes of taste and "fancy."23 Kate Field's Pen Photographs of Dickens'Speeches attempts with the pen what the photograph was achieving in visual communication, for in this work she uses line and text to convey the power and intonation of Dickens's dramatic readings of his own novels. She links blocks of text to each other with diagonal lines to indicate rising and falling vocal patterns, to create almost a musical scoring of speech. In 1864 Alexander Melville Bell devised a system of what he called visible speech, in which pictures, accompanied by diagrams, indicated a series of mouth and breath patterns (Fig. 12). These pictures allowed one to learn languages purely through mouth positions and breathing. (The young Alexander Graham Bell learned Mohawk this way.)24 Dickens's serials contained a number of advertisements for penmanship courses, lessons that would teach professional business and writing hands to those who needed them (Fig. 13). In the example I have chosen, a hand holding a quill is poised above paper in the act of writing. This image is repeated in numerous self-portraits of artists and countless portraits of authors whose "hand" is pictured at a similar moment.25 The very business of the British Empire turned on the traces left by these "hands": mechanical diagrams, engravings, illustrated logbooks,

GERARD CURTIS

drawings from expedition artists (in Wilkie Collins's Woman in White, Hartwright, the drawing master, leaves England as an expedition artist), church script, shorthand (for which there were specialized journals, some containing examples of Dickens's own shorthand script), the writing in accounting books, export and import accounts, governmental and legal documents (done in their own legal script). The writing and drawing master taught these new scribes of the empire to record in pen and pencil the very accounts, records, and images that fed and nourished it. As if to insist on the importance of script, Dickens in his novels stresses the power of the written line over the printed typeset line. In Bleak House, for example, a letter in legal script to Esther Summerson is reproduced, giving the documentation added import and relevance. In the serial version of Sketches by Boz, sections of handwritten "official" script were used in an advertisement, placed by Dickens, to authenticate the legality of his warning to piraters of his novels. Wilkie Collins uses similar "hand"-scripted passages in The Woman in White for a death certificate and a tombstone inscription.26 The linking of penmanship and drawing extended beyond illustrated novels and books. The Hudson Bay Company archives contain James Isham's Observations on Hudson's Bay of 1743.27 Here, on opposing pages are neat penned lines of observations on life around Hudson Bay and "descriptions and illustrations of methods of trapping, weather, and flora and fauna." The illustrations are crude, with only a few colors used, but, like Michael Faraday's later travel logs and scientific notebooks, Isham's book shows how drawing and writing were seen as joint methods of capturing data. The increase in autograph collecting provides further evidence of the value placed on line in the nineteenth century. The painter W. P. Frith noted the price of fame for artists and writers meant being besieged by autograph seekers; and once an autograph was garnered, it joined others in a parlor table autograph book for the appraisal of the collector's colleagues. What the nineteenth century witnessed was the growth of a popular desire to see and collect these original marks and traces for their cachet value. The Birmingham Journal in 1875 noted how thousands of people lined up outside a bookseller's shop just to see a single page of the manuscript of one of Dickens's novels that was put on display. The Illustrated London News of 1912 reproduced facsimiles of manuscript pages from Edwin Drood and David Copperfield to celebrate the centennial of Dickens's birth, while the Christian Science Monitor reproduced a facsimile letter and signature from Dickens.28 The manuscript of George

SHARED LINES

33

du Maurier's Trilby was eventually placed in a special crystal display case for its many admirers.29 In turn-of-the-century publications like Collingwood's Ruskin Relics, aspects of Ruskin's life are represented by incorporating various "lines" within the text: facsimiles of Ruskin's writing, facsimiles of his musical scores and markings, and reproductions of his drawings and maps. Collingwood notes in his introduction that such diffuse elements give a full and rounded picture of Ruskin. John Forster, too, combined various types of line in his Life ofDickens to convey Dickens's character. Most notable of all these line collections was the short-lived journal the Autographic Mirror (Fig. 14), which displayed facsimiles of musical scores of significant composers, signatures (Dickens's appeared twice), selections of manuscript pages and letters, and drawings by well-known artists. The journal also included Mexican Mixtec codices and their "hieroglyphic signs."30 Throughout one sees "line" as a collectible and shared commodity, uniting sound, image, and text. Transcending cultural boundaries, as in the Mixtec codices, line becomes a collectible universal communicant. Thomas Webster, R. A., supplied a sketch of his hand and his autograph to the journal, providing "one of his sketches, a hieroglyphic united with his autograph 'Witness my Hand.'" 31 Philip Hamerton wrote in The Graphic Arts (1882): All writing, whether careful, or careless, is drawing of some kind. . . . Rapid handwriting is not merely like sketching, it is sketching. The same strong marks of idiosyncrasy which are to be found in the sketches of artists exist in handwriting, and there is the most various beauty in handwriting. It is curious, considering how few people give a thought to these matters. . . . People write legibly or illegibly, elegantly or inelegandy, but they seldom put letters together which do not go well with each other. There are instances of incongruity, but they are rare. In general they are prevented from occurring by the unities of taste and habits which form the identity of each of us, so that we acquire a personal style in penmanship as we do in the use of language.32 Hamerton continues: Suppose that you have to write a letter. You take a sheet of white or toned paper and dip your pen in black ink. You then write away rapidly and your pen leaves the black fluid wherever it has passed in the shape of free lines. What you are really doing all the time is sketching, though you do not think of it under that name. You are sketching the forms of letters, hurriedly and inaccurately, perhaps, but still so that the intended forms are perfecdy recognizable by anybody who can read that kind of writing. This pen process

34

GERARD CURTIS

is one of the important forms of graphic art... and it is quite an artistic process [emphasis added].33 In magazines like Punch, initial letters to articles showed how typographic, written, and drawn lines could be linked in an image (Fig. 15). The covers or title pages of Dickens's serials often combined image and text. The lettering of the title page of Little Dorrit (Fig. 16), done by Phiz, for example, with its chains and bricks, echoes the novel's themes of prison and confinement. Such lettering strengthens the reader's illusion that the printed novel is a manuscript, thus relinking the typography to the original act of writing. Edwin Drood contains a similar use of the illustrator's script as a visual device. Such devices occur in all the serial issues of Dickens's novels, with the illustrator's cover design and the captions (seemingly handwritten) beneath the illustrations reasserting the presence of the graphic hand (echoing what Webster had made graphic through his hieroglyphic hand in the, Autographic Mirror). In The Clothing ofClio, Stephen Bann has noted how Charles Reade's Cloister and the Hearth (1861) utilizes an illustration of a set of clasped hands within the body of the text. Here the illustrated hands actually break into the middle of a sentence, becoming attached to the reading process, and blending the illustrative and narrative languages operating in the novel.34 Reade tells us that the hands are there for the illiterate parents in the novel to read. But whereas Bann emphasizes Reade's narrative strategy in uniting the visual sign here with the textual, there is a more fundamental link between the drawn and written line occurring. The illustration is drawn by the same hand as the letters that the parents cannot read. A critic of the period, in the Saturday Review, noted how the modern illustrated book he was reviewing was part of the new "hieroglyphics" sweeping Victorian society. The initial letters in Punch, Cruikshank's illustrations, the chains and brick in Phiz's lettering for Little Dorrit, illustrated magazines like the Graphic and Cornhill, and Charles Reade's Cloister reveal a "hieroglyphic-pictographic" culture based on a language of ideogram, pictogram, and phonetics (Fig. 17). By the mid nineteenth century, the graphic arts were seen as an extension and evolutionary development of picture writing and the hieroglyph. The social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, as Walter Crane pointed out, praised the English graphic press on this basis.35 At this point, I would like to return to Cruikshank and his portrait illustration of himself and Hone. By the latter half of the century the unity he depicted between the drawn and written line had been dis-

SHARED LINES

35

rapted.36 Cruikshank's own polemic article, "The Artist and the Author," provides vivid evidence of this development. Cruikshank claimed for himself a role in originating Dickens's Oliver Twist and Ainsworth's novel The Tower. He claims, not that he has written the novels themselves (as some critics have asserted), but that he was more than a mere illustrator, that he was an equal partner, an artist (as the title "The Artist and The Author" suggests) working with the author, stimulating his visual imagination (for example, showing Dickens models, ideas, and locations central to the story of Oliver Twist). There is no doubt that early in the century Ainsworth and Dickens had recognized such a partnership with Cruikshank. Ainsworth's Magazine of June 1842 featured an advertising poem celebrating Cruikshank's association with Ainsworth in producing the magazine: Cruikshank! I do rejoice to see thy name Reckon'd with Ainsworth's in the roll of fame! Union most pregnant! that with grace doth bind In faithfull bonds such pencil and such pen — Kith bond to kin, and neither less than kind.37 In illustrating Dickens's Sketches by Boz, as in the print entitled "Public Dinners," Cruikshank showed both himself and Dickens in the act of observing London life; in another he showed himself and Dickens floating off together in a balloon above their admirers' heads. It must be remembered that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Dickens started out providing simply the letterpress captions to the then famous artist Robert Seymour's print series the Nimrod Club (which would be taken over by Dickens for his first novel, Pickwick). As if to verify the importance of the artist to the author at the beginning of the century, Dickens, in his original manuscript of Oliver Twist (Forster Bequest, Victoria and Albeit Museum), wrote George Cruikshank's name immediately under his own at the beginning of each division of his manuscript. Dickens's later manuscripts did not feature the illustrator's name so prominently. Dickens, without success, had advocated that the Royal Academy consider line engraving an art, and Cruikshank its prime representative. An early reviewer of Oliver Twist commented on the joint value of illustrations and text in telling the story, suggesting that Cruikshank be elevated to the Royal Academy on the basis of his engravings. The failure of the Royal Academy to recognize the graphic arts and the graphic artist may have led to the eventual degrading of the medium. More than anything in the century, however, the rise of photography spelled the

36

GERARD CURTIS

end, for with it the engraver slipped from "implied" artist to popular illustrator of mass-market imagery. Line art became, by the end of the century, secondary to the line of literature and the silver halide dots of photography. The subtle paradigmatic shift in the relationship of the written to the drawn line was visually represented by a change in the volume covers of the Illustrated London News. Prior to 1857 Art and Literature are shown hand in hand, surveying the world (Fig. 18 echoes Cruikshank's and William Hone's positions of equality). After 1857 Art is shown as subordinate, behind Literature and looking over her shoulder, to the text, for guidance (Fig. 19 echoes Dickens's textual takeover of Seymour's pictorial Nimrod Club). James McNeill Whistler complained in 1888 that contemporary critics and writers on art had gone overboard in viewing art as "more or less a hieroglyph" and in allowing art to be subsumed by literary analysis rather than by artistic and aesthetic merit.38 Both Henry Blackburn, in 1893, and Joseph Pennell, in 1896, mention the collapsing role of, and the lack of respect for, the pictorial image, illustration, and the graphic artist. For Blackburn and Pennell, photography had become the main competition, mass production of images and the growing importance of the author having further diminished the role of the graphic artist. Because of the hack illustrator, as they noted, the work of the true artist had cheapened.39 That photography direcdy challenged the pencil line is evident from William Henry Fox Talbot's Royal Society talk of 31 January 1839, tided "Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing," or "the process by which natural objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of an artist's pencil [emphasis added]." In 1844, when Talbot produced his photographically illustrated text The Pencil ofNature, he inserted a notice to the reader, similarly worded to deny assistance from engravings or "any aid from the artist's pencil."40 The challenge to the writer's pen would take longer, but it too was on its way. As Alexander Graham Bell was to point out in his effort to develop the phonograph, its invention and perfection would "be a contribution to the world's utilities of little less consequence than the invention of printing."41 The pen line and type were to have their successor in a device that would capture the voice. The phonograph and photograph, two inventions of the nineteenth century, would thus shift humans, after thousands of years of dependency, away from the drawn and the textual line (whether written or printed). The challenges to the artist's pencil from photography, hackwork, and the rising importance of the author led, as Blackburn noted, to "the

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37

drawing ofour national reputation in the mire''''-, the deterioration of illustration became a "serious matter."42 This concern echoes Cruikshank's earlier concerns in "The Artist and the Author," where the writer has gained credit and fame while the position of the artist has diminished. For Blackburn, the art of printing, mass literacy, and the stress on the written hand had led by the 1870s to "some neglect of the art of expressing ourselves pictorially."43 He further notes how the emphasis on writing has caused children to lose their "freedom and power of expression." With this drawing talent lost, "the [natural] hand is gone forever" and is instead chained to parallel lines of scribing. What one is left with, then, by the end of the nineteenth century, is the obverse of the illustration of Hone and Cruikshank discussed at the beginning of this essay. The artist was now battling with the author, as in Figure 20, where the two figures are shown standing on the pages of an open book with their respective instruments, the pen and pencil, as giant swords. The winner in the battle of the lines was, as Blackburn had foreseen, the writer; in schooling, the enforced hand of writing won out over drawing. And the illustrator of this fencing image? It was none other than George du Maurier, who had suffered hardship as an illustrator, and who had, at long last (around the time this illustration was published, in fact), achieved financial success and fame as the author of Trilby (a novel where artists are "captured" in print).44 Numerous arguments in the late nineteenth century defended drawing as a necessary skill. Mary Barton in 1890 gave priority to drawing over writing in education, feeling that "art should come before literature" since drawing led to writing (she recurred to the analogy of hieroglyphs and picture writing). She adds that art dominates because "Drawing is a Universal language."45 Barton further notes that "Writing and Drawing are connected in a way that needs no demonstration, although something has yet to be done to bring the fact into practical recognition."46 There is no doubt that for Crane, Blackburn, Barton, and Hamerton drawing was a universal language, able to surmount the linguistic limitations of text through what was perceived as the universal iconics of the drawn image, and the self-referential indexicality of the graphic trace. They linked the pictorial with the textual and typographic, giving mark priority over signification, making writing a subset of drawing. They claimed that writing, after all, derived from drawing, pictographies, and hieroglyphics, and that the graphic image was a much truer extension of a hieroglyphic tradition. Thus the image and the word are intertwined, "connected through a long descent with the

38

GERARD CURTIS

hieroglyphic inscriptions of the ancient Egyptians, and the picturewriting of still earlier times," in Crane's words.47 And Crane felt that these graphic hieroglyphs "carried picture-writing into another and more complex stage," giving expression to the Victorian age and becoming the common language of the period.48 Holman Hunt goes so far as to say that drawing is not only essential to any child's basic education but also leads to all the symbols essential for instruction. Drawing is, in fact, the primal symbol of all; for the alphabet—after all its mutations . . . still bears intelligible pictures of the objects which originated the sounds intended, or suggested the meaning to be conveyed . . . the letter S represents a serpent, whose hissing gives the sound; . . . the letter U is said to be a picture of a bull's horn, the bellowing of this animal being the vowel-note.49 Hunt goes on to note how the pen and its movement are the same for writing and drawing. Like Barton and Crane, he demanded that drawing be taught in school, so that the child could be fully educated to appreciate and understand language and its pictographic structure. And while the iconic structure Hunt gave the alphabet might seem naive in one respect, there was strong support for his views on the merits of drawing as an educational tool and its role in releasing the imagination from the tight strictures of a purely alphabetic/literary education. Drawing, it was felt, would reawaken in the writer the graphic "visibility" of text, its indexical "truth" (both of which Sterne and Blake had explored, and which the Dadaists, Cubists, and Surrealists were to "rediscover"). Yet these claims by Hunt, Barton, and Blackburn on the role of drawing were defensive, responding to a shift in the value of, and the relationship between the "lines" of illustration and text; illustration failed, and one can argue that the visual graphic imagination ended up becoming (as Blackburn seemed to imply) a more textual imagination. The hieroglyphic culture that Blackburn and the others desired had flourished briefly in the first half of the century but thereafter went into decline. Blackburn's hope had been that the new era of photography would allow manuscripts of novels to be reproduced in facsimile, thus eliminating the need for printing at all (except for cheap "Penny dreadfills") and relinking the written line to the drawn line. This, for Blackburn, would allow the author's hand to be part of a new reading process.50 Photography, however, did not replace printing, as Blackburn had hoped. Rather it replaced illustration as it increased in value through the century as the new "image" of reality. Photography also took away

SHARED LESTES

39

something far more significant: the ability of the graphic arts to transport the visual imagination beyond pictured realities, beyond the power of the eye, as with such real/imagined front-page illustrations as those showing Dickens at the site of the Staplehurst rail disaster (Fig. 21), or a conflagration inside Haworth Castle (a scene no human could have witnessed). Ultimately photography describes reality through a mechanical chemical pointillism, whereas drawings, engravings, and woodcuts enable the imagination to inscribe and open virtual realities, leaving, in their lines, traces of the visual imagination.

FACETIE AND

M I SC E L L A N I ES. BY WILLIAM HONE.

©it]) ©ne ïjunbrcû ano Cinenty «engrabingsî, DRAWN BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK.

" We twa liae paidl't"—

LONDON: PUBLISHED FOR WILLIAM HONE, BY HUNT AND C L A R K E , TAVISTOCK S T R E E T ,

COVENT GARDEN. 1827.

mm Fig. 7. George Cruikshank, "Hone and Cruikshank," in Facetiae and Miscellanies, London, 1827. Photograph by the author, courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Fig. 9. Robert Braithwaite Martineau, Kit's Writing Lesson, 1852. London, Tate Gallery. Photograph courtesy of the Trustees of the Tate Gallery.

43

Fig. ii. John Hemm, "George the Fourth," from Portraits ofthe Royal Family in Calligraphy (London, 1831). Photograph by the author, courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

45

ORGANIC FORMATION OF T H E PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS OF SPEECH..

r. •o u

Q 03

D. 9 tOO». !

Fig. 12. "Organic Formation of the Principal Elements of Speech," from Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech, 1864. Photograph by the author, courtesy of the Curator, Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, Baddeck, Nova Scotia.

46

WRITING, BOOK-KEEPING, &c. PERSONS of any acre, however bad tlieir «TILING, m a y . ID E I G H T L E S S O N S . a c q u i r e p e r m a n e n t l y

• o elegant and flowing style of PENMANSHIP, ailaptal cither to professional pursuits or private correspondence. ARITHMETIC on a method requiring only one-third the timo usually requisite. BOOK-KEEPING, its practised In the Government, Banking, and Merchants' Offices; Shorthand. Ac. Kor Terms, he., apply to Ma. SMART, at the Institution, at LV ftps: Private Door, In Swallow Street, (¡tiadrant, Urgent Street (removed from No. 5, Piccadilly). " A practical, scientific,arid really philosophical method." Colonial J.'eview. " Cnder Mr. Smart, penmanship bus br a. now, ev., prompt with n,tyUr. ^ " ^ „ ¿ f t " " * , . or*hout all tfiej in WatpoLK, not in the ¡»mortal and immoral "tt"™/but in tie"IJ.t Journal.«," ably ed.tod 11 Horn. f J/i l'uneh prtaumea that by this time hi- render. the;W«!J, •Jo*, himJ wel to .npt~.:IhMb. J»»? any record or r. fen-nee that occurred to bim, whether It apj*nrnt "wSo«li.Wr on tl» matt. ' In hart or not. If. k.wmj anr pcraon euppoaei tbat Jfr. /'«or» u bound by any M j^ IZ¿That SgSft» i. the better. Tba^f^ Parliamentary narraUrc will, aa ber.tofon. ba gnjJ»« «£3 S y ^ r » w t 5 ST»? otlrer authority,»»«. that of Beauty!

I JoU k»ow au

,»J hi* own judfmenu y*rr«uy w u. -—abling. and pausing, ana requiem« -< liad any infirmity b«,n it» can», but lx.«P H»T»'"-" n""r * mentio «!• — " Fig. 15. Initial letter T from "Punch's Essence of Parliament," Punch 62 (17 February 1872): 67. Photograph by the author, courtesy of the Librarian, University of Essex Library.

+9

-

BRADBURY U EVANS. BOUVERIE STREP.T 1857.

Fig. 16. Phiz (Hablot K. Browne), title page to Charles Dickens's Little Dornt, serial issue nos. 19 and 20 (1857). Photograph by the author, courtesy of the Dickens House Museum, London.

50

LONDON X?,

THE

OFFICE,

S5, F L E E T

STIIEKT.

ASS «01« »1

Fig. 17. Volume cover for Punch 26 (1854)- Photograph by the author, courtesy of the Librarian, University of Essex Library.

51

Fig. 18. Volume cover for the Illustrated London News 27 (1855). Photograph by the author, courtesy of the Librarian, University of Essex Library.

52

E fflMBBBBh

SISLY

TO D E C E M B E Ä

1870. ~Tki/m> f- Tlrjuisiicv m (jEiifi«C.iowroV tot Styjfo Iff^DOjf Fig. 19. Volume cover for the Illustrated London News 57 (1870). Photograph by the author, courtesy of the Librarian, University of Essex Library.

53

Fig. 20. George du Maurier, "An Edition de Luxe!" Magazine of Art, 1890. Photograph by the author, courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

54

CUAKLM DICKK1S »l'.ULVIKO TUB t l ' m u t l AT THK FATAL &A1LWAT AOCIMST, M A I VTAVLCHCB«T.—«U " ((Onniri*,

fAUi M.

Fig. 2i. Staplehurst railway accident, cover of the Penny Illustrateli Paper 9 (24 June 1865). Photograph by the author, courtesy of the Librarian, University of Essex Library.

55

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Notes The images and advertisements from the serial editions of Dickens's novels were photographed from the Sydney A. Henry and Miss M. Henry Collection in the Dickens House Museum, London. Copyright remains with the Dickens House Museum. My research was funded in part by a Commonwealth Scholarship. I would like to thank Elizabeth Behrens and Carol Christ for their editorial suggestions on versions of this essay, and Joss Marsh and Murray Baumgarten for their encouragement of my research. Dr. David Parker (Curator) and Andrew Bean (Deputy Curator) made accessible various materials and collections at the Dickens House Museum. Chris Short provided valuable assistance in tracking down images and material, and in "scribing" at various times. Special thanks to Reg and Edna Short for their continuing support of my research. 1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "To E. L., on His Travels in Greece," quoted in Ruth Pitman, Edward Lear's Tennyson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), 17. 2. Throughout The Artist and the Author Cruikshank stresses the "partnership" of these productions, as opposed to those other times when his role is that of an illustrator of Ainsworth's or Dickens's ideas. The Artist and the Author originally appeared as a letter in the Times, and then as a pamphlet: George Cruikshank, The Artist and the Author: A Statement of Facts, by the Artist George Cruikshank: proving that the Distinguished Author, Mr. W. Harrison Ainsworth is "labouring under a singular delusion" with respect to the origin of"The Miser's Daughter/' aThe Tower of London," etc., 2nd edition (Covent Garden: Bell and Daldy, 1872). 3. What follows in the next four paragraphs is paraphrased and expanded from my article "The Art of Seeing: Dickens in the Visual Market," in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 4. Copybooks are a neglected area of research for this structural foundation of word and image association. Ambrose Heal's The English Writing-Masters and Their Copy-Books, 1570-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), is an early biographical dictionary on the tradition of writing masters. See also Stanley Morison, American Copy Books: An Outline of Their History to Modern Times (Philadelphia: W. M. Fell, 1951); and Vivian Henry Crellin's master's thesis on the history of the copybook, and the copybook line, "The Teaching of Writing and the Use of Copybooks in Schools," University of London, 1976. Stanley Morison's numerous texts on handwriting provide historical links between the visual arts and text (see also his introduction to Heal's book). Molly Nesbit has presented research on the subject of French educational training in drawing and line work, particularly as regards the teaching of art and language, and its influence on painters like Picasso, Braque, and Duchamp ("The Language of Industry," During Lawrence Lectures, University College London, May 1991). These lectures enabled me to develop my own thoughts and research in this area; por-

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tions ofNesbit's lectures have been published as "The Language of Industry," in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry De Dove (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 351-94. 5. Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, Education of the Rural Poor (London: Robert John Bush, 1870), 33. 6. For a discussion of the role of writing in Dickens's novels, see Murray Baumgarten, "Calligraphy and Code: Writing in Great ExpectationsDickens Studies Annual 11 (1983): 61-72, and "Writing and David CoppetfieldDickens Studies Annual 14 (1985): 39-59. 7. The Universal Instructor; or, Self Culture for All, 3 vols. (London: Ward Lock, 1880-84). 8. See Albert Boime's discussion of drawing schools in his Art in the Age of Revolution, 17S0-1800, vol. 1 ofA Social History of Modem Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), particularly his section on William Blake (309-12). 9. See Boime, 320. 10. An excellent example of the lettering used by signwriters can be found in the color plates of William Sutherland's Practical Guide to Sign Writing (i860), reproduced in A. J. Lewery, SignwrittenArt (London: David and Charles, 1989), 17. Henry Mayhew mentions street stencilers in London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (1861-62; reprint, New York: Dover, 1968), 1:4. 11. Mayhew, 3:213-14. Mayhew also discusses the "Screevers or Writers of Begging-Letters and Petitions" who supplied the illiterate with begging letters (1:311) and a "Chalker on Flagstones" who did images of Napoleon and Christ for a living (3:214). 12. Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 33. 13. Advertisement for the Illustrated London News, in serial issue of Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlemt (London: Chapman and Hall), no. 1 (January 1843), 1214. William Andrew Chatto, "Wood-Engraving: Its History and Practice," Illustrated London News, 20 April 1844, 251. 15. John Ruskin, "Academy Notes, 1875," in The Lamp of Beauty, ed. Joan Evans (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1959), 136. Ruskin goes on to compare the Academy show of 1875 to "a large coloured Illustrated Times folded in saloons,—the splendidest May number of the Graphic, shall we call it?" (135). The best work of the year, he declares, is a watercolor illustration to a story by the woodblock engraver Mrs. Allingham (136). 16. E. Seymour, in a letter reprinted in Hippisley Tuckfield, Education for the People (London: Taylor Walton, 1839), 150. For maps that display unusual combinations of words and images, particularly from the nineteenth century, see Gillian Hill, Cartographical Curiosities (London: British Library, 1978). Noteworthy examples reproduced in Hill's text include "Hunting in Troubled Waters" (plate 58), where figures and text are used to make up European countries, and the Bellman's map in Lewis Carroll's Hunting ofthe Snark. 17. Copybooks from the Bowles School, circa 1820-30, are in the Dickens House Museum, London. 18. Examples of copybooks from the Bowles School (see n. 17) showing such flourishes are housed in the Dickens House Museum, London.

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19. Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature, quoted in Heal, The English Writing-Masters and Their Copy-Books, xvi. 20. The painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was the son of a writing master. 21. Walter Crane, Line and Form (London: George Bell and Sons, 1912), 23. 22. Ibid., 4. 23. Ibid., 6. 24. Jack Stephens, Curator of the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, Baddeck, Nova Scotia, has kindly provided information on this unique system. 25. I am presently researching the numerous images of scribes, and the transcultural importance of showing the moment of the trace, in cultures ranging from ancient Egypt to the Victorian period. 26. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 372-73. 27. James Isham's book is in the Hudson Bay Archives, Winnipeg, Manitoba; Tom Koppel, "Treasure-Trove of History," Canadian Geographic, (October/November 1991), shows a photograph of Isham's book (72). 28. Illustrated London News, 10 February 1912, 208, 209; Christian Science Monitor (Boston), 7 February 1912. 29. Joss Marsh (Stanford University), who kindly provided me with this information, also noted du Maurier's importance to the issue of the interrelatedness of the drawn and written line. In 1992 a record price of $1.3 million was set in the United States for a signed portion of a manuscript by Abraham Lincoln. 30. Autographic Mirror (issued from 1865; n.d. for this issue), 130. 31. Autographic Mirror, 26 August 1865, quotation on 37, image on 71. 32. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Graphic Arts: A Treatise on the Varieties of Drawing, Painting, and Engraving (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1882), 13. 33. Ibid., 302. 34. Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 155. 35. See Wayne Senner, "Theories and Myths on the Origins of Writing: A Historical Overview," in The Origins of Writing, ed. Wayne Senner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 2,15. 36. The disruption was not absolute. See, for example, The Dial magazine, published by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, with its stylized plates and text, or the expensive and limited publications of the Kelmscott Press. 37. The poem, entitled "George Cruikshank," is signed W . D . D . (it appears on the verso of the contents page). Cruikshank's name appeared prominently in the magazine's promotion. Ainsworth's Magazine 1 (June 1842): n.p. 38. James McNeill Whisder, Ten O'clock Lecture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1888), 17-18. 39. Joseph Pennell, The Illustration ofBooks (London: Unwin, 1896), 11, 26: Pennell believed a second renaissance for the illustrator would emerge out of the present "dark moment" (11); see also his Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmanship (London: Macmillan, 1889), 2,306-07. Henry Blackburn, "Cantor Lectures on

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the Art of Book and Newspaper Illustration," Journal of the Royal Society of Arts (27 November and 4 and 11 December 1893), 4, ix. 40. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844); for the text of the notice, see Robert Lassam, Fox Talbot: Photographer (Dorset: Dovecote Press, 1979), 22. 41. Quotation provided by Aynsley MacFarlene (Area Interpretation Officer), Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site, Baddeck, Nova Scotia. 42. Blackburn, "Cantor Lectures," 2. 43. Blackburn, "The Art of Illustration," Journal ofthe Royal Society of Arts 23 (12 March 1875), 373. 44. See Leonee Ormond, George Du Maurier (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). 45. Mary Barton, "Art Teaching in Schools," in Transactions of the National Association Jbr the Advancement ofArt and Its Application to Industry: Edinburgh Meeting (London, 1890), 438, 444. 46. Ibid., 444. 47. Walter Crane, Ofthe Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New (London: George Bell and Sons, 1896), 5. 48. Walter Crane, Ideals in Art: Papers Theoretical, Practical, Critical (London: George Bell and Sons, 1905), 90. See also Crane, Of the Decorative Illustration of Books, 208. 49. William Holman Hunt, "The Proper Mode and Study of Drawing. — 1: Addressed to Students," Magazine of Art 14 (1891): 81, 83. 50. Blackburn, "Cantor Lectures," 15-16.

