Introduction

The introduction explores both Victorian and contemporary theories of visual culture, while developing the book’s own interdisciplinary methodology. Visual culture studies, media history, art history, literary history, and cultural history number among the book’s disciplines. The chapters move across media to study novels and poems alongside photographs and illustrations. Weaving together both visual and textual strands, the book presents a revisionist, multidisciplinary approach to “culture” as it was lived and experienced in the nineteenth century. Academic divides between the disciplines today have obscured the cross-media connections studied in the book. The book’s approach captures the historical reality of the nineteenth century’s turbulent media moment, when the bounds of high art and mass culture were not yet fixed, and words and images mingled indiscriminately in the cultural field.

Conclusion

The book’s conclusion examines the early cinema of the 1890s, to look at the ways it invoked and transformed earlier Victorian visual traditions. The earliest films were shown at fairgrounds and public entertainment venues, and thus differ from the more parlor-oriented objects studied in the book. Yet early film also extended Victorian pictorial traditions. Comic strips anticipated sequential visual storytelling, which was expanded in narrative stereoviews. All of the images examined in Picture World became subjects for the earliest films, from magic portrait albums coming alive to “phantom rides” alongside picturesque landscapes. The eye-tricking pleasures of early cinema extended the phantasmagoric worlds of earlier mass visual phenomena.

Sensation

Photography was a quintessential new visual technology of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 studies cartes de visite, or small photographic portraits. These collectible photographs became both popular and controversial during the so-called “sensation” craze of the 1860s. Scholars have largely focused on sensation novels, known for their lurid crime plotlines and outrageous villainesses. Yet sensation was more than merely a literary aesthetic: it was a multimedia phenomenon encompassing both novels and photographs. It responded to new forms of spectacular female celebrity, as seen in the wild popularity of photo portraits of actresses, opera divas, prostitutes, even Queen Victoria. The carte-de-visite medium, circulating women’s portrait photographs in millions of paper copies, perfectly encapsulated sensation’s dialectic between embodiment and mediation, and between individual celebrity and the democratized mass. These themes drive the plots of sensation novels, especially Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.

Illustration

As the illustrated book became newly affordable and highly popular in the nineteenth century, “illustration” emerged as a key aesthetic concept. Chapter 3 examines the illustrated Bible, a crucial example of book illustration and centerpiece of the Victorian parlor. The Bible’s age-old subject-matter—images of Moses and Esther, Jesus and Mary—evoked an aura of pre-industrial authenticity, even while religious publishing thrived on new media networks and new print technologies. Bible illustration served as a form of world-building, presenting a fantastical yet empiricist vision that drew upon recent discoveries in history and archaeology. Illustrators worked to make the Bible British, despite its Middle-Eastern roots, leaping across time and space to create a complicated world picture. These religious images ultimately formed what the chapter calls “orients of the self,” with destabilizing scenes hovering somewhere between East and West, ancient and modern, Jewish and gentile, patriarchal and democratic, and magical and rational.

Realism

While “realism” is usually studied in novels, paintings, or photography, Chapter 2 analyzes realism in the illustrated newspaper, newly invented in 1842. The chapter focuses on reportage of the Crimean War (1853–6), often dubbed the first “media war”: this was the first international conflict to be documented by independent war correspondents, on-the-spot sketch artists, and photojournalists. The chapter argues that the war’s disastrous turns prompted a representational crisis demanding a new visual vocabulary, one that pictorial journalists addressed using four kinds of reality effects. These are designated as the descriptive, the authentic, the everyday, and the plausible, and they are tracked through the Crimean War’s distinctive newspaper imagery, including the trenches, the amputee, the nurse, and “the Valley of Death.” Alongside new journalistic norms, the 1850s also saw the first use of “realism” as a term of literary criticism, reflecting the spread of realist paradigms across media and genres.

Character

“Character” is often studied as the deep psychological self crafted by the nineteenth-century realist novel. Yet Chapter 1 proposes an alternative history of character by looking to caricature, in some of the earliest comics (“Galleries of Comicalities”) appearing in sporting newspapers in the 1830s. Early caricatures portrayed an idea of character that was grotesque, masculinist, and brilliantly exteriorized, especially in depictions of “the cockney,” the urban mischief-man whose subversive masculinity reflected the economic pressures of the new urban economy. Cartoons featuring the cockney were anti-authoritarian, carnivalesque, and often laced with crude racism and misogyny. Their mock-violent energy gave voice to some of the explosive frustration felt by working- and lower-middle-class men after the failures of the Reform Bill of 1832. The young Charles Dickens borrowed many of his earliest subjects from extant caricature motifs, reflecting some of the fundamental instabilities of social class and economic precarity defining the Reform Era.

Decadence

Chapter 6 looks to the end of the nineteenth century to study the rise of the artistic advertising poster. Posters were mass-produced, disposable, and advertised commodities like cocoa and the circus. But they also starred in major art exhibitions in London and Paris and were attacked for their “decadent,” avant-garde styles. In fact, posters offer surprising insight into the Decadent Movement, which is usually associated with 1890s literary authors like Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans. The chapter shows how decadence manifested in visual media, including the advertising poster. Though decadence typically connotes aristocratic nostalgia, it was in fact reacting to a new, middle-class consumer culture of which it was very much a part. The graphic designer Aubrey Beardsley used decadent visual styles to create advertising posters, shocking critics while successfully marketing consumer goods. As posters became metaphysical symbols of commercial modernity, some feared that they presaged imminent cultural decline.

Picturesque

Most middle-class Victorian parlors would have contained a stereoscope with which to view a collection of stereographic cards. When viewers peeped into the device, the stereoview’s dual photographs leapt into startling three-dimensionality, making the stereoscope the perfect vehicle for virtual travel—to everywhere from Egypt to Niagara Falls. While some have seen the stereoscope as a forebear of postmodernism, Chapter 5 instead aligns it with the picturesque, the high-art landscape aesthetic of the eighteenth century. The chapter reveals the surprising imbrication of nature, art, and technology: the picturesque was enabled by technological devices that ranged from the Claude glass to the camera obscura to the stereoscope. The stereoscope’s visual technology worked to remediate Romantic ideals: it was an organic machine and prosthesis attached to the spectator’s body that enabled an extraordinary, humanistic experience. Promoting corporeal fantasies across space and time, stereoscopy reflected an imperial power dynamics of global visual mastery.