Dickens’s Visual Mediations
By shifting the theoretical ground from questions of surveillance, adaptation, and illustration to questions of information, mediation, and storage, this chapter generates new ways of thinking about Dickens’s experimental and conceptual engagement with the new visual media such as photography and panoramas that were gradually transforming how people read, saw, and imagined the world around them. Drawing on Hablot Knight Browne’s iconic illustrations for Bleak House, Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit as exemplary instances of Dickens’s visual conception of the mediation of his writing, this chapter offers a new approach to the ways in which these memorable images circulated, and still do circulate, within complex global information networks.