JUDITH L. F I S H E R

Image versus Text in the Illustrated Novels of William Makepeace Thackeray

British book illustration in the nineteenth century can be neatly divided into two periods: from 1800 to mid-century, Isaac and George Cruikshank and Phiz and Thackeray drew on Hogarth's allusive and allegorical representations and on the great caricaturists James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson to create "speaking" pictures. From the 1850s on, primarily through John Everett Millais's illustrations of Trollope's novels (but also through secondary artists such as Richard Doyle, who illustrated Thackeray's Newcomes and Frederick Walker, who illustrated Adventures ofPhilip), a style deriving from English genre painting emerged that increasingly subordinated the image to the text.1 My use of the term "subordinated" suggests one significance of this stylistic shift and explains why we no longer expect novels to be illustrated. Once an illustration simply reinforces the text, it can easily dwindle into mere decoration—as it does in the ornamental style of Kate Greenaway. Thus illustration came to be identified with light literature and children's books (where, interestingly, the significant image is reviving in the work of such artists as Maurice Sendak).2 The caricatural style offered its reader-viewers an additional narrative voice, making the image as important as the text. This seeming parity incited some volatile exchanges between illustrator and writer, as when Cruikshank claimed that his illustrations were the germ and genius of Dickens's Oliver Twist and William Ainsworth's Tower of London.3 The Cruikshank-Dickens quarrel, pursued after Dickens's death by Cruikshank and John Forster (Dickens's friend and biographer), illustrates the uneasy marriage of the caricatural style and the novel. Caricature takes liberties: the impudent pen of the artist exposes the foibles of the familiar subject. Cruikshank's 60

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determination to maintain his artistic independence is not surprising, considering that he was an established caricaturist before he started illustrating novels. The case of Thackeray is different, more interesting, and ultimately more suggestive. Here is an artist who developed as caricaturistillustrator and novelist simultaneously. J. H. Stonehouse's catalogue of Thackeray's library, compiled for its auction in 1864, describes book after book as containing Thackeray's "illustrations" or "caricatures" in the "spirit" of the text. Thackeray drew in everything, from Fielding's Joseph Andrews to Baedeker's Handbuch fur Reisende in Deutschland, und dem OesterreichischenKaiserstaat— as if he could not read without seeing.4 As illustrator of his own works, Thackeray saw the relation between image and text as a self-conscious dialogue, emphasized in the subtitle of Vanity Fair, "Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society." The drawing between chapters nine and ten of the "narrator" unmasking dramatizes Thackeray's self-awareness — the face of the melancholy fool behind the mask is Thackeray's own (Fig. 22). The nature of the dialogue between text and image varied; as J. R. Harvey, Joan Stevens, Patricia Sweeney, and others have noted, the illustrations add metaphorical comment, extend the story, alert the reader to significant patterns, and supply visual types for the characters.5 Thackeray's most successful illustrations, aesthetically and interpretively, do not "illustrate" the text at all.6 The illustrations to Vanity Fair, The History of Pendennis, and The Virginians and the pictorial capitals in The Adventures of Philip create alternative story lines, presenting countervoices to Thackeray's narrations. These countervoices encourage self-conscious seeing/reading in the ways they speak against the text and among themselves. Often the illustrations do not conform to any one convention of representation: they are both mimetic and metaphoric. Martin Meisel describes Thackeray's style as a synthesis of opposites, "uniting a concrete particularity with inward signification, the materiality of things with moral and emotional force, historical fact with figural truth, the mimetic with the ideal" (36). As the reader shifts between text and contrasting image, the interpretive options multiply, allowing simultaneous but diverse meanings. The eye cannot move to the illustrations for a confirmation of the story because the illustrations both fix an image and evoke interpretations beyond those contained in the language. Thus, while contemporaries such as Henry Kingsley called Thackeray's illustrations "a key to the text," they function less to unlock what is in it than to galvanize the reader's own interpretive abilities.7 Ultimately, to read Vanity Fair, Pendennis, The Vir-

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ginians, or The Adventures ofPhilip without Thackeray's illustrations is to read a novel other than the one Thackeray intended and to lose one of the great pleasures a Thackerayan novel offers: moving between word and image, the reader shares the narrator's ability to manipulate the story.8 Thackeray most closely follows the tradition of subordinating image to text when his illustrations evoke sympathy but avoid sentiment.9 The "eye of sympathy" gives us a character's visual perspective and, without words, creates a sudden understanding of an emotional state. An intratextual illustration early in Vanity Fair works strongly to create sympathy for Amelia by showing us what she sees when she visits George's house before her father's bankruptcy. Chapter 12 criticizes the two Miss Osbornes' and Miss Wirt's disdainful dismissal of Amelia by showing us the unsympathetic women she sees (Fig. 23). The text above reads, "And this day she [Amelia] was so perfectly stupid and awkward that the Miss Osbornes and their governess, who stared after her as she went sadly away wondered more than ever what George could see in poor little Amelia" (100). The reader, however, seeing the unsympathetic, harsh faces that Amelia sees, automatically agrees with the narrator's comment below the illustration, "Of course they did. How was she to bare that timid little heart for the inspection of those young ladies with their bold black eyes?" The illustration—much more hostile than the narrator—suggests just how unyielding Amelia finds the Osbornes. While the untided intratextual illustrations are drawn in a nonmetaphoric, mimetic mode, they do not simply reinforce the text. The "eye of sympathy" that modifies our reading by giving us a sudden understanding of how a character sees, giving us that character's perspective, can suddenly reverse our involvement with the character and thrust us out of the text. The intratextual illustration that introduces Lord Steyn in chapter 37 acts against the text to create a shock that further reflection transforms into ironic surprise (335-36). In the first edition, at the bottom of the recto page, the reader is treated to the description of Becky arranged as an artwork: The fire crackled and blazed pleasandy. There was a score of candles sparkling round the mantelpiece, in all sorts of quaint sconces, of gilt and bronze and porcelain. They lighted up Rebecca's figure to admiration, as she sate on a sofa covered with a pattern of gaudy flowers. She was in a pink dress, that looked as fresh as a rose; her dazzling white arms and shoulders were half covered with a thin hazy scarf through which they sparkled; her hair hung in curls round her neck; one of her little feet peeped out from

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the fresh crisp folds of the silk: the prettiest little foot in the prettiest little sandal in the finest silk stocking in the world. (335-36) The reader's eye then moves to see what Becky is seeing: Lord Steyne, who has been innocuously introduced previously as her audience: "The great Lord of Steyne was standing by the fire sipping coffee" (Fig. 24). Steyne's leering, loutish appearance contrasts sharply with the "dainty" language of Becky's picture. The effect is to reveal the deceitfulness of Becky's art—a disguise that now seems obvious in the language itself. The overuse of diminutives and superlatives ("little feet," "prettiest little foot," "prettiest little sandal," "in the world"), the hackneyed simile "fresh as a rose," the slip in taste suggested by the "gaudy" flowers on the sofa argue that the narrator wants us to question the sincerity of this picture. The juxtaposition of illustration and text jolts us into questioning the entire value of Becky's picture making. If this is her audience, can her art be genuine? Both Becky and Steyne are morally discredited: Becky by preening for such a man and Steyne by exhibiting his brutal nature. Thackeray's use of the word "great" to describe Lord Steyne recalls Fielding's redefinition of it to describe Jonathan Wild; Thackeray had explored the redefinition in "Caricatures and Lithography in Paris."10 An instinctive revulsion from Steyne makes readers reassess Becky's efforts as they are described. The antagonism between image and text allows readers to recognize how they, too, can be drawn in by Becky's art. Readers are thus both alerted to Becky's machinations and made aware of her potency.11 Such interaction between text and illustration often turns a simple sketch into a metaphoric "realization." I exclude from this category overtly symbolic illustrations such as the pictorial initial in chapter 61 of Vanity Fair, where the cluttered hearth with no fire, slippers carelessly flung, and doll (puppet?) on the mantelpiece symbolize John Sedley's death. Such drawings are independent of the text and create their own iconography from the details of daily life. Quite different are illustrations that seem to be simple reifications of the text but which become symbolic as the reader/viewer moves between text and drawing. A clear example of this is a simple intratextual illustration of the Chevalier Strong blacking his boots in volume 2, chapter 23, of Pendennis. On the same page he refuses to procure yet another loan for Clavering because he has given his word to Lady Clavering: "the Chevalier said that he, at least, would keep his word, and would black his own boots all his life rather than break his promise" (2:227). Only in this context does the

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drawing become an emblem of Strong's integrity, in sharp contrast to the intratextual illustration of Clavering begging money from Altamont in the preceding chapter. The essential characters of the two men are crystallized in these pictures, which become "signs" of their moral quality. Patterns of such "signs" develop as tacit commentary that gradually builds a consistent counterpoint to the text. In chapter 25 of Vanity Fair, Becky, Rawdon, George, and Amelia are at Brighton, and Becky and Rawdon are in the process of fleecing George. The intratextual figure shows George and Rawdon at cards, with Becky standing at George's shoulder, gazing down with a sly smile (212; Fig. 2$). On the preceding page, the narrator had given us another word picture of Becky: "She was looking over her shoulder in the glass. She had put on the neatest andfreshestwhite frock imaginable and with bare shoulders and a little necklace, and a light blue sash, she looked the image of youthful innocence and girlish happiness" (211). This Becky is depicted in the full-page illustration "A Family Party at Brighton" opposite the intratextual (Fig. 25). In this combination of text and illustration, then, Becky's knowing expression undercuts her "innocence." The intratextual figure, following the narrator's description of Becky's watching "kindly" over George while he plays écarté, actually shows her sly calculation. The text hints at its own disagreement with the representations when the narrator describes Becky "fixing on a killing bow." Her "kindly" look is actually a "killing glance," just as her bow is both hair ornament and sexual weapon —as her reference to George as "Cupid" also suggests. Thus Becky is "betrayed" by the illustration, in which her sly smile emphasizes the irony of the narrator's descriptions of her kindness and anticipates the destructiveness of her flirtation with George. In fact, Thackeray's famous ambivalence about Becky is partly resolved for the reader of an illustrated text. By either offering information omitted in the text or actually countering the text, as in the illustrations in chapter 25, the illustrations of Becky betray her posturings and undermine the narrator's excuses. She is consistently portrayed as a sharpfeatured, narrow-eyed woman, as in the illustration at the end of the first number, "Mr. Joseph Entangled," where her face resembles that of number 32 in Henry Siddons's Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture andAction (1807).12 Throughout the novel, Becky is visually represented as either "False Gesture" (Fig. 26) or "Menace" (Fig. 27; number 29 in Siddons), sharing the slanted eyebrows, narrow eyes, and aquiline features of these figures. The continuity of the expression acts as an independent piece of information for readers, telling them not to be deluded

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by their own impulses to sympathy and warning them not to accept either Becky's or the narrator's justifications of her actions, for example, "if she did not get a husband for herself, there was no one else in the wide world who would take the trouble off her hands" (17). We see her first leaving school with this wicked smile and next at the Sedleys, while in the meantime the narrator has asked us to accept her as a "picture of gentle unprotected innocence, and humble virgin simplicity" (emphasis added, 19). Obviously something is askew because the only picture the reader sees is that of the conniving Becky, as in chapters 7,17, 25, 36, 67. The consistency of Becky's representation would have reminded readers of each monthly installment of the "real" Becky, but it would also have keyed for them passages of narrative irony. Ultimately, this consistent value-laden image encourages an ironic reading of passages that do not necessarily invite ironic reading, or even a denial of the narrator's description. The illustrations force the reader to ironize the narrative, especially because the other characters are taken in by a face that readers cannot see as honest or attractive. Moreover, this consistent representation suggests that to a discerning eye Becky's nature cannot be disguised. In a brilliant touch of irony, Becky the expert actress (or mimic) is visually "shown up" by Thackeray's pen, which transfers interpretive power to the reader, especially in the absence of an overtly ironic text. The narrator's ambivalent attitude toward Becky does not align with the consistently hostile representation of her. Readers must determine for themselves how to interweave the visual and the verbal. Becky's self-deceit is betrayed when the illustrations present information she neglects. Just as Rawdon, George Osborne, and the younger Sir Pitt are blind to Becky's nature, Becky's only perspective is that of her own self-flattering mirror. Her two letters to Amelia in chapters 8 and 11 show us her blindness. In the letter in chapter 8 Becky describes going in to dinner without mentioning her scowling face and scolding manner (Fig. 28). The reader sees this missing information, but Amelia does not; thus we are early alerted to Becky's selective perception. While Becky's omission here is deliberate, her ignorance of Mrs. Bute's plot is just that—ignorance fostered by her own vanity. Becky reports her dance with Rawdon to Amelia as a triumph while the reader clearly sees it as Mrs. Bute's scheme. The irony is emphasized when Becky includes her own drawings of her rivals (Fig. 29). She has an acute eye but no peripheral vision, so to speak. Such consistent representation and recurring patterns of juxtaposition between images and between images and words are visual dialogues, which develop into voices echoing that of the narrator, not really

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outside the text but not totally embedded within it. As the images become more overdy symbolic, as in the pictorial capitals, they become more independent of the text. Joan Stevens describes the narrative function of the pictorial capitals in particular as predictive, "foreshadowing events, offering generalized comment on the action, embodying by means of a traditional reference the basic moral implications of what lies ahead, or, at a shallower level, adding a simple visual dimension to forthcoming words" ("Thackeray's Pictorial Capitals," 116). However, the illustrations —initials, intratextuals, and full-page — also function retrospectively and accumulate meaning. Some of the patterns they establish have already been noted by Robert Colby and Joan Stevens ("Thackeray's Pictorial Capitals," 126-28), who have followed the military motif in Vanity Fair from the equestrian statue on the cover to Becky as Napoleon in chapter 64, including the various mock "campaigns" in text and illustration.13 Catherine Peters has also noted the recurring motif of church and home in the background of outdoor scenes in Vanity Fair.14 Both the military and religious patterns reify textual metaphors —for example that of Becky the "intrepid campaigner" as Napoleon. These visual metaphors offer comments on the story not acknowledged by the narrator. Patterns such as the equation of Becky with Napoleon visually unify the chapters and bridge the monthly parts. John Harvey, in Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (84-86), and Joan Stevens, in "Thackeray's Vanity Fair" (30-31), both note the continuity and comment between numbers 4 and 5 in Vanity Fair, where the image of "Love on his knees before Beauty" in chapter 15 alludes to the intratextual figure of Sir Pitt on his knees before Becky in chapter 14. The ironic image ending number 4 contrasts with the initial to chapter 15, which shows a young boy worshiping at the altar of Love while an imp peers around the initial E (128-29). What Harvey and Stevens do not note is the subtle play between word and image and the connotations of "picture." Becky and Sir Pitt are carefully positioned beneath portraits: Pitt beneath an eighteenth-century profile, Becky beneath an imprecise image of a woman whose expression recalls Becky's usual scowl —absent in this case. The text under the tableau, "Rebecca started back a picture of consternation," which at first seems to suggest that this scene is contrived, is followed by the line that says Rebecca "wept some of the most genuine tears that ever fell from her eyes" (128). The very sincerity of Becky and Sir Pitt aligns with the falsity suggested by the pictures. Sir Pitt's lust is not love, and Becky's consternation is caused by her losing a fortune, not a lover. Again, the illustration subtly betrays her, like those

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linking numbers 2 and 3 in chapters 7 and 8: number 2 closes with a vignette of a little girl building a house of cards, and number 3 opens with an image of Becky gazing at the portrait of Sir Pitt's first wife (6465). The point is clearly the futility of Becky's ambitions. A similarly ironic commentary connects chapters 10 and 11: the caricature of the swain wooing the shepherdess emphasizes the falsity of the "Arcadian Simplicity" of life at Queen's Crawley (84). The historiated initial which opens chapter 12, the first chapter in number 4, continues this parody of Becky and Rawdon, as the mile marker and the swain's finger signal the departure from "Arcadia and those amiable people practicing the rural virtues" (97). These examples of illustrations that unify chapters and parts fit into larger visual patterns that develop throughout the novels. Pastoral love in eighteenth-century costume in Vanity Fair and Pendennis, children in Pendennis, the theater and puppets in Vanity Fair and Pendennis, and the narrator-as-clown echo the verbal "languages" of literary conventions discussed by John Loofbourow.15 Like the illustrations that betray characters, these patterns act as an ironic mirror, turned outward from the story to show us alternative truths of character and event. The motif of children in the chapter initials of Pendennis suggests the characters' lack of control while manifesting the authorial control that produces the visual coherence of the sequence. For example in the text concerned with the death of Helen Pendennis (numbers 18 and 19, volume 2, chapters 17 to 21) the initial W in chapter 18 depicts a priest reading in a graveyard while a gravedigger ominously plies his trade in the background. Although the chapter relates the continental holiday after Pen's illness, the initial prepares the reader for Helen's death. The implicit prediction becomes visual reality in chapter 19, whose initial O contains Helen dead in bed with a Bible on her chest. Chapter 20 shows Pen sitting at a table with the lawyer handing him Helen's will, and chapter 21 suggests Pen's immaturity, his lack of self-knowledge, in a gruesome illustration of two children — Pen and Blanche? — playing cat's cradle on Helen's grave. The realism of the illustrations in this sequence accords with the somber subject, but the final metaphoric initial offers ironic perceptions unavailable to Arthur Pendennis, who is diminished and controlled by this ironic "mirror" of his efforts. Thackeray's "ironist's mirror" constantly reminds readers that they are reading one version of a story. The narrator's assertion in Vanity Fair that "the world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face" (9) denies the traditional role of the artist's mirror: to reflect empirical reality. Perhaps that is why Thackeray described the

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glass he turned outward on the world as "warped and cracked" and advertised Vanity Fair as "brilliantly illuminated with the Author's own candles" (xiv).16 Thus Thackeray's clown looks at his own reflection because the external world, represented by the characters and story, is reflected and illuminated by the "lamp" of the author's ego (Fig. 30). In fact, Thackeray's "clown" in the 1848 tide page is not a clown at all; he is wearing the costume of a fool or jester, closer to that of the pantomime harlequin. Moreover, Thackeray's draftsmanship is ambiguous enough to suggest that the fool in modey sees himself in a cracked mirror. Thackeray's mirror was "cracked" because he knew his imaging was no true reflection. Not only does a mirror show you images backward; but also how you hold it determines what you see. The modey fool of Vanity Fair is not the only character trapped by his mirror. The two illustrations juxtaposed in the Garland edition (but not in the first edition) are the Fool and the drawing of Becky finally revealing George as a shallow fool: she shows Amelia his letter, written before he went to battle, asking Becky to run away with him. Amelia has already written Dobbin, asking him to return; nonetheless, this revelation shatters her idealized image of George. And this triumphant Becky has defeated herself by her own fixed perspective, starting as early as those youthful letters to Amelia. This juxtaposition connects the story to the narration of the story. Just as Amelia's idealized image of George traps her in a version of reality that reflects her romanticism but not George's character, so, too, the narrator can only tell a story that is a version of the way he sees the world. Vanity Fair's true Narcissus is George Osborne, who opens chapter 13 by gazing at himself in a looking glass over which is superimposed a massive "I" —emblematic of his egotism and closed perspective (104; Fig. 31). But this emphatic "I" is actually the narrator, who perforce is also egoistic and reminds us of the gazing fool on the tide page. Thus mirrors in Thackeray's illustrations suggest that all representations are ultimately self-representations. And in fact the narrator's attempts at absolute "truth" are undermined by illustrations that visualize narrative uncertainty. Vanity Fair, Pendennis, and The Virginians all contain illustrations that parody the narrator's sources of information: letters, rumors, gossip, and eyewitnesses. The image of the clown undercuts narrative stability to hint at an escape from solipsism. To move from mirror gazer to harlequin is to escape from an illusion of stable reality that ultimately imprisons individuals in their own gaze or self-fashioning and into the manipulation of their own interpretations of reality. Individuals may still be isolated,

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but they have more power, and, if they wish, they can create illusions of community—as Thackeray's narrator does between himself and his "friendly" reader.17 Pendennis dramatizes this process. Pen changes from a self-absorbed mirror gazer to melancholy fool: or from character to narrator. Pen's first essay in public dandyism, in chapter 18 of the first edition, is marked by Thackeray's illustration of him admiring himself in his academic robes in his tutor's mirror: he put the pretty college cap on, in rather a dandified manner and somewhat on one side, as he had seen Fiddicombe, the youngest master at Grey Friars, wear it. And he inspected the entire costume with a great deal of satisfaction in one of the great gilt mirrors which ornamented Mr. Buck's lecture room. (1:167) In volume 2, chapter 16, Pen ends this first, sexual, phase of his wouldbe writer's narcissism when he resists the temptation to seduce Fanny Bolton. Appropriately, his thwarted desire consumes him in an actual fever—Thackeray here makes wonderful use of his own brush with death while writing Pendennis. He has to have his head shaved and, in ironic counterpart to the earlier illustration, the intratextual figure shows us Pen "sadly contemplating his ravaged beauty" (2:148) in a small mirror on his dressing table. Pen's social vanity is thwarted in much the same way; his honor will not let him accept the fortune and seat in Parliament his uncle's blackmail has obtained for him. If he marries Blanche, it will be in a small, plain way. The ironic reward of such integrity is to become the fool. Pendennis ends with a visual harlequinade—not referred to in the text—that illustrates Pen's entry into the world of the ironist. Pen moves into the pictorial capitals (heretofore reserved for metaphoric comment), a literal and symbolic movement out of the boundaries of "story" and "event." Pen's discovery of his own acting during the course of the novel is visualized in his appearance as Harlequin, which disqualifies him as "character," lifting him from the fixed perspective of those who do not know they are "acting" in a story to the detached, ironic perspective of narrator. Pen's last illusion is one that he actually recognizes as an illusion: his election campaign for the seat of Clavering. While the reader, aware of the Major's blackmail, which makes the seat available for Pen, knows more than Pen at this point, Pen does know that his election antics are theater. The "consummate" hypocrisy of Pen "acting" to gain people's favor (2:269) is not mimetic theater but pantomime—extravagant and self-aware theater that transforms ordinary life into fantasy. The initial to volume 2, chap-

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ter 27, depicts the traditional pantomime characters Harlequin, Clown, Columbine, and Pantaloon on the hustings, parodying the conspiracy between actors and audience who act the part of not acting (Fig. 32).18 When the masked harlequin of the election in this chapter unmasks in chapter 34, he is easily recognizable as Pendennis (Fig. 33). HarlequinPen, whose costume echoes that of the 1844 pantomime Harlequin Crotchet and Quaver; or, Musk for the Million, gazes questioningly at a masked lady as if asking her whether she too will unmask and what will be revealed when and if she does. The "D" encasing Harlequin-Pen and the lady begins Pen's letter to Blanche, asking her to drop her mask of romance. Harlequin-Pen here holds the magic bat, which has the power to transform all the characters in the harlequinade. Pen no longer wears his mask because he knows enough not to believe in his roles. He has discovered that his ambition to shine as an M.P. was founded upon his uncle's blackmail of Blanche's stepfather. To retain the honor he has prized all his life, Pen must settle for a more limited private life. But his triumph is to transform himself without bitterness and to see the humor of his own self-deception. "He laughed to think of how Fortune had jilted him, and how he deserved his slippery fortune. . . . It amused his humor; he enjoyed it as if it had been a funny story" (emphasis added; 2:332). The narrator's term "story" tells us Pen is starting to turn his own life into a text — and any reader familiar with Thackeray knows that for him this is the basic process offictionalizing.Paradoxically, Pen acquires the clear-sightedness that will make him an author by recognizing that acting is inescapable but that one can choose one's roles. The initial to volume 2, chapter 35, interprets for us Blanche's inability to emerge from her roles (Fig. 34). The lady has unmasked, but Harlequin has been superseded by Clown, recognizably Pen's rival, Henry Foker. The intratextual figure that follows depicts a "discovery scene" straight from melodrama. Pen refuses his assigned role, however, and simply laughs once again at his own gullibility and Blanche's scheming. His laughter, the irony of his conversation with Blanche, and his eventual willingness to be cast as the villain demonstrate his confidence in an identity that exists independent of others' expectations. In pantomime Harlequin, unlike the clown, wields the magic bat that can transform himself and others—just as the narrator controls his story or the manager his puppets. Harlequin masked is an anonymous actor, subject to the story like any other puppet or stage character, but unmasked he is the melancholy moralist who tells a tale. The harlequin image is Thackeray's developed image of the Vanity Fair clown-as-narrator.

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Harlequin without his mask is known to present a very sober countenance, and was himself, the story goes, the melancholy patient whom the doctor advised to go and see Harlequin — a man full of cares and perplexities like the rest of us, whose Self must always be serious to him, under whatever mask or disguise or uniform he presents it to the public.19 This sequence places Pen and the narrator in and outside the tale, unable to escape from their perception of the story because that story is their perception. Pendennis complicates the relation between appearance and self because Pen unmasked will become Thackeray masked. The fool preaching to other fools on the title page of Vanity Fair does not suggest this same edge of ironic control. Donald Hannah describes Thackeray as "both puppet-master and one of his own puppets, pulled by the same strings, actuated by the same motives which animate his own figures."20 But the puppet frame was conceived toward the end of the serialization; it was an afterthought, not part of Thackeray's original plan. Without this frame, the fool seems less in control, especially when compared with a possible model for this engraving. An engraved scene from the 1844 pantomime Harlequin Crotchet shows a clown lecturing "on soap suds." Although he does not stand on a barrel, the clown is elevated above his crowd and is behind a washtub. In composition the two works are very close. The self-consciousness of pantomime is suggested less by this tide page than by the famous sketch of Thackeray "unmasked" at the end of chapter 9. But the clown illustrations in Vanity Fair only imply authorial power. The clown balancing on the W in chapter 27, the clown leading the parade of clowns in chapter 40, and the clown on stilts being rocked by another clown in chapter 49 connect the narrator to the characters more than to the reader or to the narrator's modes of telling. More self-conscious about authorial control is the initial to chapter 2, showing a boy and girl peering into a peep show, which suggests the writer's power to manipulate what the reader sees. The egoism of such control is clearly the focus of the narrative "I" above the sketch of George looking in the mirror in chapter 13. But while subjective perception is an entry into "reality," it is never a definitive entry, and this uncertainty is depicted in chapter 37, where the clown balances the narrator's "I" on his nose (Fig. 35). The "I" that tells us the story is unstable because it cannot be sure of what it tells. Subjective modes of knowledge such as letters, reading, and gossip characterize Thackeray's narration —and his illustrations emphasize the parallel between the epistemologies of characters and narrator.21 Jones at his club in chapter 1 of Vanity Fair, Pen hearing himself in print in

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volume i, chapter 36, and the Major in the same chapter reading the Pall Mall Gazette—all image readers' own reading. Rawdon and Dobbin reading the letters we have just read in the text draw readers into the perspective of the characters but cannot counter the general ironic distance (chapters 15, 42). The servants listening to Amelia play the piano (chapter 4), Briggs and Firkin overhearing Sir Pitt proposing (chapter 15), Gumbo lying about Harry's wealth (chapter 16), and Parson Stack gossiping about George and the Indian woman (chapter 55) in The Virginians parody the narrator's culling of information and our own interpretive activity as readers who make our own stories from the bits and pieces we are given. The self-consciousness evinced by the illustrations in Pendennis tells us that even when Thackeray seems to offer a more stable and conventional narration than in Vanity Pair, he still looks askance at his own story. The resulting "story" is incomplete and untrustworthy because image and text destabilize each other. A process of reading and seeing evolves that compels readers to endlessly revise what they have read and seen. Readers become aware of the interpretive strategies they apply to create stable stories and thus realize how much "story" depends upon interpretation. The tension between image and text constantly warns readers about the danger of self-deception —their own as well as the characters', "the dangers of creating from half-sight a self-flattering version of the world."22 The deliberate contrasts between image and text and the presence of metaphoric patterns argue that Thackeray intended his readers to read self-consciously. Paradoxically, the incomplete "versions" of characters and events that constitute a Thackeray novel free readers from entrapment in their own web of interpretations. Ultimately, to read a Thackeray novel without its illustrations is to miss the imp looking over your shoulder, holding a mirror to your own reading.

Fig. 22. W. M. Thackeray, The Narrator unmasked, Vanity Fair (1848), chapter 9. Reproduced by permission of Garland Publishing, Inc.

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Fig. 23. W. M. Thackeray, Amelia and the Miss Osbornes, Vanity Fair (1848), chapter 12. Reproduced by permission of Garland Publishing, Inc.

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Fig. 24. W. M. Thackeray, The great Lord Steyne, Vanity Fair (18+8), chapter 37. Reproduced by permission of Garland Publishing, Inc.

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Fig. 25. W. M. Thackeray, A friendly game of cards and "A Family Party at Brighton," Vanity Fair (1848), chapter 25. Reproduced by permission of Garland Publishing, Inc.

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Fig. 26. M. Engels, "False Gesture," from Henry Siddons's adaptation of Engels's Practical Illustrations ofRhetorical Gesture and Action, 1807. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Coates Maddux Library, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.

Fig. 27. M. Engels, "Menace," from Henry Siddons's adaptation of Engels's Practical Illustrations ofRhetorical Gesture and Action, 1807. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Coates Maddux Library, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.

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Fig. 29. W. M. Thackeray, Mrs. Bute's scheme and Becky's rivals, Vanity Fair (1848), chapter 11. Reproduced by permission of Garland Publishing, Inc.

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Fig. 30. W. M. Thackeray, "The Letter before Waterloo" and The Fool and his mirror, Vanity Fair (1848), frontispiece and tide page. These illustrations were not juxtaposed in the first edition; "The Letter before Waterloo" was near the end of the novel. But this placement does capture the narrator's ambivalence toward his story. Reproduced by permission of Garland Publishing, Inc.

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Fig. 31. W. M. Thackeray, George and his beloved, Vanity Fair (1848), chapter 13. Reproduced by permission of Garland Publishing, Inc.

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Fig. 32. W. M. Thackeray, On the hustings, The History ofPendennis (1850), vol. 2, chapter 27. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Coates Maddux Library, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.

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Fig. 33. W. M. Thackeray, Dear Blanche, The History ofPendennis (1850), vol. 2, chapter 34. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Coates Maddux Library, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.

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Fig. 34. W. M. Thackeray, Pen's harlequinade, The History ofPendennis (1850), vol. 2, chapter 35. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Coates Maddux Library, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.

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Fig. 35. W. M. Thackeray, A delicate balance, Vanity Fair (1848), chapter 37. Reproduced by permission of Garland Publishing, Inc.

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Notes 1. The change in style that signaled the subordination of image to text was in part caused by, and was indicative of, the increasing industrialization of book production itself. With the move from monthly publication to weekly serialization in magazines such as the Graphic,fictionbecame part of a proto-assembly line. Not only did authors find their labor increasingly controlled by the magazine, and its intended readers, but illustrations were often produced piecemeal. The sketching and engraving of an illustration could proceed simultaneously, with each section passed along after drafting to the engraver, so that neither artist perceived or controlled the whole; thus the "artist" disappears into the technician. See N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 65. 2. Beardsley and Morris are exceptions to this tendency: Beardsley's "decorations" are distinctly shocking while Morris's illustrated works, such as the Kelmscott Chaucer, harken back to Blake and illuminated manuscripts, not George Cruikshank. But neither artist really involves his images with the narrative process, as Thackeray or Cruikshank did. Thus their excessive decorativeness excludes them from my consideration here. 3. Actually Cruikshank advanced this claim in the 1870s. Shelton Mackenzie first reported it in the American Roundtable, and then Cruikshank seconded it in The Artist and the Author in 1872 (Hilary Evans and Mary Evans, The Life and Art of George Cruikshank, 1792-1878 [New York: Phillips, 1978], 92-96). 4. J. H. Stonehouse, Catalogue of the Libraries of Charles Dickens and W.M. Thackeray (London, 1935). See especially the section "Relics from the Library of W. M. Thackeray," 163-82. For a list of Thackeray's prepublication drawings, done while he was a child and at Cambridge, see Lewis Melville, "Thackeray as Artist," Connoisseur 8 (1904): 25-31,152-55. 5. J. R. Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (New York: New York University Press, 1971); Joan Stevens, "Thackeray's Pictorial Capitals," Costerus: Essays in English and American Language and Literature, n.s. 2 (1974): 113-40, and "Thackeray's Vanity Fair" Review of English Literature 6 (1965): 19-38; Patricia Sweeney, "Thackeray's Best Illustrator," Costerus: Essays in English and American Language and Literature, n.s. 2 (1974): 83-112. Subsequent citations of Harvey's and Stevens's works are given parenthetically in the text. 6. Thackeray drew three kinds of illustrations: pictorial capitals at the beginning of a chapter, usually metaphoric; intratextual illustrations deliberately placed to affect the reading of the text; and full-page illustrations, withtitlesthat seem to be simple realizations of the text. Meisel notes that Thackeray's fullpage illustrations are most closely bound by the conventions of straightforward "realization," but there are quite a few exceptions to this rule besides the familiar "Second Appearance of Clytemnestra," especially if one takes Meisel's own advice to look for Thackeray's illustrations as embodiments of states of mind or feeling (Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983], 335; subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text).

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7. Henry Kingsley, "Thackeray," Macmillans 9 (1864): 360. Kingsley, in nineteenth-century terms, also confronts the paradoxical experiential realism created by Thackeray's self-conscious mode. Vanity Fair merged its fiction with its readers' lives so well that Kingsley felt it "had taken entire possession of us and of the world. Through the exquisite perfection of the art, the art itself was not only ignored, but indignantly denied" (357). 8. The editions of Vanity Fair and Pendennis cited in this essay are those issued by Garland Publishing, complete with all illustrations. All citations are given parenthetically in the text (Vanity Fair, ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg [New York, 1989]; The History of Pendennis, ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg [New York, i99i]). 9. This is a fairly traditional function for book illustration. Cruikshank, for example, often composed his illustrations from the point of view of one or more characters. A familiar instance of this technique is the illustration "Fagin in the Condemned Cell" for Oliver Twist, where we see the cowering Fagin from Oliver's and Mr. Brownlow's sympathetic point of view. 10. W. M. Thackeray, "Caricatures and Lithography In Paris," Fraser'sMagazine 32 (1839): 295-300. 11. The ensuing conversation about the "moral sheepdog" and "shearing" Lord Southdown affirms the moral judgment of readers. 12. As Nina Auerbach notes, the publicness of nineteenth-century life demanded acting that did not seem to be acting: "To be was to be seen" (Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990], 32). Meisel discusses the handbooks for theater style in Realizations, part 1. Henry Siddons's Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action is actually an adaptation of M. Engels's German handbook. Siddons was the son of Sarah Siddons. The numbering of the illustrations is from an 1822 edition of Siddons's handbook. 13. Robert Colby, Thackeray's Canvass ofHumanity: An Author and His Public (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), 235. 14. Catherine Peters, Thackeray's Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), 169. Peters identifies the church in the frontispiece as the one in Ottery St. Mary, an identification made earlier by S. M. Ellis, who explained it as "an allegorical fancy that amid all the vanities and sins and turmoil of life there remain in the background of memory scenes from far-off happy days of youth and innocence and peace" ('Thackeray's Illustrations: Their Personal and Topographical Interest," Athenaeum [September 1916]: 404). 15. John Loofbourow, Thackeray and the Form of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964). 16. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946-54), 2:423. 17. For an excellent discussion of the necessity for role-playing that does not, however, consider the visual role-playing of illustrations, see Edgar F. Harden, "Theatricality in Pendennis," Ariel 4 (1973): 74-94. 18. English pantomime developed from commedia dell' arte and was a favorite Christmas entertainment. Usually, the play began as a mimetic comedy or burlesque with old Pantaloon, aided by Clown, trying to thwart the love of

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Harlequin and Columbine. At a crucial moment in the action, the Good Fairy would descend with the magic bat and she or Harlequin (after she gave him the bat) would transform the scene into a harlequinade, an acrobatic chase culminating in the shift of the entire set into a fantasy world. Thackeray suggests some of the extravagance of this transformation scene in the tide and beginning of the last chapter of The Adventures ofPhilip, "The Realms of Bliss." 19. W. M. Thackeray, "Swift," in The Four Georges and the English Humourists, Everyman's Library (New York: Dutton, 1968), 3-4. 20. Donald Hannah, "'The Author's Own Candles': The Significance of the Illustrations to Vanity Fair" Renaissance and Modern Essays Presented to Vivian de Sola Pinto (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 127. 21. Amy Wilkinson calls such haphazard collection of information a "Tomeavesian" way of knowing the world, after Tom Eaves, a convenient gossip in Vanity Fair who provides the "narrator" with much of his information about high society (Amy Wilkinson, "The Tomeavesian Way of Knowing the World: Technique and Meaning in Vanity Fair," English Literary History 32 (1965): 37087. Wilkinson's emphasis is less on these multiple conflicting voices than on the way that gossip, as an epistemology, constructs its own truth, obviating any truth of event. 22. Jerry Williamson, "Thackeray's Mirror," Tennessee Studies in Literature 22 (1977): 134-

JENNIFER M. GREEN

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

Unlike the work of the early great Victorian landscape photographers, Peter Henry Emerson's late-nineteenth-century visions of rural southeast England offer no startling geometries or precocious angles. Scenes more reminiscent of Impressionist paintings than of anything in photography's own short history, they illustrate their author's early claims for photography as a naturalistic art. Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886), Emerson's first published photographic book, was in fact a practical account of his theories, with its own labors of picture making and writing neady divided: where the photographs provided "art for lovers of art," the accompanying text was to be "illustrative of and somewhat complementary to them . . . depicting in words, surroundings and effects which cannot be expressed by pictorial art." 1 The book appears aptly named, with its equal emphasis on representing human and animal life in its surrounds of marsh, fenlands, and coastal waters. Further, in its deliberate efforts to counter the studied theatricality of photographs such as those by Henry Peach Robinson, Emerson's experiments in naturalism succeed: the pictures are, for the most part, imposed, and there is a freedom, as critics have noted, from artificiality and sentimentality.2 Emerson's aim was to use the camera impressionistically, to record neither the literal facts of the self-conscious documentary nor the simulated events of Robinson's studio, but rather to create a sense of human vision—to work, in other words, against the notion of the camera as a tool of perfect record and to claim it instead as an agent in naturalistic and aesthetic creation. Yet the relation between life and landscape on the Norfolk Broads is one not of aesthetics but of labor; and labor provides the true subject 88

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of these pictures. Between Emerson's theories of photography and his conceptions of landscape, however, that subject vanishes into the picturesque, the laborers themselves reduced to mythical, powerless creatures, faceless models of charming work. Further, despite Emerson's interest in the conditions of the rural poor, any vestiges of social commentary that might be offered by the camera are denied by the accompanying text, which invites a generalized aesthetic response to the photographs. In later books, such as Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888), the text forgoes aesthetic considerations, documenting, instead, the frequently grim details of working life on the Broads; but in a striking imbalance, the accompanying photographs in this and other books by Emerson present increasingly romanticized and abstracted views of life in rural Norfolk and Suffolk. The tension that complicates our response to Emerson's work can be traced to the divisions and shifts in his own attitudes toward photography. His book of theory, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (1889), made the claim that "All good art has its scientific basis";3 the same year Emerson argued before the Camera Club for the importance of distinguishing art from science, for art "differs from science fundamentally."4 More dramatically, Emerson was to renounce altogether his views on photography's position among the fine arts, recanting in January 1891 in a black-edged pamphlet that announced "The Death of Naturalistic Photography" and modifying his earlier theories so drastically, with a new chapter entided "Photography—Not Art" in a later, much revised, edition of Naturalistic Photography, as to almost invalidate his own original claims.5 Much of what one can say about Emerson's photographic theories during the late nineteenth century, then, can be refuted by his own words, in which he engaged in a continual assessment and reassessment of photography's status with regard to other art forms. It is possible to trace the development of those theories, but my emphasis here will instead be on a particular element of his photographs that appears to remain constant. After briefly considering how Emerson's photographs chart the theories he laid out in the early editions of Naturalistic Photography, I argue that the text accompanying the early pictures subverts their subject matter by focusing attention on aesthetics and urges a reading of the photographs that overlooks the human labor at their center. Emerson in his first book "frames" life on the Norfolk Broads —invests it, in other words, with arguably false significance. But I also make the more farreaching argument that the tension in Emerson's works between text and photographs that shaped all his books and indeed his entire photo-

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graphic career is in fact an inevitable and necessary element of the picturesque; Emerson's work offers its own explanation for the appeal of this kind of photography to the late-Victorian imagination. Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads was printed on white vellum, and bound in green morocco—"a thick, handsome volume, which any person of artistic taste may feel proud to own," observed the Photographic News.6 It contained forty platinum prints, interspersed with lengthy commentary on individual photographs, related events, or more general subjects, and concluded with an essay on landscape art by the landscape painter T. F. Goodall, Emerson's friend and companion on the Broads. The albums, available in standard and deluxe editions, were issued in limited printings; the negatives and printing plates were destroyed by arrangement with the publishers.7 The work was a collector's item, available to a select few. For the most part, the prints map out the theories later expressed in Naturalistic Photography. According to this work, the fundamental purpose of artistic photography is to reveal the inner reality of its subjects, a revelation made possible by the photographer's intimacy with the subject. Predictably, Emerson scorned the creations of weekend photographers who roamed the countryside in search of views: "The student who would become a landscape photographer," he writes, "must go to the country and live there for long periods; for in no other way can he get any insight into the mystery of nature" (Naturalistic Photography 1890, 245). The photographer must, in fact, aspire to a Wordsworthian relationship with nature, which requires both appreciation and inner discipline: "You must. . . train your feelings," he instructs, "for, as John Constable said, 'the art of feeling nature is a thing almost as much to be cultivated as the art of reading the Egyptian hieroglyphics'" (1890, 250). The art of feeling nature does not preclude some interference on the part of the photographer representing it; on the contrary: "The objects must be arranged so that the thing expressed is told clearly and directly" (1890,248). Thus the search for a view becomes the search for potential, a potential recognizable only by one versed in the "mystery of nature." As for the subject itself, it must fulfill three requirements before it merits being photographed: "The subject must have pictorial qualities, it must be typical, and must give aesthetic pleasure" (1890,250). While together these three will ensure truthfulness in representation, such representation has nothing to do with the world of facts: "the fewer facts we record in Art, and yet express the subject so that it cannot be better expressed, the better" (1890, 298).

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Essentially, then, Emerson advocates both an intuitive and a familiar knowledge of the subject that will enable the photographer to decide what is typical and what, therefore, may be deemed truthful (truth being construed here as the consequence of repetition); he recommends an attention to the pictorial that is based on the understanding that the best pictures are the most beautiful; and he calls for a Keatsian leap in which the photographer assumes that what is beautiful is most true. As Goodall puts it in the closing essay to Life and Landscape, "beauty consists in appropriateness; the right thing in the right place is the beautiful thing. Truth is beauty" (77). Artistically, Emerson holds that truths are best conveyed with a minimum of detail. And in his photographs there is indeed less rustic paraphernalia than we see in Robinson's work. Excess is, instead, provided by the prose, which in certain places overwhelms the reader. Here is Emerson, to use his own criterion, at his most "typical": Perhaps the great charm to be felt in this country is the ever-changing aspect of the landscape. One tide gives us the peculiar heavily clouded sky so often depicted by Gainsborough, with here and there a glint of sunlight shimmering on the high line of the full river, and on the innumerable small repetitions of the surrounding dikes . . . Every day, and many times a day, the picture changes. One moment the commons seem desolate and deserted by all life; the next they are beautiful, as if clothed by magic with varied tints of sunlighted gorse and spring flowers; while horses, magnificent in their freedom, career over hill and dale . . . scattering by their wild ungoverned paces the gentler herds of kine. At another moment, a fierce rainstorm sweeps down and seems to wash all brightness away. Yet another day . . . The river is there flowing high in the middle distance; the dikes are full, but there is no silver in the landscape today; the soft gradations are all in dainty greys, and russet browns, and sober greens, (quoted in Newhall, 32) Two things are worth noting here. First, his highly visual response to the scene. The countryside to Emerson is already "landscape," pictorial, two-dimensional. "Landscape" is a loaded term, of course: "the perception or poetic re-creation of landscape," Carole Fabricant writes, "is always inextricably bound up with broadly political considerations, whether or not they are openly acknowledged." 8 As John Barrell notes, "we can speak of the 'landscape' of a country, but in doing so we introduce, whether we want to or not, notions of value and form which relate, not just to seeing the land, but to seeing it in a certain way—pictorially."9 Landscape as a way of seeing depends upon the taming or controlling of the wild: the act of depiction in pictures or words or both is one of simultaneous domestication. For Emerson at the close of the

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nineteenth century, the landscape of the Broads is both wild (there are horses) and cultivated (there are cows). It is also continually changing, an idea to which I return later. In its tribute to what is essentially an already painted scene, the passage raises a question pertinent to the photographs in Life and Landscape: what is their intended relationship, not only to nature, but to art? Was it Emerson's intention to render photographically what eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century painters such as Gainsborough and Constable had accomplished on canvas (thus rendering incidental the relationship of his photographs to nature)? Was he trying to reconceive his own relationship to nature through the very different medium of the camera? That question is best answered, I think, by considering the human figures in his landscapes that frequendy provide the subject of his work. The first plate of Life and Landscape, "Coming Home from the Marshes," shows four laborers apparently returning after a day's work (Fig. 36). To explain the photograph, Emerson writes: To the left stretch masses of golden-ochred rush, to the right the rich greens of the marshes, and throughout winds the river, a vein of the deepest cobalt, while overhead roll masses of snow-white cumuli flying before the wild west wind. Along the marsh wall comes a group of labourers returning from their short day's work. Typical specimens these of the Norfolk peasant, — wiry in body, pleasant in manner, intelligent in mind. Their lot, though hard, is not unpleasant. . . . They have just returned from cutting the reed. Protected by their long marsh-boots, they may be classified as "waders," for they spend much of their time standing in water up to their boot-tops. Nevertheless they are happy and healthy. (10) Emerson the naturalist thus classifies the specimen for the field observer. Both the appearance and the behavior of the human subjects of Life and Landscape (a "healthy, merry crew") are described: "Shy of strangers at first, they improve on acquaintance. . . . 'It is a sweet and civil country'" (10). The laborers are, it seems, representatives of a type whose very existence guarantees the health of England. But they are also, inescapably, part of the landscape Emerson describes, along with the marshes, rushes, river, and clouds, and despite their central position in the photograph, they are no more important than these. One obvious difference, of course, is that Emerson required the cooperation of his human subjects in making this photograph and presumably set up his camera shot before the subjects were permitted to walk toward him. "By far the most difficult branch of photography," wrote Emerson, "is that in which figures occur in landscapes" (1890, 251). The conflict between the desire to control figures in a landscape and the wish to

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represent them truthfully was much debated by photographers during the 1880s; numerous articles on the subject in photographic journals attest to the relevance of Emerson's concern. Part of the difficulty, according to one way of thinking, was the urge to include human life at all: People cannot take a river view, complained one reviewer of landscape photographs in the British Journal ofPhotography, "without giving an offensive prominence to the inevitable fisherman, rod in hand." The better option is to get the angler "to retire beyond the grasp of the lens, leaving the rod and basket on the bank to represent him." The journal advises that figures "occupy the least important and weakest part of the subject as regards its interest; let them be placed on different levels if possible and in various and contrasting positions, and let them be subordinate to and aid the general sentiment of the landscape."10 Andrew Pringle, a member of the Photographic Society of London, wrote that "If figures are to be in a landscape they must be . . .'of the picture, and not merely in it.' . . . The figures must be useful to the landscape in some way." 11 Photographers who think this way select figures carefully for their service to the landscape as well as for their visual charm. Such figures were not always easy to find. In his book on landscape photography, Robinson writes of a picturesque model caught wild, but too stupid to be of any use. Naturally she had a delightful smile, and although I tried all I knew for a fortnight to overcome her timidity—mixed her with tame models, as they train wild elephants — she remained camera-shy, and I could do nothing with her. I did the next best thing. I bought her clothes.12 What Robinson means here is not that he purchased clothes for her, but rather that he paid her for her outfit, with which he could then equip someone of his own class exported to the scene. By vising the term "tame models" (albeit in jest), he implies that the "wild" (original) subject is only an amateur, whom the "tame" professional can represent with greater authority. Robinson preferred to use models — upper-middleclass women or even paid professionals who were pleased to play shepherdess for a day. Their clothes had to be genuine and could be "obtained at first hand from the original wearers" (1896, 98). The original wearers, though, rarely feature in Robinson's pictures, since "it is not easy to explain what you want to a fresh caught peasant" (98). On the other hand, "With a well-trained model," he notes, "you can get nearer to nature than nature herself" (98). This was precisely Emerson's desire. In Naturalistic Photography he

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urges students, "never forget. . . the type; you must choose your models most carefully, and they must without fail be picturesque and typical. The student should feel that there never was such a fisherman, or such a ploughman, or such a poacher, or such an old man, or such a beautiful girl, as he is picturing" (1890, 251). Despite the urge to outdo nature, however, Emerson photographed only persons wearing their own clothes, in surroundings familiar to them. And in Life and Landscape he shows his subjects at work, catching eels, mowing the hay, cutting reeds. Whatever the activity, the labor provides at least the titular subject of the photographs: "Taking Up the Eel Net," "Quanting the Marsh Hay," "Poling the Marsh Hay," and so on. In thus representing rural life, Emerson seems to have been following what Barrell claims was an established notion in both literature and the visual arts of the late nineteenth century, that "the actuality of the life of the poor could be represented only by images of them at work and that to depict the poor at rest was to sentimentalise or to pastoralise them."13 Barrell finds this notion a prescriptive, not a descriptive, constraint: it is not so much that the poor always do, but that they always should, work; and its survival into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as a check against sentimentality, has meant that it has also become a barrier between seeing the poor as simply workers with no other identity, and the possibility of seeing them as men with their own choices to make, and a disposition to do other things than the toil they were born to perform. (92) In Emerson's efforts to portray a world of georgic labor rather than idyllic repose the individual laborer is invariably sacrificed to the generalized image of work. While the photographer, as Barrell suggests, avoids the charge of sentimentality, his pictures invite a consideration of the subjects that has little or nothing to do with the conditions within which they labor. In almost all the photographs they have their faces turned down or away from the camera; or they are in shadow, or far enough away so that we cannot see their faces. The majority of Emerson's photographs thus show labor not in individual but in abstract terms: the workers are a part, not a distinct feature, of the landscape. Instead of standing out as individuals, they blend into their surroundings. "Rowing Home the Schoof-Stuff," in Life and Landscape, shows a figure in a rowboat against a tranquil evening sky, his oars appearing to rest upon solid water (Fig. 37). Two-thirds of the picture in fact consists of water, brighter than the evening sky, which gives back the clear and

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empty gleam of a mirror. In comparison with this expanse, the dim cottages and trees at the water's edge seem small, nested like birds in the marshes. The Broadsman is placed almost exacdy at the center of the photograph, the perfection of his shadow in the water suggesting immobility rather than the homeward motion of the tide. As still as the reeds over which he gazes, he bisects the horizon, joining sky and water, while his resting oars take the eye to right and left of the boat, to reeds and houses and again back to his dark mass at the center. The identity of the man himself remains, meanwhile, in the context of the photograph, not so much a mystery as an irrelevance. Later works, such as PicturesfromLife in Field and Fen (1887), aestheticize labor to such a degree that not only the identity of the workers is obscured but also the precise nature of their work. "The Mangold Harvest" is such a study, in which the bent backs of the workers and their occupied hands are sufficiendy distanced to allow an impression of harmony rather than muscular discomfort (Fig. 38). In this book, with its epigraph from Millet, Emerson's text is concerned wholly with art and photography, while the pictures must speak for themselves. "Art is a language," he writes, "and pictorial art is the expression by means of pictures of that which man considers beautiful in the world around him" (9). It seems highly likely that artistic aspirations played a part in displacing labor from the center of Emerson's photographs. 14 Nevertheless, social as well as aesthetic theory required the distancing of the reality of labor from the images of the land. As Aaron Scharf observes, the photographs of Life and Landscape show "honest folk content with their lot —a confirmation of Victorian values. Indeed," he adds, "the figures in the silvery, dreamlike landscapes are so much at one with nature that they appear physically to grow out of the earth itself." 15 Like Hardy's Tess, whose spirit rises within her as "automatically as the sap in the twigs," there is no boundary between workers and the terrain they inhabit.16 Hardy might indeed be writing of Emerson's photographs when in that novel he describes how "a field-woman is a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it" (137-38). O f no more consequence than a marsh heron, an eel, a cottage, yet as necessary to the elements of the picturesque as all of these, the figures in Emerson's landscapes, like Hardy's women, have had their individuality sacrificed to their aesthetic appeal as types. The text of Life and Landscape participates by directing the eye toward generalities rather than specifics, toward adulation rather than consider-

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ation. One such example is "Poling the Marsh Hay," which is striking for its central figure of a woman who pauses in her work of bearing away some hay (Fig. 39). The impact of the picture, which is unusual in that the woman directly faces the camera (although her glance is directed away), grows out of the forbidding darkness of the sky and the gloom of the surrounds, the indistinct figures behind the woman, and her temporary pause against a threatening sky.17 Goodall's accompanying essay, "Marsh Hay," however, bears little relation to the image and not only omits any mention of the woman but also emphasizes the picturesque qualities of the summertime laborers at the expense of the difficulties of the work: Splendid the mowers look, as they sweep down the tall rank herbage; their loose shirts, of white or blue cotton, with sleeves turned back to the elbow, gleam in the sunshine; their legs are encased in the tall marsh boots, without which they could not work in comfort on the swampy soil. Strapped to their backs are their hones; wide, soft felt hats cover their heads, picturesquely shadowing their faces. Superb is the action of the men as they bend to the heavy work, or, standing with booted legs wide apart, hone their scythes, or wipe the gathered moisture from their faces. (45) "Poling the Marsh Hay" has become one of Emerson's better-known pictures, but for reasons that have little to do with the images created here by Goodall of a freshly laundered and sunny peasantry sweeping through the grass. The text refers to a generalized image of work not merely overridden by the photograph but emphatically negated by it. By way of explaining the bleakness of this particular photographic version of his rural idyll, Goodall explains: On a dull November day some poor peasants are bringing home the remnants of their crop, which, left too late, has been caught by the autumnal flood, and lain for weeks soaking in the water. When the water fell, the sodden heaps were moved, and placed on the marsh wall to dry, and they are now poling them away to the litter stack. (46) This, then, is the year's end, a somber final image of the cycle of seasons that can be most pleasingly recalled, not in the photograph, but rather in the text; not, in other words, through visually documented details but rather through generalities that invite the reader to dwell on the picturesque qualities of imaginary work. Hard as it is to determine the extent to which a text directs a reading of an image, there is obvious tension here between words and picture, as well as evidence of the continual struggle between Emerson's efforts to represent visually the truth of the thing and his subsequent denials

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that the truth is to be sought in the accumulation of empirical detail. In later works, such as Pictures ofEast Anglian Life, the imbalance between text and image of "Poling the Marsh Hay" seems, though preserved, to be reversed, as the landscapes tend toward impressionism and away from the detail of Life and Landscape. Figures are further marginalized or absent altogether, while the much lengthier and more detailed prose, through its heightened attention to the harshness of rural existence ("from our point of view," writes Emerson, the peasant's life is "fearful"), implies a documentary responsibility on the part of the photographer and an intention that is largely unrealized by his photographs. In other words, Emerson's books demonstrate progressively a split between notions of what photography ought to do and what might actually be done with it. Despite the divergence of pictures from texts, Emerson's books fuse the duty of photography—which was, Elizabeth Easdake claimed in 1857, "to give evidence of facts, as minutely and as impartially as, to our shame, only an unreasoning machine can give" 18 —with its artistic potential, through their appeal to the picturesque. What is picturesque, of course, may not always be true; that is to say, a picturesque object or moment does not necessarily represent a general state of affairs. Emerson's desire for a subject that is both "picturesque and typical" thus pulls two ways, since the picturesque may resemble, not the everyday instance, but something outside nature; its point of reference is art, and its relation to beauty accidental. For while beauty aspires, as Wolfgang Kemp has written, to the "smooth, bright, symmetrical, new, whole, and strong," the picturesque —that which is picture-worthy—is in the province of time and thus by its very essence associated with decay, age, and mutability. "According to this [late-seventeenth- and earlyeighteenth-century] system of classification," Kemp claims, "whatever was in the process of decay was potentially picturesque, because one could detect in it more, and more obvious, signs of wear and irregularity."19 Emerson's affection for the picturesque was inevitably shaped by his eighteenth-century models, whose landscapes reflect the lists of picturesque objects compiled by contemporary aestheticians who praise "Gothic cathedrals and old mills, gnarled oaks and shaggy goats, decayed cart horses and wandering gypsies."20 The "Willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork" that Constable claimed to love are represented in the slippery walkways, stagnant waters, shabby thatch of the cottages, and aging hulls of boats in Emerson's photographs. 21 A

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rained water mill provided him with the perfect instance of the picturesque: a useless and decaying link with the past made interesting by its patterns and shadows to the reader who knows nothing of its former function (Fig. 40). Goodall writes appreciatively in Life and Landscape of an old boat, "bleached, blistered, . . . worm-eaten, [and] neglected," (37) while Emerson describes (admittedly ironically) "a picturesque cottage with rotten and leaky roof and dripping walls —a damp fever den."22 Clearly, rotten planks, decayed cart horses and ruined water mills have little utilitarian merit. The picturesque, however, requires that even that vestige of utility be denied. Thus it makes sense that labor in Emerson's photographs is valued for its aesthetic properties, not for the work itself. In fact, the job itself is abstracted to type, so that the eel catcher or hay poler becomes a mythological worker, defined by the work and undifferentiated from it. As Ruskin observes, for the creator of the picturesque, utilitarian associations are both a distraction and an irrelevance. Whatever the lifelong hardships of a particular human subject, to the "heartless" trafficker in the picturesque he "has at last accomplished his destiny, and filled the corner of a sketch, where something of an unshapely nature was wanting."23 Thus Emerson's photographs, ostensively preoccupied with work, are largely emptied of their social and economic significance. But they also meet the requirements of the picturesque in the more general sense that they record the decay of a way of life and of a social order. Paradoxically the pictorial photograph works against the dynamism of decay, enforcing stasis onto the mutability of the picturesque and framing it with nostalgia. Photography arrests decay, in a static, suspended moment. By virtue of its very medium, the poignancy of whose images lies in their relationship to time, picturesque photography figures the always already lost; for Emerson, what was lost was a particular social system, the right thing in the right place, a certain symmetry that heralded art and ordered the landscape and, not coincidentally, assigned different functions to words and pictures. Despite their mutual unease, the text and the photographs of Life and Landscape are assigned roles of equal importance: the labor, as Ellen Handy has observed, is divided equally between them (183). After Life and Landscape, however, we witness a gradual peeling away of language from image, a widening gap between the aesthetic and utilitarian functions of Emerson's books. In his later works — particularly Marsh Leaves (1895)—the photographs make no pretense at recording the working lives of laborers or the conditions of the rural poor. They offer instead

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images abstract to the point of impressionism, whose preoccupation is with light, shade, shape, and distance, but rarely with human existence (Fig. 41). Indeed, these pictures are startlingly beautiful in part bemuse they reveal a nature isolated, silent, kaleidoscopic in its range of shapes and largely untouched by human interference. By contrast, Emerson's later writings increasingly recognize the lives lived out within the frame of his photographs. His apparent goal at times is to deny or adjust a reader's response to the fragile beauty of the images. The divergence of text from image makes the effect of Emerson's later work ultimately ironic, for in this divergence his photographs figure the very modernism whose rising tide they try to stem. By contrast with much domestic photography of mid-century, and in keeping with the tradition of the picturesque, Emerson's fin-de-siecle pictures emphasize, not acquisition, but loss. The photographs of his early books, like the writings of the later, claim to record work, to image an era but ultimately do neither so much as they display the uses of naturalism in the service of nostalgia. His increasingly apparent failure to connect words to his pictures, or pictures to the words, suggests a perceived fracturing of word from thing and of word from representation—the demise of naturalism, in short, and the advent of modernity. Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads received good reviews. The Photographic News praised Emerson for "endeavouring to form a real and truthful school of photographic representation."24 The Amateur Photographer heralded its publication: "the issue of this book marks an epoch in the history of book-making. . . . such perfection of photography, such perfection of reproduction processes, and such perfection of artistic feeling have never before been brought together."25 Ultimately, of course, one must follow Barrell's directive and ask what is being claimed in these pictures about the rural poor. If the reviewer for the Photographic News thought the pictures "truthful," what was it about life that the pictures confirmed? If the Amateur Photographer found perfection in the feeling, what was the name of that perfect feeling? The truthfulness of Emerson's photographs depends upon the desire of those who view them for a world in which it is only natural that certain people work on the land—natural, because these people are as much a part of the land as the trees. Emerson's landscapes counter social instability with images of stasis like those of Gainsborough and Constable. But because of his medium, Emerson's version of rural life at the close of the century had greater potential for verisimilitude: his deliberately pictorial photographs denied that photography must be used in

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the service of documentary while it used its documentary resonance in the service of the photographer's own mythology. From its beginnings, photography had figured in the debate between what we may loosely term the schools of realism and romanticism. Indeed, the power of a photograph as a text lay precisely in its potential to be identified either as proof of the nature of the world's existence, which is nothing beyond what we see, or as proof that the world cannot be so represented—that its true nature must somehow be absent from any representation. For its first fifty years the art-science debate had defined photography variously as descriptive or interpretive, expressive or prescriptive, romantic or realist, scientific or artistic. Instead of resolving those issues, the end of the century argued them more vigorously, in part because of an increased and mutual influence of photography and other art forms. "It is quite probable," the reviewer ofLife and Landscape for the Photographic News wrote, "that the historian of fifty years to come may set down the present time as that period at which the artist and the photographer began to considerably influence each other."26 That influence had been at work since the invention of photography and had always been controversial. Robinson in his memoirs refers to the 1860s, however, as a time when "the opposition to art in photography was at its fiercest."27 The objections raised to applying artistic principles to photography suggest genuine concern about what photography ought to be permitted to do. Its foremost duty, according to one school, was to represent truth in its entirety. But as early as 1853 photographers eager that photography rise above mere mechanical production challenged that duty, while journals frequently debated questions of technique as a pretext for examining more fundamental disagreements about the role of photography in art. " I do not consider it necessary that the whole of the subject should be what is called in focus," wrote one practitioner; "on the contrary, I have found in many instances that the object is better obtained by the whole subject being a little out of focus, thereby giving a greater breadth of effect, and consequently more suggestive of the true character of nature."28 These comments caused, as Eastlake describes it, "no little scandal" (460). "Hitherto the chief aim of the photographer seems to have been a biting sharpness of detail in the negative," wrote Goodall in Life and Landscape, but this "is generally quite fatal to the result from an artistic point of view" (79). O. G. Rejlander defended his practice of playing with focus by observing that a photograph was a representation, and not the thing itself: "If the old masters had finished the skin up to the 'focus,' they would have literally reproduced a model instead of pre-

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senting to our imaginations a Madonna." 29 The debate over focus articulated a philosophical divide between those who would see the world as the camera could show it and those who held that the full truth about the world must be sought beyond its surface. Moreover, the play of the artist's imagination was impeded by the prolific details made possible by photography; such details, wrote one contributor to the Journal of the Photographic Society, were not pleasing: they rather excite wonder as optical curiosities. The chemical and optical means of producing photographic images have in fact been brought to greater perfection than the artist requires for the production of effect by means of those broad masses of arranged and contrasted light and shade which, under proper management, indicate character sufficiently, and leave the imagination to fill up deficiencies.30 The American Journal of Photography went so far as to claim not only that it was acceptable to remove the distraction of unnecessary details in photography, but also that an absence of such details was in fact proof of artistic worth: "sacrifice of detail in the unessential parts of a picture, is always evidence of artistic feeling."31 Artistic feeling itself was inspired by the attempt to photograph truthfully—to photograph what people saw, rather than what was really there. "All at once the fundamental distinction between Science and Art dawns upon us," stated Emerson. "We cannot record too many facts in Science; the fewer facts we record in Art, and yet express the subject so that it cannot be better expressed, the better."32 "If photography is to be art," wrote John Bartlett, it "must represent nature as it is presented to our senses, not as things actually are. . . . The law of the persistence of vision must not be violated."33 Although Emerson's use of and theories on soft focus varied considerably during his photographic career, his work was generally in accordance with Bartlett's view. His photographic theory was based upon Helmholtz's optical theory as well as his own observations that "the eye sees most sharply in the center of the field of vision" and "nothing in nature has a sharp outline";34 his aesthetic was thus fed both by science and by his faith that truthfulness is best served by an attention to feeling at the expense of detail. But because for Emerson the truthful image was invariably the most beautiful, his photographs make beautiful — and hail as picturesque —that which represents the truth as he sees it; and he sees it in the preservation and the framing of a serene and stable agrarian order. The picturesque, which is transitory and mutable, is, ironically, used by the photographer to preserve and stabilize and fix the right thing in the right place.

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To observe the conundrum of Emerson's vision is to claim no new insights into the workings of pictorial photography, a reactionary genre that has fallen into disrepute for the essentially political reasons I have described. Emerson's photographs, however, do more than chart the uses of the picturesque in the services of mythmaking. The tensions surrounding photography throughout the nineteenth century made of it a site for debating the very nature of representation. The inconsistencies of Emerson's work illuminate some of the issues at stake in this debate. The images themselves, however, suggest neither unrest nor dissent, and affirm only an orderly, harmonious, and ultimately even ethereal vision of English rural life.

Fig. 39. P. H. Emerson, "Poling the Marsh Hay." Piatinotype, 1886. From Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, plate 17. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.

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Fig. 40. P. H. Emerson, "A Ruined Water Mill." Platinotype, 1886. From Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, plate 11. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.

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Fig. 41. P. H. Emerson, "Marsh Weeds." Photogravure, 1895. From Marsh Leaves, plate 6. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.

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Notes Thanks to Ms. Jacklyn Burns of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California, for her assistance with the photographs. 1. Peter Henry Emerson, with T. F. Goodall, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (London, 1886), preface. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 2. See, for example, Nancy Newhall, P. H. Emerson: The Fight for Photography as a, Fine Art (New York: Aperture, 1975), 141. 3. Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalistic Photographyfor Students of the Art (London, 1889; 2nd edition, 1890; reprint, N e w York: Arno, 1973), 210. 4. Peter Henry Emerson, "Science and Art," a paper read to the third annual Camera Club conference, 26 March 1889; published in the American Journal of Photography (May 1889): 170-75; reprinted in the British Journal ofPhotography, 12 August 1889,252-55, and 19 August 1889,269-70; and in Naturalistic Photography, 2nd edition (1890). 5. Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, 3rd edition, revised (London, 1899). 6. Photographic News, 19 August 1887, 514. 7. Newhall, 5. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 8. Carol Fabricant, Swift's Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 1. 9. JohnBarrell, The Idea ofLandscape and the Sense ofPlace, 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 1. 10. "Figures in Landscapes," British Journal of Photography, 13 M a y 1887, 291. 11. Andrew Pringle, "Selection in Landscape," British Journal of Photography, 17 September 1886, 585. 12. Henry Peach Robinson, The Elements cf a Pictorial Photograph (London, 1896; reprint, N e w York: Arno, 1973), 104. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 13. John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 17S0-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 92. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 14. As Ellen Handy observes, Emerson's photographs at times resemble Constable's works as Barrell describes them, with laborers represented indistinctly, as only a part of the landscape; the artist, writes Barrell, hides "the poor in the middle ground, where we can see their labour but not their expressions" (The Dark Side of the Landscape, 21; Ellen Handy, "Art and Science in P. H . Emerson's Naturalistic Vision," in British Photography in the Nineteenth Century: The Fine Art Tradition, ed. Mike Weaver [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 190). 15. Life and Landscape: P. H. Emerson: Art and Photography in EastAnglia, 188s1900, exhibition catalogue, ed. Neil McWilliam and Veronica Sekules (Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, 1986), 28. 16. Thomas Hardy, Tess 0/ the D'Urbervilles [1891] (New York: Penguin, 1978), 151-

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17. See Handy for a more elaborate and helpful reading of this photograph, 185-87. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 18. Elizabeth Easdake, "Photography," Quarterly Review 101 (London; April 1857): 466. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 19. Wolfgang Kemp, "Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition," October 54 (1990): 104. 20. Kemp, 105, quoting Walter John Hippie, The Beautifiil, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), 210. 21. Kemp, 105, quoting John Constable, Memoirs ofthe Life of John Constable, ed. Charles Robert Leslie and Andrew Shirley (London: Medici Society, 1937), 118. 22. Peter Henry Emerson, Pictures ofEast Anglian Life (London, 1888), 119. 23. Kemp, 107, quoting John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London: J. M. Dent, 1906), 9-10. 24. Photographic News, 19 August 1887, 515. 25. Amateur Photographer, 25 March 1887,145. 26. Photographic News, 19 August 1887,514. 27. Henry Peach Robinson, Letters on Landscape Photography (London, 1888; reprint, New York: Arno, 1973), 12. 28. Journal ofthe Photographic Society, 3 March 1853, 6. 29. O. E. Rejlander, "Desultory Reflections on Photography and Art," TearBook ofPhotography, and Photographic News Almanac (London, 1866), 46. 30. Journal ofthe Photographic Society, 21 April 1853, 44. 31. "Our Illustration," AmericanJournal ofPhotography (February 1887): 30. 32. "Science and Art," AmericanJournal ofPhotography (May 1889): 172. 33. John Bartlett, "The Short-comings of Photography in Relation to Art," American Journal of Photography (December 1887): 208-9. 34. Emerson, Naturalistic Photography (1890), introduction.

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HANDY

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

As both liquid and solid waste accumulated at a remarkable rate in Victorian cities and posed urgent problems of disposal, anxieties about (and fascinations with) excrement took various forms of expression in both life and art. The excretory process and its products were as unmentionable in most social contexts as they were inescapable. How then could they be figured in a novel or in a series of photographs? In both its naming and visual imagery, prose adopts strategies for evading and transforming waste different from those available to photography, which possesses a directly indexical relation to the world it represents. How are photography's and fiction's evasions of—and preoccupations with —excreta and urban sanitation both imaged and concealed? And how do the antithetical categories of wet and dry operate in these representations? Lytton Strachey, in his memoir of the childhood home he first knew in 1884 (69 Lancaster Gate, London), described its late-Victorian sanitary facilities: The one and only bathroom was. . . perched, with its lavatory, in an impossible location between the drawing room and the lowest bedroomfloors— a kind of crow's nest—to reach which, one had to run the gaundet of stairs innumerable, and whose noises of rushing water were all too audible from the drawing room just below.1 The eminendy Victorian position of this lavatory was all too proximate to the drawing room, but unspeakable to anyone lacking the naughty desire to reject convention that actuated Strachey and his Bloomsbury cronies. This passage serves well to locate the social position of the very m

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topic of excrement in polite society, yet a great distance lies between the bourgeois Stracheys' lavatory and the squalid arrangements of the urban poor. The historian F. B. Smith, writing of the outskirts of earlynineteenth-century London, noted that one of the great divisions between the respectable and the unrespectable was where and how one relieved oneself. . . . Only the very respectable had an earth-closet or a midden. The rest just relieved themselves in the fields, while "the back streets, courts and other eligible places are constandy found strewed with human excrements."2 Although to the Victorian social crusader such behavior was mentionable, it was not so to the novelist or photographer. Both Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Thomas Annan's Photographs of Old Closes and Streets ofGlasgow brought imagery of human waste dangerously near to the drawing room, but only by employing evasive strategies. Much recent work in Victorian social history reminds us how omnipresent this subject matter must sometimes have seemed. Anthony Wohl has written pungently that "by mid-century Victorian England was in danger of becoming submerged in a huge dung heap of its own making. . . . To stand close to a defective sewer today is to recapture the essence of earlyand mid-Victorian towns." 3 These "towns" were all characterized by growing slum areas, which, like lavatories in middle- and upper-class consciousness, were not always acknowledged or apparent but were always threatening to obtrude themselves upon public or polite notice. Engels noted in The Condition ofthe Working Class in England that Every great town has one or more slum areas into which the working classes are packed. Sometimes, of course, poverty is to be found hidden away in alleys close to the stately homes of the wealthy. Generally, however, the workers are segregated in separate districts where they straggle through life as best they can out of sight of the more fortunate classes of society. The slums of the English towns have much in common. . . . [The streets] are filthy and strewn with animal and vegetable refuse. Since they have neither gutters nor drains the refuse accumulates in stagnant, stinking puddles.4 Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition ofthe Labouring Population ofGreat Britain confirmed, with a plethora of description, that the filthy culs-de-sac of British slums greatly resembled each other in their overcrowding and proliferation of infectious diseases.5 But the stinking puddles and animal refuse of those slums were seldom, if ever, apparent in literary or visual artistic representations. Freud, writing on repression in 1915 and employing an image redo-

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lent of the compost heap, noted that desire develops "in a more unchecked and luxuriant fashion if it is withdrawn by repression from conscious influence. It ramifies like a fungus, so to speak, in the dark and takes on extreme forms of expression."6 John Kucich has argued that Dickens's notoriously divided sensibilities evidence, not repression and unresolved conflicts, but "a coherent strategy of representation," a deliberate employment of the fungal ramification Freud mentions.7 Kucich's theme is Dickens's repression of violence, not of excretory functions, but his presentation of repression as other than a silencing of proscribed desire is valuable in addressing different and larger questions, including the functions of repression in visual representation. Pictorial and narrative strategies necessarily differ, but there are important parallels between Dickens's and Annan's treatments of the presence of excrement in the city. From 1868 to about 1871 Thomas Annan (1829-1887) photographed in the slums of Glasgow, which was then the most overcrowded city in Europe, and consequendy renowned for its epidemics and the appalling state of its slums. Chadwick, among other observers, noted that the conditions in Glasgow were "the worst of any . . . in . . . Great Britain."8 Irish and other immigrant workers lived in elaborately subdivided tenements, most dating from the seventeenth century, packed together in the heart of old Glasgow in the parish of St. Mary Tron. An 1843 article in the Artizan described the area south of the Triangle and west of the Saltmarket, as well as in the Calton, off the High-Street, etc. — endless labyrinths of narrow lanes or wynds, into which at almost every step debouche courts or closes formed by old, illventilated, towering houses crumbling to decay, destitute of water and crowded with inhabitants, comprising three or four families (perhaps twenty persons) on each flat, and sometimes each flat let out in lodgings that confine—we dare not say accommodate — from fifteen to twenty persons in a single room.9 These dangerous and insalubrious slums were to be torn down by authority of the Glasgow City Improvement Act of 1866, which provided for demolitions in the old city to make way for new "dwelling houses for the mechanics, labourers, and other persons of the working and lower classes" —the first municipal renewal project in Great Britain.10 The work was initiated by John Blackie, lord provost of Glasgow, and demolitions began in 1868, despite Blackie's removal from office by a newly enfranchised electorate disappointed by the heavy tax burden this ameliorative project entailed.11 This slum clearance had various motivations. The frequency of cholera epidemics was to be reduced by eliminating

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the overcrowding that breeds contagion, and a pure water supply was piped from Loch Katrine to the area. But there were commercial as well as public health concerns, such as the building of large metropolitan railway terminals, which necessitated the incursion of the train lines into the center city.12 Annan was commissioned by the city officers responsible for implementing these improvements to document the slums before their destruction. A successful commercial photographer specializing in architecture, he had begun his career as a copperplate engraver, took up calotype photography in 1855, soon switched to the glass negative technique, and subsequently made a point of learning new processes as they were developed. The cumbersome glass plates he used as negatives for most of his photographic work had to be processed immediately on location, and he converted a hansom cab to serve as his portable darkroom when he photographed country houses, church windows, or the closes. Annan's glass negatives required as much light as possible and long exposures by today's standards. He was unable to photograph indoors, and practical flash lighting for photography had not yet been invented. Parallels exist between Annan's work and that of Charles Marville (1816-1879), who photographed for more than twenty years in Paris under the jurisdiction of the Baron Haussmann, who was systematically transforming Paris into a modern city of uninterrupted mobility for both military maneuvers and civilian traffic. A whole constellation of grand Imperial projects was documented by official photographers to create imperial propaganda as well as a historical record of this period. Marville photographed before, during, and after the razing of insalubrious slums and the building of broad new boulevards in their stead. Maria Morris Hambourg has written that Marville was "very much Haussmann's man, quite in sympathy with the rigorous, relentless logic of the prefect's plan." 13 But whose "man" was Annan, what was being documented by his photographs, and by whom were they meant to be seen? Although a public civic commission, Annan's work was seen by a relatively limited audience. Unlike Dickens, whose fictions had a genuine mass audience, Annan worked for the record rather than for a public. In 1871 an edition of perhaps fourteen copies of Annan's suite of photographs was privately published, and in 1877 each trustee of the Glasgow City Improvement Acts received a personal copy of the pictures they had commissioned. Other copies were distributed to libraries and civic bodies in Glasgow and elsewhere. Final editions appeared in 1900, with the addition of historical text. The high cost of photographic

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publishing made these albums (in which each plate is an original photographic print) more suitable for institutional collections than for the parlor tables of middle-class homes. And though the buildings being destroyed were judged architecturally distinguished enough to merit recording before their disappearance, it is unlikely that public interest in their pictorial record would have been widespread. The British archives were much less comprehensive than those of the French, and these pictures were exhibited to the public only once, at the Kelvingrove Park Museum. 14 Much that was observed by the reformers who visited these slums with pen in hand eluded Annan's camera. His pictures repeatedly depict the approaches to the closes, or interior courtyards of tenements, eloquently conveying the sodden dankness of the wretched area. Close, No. 61 Saltmarket (Fig. 42) is one of the starkest of Annan's photographs. In it, a dead-end alley culminates in an ominous rectangle of darkest black that offers no real escape from the narrow space whose walls rise up abruptly out of the frame. The very bricks of these walls seem permeated by unwholesome moisture, and puddled liquid is prominent in the foreground. Chadwick quoted a local source's description of passages like these: We entered a dirty low passage like a house door, which led from the street through the first house to a square court immediately behind, which court, with the exception of a narrow path around it leading to another long passage through a second house, was occupied entirely as a dung receptacle of the most disgusting kind. Beyond this court the second passage led to a second square court, occupied in the same way by its dunghill; and from this court there was yet a third passage leading to a third court and a third dungheap. There were no privies or drains there, and the dungheap received all the filth which the swarm of wretched inhabitants could give; and we learned that a considerable part of the rent of the houses was paid by the produce of the dungheaps. Thus, worse off than wild animals, many of which withdraw to a distance and conceal their ordure, the dwellers in these courts had converted their shame into a kind of money by which their lodging was to be paid.15 Closes, Nos. 97 and 103 Saltmarket (Fig. 43) depicts one of the courtyards between buildings secluded from the streets that are described in the quotation. But the dung heap is emphatically absent. In Close, No. 31 Saltmarket (Fig. 44), a more typical image, a man leans against a wall as it curves toward a hidden vanishing point. One of Engels's "stinking, stagnant puddles" is just behind him. In selecting subjects for photographs, Annan invariably evaded the

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contagion-breeding muckheaps. His images normally emphasize the narrow, recessive, and distincdy uninviting passages (called wynds) leading to the closes rather than those courts themselves. The resulting compositional formula was visually striking, but insufficiently so to explain the frequency of its occurrence in Annan's oeuvre. The closes themselves were the more characteristic architectural elements, and in their broader spaces the light necessary for photographic exposure would have been more plentiful. Their absence from the photographic series suggests deliberate evasion. It is difficult to draw conclusions without knowing the specific instructions Annan received from the trustees of the City Improvement Acts. While the courts and dung heaps were the main preoccupation of the makers of the written records of Old Glasgow, Annan may have considered that his own medium would render excrement too vividly for decorum. Photography, in its short history, had not yet developed its own hierarchy of pictorial subjects and values, but those of Academic painting were freely appropriated and applied by photographers. Photography was already being skillfully used as a medium of propaganda and selective concealment rather than as an instrument of purest objectivity, as the carefully edited photographic record of the Crimean War demonstrates. Like any medium of representation, photography could deny circumstance and bowdlerize unpleasant reality; indeed, its inherent accuracy and detail of rendering provided even more motive for so doing. Historians of photography have argued whether Annan's pictures are artistic productions or the precursors of the socially engaged documentary photography practiced by Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and others in the United States from the 1890s to the 1920s. Margaret Harker, trying to establish Annan as an appealing tmteur, wrote of his work that "Individual prints, when carefully matted, are very attractive indeed, especially of those subjects which have a natural pictorial quality, and where the human wretchedness is not so obvious." 16 Presumably she prefers the drier views. A more astute reader of these photographs, Julie Lawson, described Annan as struggling with an ethical dilemma as he photographed the closes, seeking "a way of seeing in which morality did not become enmeshed with accusation, and formalism was not the threshold to indifference." 17 Surely, however, these words describe the earnest struggles of late-twentieth-century viewers to assimilate the photographs to history rather than the issues confronting Annan in the slums as he worked. In preference to the dung heaps, Annan's photographs emphasize details like the primitive outdoor sinks (mandated by an earlier sanitary

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reform) attached to many of the buildings for rudimentary washing, especially of clothing. Such a sink is visible affixed to the wall at the right in Close, No. 80 High Street (Fig. 45).18 Recently laundered garments of varying kinds are strung on what look like flagpoles above the narrow alley. Lawson suggests that the inclusion of laundry in many of Annan's photographs is meant to redeem the reputation of the poor, who were often stigmatized as dirty,19 and she may be right. But the spatterings of wetness in the gutter and the foreground is as likely to have come from urine poured into the sink to drain into the gutter as from futile attempts at cleanliness. As one account grimly noted: In our opinion, the privy (a public facility in the back yard) is in no case a sufficient provision for flatted tenements. It is never used, and the result is that every sink is practically a water closet, and the stairs and the courts and roofs of outhouses are littered with deposits of filth from windows.20 Contagion and filth are thus evoked through liquid waste rather than the omnipresent but unacknowledged solid wastes. Annan must have taken great pains to avoid including the dunghills in some of his compositions; I imagine him doing so by actually standing against one, turning his back to it, perhaps with the legs of his large camera's tripod balanced on its lower slopes. How else could he have photographed in those narrow confines without showing the dung heaps? This hypothetical scene is an emblem of the repression operating in both Annan's and Dickens's work: the unmentionable, undepictable subject is inescapable at close quarters. A report of 1839 (quoted by Engels) said of the dung heaps in the closes of Glasgow that " N o one seems to have taken the trouble to clean out these Augean stables, this pandemonium, this nucleus of crime, filth and pestilence in the second city of the empire." 21 It is unlikely that such a Herculean cleansing was undertaken solely for the sake of Annan's photographic activity. It is just possible, however, that his photographing was timed to occur immediately before the demolition began, and that the owners of the mountainous dung heaps had evacuated them beforehand. Such literal means were necessary to shape camera images of the closes, while the novelist had relatively more flexibility in representing unacceptable subjects. An unwholesome seeping moisture of unspecific origins is prevalent in Annan's pictures, a kind of surrogate for what is not shown. In Close, No. 128 Saltmarket (Fig. 46) the moisture gleams about halfway back into the represented space, just beyond the rickety exterior staircase descending at the right. The liquid streams through the gutter along the righthand side of the picture, advancing toward the foreground and con-

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trasting with the rigid and static architectural forms that close and govern the composition. Although Dickens portrayed London as awash in a flood of filth and miasmic exhalations, his rendering of excrement differed from Annan's by denying the dampness of the substance. N o insinuating trickles moisten Dickens's towering piles of dry mounded "dust." Charles Dickens published Our Mutual Friend in parts between May 1864 and November 1865, only a few years before Annan's photographic work in the closes of Glasgow. The novel's scope encompasses many quarters of London as well as the Thames-side and northern slums and waste grounds, while Annan's study was restricted to a single district. Dickens sketched the degrading effects of wealth in different guises; prominent among his motifs is that of the dustheaps (and, even more grotesque, the corpses of the drowned) as a source of prosperity. Dickens represents the entire city as a functioning organism; in the hidden, dangerous world of the closes Annan suggests a cancer within that organism. Catherine Gallagher has described how in Victorian society "the body came to occupy the center of a social discourse obsessed with sanitation, with minimizing bodily contact and preventing the now alarmingly traversable boundaries of individual bodies as either valuable or problematic." 22 The emergence of excrement from bodies; its concealment in chamber pots, privies, and sewers; and its possible failure to remain suppressed—all were the sources of anxiety and fascination pertaining to the social, urban body as much as to an individual one. For Annan, waste (like darkness) was an attribute of poverty while for Dickens, whose ironic, less literal, vision preferred symbols to simple exemplars, waste was equated with money. In each case, evil was presumed; Dickens's plot works to establish the corrupting potential of wealth, whereas Annan's photographs depict the unhygienic degradation of poverty. Yet neither referred direcdy to the principal elements of the waste Dickens so euphemistically called "dust," that is, the human and animal excrement that threatened to overwhelm the densely populated cities where the poor lived close packed like animals in slaughter yards, and where armies of horses provided transportation while contributing to the filth in the streets. By around 1850 those horses deposited approximately twenty thousand tons of manure in the streets of London per annum.23 Indeed, it is estimated that six hundred horses were employed in the dust- and night-soil-collection business alone!24 Jane Jacobs, in her classic study The Death and Life of Great American Cities, quotes from an essay by H . B. Cresswell, an architect, that recalled London in 1890:

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But the mud! And the noise! And the smell! All these blemishes were [the] mark of [the] horse. . . . The whole of London's crowded wheeled traffic — which in parts of the City was at times dense beyond movement — was dependent on the horse: lorry, wagon, bus, hansom and "growler," and coaches and carriages and private vehicles of all kinds, were appendages to horses. Meredith refers to the "anticipatory stench of its cabstands" on railway approach to London: but the characteristic aroma — for the nose recognized London with gay excitement—was of stables, which were commonly of three or more storeys with inclined ways zigzagging up the faces of them; [their] middens kept the cast iron filigree chandeliers, that glorified the reception rooms of upper and lower middle class homes throughout London, encrusted with dead flies and, in late summer, veiled with jiving clouds of them.25 Like the flies around the filigree chandeliers linking horse manure to fashionable receptions, the nuisance of equine by-products in the streets is amusingly insinuated by Dickens into an absurd dinner table conversation in the novel. Mr. Podsnap inquires whether an uncomprehending French visitor has perceived any public evidence of the effects of the British constitution: "I Was Inquiring . . . Whether You Have Observed in our Streets as We should say, Upon our Pawy as You would say, any Tokens — " The foreign gendeman, with patient courtesy, entreated pardon; "But what was tokenz?" "Marks," said Mr Podsnap; "Signs, you know, Appearances—Traces." "Ah! Of a Orse?" inquired the foreign gendeman.26 Where did the droppings of London's horses go? What happened to human waste, produced in staggering quantity by the constantly growing city? Cesspools and sewers retained, then drained some of this matter, often direcdy into the Thames, but solid, towering dung heaps also appeared on the outskirts of the city. Our Mutual Friend's Mr. Boffin, the Golden Dustman, is the inheritor of his former employer's superbly lucrative dust yard, which purveyed "coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bonedust, crockery dust, rough dust and sifted dust, — all manner of Dust."27 But few of these varieties (apart from coal dust) would have been plentiful enough to make the dust mountains Dickens describes, and none of them would have been commercially attractive to purchasers. Most of the "dust" bought and sold in Victorian cities was excrement, valuable as a component in agricultural fertilizer. As an 1839 investigation of the Glasgow slums Annan was later to photograph reported, "the centre of the court is the dunghill [of the tenement], which is probably the most lucrative part of the estate to the laird in most instances, and which it

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would consequently be deemed an invasion of the rights of property to remove."28 The peculiar architectural plan of Glasgow, with its warrens of closed courts, led to the sequestration of dung heaps, whereas in London these depositories were more commonly displaced to the outskirts of the city. Dickens was well aware of this, though he presented the mounds of organic filth as "dust" in Our Mutual Friend. In 1851 a description that served as one of the sources for the Boffins' dust yard appeared in Household Words. The region described lies between Battle Bridge and Euston Square: "It's a rum place, ain't it?" remarked the dustman. "I am forced to come through it twice every day, for my work lays that way; but I wouldn't, if I could help it. It don't much matter in my business, a litde dirt, but Hagar Town is worse nor I can abear." "Are there no sewers?" "Sooers? Why, the stench of a rainy morning is enough fur to knock down a bullock. It's all very well for them as is lucky enough to have a ditch afore their doors; but, in gen'ral, everybody chucks everythink out in front and there it stays. There used to be an inspector of nuusances, when the choleray was about, but, as soon as the choleray went away, people said they didn't want no more of that suit till such times as the choleray should break out agen.29 Henry Mayhew's authoritative account of the life and work of dustmen in London Labour and the London Poor stated that "The dustmen, scavengers, and nightmen are, to a certain extent, the same people."30 Dustmen collected ashes and household rubbish, scavengers went freelance through the streets and garnered horse droppings and any other lucrative detritus they might come upon, and night-soil men worked under regular contract to remove the accumulated human waste from privies and dung heaps. Thus as many twentieth-century critics have noted, while Dickens wrote that Mr. Boffin's wealth derived from "dust," other substances are certainly implied. In 1941 Humphrey House pioneered open discussion of the "dust" in Our Mutual Friend by writing that "One of the main jobs of a dust-contractor in Victorian London was to collect the contents of the privies and the piles of mixed dung and ashes which were made in the poorer streets; and the term 'dust' was used as a euphemism for decaying human excrement, which was exceedingly valuable as fertilizer."31 The actual monetary value of the waste so collected has not yet been charted accurately by historians. Chadwick's Report considered whether entrepreneurial waste collection was economically viable:

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It might have been expected, from the value of the refuse as manure (one of the most powerful known), that the great demand for it would have afforded a price which might have returned, in some degree, the expense and charge of cleansing. But this appears not to be the case in the metropolis. . . . The cost of removal, or of the labour and cartage, limits the general use or deposit of the refuse within a radius which does not exceed three miles.32 Whether or not collection efforts were profitable in practice, however, the belief in the economic value of this waste was widespread. In Can You Forgive Her? (1860-61) Trollope's comic character Mr. Cheeseacre of Oileymeade speaks lovingly of the valuable muckheaps on his property, hoping thereby to induce a lady to accept his suit. And in OrleyFarm (1864-65) the young heir to the eponymous property reveals his impractical nature in his desire to pursue two inappropriate careers: philology and scientific farming. In the cause of the latter, he orders ruinously expensive guano from Liverpool rather than sensibly preferring the locally available product. Charles Kingsley's fascination with chemical transformations in Yeast (1850) led to strangely overwrought praise of sewage as "vast stores of wealth, elaborated by Nature's chemistry, into the ready materials of food; which proclaim, too, by their own foul smell, God's will that they should be buried out of sight in the fruitful, all-regenerating grave of earth."33 Christopher Hamlin has argued that the chemist Justus von Liebig is the key figure in the Victorian discussion of waste disposal, putrefaction, and decomposition of solid waste.34 Chadwick, for instance, quoted Liebig to the effect that it was "astounding" how little care was taken to preserve night soil as manure for agricultural use.35 But many schools of thought concerning issues of sanitation existed. Hamlin cites "A Letter on Sewage" written in 1870 by a visiting American, who soon found that partisan violence was not confined to republics alone, nor to political parties, nor could theology ever produce bitterer denunciations than were poured out by one party upon another on this subject. If I had not been amused, I should have been indignant at hearing men whose works I have read for a quarter of a century, and thought were men of consummate wisdom, sagacity and coolness, using language worthy of Billingsgate toward an unlucky and persistent supporter of the "earth-closet" idea.36 While the larger social questions of sanitation and the chemical processes of organic decay were the subjects of heated and passionate debate, the quotidian reality of excretion and of filth in the cities was drastically less acceptable as a subject of public comment.

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Thus Dickens, using evasive, allusive terminology, rendered repellent excrement as euphemistic dust, suggesting at once industrial production and the state to which Christian burial services announce all flesh is to come. Though "dust" was not the usual term for animal and human waste, he seized upon its possibilities. He described the region of the dustheaps (near the present-day St. Pancras Station) as "a tract of suburban Sahara, where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors."37 While Dickens desiccated humid massy excrement through language, Annan diluted it through pictorial metonymy, indicating the presence of waste in the slums through the slicks of noisome moisture in the foregrounds of his pictures. Both Dickens and Annan transformed the unspeakable matter into other substances, but Dickens did so more simply, through naming. Like Poe's purloined letter, it is always in plain view. Annan, on the other hand, practiced a subtler transformation, because he was unwilling to commit this substance to the camera's only too accurate and unevasive rendering. He could not allow it to appear at center stage in undisguised form. But the real nature of Dickens's "dust" was not always concealed. Not ashy grit but moist effluent, it is emphatically fecal in origin. In a portentous passage, Dickens figured the Boffins as prosperous dung beeties: And now, in the blooming summer days, behold Mr and Mrs Boffin established in the eminently aristocratic family mansion, and behold all manner of crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures, attracted by the gold dust of the Golden Dustman.38 The shit that draws the flies may be solid, but it is also oozing and damp. The Saharan dryness Dickens posits at the beginning of the book gives way by its end to a description of waste that is moist-er, a closer approximation of the liquid filth of Annan's photographs. When the evil Silas Wegg is finally punished by Sloppy, "dust" is revealed as excrement, which makes its first direct appearance in the novel, ostensibly by happenstance: Mr Sloppy's instructions had been to deposit his burden in the road; but, a scavenger's cart happening to stand unattended at the corner with its little ladder planted against the wheel, Mr S. found it impossible to resist the temptation of shooting Mr Silas Wegg into the cart's contents. A somewhat difficult feat, achieved with great dexterity, and with a prodigious splash.39 That splash (an impossible sound for dry dust to make) and the presence of that scavenger's cart confirm Dickens's fascination with the omnipres-

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ence of excreta in the Victorian city. Is this the return of the repressed? Or has Dickens evaded the strictures of convention rather than repressed consciousness of the proximity of filth to the society that produces it? He does not remove it from conscious consideration; rather, he constantly draws attention to it. Kucich argues that repression in Dickens is "a rhetorical figure. Far from concealing its operation —as a classically Freudian mechanism of representation would —repression in Dickens actually names itself as repression and details its function, assigning itself a specific set of meanings and values."40 Dickens's strategy here is in fact visual, while Annan's is metaphoric; the textual description of the dustheaps is as vivid and precise as photography is customarily reputed to be, while the photographs suggest their subjects by surprisingly indirect and associative means. In an odd episode toward the end of the novel, Lavinia Wilfer and her mother and her suitor travel through the city in a coach. Reproving her mother for her inability to loll comfortably, Lavinia says: "But why one should go out to dine with one's own daughter or sister, as if one's under-petticoat was a blackboard, I do not understand." "Neither do I understand," retorted Mrs Wilfer, with deep scorn, "how a young lady can mention the garment in the name of which you have indulged. I blush for you." . . . Here, Mr Sampson, with the view of establishing harmony, which he never under any circumstances succeeded in doing, said with an agreeable smile: "After all, you know, ma'am, we know it's there." And immediately felt that he had committed himself. "Really, George," remonstrated Miss Lavinia, "I must say that I don't understand your allusions, and that I think you might be more delicate and less personal."41 Dickens did not "indulge" in the name of the excrement that pervades Our Mutual Friend as it pervaded London itself, and he did not blush either. Like Miss Lavinia, he was capable of making an allusion that he immediately refuses to acknowledge. But as his narrative rolls like that carriage through the streets of the city, waste splashes, crossing sweepers remove "Traces" of "Orses," and bugs swarm where the stench rises from the manure piles of Battle Bridge. Annan's photographs, also unblushing but perhaps more ambiguous, depict similarly fetid aspects of a smaller section of a city, lying close by the broad, relatively clean boulevards of commerce and public life. High Streetfromthe College Open (Fig. 47) depicts such a thoroughfare, off which lie many of the wynds and closes pictured in the photographs I have discussed. The broad pavements and modern gas lamps suggest a

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clean, well-ordered city. But —exceptionally—in the foreground near the gutter lies a dark irregular mass, perhaps one horse's contribution to the befouling of the city's streets. Although Ruskin once opined that "a good sewer is far nobler and a far holier thing. . . than the most admired Madonna ever painted," such frankness was unusual outside the sanitary reform movement in Great Britain.42 In France, the relation of waste, sewage, daily life and art was seen differently The Paris sewers were among the wonders of Second Empire engineering and were visited by crowds of tourists. Flaubert, whose sleep was sometimes troubled by the nocturnal visits of the cesspool cleaners to his house, nonetheless expressed interest in their operations and recognized a parallel between their work and his own. He wrote to Louise Colet that "The artist must raise everything to a higher level; he is like a pump; inside him is a great pipe reaching down into the bowels of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was pooled beneath the surface and brings it forth into the sunlight in giant sprays."43 To set art and sanitation into relation in this fashion is to reveal a directness unparalleled in the work of Annan or Dickens. Transformed yet present in the foreground of both Our Mutual Friend and Photographs of Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, excrement is acknowledged as a memento mori emblematic of the human condition and as the inevitable by-product of the healthy functioning of the city, but never as a metaphor for the content of artistic production. The waste accumulated by the city, like that of the individual, was a source of inspiration because of the anxieties it elicited; for Annan as for Dickens, those anxieties become organizing principles of art very different from Flaubert's cathartic spray from the cesspool of the unconscious.

Fig. 42. Thomas Annan, Close, No. 61 Saltmarket, 1868-77. Albumen silver print from glass negative. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.

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Fig. 43. Thomas Annan, Closes, Nos. 97and 103 Saltmarket, 1868-77. Albumen silver print from glass negative. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.

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Fig. 44. Thomas Annan, Close, No. 31 Saltmarket, 1868-77. Albumen silver print from glass negative. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.

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Fig. 45. Thomas Annan, Close, No. 80 High Street, 1868-77. Albumen silver print from glass negative. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.

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Fig. 46. Thomas Annan, Close, No. 128 Saltmarket, 1868-77. Albumen silver print from glass negative. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.

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Fig. 47. Thomas Annan, High Streetfromthe College Open, 1868-77. Albumen silver print from glass negative. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.

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Notes This paper would not have been undertaken without encouragement from my colleague Deirdre d'Albertis, whose stimulating conversation has been very valuable to me during its writing, and to whom I owe many thanks; it has benefited also from comments offered by Lauren Goodlad. 1. Lytton Strachey, "Lancaster Gate," 1922, quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986), 45. 2. F. B. Smith, The People's Health, 1830-1910 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 1973. Anthony Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: J. M. Dent, 1983), 86, 81. 4. Friedrich Engels, The Condition ofthe Working Class in England [1845], ed. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958), 33. 5. Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition ofthe Labouring Population of Great Britain, 1842, ed. M. W. Flinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965). 6. Sigmund Freud, "Repression," 1915, in General Psychological Theory: Papers onMetapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1965), 107. 7. John Kucich, "Repression and Representation: Dickens's General Economy," Nineteenth Century Fiction (June 1983): 64. 8. Chadwick, 99. 9. "On the Health of the Working Classes in Large Towns," Artizan (October 1843): 230; quoted in Engels, p. 43. 10. Glasgow City Improvement Act, 1866, quoted in A. L. Fisher, "Thomas Annan's Photographs ofOld Closes and Streets ofGlasgow," Scottish Photography Bulletin (Spring 1982): 13. 11. Margaret Harker, "From Mansion to Close: Thomas Annan, Master Photographer," Photographic Collector 5, no. 1 (1984): 88. 12. Anita Ventura Mozley, introduction to Thomas Annan, Photographs of Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow 1868/1877 (New York: Dover, 1977), ix. This facsimile edition of Annan's book is an invaluable resource despite the poor quality of the reproductions. 13. Maria Morris Hambourg, "Charles Marville's Old Paris," in Maria Morris Hambourg and Marie de Thezy, CharlesMarville (New York: French Institute, 1981), 11. 14. Mozley, v. 15. Dr. Neil Arnott, quoted in Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition, 98. 16. Harker, 91. 17. Julie Lawson, "The Problem of Poverty and the Picturesque: Thomas Annan's Photographs 0/Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow 1868/1871," Scottish Photography Bulletin, no. 2 (1990): 42. 18. Such exterior sinks were wretchedly inadequate but nonetheless they represent the most tangible and effective progress of the Glasgow sanitary reform movement to that date.

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19. Lawson, 43. 20. Presbytery of Glasgow, Report ofthe Commission on the Housing ofthe Poor in Relation to Their Social Condition, 1891; quoted in Andrew Gibb, Glasgow: The Making ofa Great City (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 142. 21. J. C. Symons, "Reports From Assistant Handloom Weaver's Commission," Parliamentary Papers, 1839, vol. 42, no. 159, p. 52. 22. Catherine Gallagher, "The Body versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew," in The Making ofthe Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 90. 23. Wohl, Endangered Lives, 81. 24. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor [1861-62], ed. Victor Neuberg (London: Penguin, 1985), 249. 25. H. B. Cresswell, quoted in Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life tfGreat American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 341. I am indebted to Michael Young, who directed my attention to this passage. Jane Jacobs helpfully provides a footnote indicating that the "mud" mentioned by Cresswell is a euphemism. Cresswell's essay was published in Architectural Review (December 1958). 26. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend [1864-65] (London: Penguin, 1971), 179. 27. Dickens, 56. 28. Symons, 6$. 29. "A Suburban Connemara," Household Words, 5 March 1851, 563. The intermittent attentions of authorities and the public's ignorance about the relation of sanitation to disease cited in Household Words were common, and thus cholera recurred frequendy. In Glasgow, there were epidemics in 1832,1848-49,1853-54, and 1866. 30. Mayhew, 230. 31. Humphrey House, The Dickens World (1941; London: Oxford University Press, i960), 167. An extensive body of subsequent literature on this topic exists, without consensus. Rather than rehearsing all aspects of this debate among literary scholars, I have relied upon contemporary sources and the work of historians of sanitation, which seem to me more authoritative in their interpretation of the documentation available. 32. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition, 118. 33. Charles Kingsley, Yeast (New York: J. F. Taylor, 1903), chapter 15; quoted in Christopher Hamlin, "Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease," Victorian Studies 28 (Spring 1985): 403. 34. Hamlin, 382fF. 35. Justus von Liebig, Agricultural Chemistry (Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology) (London: Taylor and Walton, 1842); quoted in Chadwick, 123. 36. Henry Bowditch, "Letter on Sewage," Second Annual Report of the State Board ofHealth of Massachusetts (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1871), 235; quoted in Hamlin, 396. 37. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 76. The phrase "suburban Sahara" echoes

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"suburban Connemara," used in the Household Words thirteen years earlier (see note 29). 38. Dickens, 257. 39. Dickens, 862. 40. Rucich, "Repression and Representation," 65. 41. Dickens, 876-77. 42. Quoted in Wohl, Endangered Lives, 101. 43. Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 25-26 June 1853; quoted in Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), no.

RONALD R. THOMAS

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

In photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid ofcertain processes... can capture images which escape natural vision.

Walter Benjamin

Sherlock Holmes, whom Watson refers to in the first tale of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has ever seen," exemplifies the essential Victorian hero who is known above all for his virtually photographic visual powers —the literary detective.1 The detective's unique talent is an uncanny ability to see what no one else can see, to "capture images," as Benjamin says of the technology of the camera, that otherwise "escape natural vision."2 Holmes has this power, he tells Watson, because of his specialized knowledge: he knows where to look and what to notice. "You appeared to read a great deal in her which was quite invisible to me," Dr. Watson notes characteristically to Holmes just as the great detective reveals his observations about a client. "Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson," Holmes replies. "You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important." 3 What we see, Holmes says, is governed by conventions, which make portions of the world visible to us and determine what is worth our attention (and what is not). The trained eye of the great detective alters those conventions of vision and exposes to us, as Holmes does to Watson and his clients, what had previously been hidden from view. Like another remarkable Victorian 134

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visual apparatus, the camera, we might think of Holmes (and the "sharp-eyed" detectives he represents) as the literary embodiment of the elaborate network of visual technologies that revolutionized the art of seeing in the nineteenth century. Just as the popular iconography of Sherlock Holmes invariably identifies him with the magnifying glass, he and these other literary detectives personify the array of nineteenthcentury "observing machines" (from the kaleidoscope to the stereoscope to the camera itself) that made visible what had always been invisible to everyone else. The camera, John Tagg contends, "arrives on the scene vested with a particular authority to arrest, picture and transform daily life; a power to see and record" — a claim that might be applied with equal accuracy to the simultaneous arrival on the cultural scene of the literary detective.4 Together, camera and literary detective developed a practical procedure to accomplish what the new discipline of criminal anthropology attempted more theoretically: to make darkness visible — giving us a means to recognize the criminal in our midst by changing the way we see and by redefining what is important for us to notice. Not only did the literary detective and the camera shape the emerging science of criminology and the techniques that made the criminal mind visible to the public eye, but they also played an important role in the process Jonathan Crary calls "a complex remaking of the individual as observer into something calculable and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable and thus exchangeable."5 In that process, the mechanism of the camera became one of the detective's primary means for identifying a suspect and defining that suspect as an observed object as well as an observing subject, whose normalcy or deviance could be perceived and managed in the eye of a machine. Focusing on the uses of photography in Bleak House and in the first tale in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I explore in this essay the implications of the remarkable correspondence between the history of the camera and the history of the literary detective in nineteenth-century England to understand how those converging histories rendered persons both visible and invisible, observers and observed. When Holmes bewilders Watson (as he constandy does) by looking at his client — or at a suspect, or at the scene of a crime, or even at Watson himself— and seeing things invisible to everyone else, Holmes typically responds to his partner's demands for an explanation by asserting, "I see it, I deduce it." 6 Holmes's vision, that is, is not innocent or objective, but is "deduced," reasoned out, rationalized, managed. It is the product of a certain way of knowing. "You see, but you do not observe,"

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Holmes reproves Watson. " I have both seen and observed" (11-12). In what Holmes sees, and in what he deems important, the master detective teaches us (as he teaches Watson) not just to see, but to "observe" — in the sense of "observing" the law, that is, conforming to certain ways of seeing. Holmes, and others like him, enable us to see through their powerful lenses — the lenses, we might say, of their cultural power and authority. While these detectives train us to see as they do, subjecting us to a process of constant visual correction and to their own superior visionary powers, they must also remain uniquely privileged sites of vision themselves. To that end, the regime of visual correction they impose upon us involves the validation of photography as a technique of surveillance and discipline, an endorsement that may well have led to the widespread deployment of photography in actual nineteenthcentury police work and to the transformation of the camera from an artistic device for portraying and honoring individuals to a powerful political technology with which to capture and control them. In 1841, slightly more than a year after Louis-Jacques Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot each announced the invention of the modern process of photography, Edgar Allan Poe "invented" the modern detective story and published the first of its kind ("The Murders of the Rue Morgue"). In the intervening year, just before he wrote his famous series of three detective stories, Poe published three essays on photography, two of them in the same magazine in which "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" would later appear.7 In the first of these essays, Poe proclaimed photography "the most extraordinary triumph of modern science," a form of representation that far superseded language in approximating reality itself and achieving "a perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented."8 For Poe, the photograph did not simply represent its subject; it attained an ontological equivalence, a "perfect identity" with its referent. But in fact, as the use of photography in detective fiction often makes clear, a photograph can completely redefine the identity of its subjcct, depending on how the photograph is composed and viewed. Poe's own fictive "observing machine," Auguste Dupin, demonstrated this principle clearly when, through the lenses of his distinctively tinted green spectacles, he alone was able to see the purloined letter that had been hidden in plain view in the lodgings of the ambitious politician who stole it. Dupin's all-seeing gaze, itself obscured from the sight of others by those tinted lenses, detected what had been invisible to everyone else and brought to light what was determined to be absent from the minister's rooms.9 Dupin knew that the solution to this political

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crime was deeply related to the fact that some things "escape observation" only by being "too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident."10 In his eyes and through his lenses — as if through the lens of a camera — this escape route is revealed and the surface of things is recaptured and re-presented to us for a more careful scrutiny. Holmes's frequent admonitions to Watson only substantiate Dupin's claim and validate his example, reminding us that what we see in a photograph —what is visible to us there as anywhere else —depends on where we look and on what we notice, on the ideological interests with which we view it and establish (in Holmes's words) what we deem important about it. When the figure commonly regarded as the first detective in the English novel appears for the first time in Dickens's Bleak House, his gaze seems to substantially transform the field of vision upon which it falls, much as Dupin's had done a decade before. 11 Mr. Bucket emerges magically in the pages of Bleak House out of the darkness of a lawyer's rooms in a flash of light and in an explicably "ghosdy manner," looking, to the hapless man he was scrutinizing and interrogating, "as if he were going to take his portrait." 12 "Appearing to [Mr. Snagsby] to possess an unlimited number of eyes," the detective Mr. Bucket seems to those on whom he looks to "take" their portraits instantaneously through his powerful lenses, a perfect description of what only the revolutionary new machine called the camera was capable of doing (281). As if to reinforce the comparison, once he takes Snagsby's measure in this scene, Bucket arms himself with a bull's-eye lantern and conducts the bewildered man through the darkened streets of Tom-All-Alone's in search of a boy, flashing his light on a series of faces, ruins, alleys, and doorways, creating the equivalent of flash photographs of these scenes of urban blight, just as he had done earlier when he seemed to take the portrait of Snagsby himself (Fig. 48). The photographic analogy is further substantiated when Bucket finally "throws his light" on the paralyzed Jo, who "stands amazed in the disc of light, like a ragged figure in a magic lanthorn" (280).13 When the detective mysteriously appears yet again, at the Bagnet household to arrest Mr. George, Bucket is described once more in terms that call to mind a photographic mechanism: "He is a sharp-eyed man, a quick keen man —and he takes in everybody's look at him, all at once, individually and collectively, in a manner that stamps him a remarkable man" (593). This power to look at and to take in the look of everyone else in a flash of light stamps Bucket as remarkably like the new portrait cameras that were beginning to appear everywhere in England at the time Bleak

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House was being written. They proliferated so rapidly because of an important technical development in the photographic process. According to Beaumont Newhall, a new era opened in the technology of photography in 1851, with the invention by Frederick Scott Archer, an English sculptor, of a method of sensitizing glass plates with silver salts by the use of collodion. Within a decade it completely replaced daguerreotype and calotype processes, and reigned supreme in the photographic world until 1880.14 Invented in the year before Bleak House began publication, this new wetplate process moved photography solidly into the commercial world (Fig. 49), as innumerable high-quality prints could now be made from a single negative (the daguerreotype process required a different exposure for each print). Such an advance in technology not only made portraits quicker and cheaper to produce but also made possible two Victorian photographic sensations that had far-reaching sociological implications: the carte de visite (a personal photographic calling card) and, later, the larger-format cabinet photograph (in great demand at first for theatrical professionals' publicity photographs and later adopted by the general public). Both of these forms of mass-produced portraiture became popular among the middle classes, widely distributed to friends, avidly collected, and proudly displayed in family albums as substitutes for the more costly oil portrait, commissioned only by members of the wealthiest and most fashionable families. As a result of this emerging photographic technology and its attendant commercial products, then, the personal portrait was rapidly transformed from a sign of aristocratic privilege and wealth to a mode of middle-class commercialism and entertainment.15 The historical coincidence of the invention of this technology with the appearance of the literary detective is important; more telling, however, is the description of the first police detective in the English novel in terms of this particular technology. The detective appears in the Victorian popular imagination, that is, looking like a camera. As Sherlock Holmes and the others who followed Bucket would confirm, the detective as a popular literary hero promoted the notion of photography as a benign form of police work. But the resemblance between the function of the literary detective in the novel and that of the portrait camera carries with it a hidden threat to personal privacy as well as a clear benefit to public safety. In the person of Mr. Bucket, photography is implicidy represented not simply as an instrument for artistic representation or as a remarkable scientific achievement, but also as a technology designed

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for surveillance and control, a technique with which to arrest its subject. When Bucket, who is able to be everywhere at once and to take in everyone instantaneously in his "unlimited" gaze, "mounts a high tower in his mind" and gazes across the landscape, he is like a powerful camera, taking the portraits of all those he sees and carrying the prints with him wherever he goes (673). Long before mug-shot files or rogues' galleries became part of the customary ritual of criminal investigation and identification in police departments, Mr. Bucket seems to have established such an archive in the photographic portrait gallery of his mind. "He has a keen eye for a crowd," the narrator informs us; and as Bucket "surveys" the details of the city scene in search of a suspect, the narrator indicates that the detective gazes with special interest "along the people's heads" that fill it, and that "nothing escapes him" (627). The "taking" of portraits plays an important part in the mystery surrounding the true identities of Esther Summerson and Lady Dedlock in Bleak House and in the investigation conducted by one of Mr. Bucket's amateur-counterpart detectives, Mr. Guppy. The first evidence we have of the filial relationship between Esther and Lady Dedlock, in fact, is provided by Lady Dedlock's portrait. Guppy's initial glimpse of it during his tour of the Dedlock estate in Lincolnshire causes a spark of recognition, provoking the law clerk to ask the servant conducting the tour whether the portrait has ever been engraved —whether, that is, it has ever been mass-produced for public consumption (82). Indeed it has not, he is told; many have asked to engrave it, but all have been firmly refused. Still, "how well I know that picture," Guppy persists. "I'll be shot if it ain't very curious how well I know that picture" (82). Though this is his first visit to the Dedlock estate, Guppy cannot be persuaded that he has not seen this portrait somewhere before. "It's unaccountable to me," he insists; " I must have had a dream of that picture." It is as if the amateur detective, Mr. Guppy, possesses a degraded version of the professional detective's photographic powers, his unconscious operating like a primitive camera producing blurred and unfocused images in his memory. The special function of the professional, Bucket, is to bring that unconscious power into consciousness, making clearly visible to Guppy (and to us) the images and relations seen formerly only through a glass, darkly. Indeed, those very images will prominently reappear later in Guppy's investigation of Lady Dedlock and her relation to Esther Summerson. When Guppy's collaborator Mr. Jobling (also known as Weevle) takes up residence at Krook's shop to spy on him, Jobling decorates his room with copper impressions of fashionable ladies, pictures taken from a vol-

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ume called The Divinities ofAlbion, or Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty. Among this august collection, it turns out, is a reproduction of Lady Dedlock's portrait. That portrait, since it has presumably not been engraved, may have been reproduced by some primitive photographic process. Indeed, copper plates could be made at this time by using an early photographic technique. But regardless of how this reproduction has been made or where its original came from, its presence in Jobling's rooms indicates that Lady Dedlock's image was "shot" and escaped her own control once it was disseminated into the world as public property. Mechanically reproduced and publicly displayed, that portrait, as honorific as its original may have been intended, now not only threatens Lady Dedlock's privacy but also usurps her control over her secret identity. Guppy's inexplicable familiarity with the original portrait of Lady Dedlock stems from his seeing Esther in it; but he may also presciently see Lady Dedlock's photograph in Lady Dedlock's portrait. If so, what he sees in addition, but resists recognizing, is the dissolution of the "aura" of "authenticity" and privilege (in Benjamin's terms) inscribed in her aristocratic identity. Whether Guppy knows it or not, in his eyes and on Krook's walls the portrait becomes a mug shot, a wanted poster that silently announces Lady Dedlock's dark past and Sir Leicester's unfortunate fall as Bucket will publicly announce them later on. This visual representation of Lady Dedlock is, then, more threatening to her station than the much dramatized fear surrounding the discovery of her handwriting and signature as they appear in the lost letters to Captain Hawdon, letters relentlessly pursued by Guppy and Jobling, Krook, Tulkinghorn, and Smallweed and finally confiscated by Mr. Bucket himself. "That's very like Lady Dedlock," Guppy says to Jobling of her gallery portrait. "It's a speaking likeness," he adds (396). And when Jobling chimes in, jokingly, that he wishes it really were a speaking likeness so that they could have some fashionable conversation with it, Guppy reprimands his friend for being flip and insensitive to "a man who has an unrequited image imprinted on his art" (397). Although the more dispassionate professional detective Mr. Bucket has mastered better than Guppy the technology of mentally imprinting images, even he is deceived later in the novel (at least momentarily) when Lady Dedlock assumes the appearance of a laboring woman and thereby temporarily eludes his gaze. For his part, Guppy's outrage at the lack of respect shown Lady Dedlock's portrait predicts what his friend's picture gallery reveals —that the conventions of class distinction as a social mechanism by which to authentically identify persons are an illusion. Or so we must infer when Guppy concludes the "taking down" of the portrait of Lady

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Dedlock from his partner's wall, clutches the copy in his hand, and proclaims that he has taken down its original a peg or two as well: referring to this "divinity" now as no more than a "shattered idol," he identifies the image he holds in his hand with his newly found power to "associate" himself with a previously unreachable class of people. "Between myself and one of the members of the swanlike aristocacy whom I now hold in my hand," he says, "there has been undivulged communication and association" (495). The "Galaxy Gallery," like the rogues' gallery that would follow it (Fig. 50), renders the portrait degraded graffiti for the decoration of a bureaucrat's rooms and the exposure of criminal minds. The movement in the novel from the oil portrait of Lady Dedlock proudly hung in her estate to the mass-produced plate of that portrait printed in a magazine to an image pasted on the wall of a law clerk's rooms recapitulates the nineteenth-century transformation of portraiture from an authentic sign of aristocratic status to a mechanical image of middle-class self-representation and, finally, to a clue for criminal investigation. "Photography," Benjamin would say in his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," "can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens," and "can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself."16 This fate, of course, is precisely that of Lady Dedlock's portrait in Bleak House. As I will explore more extensively later in this essay, it is also the presupposition upon which photography was eventually appropriated by criminologists to understand the criminal mind as well. Furthermore, as Benjamin argues, the "aura" of the original work of art was fundamentally challenged by a mechanically reproducible art like photography, bringing into question the cultural value invested in the whole concept of authenticity. "The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity," Benjamin says, and since with the advent of photography any number of prints can be made from a single photographic exposure, the idea of the "authentic" print ceases to make any sense (222-24). The association of the printed portrait of Lady Dedlock with her class status (eventually determined to be "illegitimate"), means that what is true of the "authentic" original work of art is also true of the "authentic" noble classes it represents. Benjamin suggests as much when he claims that "the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed" from a social practice based on ritual to another kind of social practice — one based on politics (224). The replacement of the fashionable family solid-

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tor and confidant in the Dedlock household by the police detective and informant registers that reversion from social ritual to political action. As an agent of the state, Bucket is explicitly invited to be a spy in the Dedlock home, a function Tulkinghorn had taken on surreptitiously in his ritualistic role as family counselor. In the case of detection that eventually comes to dominate the plot of Bleak House, the threat of Lady Dedlock's duplicated image to the aura of the ancient Dedlock family is as great as that of her disreputable past. The stability of authentic identity (as figured in the anxiety over illegitimacy in the novel) and of the authentic aristocratic class (as symbolized in the "plating" of the original oil portrait) comes under attack in the novel. Indeed, the court's seemingly inherent inability to determine the authenticity of the Jarndyce will only reinforces the reader's sense that traditional institutions have failed as enforcers of cultural continuity and that new structures must develop to perform that role. Standing in the place cleared by the technology of the camera, then, the detective officer Mr. Bucket enters to solve a mystery of identity when the court fails to decipher the mystery of the will. By so doing, Mr. Bucket not only represents a new cultural authority but also defines its power as springing, not from the preservation of traditions, but from the production of images. He popularizes a picture of the detective as the expert professional who authenticates what the ancient court and the traditional oil portrait are no longer empowered to authenticate, discriminating between the real thing and the impostor with his own brand of instantaneous photographic portraiture. Bucket is distinguished not only by his eyes but also by his insistent forefinger, which, like the finger of Allegory engraved on the ceiling of the murder victim's rooms, is constantly pointing, directing others to look in a certain place, to see what he sees in the way that he sees it. The detective is more than a sharp-eyed observer; he allows, even requires, others to observe in the way he does. At the scene of the murder Bucket investigates, the figure of Allegory is described in this way: "There he is still, eagerly pointing and no one minds him. . . . All eyes look up at the Roman, and all voices murmur, 'If he could only tell what he saw'" (585). Bucket accomplishes exactly what Allegory cannot: he points out what he sees, proceeds to tell it, and commands everyone else to mind him by seeing things his way. Like the camera, Bucket is a technology not only of observation but of representation as well. So effective is his pointing finger in these linked processes that it disciplines the vision of others, constraining their eyes into a certain field, focusing them on a specific object or person or detail. "Look again," he says to Jo when the

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boy identifies Mademoiselle Hortense as his mysterious female visitor (282). "Look again," he insists, as he directs Jo to look only at the woman's hands this time, then to look only at her rings, in a gradual process of zooming in and framing and focusing the field of Jo's vision, a process that causes the boy to revise his first conclusion and affirm that these are not the hands of the woman who visited him that night. Compared with the hand he looks at now, that of the mysterious night visitor, Jo decides, "was a deal whiter, a deal delicater, and a deal smaller"; and unlike the maidservant's common jewels, the lady's brilliant rings were "a-sparkling all over" (282). Bucket corrects Jo's vision so that the boy sees what he could not see before: these are working-class hands rather than the hands of gentility, and these are cheap rings rather than the precious jewelry of a lady. In the course of having his vision corrected, that is, Jo is also made to look hard at and acknowledge the signs of class difference that distinguish a mere woman from a lady, a French maid from one of the "Divinities of Albion." Ironically, the detective seems to contradict the ideological implications of the very technology he embodies here. As the camera democratized the human image and transformed the portrait from an exclusive possession of the privileged classes to a commodity easily attainable by the middle class, Bucket's vision seems rather to reinforce the visual signs of class distinction in this scene. We might view Bucket's later failure to recognize Lady Dedlock when he pursues her with Esther through the streets of London, however, as an implicit critique of that sign system's authenticity and dependability, or at the least as an indication of its limitations. In failing to realize that the lady had simply changed clothes with a working-class woman, Bucket, like Jo in this earlier scene, wrongly assumed that the clothes make the lady, that the visual signs of gentility constitute dependable evidence of someone's identity.17 Together, these two incidents illustrate the real force of the analogy between camera and detective: the way both signal the transformation of the visual image from a self-celebration and an index of selfproclaimed authenticity to a form of bureaucratic surveillance and identification whose decoding demands the interpretive expertise and authority of a professional. They demonstrate that what we see and how we value it result from mechanisms and conventions that can be altered as dramatically as changing a camera lens alters the field of the eye's vision. When Mr. Bucket arrests Mademoiselle Hortense, another workingclass woman who had once disguised herself as a lady, the detective is said to make "no demonstration except with the finger" as he shows the

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accused murderer where to sit. "Now, you see," Mr. Bucket informs the woman he now refers to as "the foreign female," "you're comfortable, and conducting yourself as I should expect a foreign young woman of your sense to do. So I'll give you a piece of advice, and it's this, Don't you talk too much. You're not expected to say anything here, and you can't keep too quiet a tongue in your head. In short, the less you Parlay the better, you know" (648). Bucket then explains to Sir Leicester that the woman's guilt "flashed upon me, as I sat opposite to her at the table and saw her with a knife in her hand" (649). In another of those seeming flash photographs or magic lantern images that imprint themselves on his mind, Bucket sees the culprit's guilty hands in the constricted way he taught Jo to see, indicting her with his finger and silencing her with the tale that only he can tell.18 And yet, as he speaks for the class by whom he is employed in this scene, he also speaks for the nation, projecting the guilt for the crime upon the body of the "foreign female," whose distinctively foreign manners and appearance form the visual evidence that justifies his suspicions of her. For all the complications of his character, Bucket is the single figure in Bleak House who is able not only to see through its infamously impenetrable fog, but to speak out of it as well—at once visualizing and telling the truth that otherwise remains invisible. While Bleak House was written after the advent of photography, it is set in the decade prior to Daguerre's and Talbot's announcements of their inventions. Dickens admired photography and knew as much about it as about the detective police, even if Bucket did not. Dickens even published articles on the subject simultaneous with his publication of Bleak House. His great detective, we may argue, stands in for the dreamed-of but as yet unrealized photographic technology in the novel (as the camera and its anonymous operator replace the detective in Fig. 51). What the narrator of Bleak House says of the railroad might also be said of photography: "As yet such things are non-existent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected" (654).19 Just as the detective's ubiquity and mobility anticipate the eventual pervasiveness of the railroad throughout the provinces, his visionary powers anticipate those of the portrait camera and the collodion photographic processes of the 1850s. "The eye," Dickens quotes a real detective as saying in a Household Words essay published the year before Bleak House, "is the great detector."20 Dickens refines the point by adding that "the experience of a Detective guides him into tracks quite invisible to other eyes" (369). And in another piece on the subject of criminal detection that appeared in the same journal soon after the novel was published, Dickens argues that if

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we were only "trained" to look correctly, we (like Bucket) would be able to recognize the criminal simply by looking at him. "Nature never writes in a bad hand," Dickens says. "Her writing, as it may be read in the human countenance, is invariably legible, if we come at all trained in reading it." 21 The detective's sharp eye and his persuasively pointing finger are the agents Bleak House offers for that training, teaching us to see the unseen in Lady Dedlock and in Mademoiselle Hortense as well, just as Bucket teaches the once-blind Esther to see the unseen when he brings her face-to-face with Lady Dedlock's corpse and points out to the daughter the body of her mother disguised as a working-class woman, lying on the grave of her nameless father. Throughout the text, Bucket's camera-eye does more than perceive and portray; it disciplines. The transformation of the camera from an agent of celebration to one of surveillance that Dickens negotiates in Bleak House is equally detectable in his treatment of the subject of photography in the pages of Household Words around the time of the novel's publication. During the 1850s, Dickens published two essays on the topic in his weekly journal. The first, "Photography," which appeared in 1853, about midway through the monthly publication of Bleak House, contains descriptions of the photographer and his "mysterious designs" that strongly resemble those of the detective in Dickens's novel.22 The writers of the article marveled at the achievements of this new technology, regarding it as both a magical art and a new science, dwelling on the amazing procedures by which the photographer was able to produce effortlessly "a thousand images of human creatures of each sex and of every age — such as no painter ever has produced" (54-55). The speed with which these portraits "burst suddenly into view" causes considerable awe in the authors, who affirm that it "would have given labour for a month to the most skilful of painters" to produce such results (55,58). The preoccupation in the article with photography as an advanced form of portrait painting recalls the centrality of the portrait in Bleak House and Guppy's obsession with the image imprinted on his mind and hanging in Krook's rooms. Despite its comparisons of the photographer's magic to the portraitist's skill, however, the article also manifests something ominous about the powers of this new technology. The photographer is referred to as a "taker of men" who, when asked about the origin of all these photographs — these "innumerable people whose eyes seemed to speak at us, but all whose tongues were silent" — affirms of the subjects that "they have all been executed here" (55). Unlike the oil portrait, somehow, the photograph not only silences its subjects but takes their lives as well.

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This more threatening power of the photographer becomes the focus of an article on photography that appeared in Household Words only four years later, provocatively titled "Photographees."23 Told from the point of view of the portrait photographer, it describes the camera's various subjects —the "photographees" —whom the photographer "composes" and ranks in order of their difficulty to capture in his lens. The article culminates with a description of the portraitist as policeman, recounting the time when the photographer was engaged to shoot "the most unwilling sitters whom I ever took" — a group of prisoners from "a certain north country gaol" (354). The pictures were commissioned to assist the authorities in recovering any of the prisoners who might escape the prison; the camera was deployed to "capture" their likeness and imprison them in "a portrait gallery of felons" (354). "The photographees did not like my interference one bit," the photographer affirms. "The machine seemed to remind them exceedingly of a bull's eye lantern, to which they had a very natural repugnance" (354). Like Mr. Snagsby looking in the glaring bull's-eye of that other "taker of men," Mr. Bucket, these subjects are arrested by the eye that takes their portrait and assures their imprisonment, intuitively recognizing the executionary power this technology exerts over them. If the first detective in the English novel is described as a camera, it was not long before the camera was described as a detective. A few years before Sherlock Holmes was introduced to the English public in 1887, a device called the "detective camera" was introduced into the marketplace in England. So named because it could be hidden in a walking stick or behind a buttonhole, the detective camera could be owned and operated by anyone without subjects' even knowing they were being "taken." Some of these new handheld cameras were advertised at reasonable prices in the very magazine that first published the Holmes stories, and some were even the subject of articles in that magazine about "the curiosities of modern photography" and its use in solving crimes.24 In the same volume of the Strand in which the first story of the Adventures was published, in fact, there also appeared an article on the "warranted detective camera," titled "London from Aloft," which hailed the machine's new improvements and looked forward to the day when "in time of war. . . one might snap the merry camera on the wrathsome foe below in all his dispositions and devices, and in good safety drop the joyous bombshell on the top of his hapless head —foresooth what fine thing must be that!" (Fig. 52).25 That the camera was imagined as a weapon of national defense as well as a source of truth could hardly be more graphically described than

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in this instance, where the snap of the shutter gives way to the explosion of the bombshell. Also in 1887, moreover, Blitzlichtpulver—flashlight powder—was invented in Germany for flash photography, which used guncotton and magnesium powder to provide an often dangerous explosion of light. At the same time, the dry-plate, fixed-focus photographic process of the detective camera was being perfected by Kodak, replacing the wet-plate process developed in 1851 and enabling amateurs and journalists alike to take instantaneous candid snapshots of people without their consent. So widespread was the practice that eventually the New York Times was prompted to complain about the invasion of privacy from "Kodakers lying in wait." 26 In England, meanwhile, the Weekly Times and Echo applauded the formation of a "Vigilance Association" in 1893 whose sole purpose was the "thrashing of cads with cameras who go about in seaside places taking snapshots of ladies emerging from the deep."27 Self-appointed vigilante groups were formed, that is, to police the unauthorized deployment of this policing technology. In light of this response, the term "detective camera" appeared most appropriate for these devices, since in taking someone's picture, these cameras, like the private eyes they were named after, also took possession of the subject's identity and took authority over the presentation of the self. It is equally appropriate, then, that photographs should play a prominent role in the accounts of the greatest English literary detective. In the very first story of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes ("A Scandal in Bohemia"), the master detective is not hired to recover a missing gem, protect a threatened head of state, or investigate a murder. He is commissioned by a king to procure a photograph. The possession of the photograph is of such "extreme importance," Holmes's client predicts, that it will have a significant "influence on European history" (15). The personal photograph, this tale acknowledges, has profound historical and political implications. When the king of Bohemia appears in disguise in the beginning of "A Scandal" to request that Holmes protect him from ruin by the actress with whom the king had become romantically entangled, Holmes immediately sees through the king's disguise. He does not see, however, why the king is so concerned that the "adventuress" will blackmail him and destroy his plan to marry the princess of Scandinavia because, it appears to Holmes, this Miss Irene Adler has nothing "to prove" the "authenticity" of her claims against the king's reputation. Handwriting can be forged, Holmes assures him, personal notepaper stolen, the royal seal imitated. There is really nothing to worry about. But when Holmes learns that the king has had a photograph

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taken of himself in the company of the woman in question, the detective recognizes the danger. "Oh, dear!" he exclaims. "That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an indiscretion. . . . You have compromised yourself seriously" (17). The usually unflappable Holmes's extreme reaction to the power of the photograph to authenticate and to threaten is striking here, especially since immediately before his interview with the king, Holmes himself has (like his predecessor, Detective Bucket) been described to us as a kind of camera. Not only is Holmes introduced by Watson in the beginning of the story as "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has ever seen," but he is also identified by the doctor as a "sensitive instrument" in possession of "his own high-power lenses" (Fig. 53), which are capable of "extraordinary powers of observation" (19). It is only fitting, then, that the object of Holmes's quest in the first of his adventures should be a photograph. And it is just as appropriate that at the conclusion of his investigation Holmes should request of his royal client another photograph (of Irene Adler alone in evening dress) as payment for his services. The purpose and the end product of the detective's labor, in other words, are equated in this tale with the purpose and end product of the camera. What is it, then, that this powerful, personified camera "sees" and fears in the photograph he sets out to take on behalf of his client? Paradoxically, not only does Holmes recognize the photograph as a piece of incontestable evidence, as a genuine index to truth and "authenticity," but he also perceives it immediately as a powerful weapon with which the truth can be manipulated. "The photograph becomes a doubleedged weapon now," he observes to Watson when he learns of Miss Adler's sudden marriage to an English lawyer named Godfrey Norton. "The chances are that she would be as averse to its being seen by Mr. Godfrey Norton, as our client is to its coming to the eyes of his Princess. Now the question is —Where are we to find the photograph?" (25). Even if Irene Adler's new circumstances make her prefer to suppress rather than reveal the photograph in question, the picture remains a dangerous weapon, and the king is still willing to "give one of the provinces of my kingdom to have that photograph" (18). The king realizes that this image of himself must be possessed so that it can be disowned. He is convinced that the history of Europe is at stake. In a narrative in which no one is quite who they appear to be, where the client, the detective, and the suspect all wear disguises, this ultimate visual index of "authenticity" can be deployed as a deceptive weapon. It must be bought, Holmes first recommends when he learns of Miss Adler's possession of

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the photograph; failing that, he says, it must be stolen. Even if this particular picture is no longer a direct threat against his client, Holmes knows that whoever possesses it controls the truth —and can thus influence the course of history. When Holmes first considers the photograph the king engages him to retain, before even seeing it he realizes that, like him, it represents a powerful representational technology. It may stand at once as a proof of "authenticity" and as a "weapon" of manipulation that gives its possessor significant power. But in the other photograph of Irene, which replaces the first, he sees exacdy what the king sees—the woman. He sees the essential qualities of the feminine captured in a single image. "To Sherlock Holmes," Watson begins the narrative cryptically, referring to Miss Adler as the subject of this photograph, "she is always the woman." Irene Adler holds this privileged place for Holmes, we are led to believe by Watson, because the great detective who spurns all emotional involvement is romantically attracted to her—and only to her. This attraction explains why in the first of the adventures, Holmes uncharacteristically fails to attain his objective and is deceived himself. Emotional involvement produces "grit in a sensitive instrument" like Holmes, Watson tells us, "or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses" (9). This is why "A Scandal in Bohemia" is the exception that proves the rule of the great detective's infallibility, and why, having been outwitted by Irene Adler, Holmes henceforth remains a resolutely cold and unemotional "machine." But such an explanation only begs the question. Why is Irene Adler the sole woman to catch Holmes's eye (and put the crack in his lens)? Why does she stand for "the woman" in his mind? Irene Adler has this power for the perfect observing machine because for him she is first and foremost a photograph. Or, to be precise, she is two photographs: the one Holmes was hired (and failed) to obtain and the one he requests (and receives) as payment for his services. Irene Adler outwits Holmes by substituting the second photograph for the first. Since for Holmes, she was said to always be the woman, it is only right that she should deceive him and foil his plan by disguising herself as a man, thereby forcing the detective to give himself away unawares. Irene is a threat not only because she is a commoner who can embarrass royalty, but also because she is the woman who can be mistaken for a man —because she challenges the detective's perceptions of her and her conformity to certain gendered codes of behavior. As Bucket is deceived for a moment by a lady's disguise as a laborer, Holmes is momentarily deceived by a woman's disguise as a man. That brief lapse foils Holmes's

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whole plan of attack and denies him the photograph he originally set out to possess. In the course of explaining his plan for solving the case to Watson, Holmes indicates that he knows exactly how women behave, and that this knowledge is the basis of his entire strategy: they are "naturally secretive," he declares to Watson, and this distinctively female characteristic will trick Irene into showing him where she has hidden the photograph. "When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfecdy overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it" (28). Holmes concocts his scheme, confident that women are perfectly predictable creatures ruled by instinct and impulse, fundamentally unlike the men who know how to take advantage of these traits. When Irene appears at Holmes's own front door dressed as a young man in a coat and hat rather than as a woman in evening dress, therefore, Holmes literally does not see her. H e observes her but he does not see her, because he observes the visual laws that prescribe the way a woman should appear rather than describe the way she is. Holmes had reasoned that a cabinet photograph of the kind he sought was too large to be hidden on Irene Adler's person. So large did the image loom in his mind, it would seem, that he sees only the photograph when he should be seeing her body. As it turns out, the photographic image was not hidden on Irene's body; her body itself was hidden (at least from Holmes) by the photographic image of her as "the woman" as it was imprinted on his mind. When Irene Adler foils Holmes's plan to recover the photograph and sneaks away with it, she leaves behind a note that explains how she fooled him into giving himself away. "Male costume is nothing new to me," she says. " I often take advantage of the freedom which it gives" (31). "As to the photograph," she goes on to explain, " I kept it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might take in the future." Like male costume, the photograph that puts the woman in the same frame with the king serves as a cloak of freedom for her. But the resourceful actress also leaves behind for the king this other photograph "which he might care to possess" —the one of herself in evening dress. It is Holmes, however, not the king, who wants this picture of the woman alone in what we might call "female costume." In this photograph, Irene Adler may be safely captured as the more predictable feminine sexual object Holmes imagines (and desires) her to be. "This photograph," Holmes says, he "should value even more highly" than the crown jewels the king offers

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him in payment for his troubles at the end of the case. If the first photograph in the case is a weapon Irene Adler will use to safeguard and secure herself, this second photograph is a weapon Holmes can use to safeguard and secure his image of the woman. "And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable tide of the woman," Watson repeats in the tale's final sentence. For Holmes, that is, the photograph does not just represent the woman; it is the woman. Tucked away in his file, the photograph becomes a replacement for the person. But this photograph is also a reminder to us, if not to Holmes, that the Victorian ideology of gender blinded even the most perfect observing machine in the world, that it produced limitations on vision that even Holmes had to "observe." 28 In many of the Holmes stories that follow "A Scandal in Bohemia," photography figures prominendy as a means to secure an identity, unmask an impostor, or substantiate an accusation in "The Man with the Twisted Lip," "Silver Blaze," "Yellow Face," and "The Cardboard Box," for example. Fittingly, however, in the first story of the last Holmes volume, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, a photograph of a woman is once again the object of Holmes's investigation, and once again photography is acknowledged not only as a form of evidence but also as a weapon of manipulation. As in the earlier case, Holmes is hired to defend the honor of a royal client who wishes to remain anonymous. But "The Case of the Illustrious Client" offers an ironic commentary on its predecessor, for in the later case the avid collector of photographs is neither the detective, nor the client, nor the police but an internationally renowned criminal—"the Austrian murderer," Baron Gruner. Among the cruel man's vices, it seems, is womanizing, an activity Gruner records in a book of photographs. "This man collects women," we are told by one of his victims, "as some men collect moths or butterflies. He had it all in that book. Snapshot photographs, names, details, everything about them." 29 Just as police departments and detective agencies were assembling books of criminal mug shots to aid their investigations, this criminal keeps an archive of his illustrious victims' portraits, which he uses to blackmail the women once he has disposed of them. "The moment the woman told us of it," Holmes says of this book of photographs, " I realized what a tremendous weapon it was" (998). In this case the weapon of photography is aimed at the British royal family rather than a European monarch, and at the risk of his own life Holmes rescues that weapon from foreign hands. Whereas "A Scandal in Bohemia" threatens Holmes's reputation by handing him one of his rare defeats, this other case threatens his very life when his snapshot-collecting

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antagonist seriously wounds him. In both cases, however, the detective is hired to obtain photographic evidence for "an illustrious client," aligning himself with the interests of an ancient nobility by getting control of a modern technology.30 In these foundational texts in the history of Victorian detective fiction, photography both observes and defends late-nineteenth-century European class privilege (as Lady Dedlock's portrait becomes a clue in the detection of her common "criminal" past) and gender difference (as Irene Adler challenges Holmes's "natural" categories of differentiation between men and women as exhibited in her photograph, even as she threatens European royalty). Realigning the framework of patriarchal power and defining themselves as the rightful replacements for debased legal authorities, Bucket and Holmes represent new forms of privilege and power, qualities invested now in a class of professionals (like themselves) who are legitimized by their expertise rather than their birth. These literary detectives not only represent that class but also secure and safeguard it with the high-power lenses through which they observe the world and convert it into images subject to their expert surveillance. Repeatedly, the technology they embody is focused upon the body of a woman, the representation and possession of which either enables the maintenance or threatens the subversion of established categories of class and gender. Throughout these narratives of detection and enforcement, then, the photograph figures as a contested site of power and representational authority, just as it increasingly did in actual police practice in the nineteenth century. Assertions like Poe's about photography's scientific character and its power to capture rather than simply represent the real prefigured these eventual applications of photography to criminal identification, prisoner documentation, and courtroom evidence. As the texts examined here demonstrate, however, in addition to popularizing this notion of photography as evidence and authentication, detective fiction also made clear that the photograph could be a weapon for control and coercion.31 Indeed, police work was one of the first public uses to which the new technology of photography was put when the portraitist Mathew Brady was commissioned in 1846 to photograph criminals for a British textbook on criminology.32 Later in the century, police departments in Europe and America alike adopted Alphonse Bertillon's archival system for organizing criminal information, a system based on the portraitparlé, or "talking picture," a card consisting of a photograph of the criminal accompanied by a set of vital statistics by which he could be identified with certainty (Fig. 54). Whatever the suspect might claim

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about himself, the assumption was, his photograph could "talk" too, and would invariably tell the real truth about him. The links between the methods of Bertillon and those of Holmes are clear enough to be registered explicitly in the Holmes stories themselves. When in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty" Holmes speaks with Watson about Bertillon, he expresses his "enthusiastic admiration of the French savant."33 Later, in "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (a tale in which identifying a family portrait plays a central role), Holmes's client refers to Bertillon and Holmes as the two "highest experts in Europe" in criminal investigation, citing Bertillon as "the man of precisely scientific mind" and Holmes as the "practical man of affairs."34 Indeed, their careers were almost exactly contemporary since Bertillon was just rising to prominence in the Paris Prefect of Police office when Holmes was introduced to the public in the pages of the Strand. Holmes, the practitioner of Bertillon's theory, was also the popularizer of his method, which included the application of photography to police work. As is demonstrated by the widespread deployment of the portrait parte (or mug shot) and the rogues' gallery as forms of criminal identification, photography was appropriated in the nineteenth century by police and detective forces alike as an instrument of dependable intelligence and as a basis for conclusive proof, effectively transferring the suspect's right to tell his own story to an official agent of the government. If Bertillon's use of photography to distinguish one individual from another depends upon and reinforces the authenticating virtues of photography, however, Sir Francis Galton's somewhat earlier introduction of composite photography to render the portrait of a "criminal type" emphasizes photography's disciplinary and controlling powers. One of the more imaginative and revealing deployments of photography in the emerging science of criminology, Galton's composite photography sought to visualize and "bring into evidence" all the traits of the typical criminal, much as criminologists like Lombroso or Havelock Ellis did in identifying the "stigmata" that mark the "born criminal." When Ellis uses one of Galton's composites as the frontispiece to the first edition of The Criminal, the pioneering book on criminal anthropology in England, he makes the relation between the two fields of inquiry explicit (Fig. 55).35 The observing machine Galton invented, like those of Dickens or Doyle, disciplined the observer's eye, making certain invisible features visible and making certain visible features disappear. Galton's account of the technique's capabilities seems to invoke Dickens's and Doyle's descriptions of their visually gifted detectives: "A composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before the mind's eye of

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a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in an exalted degree." 36 Galton first described the procedure for making these photographs in 1878, in a paper tracing the idea to a stereoscopic technique in which cartes de visite from two different people were used to create the illusion of a single face with the attributes of both persons. He gradually refined the procedure to superimpose many portraits of criminals on a single negative to produce pictures of what he called a criminal type. The images so produced "represent not the criminal," he cautions, "but the man who is liable to fall into crime" (224). "These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality," Galton would nevertheless maintain. "Nobody who glanced at one of them for the first time would doubt its being the likeness of a living person, yet, as I have said, it is no such thing; it is the portrait of a type and not of an individual" (222). The machine Galton devised to achieve this visualizing power was based on a principle of redundancy. When he photographed the carefully registered portraits of various criminals in succession on a single plate, he reasoned that whatever traits were common to all the criminal faces would reinforce one another and appear with more definition on the final print, while the eccentric features of a single individual would appear only once and therefore would effectively disappear in a blur on the final print: "The effect of composite portraiture is to bring into evidence all the traits in which there is agreement, and to leave but a ghost of a trace of individual peculiarities" (7). " I have made numerous composites of various groups of convicts, which are interesting negatively rather than positively," he continues. "They produce faces of a mean description, with no villainy written on them. The individual faces are villainous enough, but they are villainous in different ways, and when they are combined, the individual peculiarities disappear, and the common humanity of a low type is all that is left" (11). In Galton's reasoning, as in his photographs, the individual becomes ontologically secondary to the primary reality of the type of which he or she is an example, even though the type is itself constructed from the assembled individuals. For Galton this "type" is not a fiction even if it is a construction. Indeed, the composite photograph his camera produces appears real to many people because, Galton argues, in a sense it is. The composite photograph reveals some essential truth, it "brings into evidence," as he puts it, truths otherwise invisible to the eye. Galton uses the rhetoric of the "type," the "ideal," and the "generic" to suggest the higher reality of an abstract yet authentic human norm, compared to which individuals are reduced to ghosdy traces, existing literally as mere shadows of the more substantial type. Instead of the photograph's "perfect identity"

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with the subject it represents that Poe proclaimed, Galton's composite photograph achieves greater reality and truth than its individual subjects ever could. For Galton, the photograph of the type is the real thing, and whatever constitutes the individual is reduced to an insignificant blur: Composite pictures, are, however, much more than averages; they are rather the equivalents of those large statistical tables whose totals, divided by the number of cases, and entered in the bottom line, are the averages. They are real generalisations, because they include the whole of the material under consideration. The blur of their outlines, which is never great in truly generic composites, except in unimportant details, measures the tendency of individuals to deviate from the central type. (233) In Galton's hands, the camera is wielded like a weapon to enforce and defend a particular conception of the criminal type and of reality as well. His images not only make the deviant equivalent to the criminal, they train every individual to be subject to the tyranny of types (normal and criminal) and to view every other individual with the eyes of a suspicious detective. By taking persons out of their concrete historical circumstances and locating them in some timeless zone of photographic reality, Galton is able to investigate the mind as well as the body of the criminal and to expose us to the process at the same time. "My argument is," he asserts, that the generic images that arise before the mind's eye, and the general impressions which are faint and faulty editions of them, are the analogues of these composite pictures which we have the advantage of examining at leisure, and whose peculiarities and character we can investigate, and from which we may draw conclusions that shall throw much light on the nature of certain mental processes which are too mobile and evanescent to be directly dealt with. (232) It is easy to see how a technique that so seamlessly elides the barrier between imagination and fact and ignores any fundamental distinction between individual identity and collective "character" could be put to use in Galton's argument for a policy of eugenics to improve the race and to fortify the nation. Indeed, the book in which Galton first used the term "eugenics" and elaborated its principles begins with a chapter describing the technique of composite photography and its importance in demonstrating how "the innate moral and intellectual faculties" are "closely bound up with the physical ones" {Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 1883). It is also easy to see how the authenticating and disciplinary function of photography suggested by the perfect observing machines Mr. Bucket and Sherlock Holmes (who merely moni-

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tored gender and class difference) could develop into a nightmare of policing and control aimed at purifying a race and typing individuals. Like their literary counterparts, Victorian scientists made use of Victorian cameras to teach the world to see in new ways, to observe laws of vision that often obscured as much as they illuminated. The photograph and the literary detective, like the fingerprint and the entire discipline of criminology, may be thought of as allied forms of cultural defense in which the bodies of persons were systematically rendered into legible texts and then controlled by the experts, who alone knew how to read them. When we look at those nineteenth-century photographs, and at the machines that took them, we must remember that these images were generated to make us notice certain things about history by making us blind to other things.

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(Oil)

Fig. +8. Engraving by R. T. Sperry from Helen Campbell, Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows ofNew York Life (Hartford, Connecticut: A. D. Worthington, 1892), introducing the chapter by Thomas Byrnes from the "Famous Detective's Thirty Years Experiences and Observations." The engravings for the book were made "from photographs taken from life expressly for this work, mosdy by flash-light." Recalling the scenes of Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, the flash of the detective's bull's-eye here resembles the flash by which the original photograph would have been taken.

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Fig. 49. George Cruikshank, wood engraving of Richard Beard's public photographic portrait studio in London, 1842, the first such studio in Europe. Beard franchised the business throughout London and the provinces between 1841 and 1850, by which time the considerable fortune he had accumulated was exhausted by protracted lawsuits against infringers of his copyright. Photograph courtesy of the Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

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Fig. 50. Jacob A. Riis, "Photographing a Rogue: Inspector Byrnes Looking On." Byrnes's use of the portrait for his famous rogues' gallery anticipated the widespread use of the portrait parlé of Bcrtillon in police departments and the files of mug shots that would form the basis of criminal records in Europe and America. Photograph: The Jacob A. Riis Collection, Museum of the City of New York; used with permission.

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Fig. ji. Drawing by R. T. Sperry, "An Unwilling Subject —Photographing a Prisoner for the Rogue's Gallery at Police Headquarters" (1892). This engraved version of Figure 50 (demonstrating Byrnes's technique of coerced and resisted portraiture) replaces the detective at the left in the photograph with the photographer and his camera, suggesting their interchangeability. Like Figure 48, this engraving illustrates the chapter of Byrnes's recollections in Darkness and Light.

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Fig. 52. Honore Daumier, "Nadar Raising Photography to the Height of Art," lithograph, 1862. Nadar is credited with taking the first aerial photograph (in 1850) and was one of the first to use arc light for flash photography in the early 1860s. As the Strand. Magazine article attests, the aerial photograph would, in 1890s England, become a form of national surveillance and defense as well as an elevated art. Photograph courtesy of the Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

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Fig. 53. D. H. Friston's frontispiece for the first edition of A Study in Scarlet is the first depiction of Sherlock Holmes. It pictures him with the high-powered lens with which he would always be identified.

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Fig. 54. In this illustration from Anthropologie Métrique, the bôok Alphonse Bertillon co-authored with A. Chervin (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1909), the camera resembles a machine of execution or interrogation as much as a form of representation. Bertillon's system was deployed by law-enforcement agencies, anthropologists, and even missionaries to monitor, scrutinize, and control the criminal (or foreigner).

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LONDON: WALTER SCOTT, 24 WARWICK LANE,

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Fig. 55. The frontispiece for the first edition of Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (1890), employs one of Sir Francis Galton's composite photographs to represent "the criminal type."

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Notes 1. Arthur Con an Doyle, " A Scandal in Bohemia," in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 9. 2. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 220. 3. " A Case of Identity," The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 42. 4. John Tagg, The Burden ofRepresentation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 64. 5. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: M I T Press, 1991), 17. 6. " A Scandal in Bohemia," The Adventures ofSherlock Holmes, 11. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 7. These two essays appeared in the April and May 1840 issues of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, which merged later that year into Graham's Magazine, where "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" was published in April 1841. 8. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Daguerreotype," Alexander's Weekly Magazine, January 15,1840. 9. For a discussion of what Lacan calls "the fallacious complementarity of the glance" in Poe's tale, see Barbara Johnson's investigation of Lacan's and Derrick's exchange on the subject in "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida," in Psychoanalysis and the Question ofthe Text, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 149-71. 10. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Purloined Letter," Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 213. 11. Other, earlier, Dickens novels contained characters who performed investigations. Mr. Nadgett of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) is one example, a man also distinguished by his powers of observation: "he saw so much," we are told, "every button on his coat might have been an eye" (chapter 38). Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) mentions a minor character who is an officer of the Detective Service. But Bucket is generally regarded as the first fictional police officer in the detective branch of the English police force to play a significant part in an English novel. 12. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New York: Norton, 1977), 275. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 13. That the magic lantern was a device used to create visual images before photography but came into its own once photographic images could be projected by it reinforces the point I make below: since this novel is set before but written after the invention of photography, Bucket stands as a personified harbinger of that technology. 14. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 59. 15. For a detailed study of the impact of the carte de visite on European society, see Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A. A. E. Disderi and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

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16. Benjamin, 220. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 17. Audrey Jaffe demonstrates how in "The Man with the Twisted Lip" Sherlock Holmes inhabits a similar contradiction. "The story raises the possibility that the gentleman and the beggar are the same only to repudiate it," she claims; "its ostensibly democratizing identification of the two figures, like that of Victorian popular ideology in general, in fact [is] the expression of anxiety about such potential transformation" ("Detecting the Beggar: Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Mayhew, and 'The Man with the Twisted Lip,'" Representations 31 [Summer 1990]: 107). 18. Flash photography would not be practiced regularly until the invention of flashlight powder in Germany in 1887. As early as 1867, however, Timothy H. O'Sullivan would use dangerous and unpredictable magnesium flares to illuminate his subjects in the mines and caves of the Sierra Nevada (see Newhall, 94-95,133). Once more Bucket seems to anticipate the eventual possibilities and deployments of a technology that had only recently been invented. 19. See T. W. Hill's note in the Norton critical edition of Bleak House, establishing the novel's setting in the 1830s, a finding based upon the development of the railroad in rural England (654). 20. W. H. Wills and Charles Dickens, "The Modern Science of ThiefTaking," Household Words 1 (13 July 1850): 371. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 21. Charles Dickens, "The Demeanor of Murderers," Household Words 13 (14 June 1856): 505. 22. Henry Morley and W. H. Wills, "Photography," Household Words 7 (19 March 1853): 55. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 23. John Payn, "PhotographeesHousehold Words 16 (10 October 1857): 35254. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 24. John Tagg, The Burden ofRepresentation, 53. 25. "London From Aloft," Strand Magazine 2 (1887): 492-98. 26. Quoted in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 187. 27. Quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 135. 28. Derek Longhurst has argued that women in the Holmes canon are generally rendered as both the agents and victims of criminality based upon a certain conception of "natural" gender difference. Whenever women, who are understood to be essentially passive, become active figures, they violate the natural (as well as the social) order. See Longhurst, "Sherlock Holmes: Adventures of an English Gentleman, 1887-1894," in Gender, Genre, and Narrative Pleasure, ed. Derek Longhurst (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 51-66. 29. Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Case of the Illustrious Client," in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, c. 1930), 2:990. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 30. So profound was Doyle's own belief in the authority of photography and in its value for protecting ancient powers that he ardendy defended his belief in fairies and the spirit world with the evidence of spirit photography. See Doyle, "Fairies Photographed," Strand Magazine 60 (December 1920): 463-68, and "The Evidence for Fairies," Strand Magazine 61 (March 1921): 199-206.

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31. Catherine Belsey has shown that this same ambivalence between authentication and manipulation occupies the Holmes stories' frequent textual digressions about their own truth and fictionality. "Through their transgression of their own values of explicitness and verisimilitude," she claims, "the Sherlock Holmes stories contain within themselves an implicit critique of their limited nature as characteristic examples of classic realism" ("Deconstructing the Text: Sherlock Holmes," in Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading, ed. Tony Bennett [London: Routledge, 1990], 284). 32. Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," in The Contest ofMeaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 348.

33. Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty," in The Memoirs ofSherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 221. 34. Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Hound of the Baskervilles," in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, c. 1930), 2:672-73. 35. See Allan Sekula's elaborate and informative treatment of the uses of photography by Bertillon (the "compulsive systematizer") and Galton (the "compulsive quantifier"). Sekula makes a case for the centrality of these two figures in establishing the concept of the photographic archive as a means to honor the bourgeois self and delimit the terrain of a threatening other ("The Body and the Archive," 353-75). 36. Francis Galton, "Composite Portraiture," in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: J. M. Dent, n.d.), 223-24. First published in 1883. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.

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HOMANS

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

[Acknowledging] one important truth [will make a successful marriage]—it is the superiority of your husband as a man. It is quite possible thatyou may have more talent, with higher attainments. .. but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man. Sarah Ellis, The Wives ofEngland, 1843 Since the Queen didfor herself for a husband "propose," The ladies will all do the same, I suppose; Their days of subserviency now will be past, For all will "speakfirst"as they always did last! Since the Queen has no equal, "obey" none she need, So ofcourse at the altarfrom such vow she'sfreed; And the women will allfollow suit, so they say— "Love, honour," they'll promise, but never— "obey." 1841 London street ballad

What made it possible, at a time when women were meant to "obey," for a woman to occupy the throne of England for sixty-three years and to leave the monarchy's domestic and international prestige, if not its political authority, enhanced? Despite notable exceptions, women were never meant to be Britain's monarchs. The throne is patrilineal. Dorothy Thompson indicates how peculiar it is "that in a century in which male dominion and the separation of spheres into sharply defined male and female areas became entrenched in the ideology of all classes, a female in the highest office in the nation seems to have been almost universally accepted."1 Adrienne Auslander Munich points out in particular that the idea of "maternal monarchy seems absurd," an outrageous mingling of separate spheres that created a "gap in representability" to be filled by one paradox after another.2 And yet 169

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it is also arguable, by analogy with Nancy Armstrong's contention "that the modern individual was first and foremost a woman," 3 that—quite apart from the historical accident of Queen Victoria's reigning from 1837 to 1901 — the modern British monarch was first and foremost a woman: to be specific, a middle-class wife. The characteristics required of the monarch of a nineteenth-century parliamentary democracy were those also required of middle-class wives, and if a married woman had not occupied the throne for most of the century, the monarchy would have needed some other way of associating itself with wifeliness. Just like a middle-class wife, the monarch was obliged (beginning in the seventeenth century, but increasingly so) not to intervene in politics. Like a middle-class wife spending her husband's income, she was expected to spend the wealth of her nation in a manner that displayed both its economic strength and her dependency.4 She had to serve as public, highly visual symbol of national identity and of her nation's values, just as a middle-class wife might be expected to display her husband's status. She had to be available for idealization and, by the same token, to be manifesdy willing to relinquish active agency in political affairs, so that others could perform remarkable deeds in her name, as when, for example, in 1871 Disraeli presented the crown of empire to his Fairy Queen. As the nation's wife, Britain's nineteenth-century monarch had to be a married woman. To look at the matter from another angle, female monarchy posed numerous representational problems, as Munich argues, but those problems and others could be resolved if the queen was a wife. Britain, finding itself under female rule, capitalized on the desire to limit female power by making that the alibi for limiting (but not eliminating) the monarchy's powers and entidements. By presenting herself as a wife, Queen Victoria offered the perfect solution to Britain's fears of both female rule and excessive monarchic power. At the same time, as if in compensation, the monarchy acquired what is granted to middle-class wives in exchange for their loss of economic and social autonomy: that ambiguous resource early Victorian ideologues call influence.5 Through Victoria, the monarchy embraced the limitation of its powers to symbolic ones, and flourished as a result. Historians generally agree that the Victorian monarchy succeeded— that is, survived into the twentieth century when other European monarchies disappeared —despite Victoria's unpopularity from the death of Prince Albert to the first Jubilee, thanks to its popular representation as middle-class, domestic, and patriotic, in contrast to the profligate and foreign royalty of the previous generation (see Thompson, 87). In this

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essay I explore some specific ways in which Victoria's gender and marital status enabled such representations during the early part of her reign, simultaneously creating the appearance of limited female and monarchic power and expanding the monarchy's symbolic power and ideological influence. The monarchy succeeded because of its transformation into a popular spectacle during the nineteenth century; during that time the association of royal spectacle and middle-class practices and values came to seem the permanent hallmark of the royal family.6 This spectacle depended for its effectiveness on Victoria's gender. A woman is perhaps more readily transformed into spectacle at any historical period; the Victorians, in the period I examine, were treated, specifically and paradoxically, to the spectacle of royal domestic privacy, a privacy that centered on the ever-plumper figure of their queen as wife and mother. Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert both enabled and complicated her impersonation of the woman her nation needed. Just as Victoria both functioned publicly as the nation's wife and was herself, in private, a wife, she both publically impersonated a domestic woman and really was one. But these public roles are inversely, or at any rate not causally, related to the private versions of them. On the one hand, to pursue the analogy to Nancy Armstrong's argument that the modern individual was a woman, Victoria could be said to have had no larger share of power than that of the average woman Armstrong has in mind, a conduit for the sort of power a Foucauldian reading attributes to all — great, perhaps, but unrelated to individual empowerment or agency. On the other hand, she was unique, a woman whose life was related to ordinary female domesticity only by analogy and masterful tricks of representation, with powers that included her having —if any individual could be said to have it—individual agency. If it was not because she was a domestic woman that she appeared to be one, it was still because she was an ordinary woman in another sense: her representational powers could not exceed those of any other citizen. She could only manipulate her image to the extent that her culture made it possible for her to do so. Queen Victoria's resemblance to a middle-class wife made her seem ordinary, but the meaning and effectiveness of that resemblance depended on the contrast with her extraordinariness. As she acknowledges in a letter, her ordinariness is at once genuine and deliberate, that of a unique individual empowered to be exemplary: "they say no Sovereign was more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say), and that, from our happy domestic home — which gives such a good example."7 She represents palatial Balmoral Castle and Osborne House—purchased and renovated at great expense to the nation—as homes and herself as an ordi-

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nary woman who adored her husband and took an uncommon interest in raising her children. For state occasions she preferred wearing a bonnet to wearing a crown, and she preferred her wedding lace and veil to the robes of state.8 For her Jubilee procession in 1887 she horrified her family by refusing to wear anything more glamorous than her black widow's dress. But the rituals for which she chose such costumes were no less costly for her dowdy tastes, and a queen in a bonnet cuts a very different figure from a commoner in a bonnet; in Victoria's case, the crown is visible by its absence. Whether Victoria's own agency constructed this imposture or it was constructed for her by social forces operating independent of her can never be established. Her choosing to seem ordinary may have been both the act of a remarkably shrewd and inventive monarch, accurately discerning the only route available to effective monarchical power, and the role given her by the culture that produced her. The most that can be said is that she performed certain gestures of self-representation in conceit with other representations of her in the media, gestures that were legible and efficacious only because they coincided with representations already in place. Sarah Ellis's writing on the newly crowned Victoria suggests that for her contemporaries Victoria both produced "the royal image" and was subjected to the Victorian construction of her as of all women. Ellis sees Victoria at once as the epitome of the "influence" that serves as the alibi for containing women within the domestic sphere, not differentiating between Victoria's powers and those of her female subjects, and as unique authorizing agent of that containment. The women of England must "prove to their youthful sovereign, that whatever plan she may think it right to sanction for the moral advancement of her subjects . . . will be . . . faithfully supported in every British home by the female influence prevailing there."9 Victoria is at once an exemplary construct of Victorian ideology and its fantasized author. Queen Victoria appears to have shared with her subjects a collective fantasy about her own powers and her agency that is to be identified neither with a specific state or royal authority nor with the cultural power all subjects have. Whatever individual agency monarchs have takes the form, by the time of Victoria, of influencing ideological shifts. For Victoria this power lay in manipulating the spectacle of royalty, as well as in being manipulated by it. Serious-minded middle-class domesticity was becoming the behavioral norm for her nation, and in acting for the public like members of the middle class, Victoria and Albert could be said to have "encouragefd] trends which were already devel-

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oping" (Thompson, 87-88). She helped her nation to become powerful and prosperous by helping it see itself as a middle-class nation, just as she smoothed the transition to a wholly symbolic monarchy that would have taken place with or without her in the nineteenth century. For Victoria's monarchy to become and remain popular, the potential disadvantage of a woman on the throne — specifically, the fears of female rule that a queen regnant would inspire — had to turn into an advantage for the monarchy's middle-class imposture. This, Victoria's early marriage made possible (while, as we shall see, it also perpetuated those fears in other, though less potent, forms). It was possible for her subjects to read her marriage as no different from any other, as a form of privatization through which women were defined as the complements and subordinates of men. Her marriage subdued anxieties about female rule and at the same time made her a model for the middle class because gender hierarchy was becoming a hallmark specifically of the middleclass family. When Sarah Ellis writes that a wife must recognize "the superiority of [her] husband as a man," in the passage quoted as the first epigraph of this essay, she directly addresses, and simultaneously constructs, the category of middle-class wives. Ellis's interest, like Victoria's, was explicidy in shaping the emerging middle class, and gender hierarchy in Victoria and Albert's "happy domestic home" would have helped establish the middle-class nature of that home. Popular representations of Victoria at the time of her coronation betray enormous and sometimes self-contradictory anxieties about female rule. Such apprehensions and the urgent need to see Victoria controlled by a husband are complexly dramatized in a pair of broadsheets from this time. In one, titled "Petticoats for Ever" and headed by the image of an enormously fat, menacing-looking woman (Fig. 56), two characters, Kitty and Joan, hold a conversation about the "wonders" the new queen will do "all in favour of the women." There will be a Parliament of women (with names like "Mother Mouthalmighty") and an act passed providing "that all women, married or single, are to have a roving commission, to go where they like, do as they like, and work when they like . . . and [that they] shall have . . . a gallon of cream of the valley each to drink health to the Queen." The fear is specifically of female bodily excess as well as of political misrule, although the threat posed by female rule is here defused by comic exaggeration. Another, and opposite, popular strategy for relieving anxieties about Victoria's accession was in effect to deny that a female monarch would rule at all. A second broadsheet, "The Coronation" (Fig. 57), represents the sentimental possibilities of seeing the queen as a simple woman.

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Celebrating her sincerely on her coronation day, this doggerel inserts Victoria firmly into the female sphere as dutiful daughter ("Tho' Victoria does the sceptre sway, / Her parent may she still obey") and into her female role as genetic link between generations of men: "E'er she resigns all earthly things, / Be mother to a line of Kings." The broadsheet closes with the image of a coronation, but it is, oddly, of a king, not a queen. The queen is merely a consort (it seems) sitting uncrowned next to him as he receives the crown, as if to suggest the role England would prefer for Victoria, whose portrait at the top of the page represents her as young, sweet, and unthreatening. But even this soothing image may betray an attendant fear: if the queen acts only as consort, as the closing image seems to hope, then the same image presents the danger that an actual consort may act as king. Taken together, the two broadsheets suggest that female rule is inescapably disadvantageous: being queen may give her powers improper to a woman, or a proper woman may be too weak a monarch. After Victoria's marriage, although it was constructed largely to allay fears of female rule and transform it into a source of middle-class imagery, these twin anxieties —that Victoria would exceed her domestic role and fail to do so —continued to surface, as the doggerel quoted as the second epigraph to this essay suggests. Victoria did, however, promise to obey Albert, contrary to the verse's assertion ("her promise to 'obey' the Prince was heard throughout the Chapel" 10 ), and its erroneous emphasis on her refusal to obey may stem from either the fear of such a refusal or, indeed, a wish for it. It would not do for Victoria to appear too much a private woman and Albert's subordinate, for fears of Albert's foreign loyalties were just as potent as fears of a woman's rule (see Thompson, 36-41). Another cartoon from the time of the marriage, titled "Trying It On" (Fig. 58), emphasizes the equal and opposite risks of her status as wife. This cartoon, in which Albert poses admiringly before a mirror wearing the crown of England, expresses the anxiety that the suspect foreigner —because (as he puts it in the cartoon's text) "vat is yours is mine, now ve are married" — will take over the monarchy. His threat may be in part defused by the presence of the mirror, which feminizes him by representing his vanity, and by the presence of sports equipment that suggests it is all just play, but Victoria looks on horrified and helpless. Victoria's marriage did on the whole consolidate the image of her as an ordinary and unthreatening woman, but representations of the royal couple had to balance reassurances of Victoria's domestication with those of her sovereignty. Victoria herself wrote ambivalently about the prospect of marriage in

VICTORIA'S SOVEREIGN OBEDIENCE

the abstract, and her feelings in some ways echoed those of her subjects. Anticipating those who feared Albert's taking over the monarchy, Victoria wrote in her diary: at present my feeling was quite against ever marrying. . . . marrying a subject was making yourself so much their equal. . . . I said I dreaded the thought of marrying; that I was so accustomed to have my own way, that I thought it was 10 to i that I shouldn't agree with any body.11 That she soon decided to consider marriage anyway suggests that she understood it as a giving up of personal autonomy that would nonetheless maintain or increase her powers. Most immediately, she wanted to get her dominating mother out of her household, and the only way to do so with propriety was to marry, thus substituting for her mother's rule another form of subordination, probably a greater one, and gaining one power only by losing another. A larger motive may have been her desire to stabilize her image as queen of a middle-class nation. Here again she enhances her particular form of rule, her power as symbol, only by taking the risk of giving away her power over herself. Perhaps in response to both popular anxieties and Victoria's own worries, representations of Victoria and Albert once they were married—commissioned portraits, cartoons, and other popular images alike —helped to disseminate a complex picture of royalty's superordinary domesticity, publicizing the monarchy as middle-class and its female identity as unthreateningly subjugated yet somehow reassuringly sovereign. That there was such a congruence between commercial and commissioned works suggests the reciprocal shaping, between the queen and her subjects, that I am arguing for: while the popular press enacts its power to shape her as England's middle-class queen, she too shapes her subjects in her own image. These images also support my argument that Victoria chose to hold her power in the only way open to her, by giving her power away. These images play on two conventions of hierarchy, one related to Victorian portraiture, the other, to protocol. First, height conveys power, so that portraits with both husband and wife seated or standing "naturally" represent the husband as the more authoritative (recall that Prince Charles had to stand on a step to tower appropriately over Lady Diana in their nuptial portrait). Typically in Victorian marital portraits the husband stands while the wife sits (or occasionally, in a convention that reads in essentially the same way, he sits center stage while she leans deferentially against the back of his chair), to emphasize their difference and perhaps also to suggest her bodily weakness and his strength.

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This convention runs counter to the second, however, that the monarch may sit while others stand, while no one may sit in her presence unless invited. Victoria's sitting or standing, in other words, can represent, simultaneously and ambiguously, her power as sovereign and her subordination as wife. Complicating the question is the Victorian revival of chivalric conventions, whereby the woman's elevation may represent not her power but "a tactical inversion of the real relations of power . . . a strategy for reconciling women to the facts of gender relations [in marriage], that they are called goddesses by the men because they are going to have to treat the men as gods." 12 Placing a woman on a pedestal, as is well known, does not necessarily mean giving her an advantage. Victoria loved an 1843 portrait of Albert in full armor and commissioned double portraits and a statue of the two of them in Anglo-Saxon dress, suggesting her identification with the days of chivalry.13 Where her image is elevated, therefore, it is hard to say whether that elevation connotes royal authority or symbolic femininity; indeed, by conflating these two possibilities, such images suggest that feminine idealization is the only form monarchic power can take. Moreover, confusingly, because Albeit himself was often represented as feminized by his role as consort (proposed to by Victoria, dependent on her wealth, and described by her as "beautiful," an "Angel," with "a cheek like a rose"), his elevation may mean conventional male supremacy—or it may mean that he is the woman on the pedestal. While numerous cartoons of Victoria and Albert around the time of their marriage represent them at a standoff—she powerful through sovereignty, he powerful through masculinity—many popular portraits of the royal pair thereafter represent them with their family, surrounded by increasing numbers of rosy-cheeked children. In Figure 59, the frontispiece to a songbook, Victoria is seated, engrossed in the baby she holds in her lap, to identify her with the private female sphere. Albert's arms enclose Victoria as well as the children, and his gaze directly returns that of the viewer, to suggest that he takes in the public as well as the private realm, like any Victorian husband and man of business. Although the words "God Save the Queen" appear prominendy, no one wears a crown. A rural scene below the portrait connotes ordinary domestic pleasantness, but it also elevates the royal family to the heavens, to make them an object of veneration, in the manner of a Renaissance Assumption of the Virgin. This is the apotheosis of the royal family as middle-class folks, with the queen imaged as governing, paradoxically, by removing herself absolutely from the sphere of government. This representation occupies one extreme of the range of contempo-

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rary images, which show Victoria domesticated and Albert firmly ensconced in the role of protective and superior Victorian husband. Figure 60, while also domestic, at first suggests a contrast. Victoria's figure is the higher of the two, centered in a throne-like structure, while the far from patriarchal Albert on all fours indulgently plays "horsey" with his children. Victoria makes no intimate visual or bodily contact with her children, in contrast to her absorption in her children in "God Save the Queen." Perhaps, however, Albert's subordination in this scene —he is tugged along by his cravat, decked with flowers, and used as a prop for baby's delight —is all play, thus connoting the reverse of subordination, a reading supported by the light tone of the drawing and by the pose of Victoria's bending, yielding, and smiling figure. But I would suggest that the picture makes even more explicit than "God Save the Queen" how Victoria used her domestic position to reign. Framed by the words "To the Queen's Private Apartments: The Queen and Prince Albert at Home," the picture exemplifies Victoria's apparent desire to have her subjects witness her private life, to perform it as a spectacle and model, as the stage-like setting of the picture suggests. Paradoxically, the more privatized and ordinary her family life appears, the more effective it is as an instrument of ideological rule. The more she appears as a bending, yielding wifely figure, the more her subjects grant her the power to model their lives. Portraits commissioned by Victoria herself present a similarly ambiguous relationship between Victoria and Albert. In an early Landseer portrait (Fig. 61), which Victoria called "very cheerful and pleasing," Victoria stands while Albeit is seated, in body-revealing clothes, surrounded by the paraphernalia of hunting. Dogs gaze up at him adoringly, and the toddler Vicky, their first child, toys with one of several dead birds as she stands at the far end of this animal group, mirroring her mother's position. The dog between Albert's legs especially suggests his phallic dominance of the scene. The signs of female domesticity are here displaced by the signs of masculine prowess, and Victoria's pose mirrors not only that of her tiny daughter but also that of the dogs: she seems to wait attendance upon Albert as they do. The unfeminine authority that might be suggested if she stood above him is countered by these manifold indications that she is like any loving Victorian wife, deferring to her husband's centrality, not towering above him —the elevated symbol of domesticity for whom he performs his chivalric, manly deeds rather than the family decision maker. Moreover, the rule that none may sit in the queen's presence strengthens the suggestion that here she wishes to be seen as wife, not queen. Paradoxically, their posi-

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tioning must reverse the usual husband-wife pose for him to be read as husband and her as wife. Nonetheless, the open door framing the picture at the far right serves as a reminder that this model Victorian domestic privacy is being deliberately exposed and that Victoria's deference in the picture may have other meanings in the context of its display. Indeed, it could also be argued that the composition rises triangularly toward her and that all eyes really are on her, not on Albert. While the domestic femininity of her form is emphasized by her elaborate lacy dress, his body, on display as a masculine body, could nonetheless be said to be feminized, in that bodily display is itself feminizing. The Byronic tights he wears represent the costume of an earlier age and of outmoded aristocratic pleasures. Real men—prime ministers and businessmen, for example—after 1820 wore pants, so that costumes like Albert's here look romantic and effete.14 It is unusual for a hunter to be shown indoors, as if his masculinity had been captured and tamed by Victoria's coercive domesticity. Turning the paradigm of chivalry the other way, we could say that Victoria is not diminished here by her symbolic elevation. For a parliamentary queen, symbolic power—a woman's power—is the only possible form of royal authority. Perhaps what is really on display here is not (or not only) Victoria's domestic deference toward Albert, but (or but also) her supremacy over a feminized Albert and an adoring nation. This ambiguity receives a somewhat different emphasis in perhaps the most famous portrait of the family, painted in 1846 by Winterhalter (Fig. 62), who, along with Landseer, was the chief portraitist to the royal family.15 Here both Albert and Victoria are seated, this time in regal attire, on throne-like chairs in a formal, stagy setting. Despite the presence of five active children, the parents' expressions are more businesslike than cordial. The painting mingles the genre of conversation piece with that of the formal state portrait, and the setting heightens the ambiguity (as to privacy and publicity) we have also seen in the Landseer painting and in the cartoon To the Queen's Private Apartments. While the children in the right foreground seem to tumble about in a domestic space not unlike that in the Landseer portrait, albeit in their best clothes, the left background framing Victoria and Albert is an idealized and undomestic combination of "fine turquoise-blue skies" (specifically requested by Albert) and formal drapery.16 Are Victoria and Albert public or private, indoors or out, onstage or not? Privacy is being publicized here, and public life privatized. This ambiguity is echoed by the painting's locations: it hung in the dining room at Osborne, Victoria and

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Albert's most home-like home, but it was also engraved by Samuel Cousins and therefore enjoyed wide public circulation. The painting's formal ambiguities reinforce those of the figures' poses. Although Albert is seated closer to the picture plane and obstructs part ofVictoria's figure with his elegandy clad leg, Victoria wears a crown while he does not, and their relative heights have been misrepresented so as to make Victoria almost as tall (against her chair and also in the picture plane) as Albert, despite the shrinking of perspective. Furthermore, in exact contrast to "God Save the Queen" (Fig. 59), it is now she who gazes unflinchingly out at the spectator, while her husband's gaze is absorbed by his child. Of course, the look shared at some distance between father and eldest son differs gready from the mutual gaze of mother and infant in "God Save the Queen"; it suggests patrilineage and the passage of power from father to son rather than cozy parental love. Yet Victoria's steely gaze looking out between them reminds the viewer that it is her line, not Albert's, that is importandy continued in their son, and that patrilineage in this case is subordinate to other principles of hierarchy. Her arm around her son thus conveys both domestic maternity and royal lineage, just as the setting conveys both state formality and domestic intimacy. Although the picture represents her in just about as authoritative and regal a pose as she was willing to occupy in family portraits of this period, and although Victoria was known to have "loved" this picture,17 in the sketch she made of it, she revises her own figure in significant ways (Fig. 63). She has made her head bow further and more yieldingly toward her son and perhaps has changed the direction of her gaze from out at the viewer to down toward her son, and she has removed or elided the crown on her head. Appreciating Winterhalter's relatively regal and public vision of her, she nonetheless domesticates it further. Or perhaps she liked the picture because she saw it in the way that she sketched it, as more domestic than it is. By i860 in England, costly and traditional oil portraiture had lost ground to a newer method of representation, for "hand-tinted portrait photographs were being praised as 'truthful beyond the artist's power.'" 18 Along with its relative cheapness and availability, photography's claim to offer greater realism made it the middle class's favored method of recording itself (the representation of itself as "the real" was part of the middle class's strategy for making its values normative for all classes of British society), and the royal family began to commission photographs too. 19 And just as photography supplanted oil painting, so

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trousers supplanted knee breeches and hose as Albert's habitual portrait costume, while Victoria's dress rarely suggests her rank. These photographs, in their striking difference from the oils of just a decade earlier, may represent the fruition of Victoria's efforts to be portrayed as a middle-class queen; even so, they adjust Victoria and Albert's relationship in similarly ambiguous ways. Of the many available images, I will discuss three made shortly before Albert's death—two Mayall photographs and one by a Miss Day, in each of which Victoria and Albert are dressed as an ordinary wealthy middle-class couple. Day's photograph was engraved for public circulation, and Mayall's images were made explicidy to be published as cartes de visite.20 In the image by Day, taken at Osborne House on 26 July 1859 (Fig. 64), Albert leans rather casually against a wall, looking an exaggerated distance down at Victoria, holding his hat, in a pose that suggests disengagement and even weariness, while she gazes up at him intensely with an expression of agitation and needfulness. She may be seated, but her attitude suggests that it is not with the precedence of a queen but rather with the humility and even bodily weakness of a worshipful, yearning wife. The first of the Mayall photographs, taken at Buckingham Palace on 15 May i860 (Fig. 65), seems at first glance to reverse this hierarchy: Albert sits and Victoria stands. But he sits confidently with legs crossed, looking up at her while holding a book as if interrupted in reading, while she stands with eyes downcast, her pose apologetic, almost servile, her arm on his shoulder, her figure partly obscured by his. She stands, but her relative height in the picture plane does not convey power or precedence. Another pose from the same session has her seated and him standing, yet he faces the camera with his arm cocked on his hip, while she looks down at the book in her lap, as if to demonstrate that the same marital hierarchy can be read in opposite poses. Because of the recurrence of servility here, it is perhaps surprising to learn that yet a third photo from the same session, posed almost identically to the first (she stands, he sits), was captioned "The Prince verifies a reference" when published by the Picture Post Library. On the one hand, his verifying a reference makes him the authority to whom Victoria defers, and that is what her stance conveys in each of the images from this session; on the other hand, that he is verifying a reference reminds us for whom he works: Victoria Regina. Does the caption disguise servility as mastery; or does the pose disguise mastery as servility? Finally in the last Mayall photograph, made six months before the prince's death (1 March 1861; Fig. 66), Victoria stands on a step so as to look almost on a level into his eyes. Does the democratizing potential

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of photography influence the content of the image? Perhaps, but his top hat and her hatlessness and lowered umbrella (and of course her crownlessness) re-hierarchize the carefully dehierarchized pose, and the ostentatious failure to conceal the machinery by which she is made to appear his height suggests that the very idea is a sort of somber joke. Another photograph from the same session represents them at their different heights: he appears about a foot taller. Seated below, standing over, or standing on a level with him, Victoria in each of these images conveys proper wifely humility and subordination toward her husband—sometimes even abjection —rather than sovereignty. Yet in the context of their dissemination these photographs could be read as we read the two cartoons (Figs. 59, 60) and the Landseer painting, as a display of her female subordination that reinforces her ideological rule. In the pictorial medium of the middle classes, Victoria and Albert assume increasingly the guise of the middle classes, their clothes and, most important, their rigid gender hierarchy; and, paradoxically, the declassing and gender subordination confirm Victoria's highest ambition, to lead by her example a middle-class nation. In the years following Albert's death in 1861, Victoria's almost groveling worship of his image became central to royal iconography, and the emphasis in the late photographs on his height and her servility seems simply to continue after his death, in exaggerated form. Figure 67, an 1862 photograph taken by Prince Alfred at Windsor, shows Victoria and Princess Alice with a bust of Albert that rises above and between them, Victoria in heavy mourning in a pose of extravagant, upward-turning devotion. (Similar photographs pose this bust with different groupings of family members, and it is usually above them all, although sometimes at one side of the composition.) This pose is anticipated by that in another photograph (Fig. 68), taken of Albert, Victoria, and Princess Vicky on her wedding day, in which, again, the stolid Albert towers above and between the two women, who seem undifferentiated—both nervous, with downcast eyes, both crowned, both busty, in similar white dresses. Photography may have its democratizing effect, but democracy here means adherence to middle-class norms, and photographic democracy puts Victoria on a level, not with her husband, but with ordinary Victorian wives, who are lower in status and in stature than their husbands — or with her daughters, who became the consorts that some early cartoons (such as "The Coronation," Fig. 57) wished Victoria herself had been. Where the Winterhalter portrait tricks the viewer into seeing Victoria's sovereignty as well as her ordinary wifeliness, photography exposes her ordinariness even more than her sover-

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eignty. O r — t o turn the photograph of worshiping Albert's statue another way—does placing him on a lofty pedestal mean reducing him, in all the ways chivalry reduces the women who are so placed? That ambiguity reminds us again that posing as ordinary was Victoria's mode of sovereignty: to put her ordinariness on royal display for popular admiration. Paradoxically, she holds her sovereignty because of the popularity she accrues by appearing as an ordinary wife: she rules in the only way she can, by giving over her authority. If she wanted to promote a worldview in which the middle-class wife's subordination underwrites middle-class supremacy, she became both the agent and the product of her own ideological designs. Her portraits not only testify to her skill and that of popular image makers in manipulating conventions for representing gender difference and class status, but also record the ideological complexity of the problem, for art and for the queen herself, of representing a queen regnant in an era desiring to see the end of female power.

Petticoats for AND

GOD BLESS THE K I T T Y . — W e l l , Mother Joan, what do you think of our young Queen ? I am told »be it going to do wonder», »nil all in favour of the women. JOAN.—Well, I am very glad of it; the men hare had their turn long enough ; and I beard she's going to po»i a new Act of Parliament, for my old man told me that a man (old him, that he heoitf another man »av, that another man read it in the Newspaper; so sit down and hare a cup of chalterwater and 1 will tell you nil about it—All married men are to allow their wive» one pint of beer and one glai« of gin every day and a» much tea and muff a« they like; o r b e compelled to sleep under the bed for a week. K I T T Y . — S o I've heard; and I know that all women, married or single, are to have a roving commission, to go where they like, do as they like, ana work when they like, provided they do not disgrace themselves, but behave in a becoming manner { and nil women in Great Britain, Little Britain, and all other great and little places, shall have, (if they can get it) a gallon of crcam of the valley each to drink health to the Queen, may she live long, have a happy reign, a good husband, and lots of pretty children. JOAN.—Thai's capital, Motlier, what do you call 'em? It's the l*»t Act I ever heard of. K I T T Y . — B u t that's not all, lor there will be a Parliament of women, all reg'lar rum'unn, besides Mother Mouthnlmighty, Prime Minister; Mrs. Kitty, Cock o' the Walk, Chanceseller at the Checquers ; Mr*. Tickle-breeches.. Privy Door-keeper ; Mrs. Ncverout, Home .Secretary ; and Misa Gadabout, Foreign Secretary.

Ever, QUEEN.

I

JOAN.—That's right, we'll settle the men, and let them know that Petticoats are master. 1 KITTY.—Every man who strikes his wife shall be | lied to the leg of the bedstead till he begs his wife's ; pardon; all stogie women, under thirty vears of age, i having neither crooked legs nor snaggle teeth, are i invited to join the Guard of Honour; and any one having more than six children at a birth is to be proj moted to the rank of Staff Serjeant; and if he don't j do • husband's duty as he ought to do, and conform I to every clause in the new Act, make him drink bis tea without sugar, till he dies. C o m e all you fair maiden A and list while I sing T h e n e w law* of England and your y o u n g Q u e e n ; F o r (Treat alterations there'll certainly he, A n d Petticoat now will be master y o u l l see. S o raaid*. wives, and widows, all merrily sing Petticoats for ever ! and God bless the Q u e e n . N o w all married men I'd hare you look o u t . O r Petticoats wilt p u t you all to the r o u t ; F o r the women hare got the right side of the Q u e e n , A n d success to the Petticoats wherever they've been. O u r Parliament W o m e n , I'll tell you quite flat, WUl do the men brown, what think you of t h a t ? T h e y witt pas« their own Acta, and have their own way, A n d «end all molly cuddles to Dotany Bay. So all yc,u young girls who are out of your teens, W h e n it come« to your turn you'll all be made Q u e e n s ; If you marry a »poony then give liim h a r d thumps, Anil we'll let him know he'« t u m ' d up Q u e e n of Trump«. P r i n t e d f«r T . Moore.

Fig. 56. "Petticoats for Ever." Broadsheet, c. 1837. From Louis James, ed., English Popular Literature, 1819-18SI (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 340.

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THE CORONATION. The sons of France may boast they're free And say they g a i n ' d true liberty, B u t still t h e y ' r e not so blest as we, At Victoria's Coronation. W h e n Philip's son to F r a n c e does steer, He'll say how Britons does revere, Likewise how bravely they did cheer, At Victoria's Coronation. W h a t praise is due to her w h o rear'd, A Q u e e n to E n g l a n d so endear'd, May her name by Britons be rever'd,

Tune,

Royal

At Victoria's Coronation. TIIO' Victoria does the sceptre s w a y , Her parent may she still o b e y , E a c h British lieart will shout huzza At Victoria's Coronation. M a y health her youthful brow adorn, And may the children y e t unborn, Rejoice upon this happy morn, O f Victoria's Coronation. E ' e r she resigns all e a r t h l y things, Be mother to a line of K i n g s , W h o s e virtues rare such love may bring AS Victoria's Coronation.

Charlie.

B R I T O N S a r o u s e ! this is the d a y , That loyalty shall bear the sway, E a c h heart be buoyaDt light and gay, 'Tis Victoria's Coronation. V i s nineteen summers since her birth, W e all w e l l know her native worth, M a y heaven smile on our festive mirth At V i c t o r i a ' s Coronation. CHORUS.

R e j o i c e , rejoice, let all rejoice, At England, Ireland, Scotland's choice, And welcome now with heart and voice V i c t o r i a ' s Coronation. W a s ever nation so much blest, O r Q u e e n b y people so caress'd, M a y sorrow fly from e v ' r y breast, At Victoria's Coronation. L o n g m a y she l i v e — l o n g may she reign Justice and truth attend her train, And H e a v e n ' s C r o w n at last obtain, O bless her Coronation. M a y heavenly wisdom long attend, O u r much lovM Queen and royal friend, And drive with scorn each traitor fiend, F r o m Victoria's Coronation. M a y wealth and commerce still increase The nation Ion» be blest with peace, And care and sorrow be decreas'd, Thro' V i c t o r i a ' s Coronation.

J. CatQicb. P ntcr. & 8, Moonwuth-Court, 1 Dills.

Fig. 57. ' T h e Coronation." Broadsheet, c. 1837. From Louis James, ed., English Popular Literature, 1819-1851 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 341-

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Trying it on.

ike a K i n ? ; Victoria, mine teat, vat you tink ? Vic.—Oh! Albert, you must'nttouch that! P m y (place 'it 1 w h e r e 1 ' y o u found it directly—it's not included in our marriage articles for you to wear,] that. It belongs o^me o n l y ! Albert.—Well, mine l u b , T no d i s p u t e i t ; but you know a l s o , V < n e r t u c k , dat vat is yourJ is mine, now ve are mirried; and so'I tink I shall take to vear i t ' as o'ten a« H i k e !

Vic.—Well, now, that CROWNS all !!

Fig. 58. "Trying It On." Woodcut, c. 1840. From Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria: The Woman, the Monarchy, and the People (New York, Pantheon: 1990), 40.

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ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF BRITISH SOKG.

Fig. 59. W. J. Linton, "God Save the Queen." Wood engraving of a picture by H. Warren used as illustration for the Illustrated Book ofBritish Song (1842). From Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria: The Woman, the Monarchy, and the People (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 45.

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. {/J 1, Ì T i ^ W ' 3v ij. TO THE "" >OUEEN*8PRIVATE APARTMEN ify ^ I

THE QUEEN AND PRINCE ALBERT AT HOME. Fig. 60. To the Queen's Private Apartments: The Queen and Prince Albert at Home. Lithograph, c. 1844.

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Fig. 6i. Sir Edwin Landseer, Windsor Castle in Modern Times: Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and Victoria, Princess Royal, 1841-45. Oil on canvas. The Royal Collection, copyright 1993 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Fig. 62. Franz Xaver Winterhalter, The Royal Family in 1846. Oil on canvas. The Royal Collection, copyright 1993 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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i*

Fig. 63. Queen Victoria's sketch of Winterhalter's Royal Family in 1846. The Royal Collection, copyright 1993 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 64. Miss Day, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Osborne, 26 July 1859. The Royal Archives, copyright 1994 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 65. J. J. E. Mayall, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 15 May i860. Copyright 1994 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 66. J. J. E. Mayall, photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, i March 1861. Copyright 1994 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 67. Prince Alfred, photograph of Queen Victoria and her second daughter, Princess Alice, with a bust of Prince Albert, 1862. Copyright 1994 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Fig. 68. Williams, photograph of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their daughter Victoria, Princess Royal, on her wedding day, 25 January 1858. Copyright 1994 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Notes This essay is a shortened version of '"To the Queen's Private Apartments': Royal Family Portraiture and the Construction of Victoria's Sovereign Obedience," Victorian Studies 37, no. 1 (Fall 1993). 1. Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria: The Woman, the Monarchy, and the People (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 98. The second epigraph to this essay is quoted from p. 38 of the same work. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. 2. Adrienne Auslander Munich, "Queen Victoria, Empire, and Excess," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 6, no. 2 (1987): 265. 3. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8. 4. Thompson argues (98) that whatever popular dislike of Victoria there was arose chiefly from the expense of her growing family to the taxpayers (along with Albert's foreign birth); this point suggested to me the analogy between queen and wife. Thomas Richards argues, with reference to the Great Exhibition and the queen's two jubilees, that the monarch was constituted as consumer and as promoter of consumption: the culture of advertising and the success of the monarchy depended on each other; see The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 18SI-1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 17-118. While Richards does not focus on the monarch's gender, Nancy Armstrong argues specifically that Victorian women (but not the queen in particular) were seen as consumers, especially of goods coming in from the empire, whose desires were both dangerous and essential to commerce; see "The Occidental Alice," Differences 2, no. 2 (1990): 3-40. Putting these two arguments together, one might discuss how Victoria's identification with the middle classes came about through representations of her as consumer; this essay instead explores how she came to be constructed as middle class through another mechanism, that of marital hierarchy. 5. See the discussion of the advantages and drawbacks of the assignment of "influence" to middle-class wives in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women ofthe English Middle Class, 1780-18S0 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 149,183, and passim. 6. David Cannadine argues that in England royal ritual became elaborate and well staged in inverse proportion to the actual power of the monarchy; see "The Context, Performance, and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the 'Invention of Tradition,' c. 1820-1977," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 121 and passim. For the media's construction of the spectacular ordinariness of the present royal family, see Judith Williamson, "Royalty and Representation," in her Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture (London: Marion Boyars, 1986), 75-89. 7. Letter of 29 October 1844, The Letters ofQueen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty's Correspondence between the Tears 1837 and 1861, 3 vols., ed. Arthur C. Benson and Viscount Esher (London: John Murray, 1908), 2:27.

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8. See Caroline Chapman and Paul Raben, eds., Debrett's Queen Victoria's Jubilees, 1887 and 1987 (London: Debrett's, 1977). 9. Sarah Ellis, The Women of England: Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (London, 1838; Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1839), 68. See also Elizabeth Langland's discussion of this and other passages in Ellis, in Nobody'sAngels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). According to Langland, Ellis uses Victoria to represent her own claims for domestic women's moral authority. 10. Giles St. Aubyn, Queen Victoria: A Portrait (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 146.

11. Entry dated 18 April 1839, The Girlhood of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty's Diaries between the Tears 1832 and 1840, ed. Viscount Esher, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1912), 2:153-54. 12. Laurence Lerner, "Private Feelings: Public Forms (Are Elizabeth Browning's Letters Literature?)," in the manuscript "Disciplines and the Canon," ed. Jay Clayton, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and H.-J. Schultz. 13. St. Aubyn, 130. 14. Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (New York: Viking, 1975), 425. 15. See William Gaunt, Court Painting from Tudor to Victorian Times (London: Constable, 1980), 211-14. 16. Marina Warner, Queen Victoria's Sketchbook (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), 112. 17. Warner, 112. 18. Patrick J. Noon, "Miniatures on the Market," in John Murdoch, Jim Murrell, Patrick J. Noon, and Roy Strong, The English Miniature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 207; see also Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention ofPhotography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 12. 19. The royal family's patronage had much to do with the rapid early development of photography, and by the end of her life the queen had amassed no albums containing 100,000 "photos" (Victoria's coinage), largely of herself and her family. See Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, Victoria R.: A Biography with Four Hundred Illustrations Based on Her Personal Photograph Albums (New York: Putnam, 1959), 256-66; see also Frances Dimond and Roger Taylor, Crown and Camera: The Royal Family and Photography, 1842-1910 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). On the relation of oils to portrait photography at midcentury, see Lauren Chattman, "Pictures of Privacy: Femininity on Display in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel," Dissertation, Yale University, 1993. 20. Gernsheim and Gernsheim report that "[hjundreds of thousands of Mayall's cartes were quickly sold" (261), and that the English craze for collecting and trading cartes began with Mayall's publications.

LINDA M. SHIRES

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

The century that elapsed between the late 1820s, when Elizabeth Barrett published her first volume of poems, and the late 1920s, when Thomas Hardy published his last volume of poems, saw highly dramatic shifts affecting the construction of nineteenth-century literary authority in British culture. Artists who had formerly thought of themselves as following a vocation increasingly saw themselves as leading a life that was potentially as commodified or commercial as that led by professionals in other fields. To be sure, the process of gaining literary authority during this period was affected by many material changes in the literary sphere, as well as by individual investments of energy.1 These changes included the new construction of various readerships, the shifting status of a genre such as poetry (from center to margins), different types of book production and distribution, and the sharp increase in published women authors. But material facts about the changing literary sphere cannot fully explain why the author as a public figure became a spectacle or why authors themselves so frequently explored the issue of visibility in their texts. Nor is it usually possible to trace in an author's life one particular moment when an assumption of literary vocation turned into a need, conscious or half-conscious, to control self-presentation and representation by others. But at least three intertwined social phenomena did alter the shaping and living of public identities. Commencing in the eighteenth century, these phenomena intensified in the nineteenth: the waning importance of a host of authorities, both secular and religious; changes in the meaning and value of public space, and, a wedding of the two prior changes: 198

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public figures whose fame rested on their exploitation of themselves as spectacles. In describing the aftermath of the 1789 French Revolution, Leo Braudy speaks of a "gap of public gaze." 2 And indeed, even after monarchy reasserted itself in the early nineteenth century, the waning influence of established civil authorities and a persistence of class struggle led to the rise of a new host of public figures —military men, scientists, authors—who gained fame differently than they might have in the past. Early-nineteenth-century men such as Napoleon and that Napoleon of poets Lord Byron illustrate how authority now had to be visibly worked for and how visibility itself had to be courted. A successful career no longer depended just on merit, or inheritance, or connections. It depended on being seen —seen at certain places, with certain people, and in particular outfits or poses. As we know, the Victorians worshiped celebrities from Wellington to Nightingale, even unwinding the shrouds of corpses in their Carlylean quest for some authority to gaze upon. In addition to the weakened influence of secular and religious authorities, the meaning and value of the public sphere itself changed dramatically from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Demographics, economic alteration, geographic migration, and changes in printing techniques all worked to form new audiences and new relations between author, supporters, and text. The patron or patroness was replaced by the literary mediator: publisher, editor, man of letters. Nor was the audience composed of members of the same class or profession. Rather the public splintered into audiences: a large and diverse public, rural and urban, marked by divisions of status, class, and gender and specific readerships. In this increasingly divided yet anonymous public sphere, writers had to work harder to get attention and keep it. The public arena, ever more confusing in its vast multitudinousness, was transformed into a stage where one could display oneself, but also protect oneself, by acting roles. To many Victorians, self-display through acting implied deceit or an inability to be what they thought of as "truly" sincere. Indeed, Matthew Arnold seems to speak for many Victorians when he laments the chance of really ever communing with another or with himself deeply at a l l in public places or in private. In poems such as the Marguerite poems, "A Summer Night," "The Buried Life," "Lines Written in Kensington Gardens," Arnold yearns for a calm and wise passivity, which he, like Thomas Carlyle, locates only with divinity or those he considers heroic geniuses, such as Shakespeare. Average men and women "trick'd in dis-

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guises" ("The Buried Life") might "play" at life, but would remain "alien" to themselves and to each other.3 Acting multiple roles, then, could be a curse as well as a blessing, for it deadened what Arnold saw as the deep feelings of the heart. Acting could even point to a radical instability of the self.4 As James Eli Adams points out in his contribution to this volume, the cultural opposition of theatricality, visibility, and surfaces to inwardness, withdrawal, silence, and depth is a complicated phenomenon that can appear in many guises. Yet the opposing sides are always in some way connected to each other. Victorian literary authority was constructed interactively, then, among authors and audiences as part of a larger cultural paradigm centering on commodities. Indeed, in the nineteenth century the commodity became the "coordinating frame within which different forms of social life — economic, political, psychological, literary—were grouped."5 Public fame increasingly depended on personal attributes and the reproduction of images. By the end of Hardy's career, when the boundaries between private and public selves had dissolved almost completely, the authorial self—his pets, his house, his marriages, his opinions on contemporary poets — became as important a commodity as his texts. It is just this commodification of the writer that William Powell Frith's The Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 (Fig. 69) satirizes. On the one hand, Frith clearly wishes to document the plethora of celebrities assembling at the Royal Academy private viewing during a typical show of the 1880s. Among the notables in this painting are Gladstone, Browning, Langtry, Terry, Irving, Trollope, Wilde, and Millais. Yet Frith uses this institution — the Academy itself and the yearly event there — to focus on spectacle and self-display. If the dignity of the event and the crowd flatten out contrasts, still the painting brilliantiy questions the borders between the public and the private. It insists on the importance of status by representing a private view of the new exhibition to invited guests. It also questions, however, the nature of such "collective privacy" by showing what the viewers have come to view and by asking what they have ended up viewing. Paintings? Each other? Each other viewing paintings? Oscar Wilde? Frith sets up a contrast between two kinds of authors in his deliberate placement and depiction of Trollope and Wilde. Anthony Trollope, at the left with top hat, surrounded by people looking at paintings and at their catalogues, is involved in the same activity, but catches a look at Oscar Wilde. The aesthetic master, with a flower in his lapel, also uses his book, but those around him stare at or worship him as he gazes dreamily at paintings. Here we have two types of literary authority set

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up in a deliberate generational, gendered, and stylistic contrast. Trollope is represented as the hardworking, older, manly man of letters, whereas Wilde is the feminized, feted dandy, gazed at and fawned upon by a circle of mostly female and young admirers.6 He is as much an object for viewing as the pictures on the wall. The painting encapsulates for us how Victorian literary authority was constructed in the public arena as an occasionally active and an occasionally more passive spectacle of authorial power. If we arrange Victorian writers according to what we might call a "spectacle spectrum," figures as different as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and Oscar Wilde would, paradoxically enough, appear close to each other. Whether in his prose, in his editorial work, or in his readings, Dickens took pleasure in performance, fully trusting to the vitality of his imagination and his dramatic skills. Carlyle created himself as a heroic man of letters even as he searched for heroes in whom to believe. And whereas he too sold his imaginative productions and himself as a unit, Wilde went one step further by selling himself to the public as an imaginative production, and a compellingly charismatic one at that. At the other end of this "spectrum" we might also find writers seldom associated with each other. Not only Trollope, or the Bronte sisters, say, but also some of the major Victorian poets resist being drawn into active spectacle. Neither Christina Rossetti nor Alfred Lord Tennyson, for instance, sell their first imaginative productions with the gusto of Dickens, or parade themselves so vigorously before crowds as Carlyle and Wilde do. To be sure, Rossetti performed as an artist's model and Tennyson enjoyed declaiming his poems to small groups of admirers. But both couched self-dramatization in a rhetoric and stance of withdrawal. Their poems, too, repeatedly take up what they view as the highly problematic relationship of authority, self-display, and identity. The power of the speaking " I " emerges most often in their texts through masks, through some relationship with static or dead bodies, or through outright refusals of participation. Perhaps the most powerful refusal of active spectacle on the part of a speaker occurs in Christina Rossetti's poem "Winter: My Secret." There, the speaker is erotically stimulated by shutting out her listeners from a putative secret, the author upholds the decorum of privacy, and the poem ironically deploys the act of withholding, as it demonstrates that withholding contributes to the mystification of commodities. Secrecy and advertised uniqueness stimulate desire. As Braudy points out: the middle-class Victorian audience is among the first to become excited by the refusal of its gaze, as well as by the reflection of its gaze (398, 402).

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The Victorian author, then, can succeed with an audience either by actively engaging in spectacles of theatrical self-display or by withholding. More interesting than the cultural opposition itself or any groupings of authors, however, is the dialectical or embattled engagement of such seemingly ambivalent impulses in a single author. With individuals, of course, negotiations differ in type and intensity at differing moments in a career. It is precisely this conundrum of the need to shape the self through display but also to remain somehow sincere that Elizabeth Barrett and Thomas Hardy confront repeatedly in their careers as authors. To find favor with an audience, artists such as Barrett and Hardy had to create public literary personae while they were also being created as memorable identities through critical and literary discourse. If they did not help to create themselves in the public eye, passive spectators could easily become bored or intensely voyeuristic. Fame might elude the artist or spiral out of his or her control, as Barrett feared it would, for example, when Mary Russell Mitford published her recollections, including Elizabeth's reaction to her brother Edward's death by drowning, the single most traumatic event of her life. Barrett felt her audiences would misunderstand her art if Mitford's recollections encouraged them to dwell on one life event. Barrett and Hardy were instrumental, I am arguing, in helping to select the very discourses by which they were defined in a public rhetoric of the literary sphere. Literary and life choices they made helped to mold their self-representations within available cultural codes about lives, careers, and art, but they also had to shape their work and careers as somehow distinctive. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Hardy consciously monitored the performative nature of their careers. A Victorian author's relationship to spectacle — whether textually or interpersonally—would have been determined by many variables, including temperament, gender, genre choice, and specific or multiple audiences. Both Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Hardy experienced alternating moments of attraction to spectacle and withdrawal from it, an oscillation of which they seemed acutely aware and which they resolved differently with regard to what each considered a deeper spiritual or political truth. Although both Barrett Browning and Hardy invested in a rhetoric of self-deprecation in their early careers and both attempted to follow a Vergilian, step-by-step literary vocation, they were profoundly attracted to men and women engaged in self-display, both those who made spectacles of themselves and those who had become spectacles by virtue of their public roles. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's long-standing attraction to George Sand illustrates her pull toward the self-dramatic. "I would

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give anything to have a letter from her, though it smelt of cigars," confides Barrett in a letter to her intimate Mary Russell Mitford. 7 The date is 1844, the occasion, Moxon's publication of Barrett's volume Poems, in which she offers her two sonnets to George Sand. As the confidence to Mitford suggests, Barrett's concern with spectacle and authority has everything to do with sex, gender, and the model of non-English literature. Indeed, she wrote to Mitford that she was enthralled, visually and emotionally, by contemporary French novels: "My whole being aches with the sight of it [the "conflagration" of French literature], —and when I turn away home, there seems nothing to be seen, it is all so neutral tinted and dull and cold by comparison."8 She is conscious of keeping her readings a "secret" (Miller, 144) in her father's house. It is therefore all the more significant that Barrett's male friends, notably her literary advisor, John Kenyon, and the literary critic of the Athenaeum Henry Chorley, advised her against publishing the sonnets to Sand because her public approval of such an unconventional woman writer might seriously harm her rising reputation. But for Barrett, as for many other women of her day, Miss Mitford not among them, Sand was a "magnificent creature" (Raymond and Sullivan, 222) about whom she loved to read and gossip and with whom she desperately wanted to connect, both publicly and privately (Raymond and Sullivan, 150-51). " I won't die if I can help it," she proclaimed, "without seeing George Sand" (Raymond, 245). The two sonnets to Sand are most interesting, however, not for their unabashed heroine worship, but for their utter ambivalence about Sand's Byronic self-display. The sonnet "To George Sand: A Desire" represents her as a figure of excess: she is both a "large-brained woman and large-hearted man," a roaring lion and an arena slave (lines 2-4), an angel and a whore (lines 7-n). 9 But this woman dressed like a man, this doubly gendered creature, proves deeply troubling to Barrett. In spite of her fascination with a woman who seems to occupy both sides of every binary, Barrett remains troubled by charges of immorality leveled against Sand. Instead of considering self-display and sexual transgression as aspects of what she calls Sand's "genius" (line 12), however, Barrett anxiously tries to separate genius from public spectacle by locating it elsewhere. If Sand is a woman of oppositions on earth, her genius resides in heaven, above all divisions and all gossip. Truth and worth transcend spectacle and earthly fame in this highly characteristic Victorian rhetorical gesture. In the second sonnet, "A Recognition," Barrett Browning goes further in rejecting self-display. She considers Sand's cross-dressing a vain

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denial of her "woman's nature" (line 2). Just as in the first sonnet Barrett wishes Sand's genius to earn her angel wings, here she maintains that God will oversee the most crucial unsexing: through death and entry into heaven, Sand will be unsexed. Although Barrett is lured to spectacle, and drawn to the erotics of both gender transgression and samesex love, she refuses to look at what is before her. She banishes her anxiety that Sand's genius may, in fact, be androgynous or bisexual or, what seems even worse, nothing more than spectacle by invoking higher truths. Barrett eventually found a use for female self-display, though, in "Lord Walter's Wife," a poem William Thackeray rejected for publication in the Comhill magazine shortly before her death. The female speaker of this poem, a mother and wife, refuses to sit passively by when one of her husband's friends flirts with her in front of her little daughter. Offended by his shallow praise of her as "far too fair" (line 6) for a woman, which disguises only thinly the cruelty he displaces onto her — "able to strangle my soul in a mesh of / your gold-colored hair" (lines 7-8), she shocks him by entering into a pushy flirtation of her own. When he then intimates that she is nothing but a "harlot" (line 49), she exposes his hypocritical practice of a sexual double standard. By having Lord Walter's wife re-engender spectacle as a male game, Barrett Browning could defend the official ideologies of heterosexual love and motherhood but also attack the male's treatment of woman. While in the sonnets on Sand, Barrett rejected female spectacle as an affront to a female purity, she now could enlist a female speaker to support that purity. But at the same time, she features a woman who must adopt a role and act like a whore to preserve a sexual purity that the male double standard is trying to corrupt. In a brilliant double move, then, Mrs. Browning asserts domestic virtue and contentment, while Elizabeth Barrett exposes the patriarchal system's defilement of the very domesticity it professes to endorse. Domestic happiness itself seems a show in which male self-displays remain a grotesque featured act. In rejecting "Lord Walter's Wife" as unsuitable for "my squeamish public," William Thackeray likens the poem to an "Aching tooth" that has to be pulled.10 He pays courtly tribute to "dear, kind, Mrs. Browning," whom he knows personally and even admires. But he also indulges himself in excessively violent imagery. Ironically enough, by refusing to publish the poem, or, as he puts it, by "cutting the victim's head off," Thackeray produces in the publishing arena an analogue for the double standard Barrett Browning points to in the domestic arena. With "Lord Walter's Wife," then, Barrett Browning dramatizes her

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anxiety about spectacle. In her response to Thackeray, she states that her viewpoint may not be wrong even if his "paterfamilias" standpoint may have to be voiced. "I am not a fast woman — I don't like coarse subjects, or the coarse treatment of any subject," responds Barrett Browning, "but I am deeply convinced that the corruption of our society requires, not shut doors and windows, but light and air." She proceeds to argue that "it is exactly because pure and prosperous women choose to ignore vice, that miserable women suffer wrong by it everywhere."11 In one sense, through her poem "Lord Walter's Wife" Barrett Browning becomes a George Sand, playing male and female parts and using spectacle to attack what she perceives to be a male-driven system of performance. Defining spectacle narrowly in terms of sexuality, she agrees that female self-display, often prompted by male egotism, can be degrading. But she can also find a use for a female-initiated female selfdisplay. As a "pure" woman and as a writer, she can confront her audience with the politics of spectacle, instead of merely indicating her ambivalence about it. For she makes spectacle accountable to what she perceives as an objective truth: the double standard. Thomas Hardy, born three decades after Elizabeth Barrett, displays a similar attraction and aversion to spectacle. But for him spectacle is connected with class as much as with issues of gender. And even more important, he is far less able to believe in any truth other than that which is subjective. He moves closer, then, to a public culture in which truth, objective or subjective, is relative: a culture where spectacle has become all. In his early days as a writer, when slowly earning the respect of the chief editors and publishers' readers in London, Hardy's anonymously serialized Far from the Madding Crowd was received as the work of another female George — George Eliot.12 In January 1874 the reviewer for the Spectator, responding only to the novel's first published part, concluded: "in every page of these introductory chapters there are a dozen sentences which have the ring of the wit and wisdom of the only truly great English novelist now living."13 To be taken for George Eliot, which might appeal to another young novelist, proved intolerable to Hardy. He was not imitating her, he insists. Yet it is difficult not to read more into Hardy's denial, for he continued to grumble about the mistaken attribution for the rest of his life. Inasmuch as Hardy indicates a wish to preserve his own identity, he also stages this confusion about authorship because, at this moment in his career, he is still deeply unsure how to market his talent.14 He has no notion what his authorial identity might be or how to construct one.

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To some degree, Hardy's rural background, his self-education, and his early dependence on experienced men in the literary sphere position him like a woman in the marketplace. Indeed, these characteristics might equally describe George Eliot herself. It is clear that Hardy regards his class as a great disadvantage; it remains unclear whether he feels that it feminizes him (see Gittings and Millgate). But his anonymous publication of Far from the Madding Crowd almost guarantees that his audience will mistake the name, sex, and status of the author. Indeed, the favorable reviews of the novel repeatedly stress the rural dialogue and incident, comparing Hardy to Eliot. Then, confronted with his own desire to be George Eliot, woman of letters, Hardy acts like Barrett when she confronts her attraction to the highly visible George Sand, woman of letters. H e defends against a public revelation of his desire for her fame. Driven to assert his independence from the premier woman novelist whose authority he cannot evade, Hardy immediately switches to another type of novel, thereby losing the audience willing to assess him in terms of established greatness. H e turns desperately from Far from the Madding Crowd, a pastoral with an educated narrator, to an urban comedy of the upper classes, The Hand ofEthelberta. H e casts aside his budding persona as the creator of Wessex because he thinks it might doom him to inferiority as a regionalist writer. With Ethelberta, argues Penny Boumelha, Hardy "takes on in a self-conscious fashion what was unquestionably, throughout the nineteenth century, the predominant mode of social mobility of the heroine: the marriage plot." 1 5 Yet with Ethelberta, the tale of a poetess-novelist-storyteller who attains wealth and status by hiding her class background from her suitor and his family and who then achieves literary fame by hiding her identity from her readership, Hardy faces head-on his ambivalence about his class origins, his identity, and fame. In presenting the story of a woman writer, Hardy also recasts George Eliot's negotiations with literary authority. But more important, the novel allegorizes Hardy's own desires for fame while confronting the relationship between "truth" and authorial spectacle. In this reading, the "hand" of Ethelberta assumes a variety of meanings, not just "hand in marriage" or "playing one's hand" in a social game, but also "hand of the past"; Hand as the maiden name of Hardy's mother, Jemima, who was always concerned with the education and rise in status of her children; or "the writing hand" of an author. 16 Finally, "hand" is a part of the body — in this context, a metonymy for the female body, or even a dismemberment, as if Ethelberta's hand could at once

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represent the whole and function separately from the rest of her. The title may also encode Hardy's recent marriage to Emma, since he gives his heroine the initials of his first wife, whom he credited with emotional support (he also pilfered from her diaries in his early writing career). Any way we choose to read the title, it seems clear that with The Hand of Ethelberta Hardy explores the reciprocal relationship between his life, illusions, and self-constructions, and the authority and identity of a storyteller. In an intelligent and tempting argument about Ethelberta that responds to Robert Gittings's negative assessment of the novel, Peter Widdowson has suggested that we should regard this work as "a selfreflexive novel of a highly complex order" that "exposes the lies" of the systems of class and gender. He argues that it can enable us to see the same kinds of exposures in Hardy's other fiction (157). Yet Widdowson appears to equate the exposure of systems — Hardy's of deceptive cultural categories and his own of the rigidities of humanist criticism — with a locating of truth. The Hand of Ethelberta is self-conscious, to be sure, but Hardy is not the driving truth teller Barrett Browning. Although he associates truth and honesty with origins, as if he were an even wiser, sadder version of William Wordsworth, his intense fascination with lies, misunderstandings, ironic twists, and deceptions, related in his mind to arbitrary failure and success, is also connected frequently to selfmisunderstandings. Perhaps, then, the truth does not exist at all. Hardy seems both more skeptical and more playful than Widdowson seems to allow. Hardy's own explanation of his purpose in The Hand of Ethelberta, in the much later ghostwritten Life, cannot be entirely discredited. There he explains that he "took the unfortunate course" of rushing into another novel after Far From the Madding Crowd, "before he was aware of what there had been of value in his previous one: before learning, that is, not only what had attracted the public, but what was of true and genuine substance on which to build a career as a writer with a real literary message."17 Surely Hardy's phrase "true and genuine substance" refers, not to ethics or metaphysics or even geology or genealogy, but to a fact, namely that in his early life he lived among rustics and had not yet, when he wrote Ethelberta, concluded that he might as well exploit that fact for the rest of his novel-writing career. Rather, he had just retreated from such an intuition by switching from pastoral to drawing room comedy. To speak of a "real literary message," or "true and genuine substance" in explaining how Ethelberta came to be written is merely

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to tell the reader lies she or he wishes to hear. Hardy realizes early and keeps relearning that in the commodity marketplace one conceptualizes and shapes oneself largely in response to one's audiences. Hardy's remarks in the Life on the publication of Ethelberta fit perfecdy with his many false denials of active social climbing. It is part of Hardy's selfpromotion to insist that there is some truth or genuine substance in his writing and beliefs. But that "substance" is shifting and shifty. Like Ethelberta herself, who lies and acts, "wishing her fiction to appear real," Hardy "discovered the full power of that self-command" (132) which allowed him to rise in the literary world and sold him to eager buyers. When at last Hardy the novelist recognizes the full value of his mythic construction of Wessex, he takes on the power of the spectacle he has staged. In becoming his landscape, Hardy blends man and mask beyond retrievable identities. He manages this blending, I would argue, until the final trio of novels, Tess ofthe d'Urbervilles, Juck the Obscure, and The Well-Beloved, when his disgust with his audience becomes so deep and the encroachment of modernity so marked that he destroys the ritual community of narrator and character, author and reader established by realist fiction. He thus challenges the present commodity market.18 To put it differently, he pushes fiction as far toward lyric poetry as it can go at this time without its narrative structure collapsing entirely. It is important to follow Hardy into his later years, however, since he was preoccupied for more than half his career with poetry. Hardy's elegy for Queen Victoria opened his volume Poems ofthe Past and Present in 1901. In this poem, " V R. 1819-1901: A Reverie," as much about fame and time as about Victoria, Hardy stages a new spectacle and gains a new identity, his identity as a twentieth-century poet, a nineteenthcentury relic. He notes Victoria's "purposed Life . . . / serene, sagacious, free" (lines 8-9) and predicts that her best deeds, now "hid from our eyes" (line 13), will yet be known. 19 But the truth is that Hardy has no particular interest in enumerating Victoria's deeds or her virtues. Hardy, a now famous and wealthy novelist, reputed in 1881 by the British Quarterly Review to have taken up "the falling mantle" of "the greatest living novelist" (Widdowson, 20) after the death of George Eliot, has reentered the field of poetry. Having come to terms with literary authority as spectacle, by half-creating Wessex and creating himself as Wessex, Hardy feels free to turn back to his first love, poetry of subjective impressions. And when he moves into that field again, there is no premier poet to stand in his way. Tennyson is dead, Browning is dead, Arnold is dead, and Rossetti, Greenwell, and Ingelow have died

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without ever filling the evacuated throne of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Hardy has outlived the Victorians' laureate and their would-be laureate as well as their very long-lived Queen. Ostensibly deferring to Victoria in the poem as the object of the funereal pomp and circumstance she has rightly earned, Hardy actually uses her, even replaces her, if you will, as the central Victorian spectacle. For with the death of this monarch, the passing of her authority, and the end of her historical era, the gap of public gaze enlarges substantially. Hardy seems to recognize what he certainly exploits for the next twenty some years, namely that he can become something even more than Wessex. He does not have to rely on just a half-real, half-created geographical region. Hardy inherits from Victoria what George Eliot, living or dead, could never bequeath: a black dress. For in becoming the plangent widow/widower of the nineteenth century, the man who never expected much, Thomas Hardy, the elegist of a time gone by and a place despoiled, can also become the object elegized, a living relic of a "purposed" past. Lionized, much visited, the great man of Dorset survives as the ruler of a Victorian England. In fact, Hardy becomes such a spectacle that tourist picnic packages are organized to visit him at Max Gate, his novels are performed onstage, and the rights to Tess, that voyeur's paradise, are bought for two silent films. Hardy spends much time in his final years honing his image, ghostwriting the narrative of his life, the one book he had said he would never write. Hardy's ostensible refusals of spectacle, coupled with his selfaggrandizements, have ensured his fame as one of the greatest of English literary commodities. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning made spectacle accountable to what she believed in as objective truth. To strip "the veils" from the "paterfamilias" as she put it, proved a risky business indeed.20 This earnestness, coupled with the contemporary public drama of her private life, means that, in spite of the recent feminist resuscitation of her poetry, her audience, for the most part, persists in attending to the romance of Mrs. Browning, the rescued maiden of Wimpole Street, and not to her complex political poems of self-effacement and self-assertion.21 Attempting to be honest and direct, Barrett Browning earned less lasting literary fame than Hardy, who fairly early in his career grasped both the arbitrariness of fame and the value of controlling all aspects of his performance.

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