Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media

481 Pages·2020·17.256 MB·English

by  Rachel Teukolsky

OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,14/7/2020,SPi
Picture World
OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,14/7/2020,SPi
OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,14/7/2020,SPi
Picture World
Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media
RACHEL TEUKOLSKY
1
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3
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OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,14/7/2020,SPi
Acknowledgments
Generousfriendsandcolleagueshelpedtoshapethisbookovermanyyears.Susan
Ziegerreadmostofthemanuscriptandspurredmeonwithherbrillianceandfire.
Matt Potolsky also read many chapters and applied his keen intelligence to help
merethinkmanythings.Individualchapterswereread,somelongagoandsome
more recently, by Rachel Ablow, James Eli Adams, Jo Briggs, Jay Clayton, Nick
Gaskill, Lauren Goodlad, Rae Greiner, Daniel Hack, Ivan Krielkamp, Richard
Menke, Sebastian Lecourt, Andrew Miller, Daniel Novak, Morna O’Neill, and
Dahlia Porter. Key conversations also took place with Elaine Auyoung, Brenda
Cooper, Colin Dayan, Elaine Freedgood, Scott Juengel, Grace Lavery, Sara
Maurer, Ashley Miller, Benjamin Morgan, Cannon Schmitt, and Jonah Siegel.
These lists don’t include all of the people who asked me questions at lectures or
conferences, or who came up to me in the hallway of a conference hotel with
importantadditionalinsights.Itseemsimpossibletoacknowledgeeveryonewho
contributed to the effort. I’m grateful for the wonderful community and web of
influences thathelped metocompletetheproject.Thewisdomofmyinterlocu-
torscontinuestoamazeme.
Thanks are due to the institutions that helped to support this writing and
research. Yale University and the Beinecke library provided a James E. Osborne
Postdoctoral Fellowship;the NationalEndowment for the Humanities granteda
Summer Stipend; and Vanderbilt University conferred a Chancellor’s Faculty
Fellowshipaswellasadditionalfundstosupportthecostsofimagereproduction.
Certain collectors kindly donated images from their personal collections and
allowed these to be reproduced in the book. Thank you to Mike Ashworth,
AndrewGasson, Peter Stubbs,andBeverly andJack Wilgus. RayNorman atthe
“World of Stereoviews,” UK, provided additional help in tracking down images.
At Vanderbilt, a heartfelt thank-you to the library and image specialists who
worked painstakingly to create a number of the book’s illustrations: Jamie
C. Adams, Philip Nagy, Nathan Jones, and Teresa Gray, Curator of Special
Collections. Jennifer Fay spent time showing me how to acquire screen grabs
from the old films discussed in the book’s conclusion. Sari Carter, a former
Vanderbilt PhD, devoted her usual tenacity to checking all of the citations. At
Oxford University Press, Jacqueline Norton and Aimee Wright applied enthusi-
asmandskillintransformingthemanuscriptintoabook.
Thanks to Duke University Press, Indiana University Press, and De Gruyters
forpermissiontoreproducepreviouslypublishedwork.MaterialfromChapter2
appeared insubstantiallyalteredform in“Novels,Newspapers,andGlobal War:
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vi 
New Realisms in the 1850s,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45:1 (Spring 2012),
31–55. Chapter4 provided material for two essays: “Cartomania: Sensation,
Celebrity, and the Democratized Portrait,” Victorian Studies 57:3 (Spring 2015),
462–75;and“WhiteGirls:Avant-GardismandAdvertisingafter1860,”Victorian
Studies 51.3 (April 2009), 422–37. A modified section of Chapter5 appeared as
“Stereoscopy and the Global Picturesque,” in Traveling Traditions: Nineteenth-
CenturyNegotiationsofCulturalConceptsinTransatlanticIntellectualNetworks,ed.
ErikRedling(Berlin:DeGruyterPress,2016),189–212.
I’mgratefultomyfamily—parentsRoselynandSaul,sisterLauren,brother-in-
lawJosh,nephewsNoahandJacob—fortheiranimatedsupportovertheyears.
Finally,thankyoutothedearoneswhohelpedmetolive,andshowedmehow:
Danielle Wasserman, Nancy Reisman, Lee Conell, Alex Trevisan, Lincoln
Holdaway, Dan Altman, Hilary Cloos, Chris Hernandez, Sebastian Conley, Alex
Gross,BenBrill,JoshSallo,ChrisReagan,andCalebStapleton.Youhavemade“as
it were, for the human body a soul of waters, for the human soul a body of
flowers.”Thankyou.
OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,14/7/2020,SPi
Contents
Introduction: Visual Culture in the Victorian Mediascape 1
1. Character
Flat, Zany, Grotesque: Caricature and the Politics of Character 21
Early-VictorianCaricatureandPersonhood 21
ThePoliticalGrotesque:BodiesofthePeople 26
Punch:TheLondonCharivari 33
BloodSports:UrbanCharacterandCockneyMasculinity 41
PhysiognomyandtheNewCityTypes 48
Pickwick’sCaricatures:Comedy,Violence,Servitude 60
GoingViral:CharacterasCommodity 73
OnMinorAesthetics 80
2. Realism
’
Realisms War Pictures: Reality Effects in the Illustrated
Newspaper 84
Crimea:ModernWar,MediaWar 84
ReadingtheIllustratedNewspaper 90
DescriptiveRealism:SurfaceandMapintheValleyofDeath 96
AuthenticRealism:EyewitnessingandtheSpecialCorrespondent 103
EverydayRealism:WarLaborintheTrenches 113
ConventionalRealism:Amputees,Nurses,andotherWarTypes 119
GeorgeEliot’sRealistWarNovel 129
OurWar:WarRealismToday 138
3. Illustration
Orients of the Self: Bible Illustration and the Victorian
World Picture 143
Machine-MadeAura 143
TheorizingIllustration:Enlightening,Expanding,Remaking 148
VictorianBibles:Commodity,History,Palimpsest,Collage 154
HeterotopiasofTime:Archaeology,theFragment,theNation-State 166
SublimeSword:TheBibleasLiberalEpic 174
RealismandtheBiblicalBody 186
Race,Jewishness,Orientalism,Aura 197
ThePersistenceofIllustration:HolyLandExperience 208
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viii 
4. Sensation
Cartomania: Sensation, Celebrity, and the Photographed
Woman 215
MakingSensation 219
CartesdevisiteandMassPortraitPhotography 226
TheGirlofthePeriod 233
Ghost,Copy,Self:TheWomaninWhite 240
TheActress,theDiva,theNewPublicFace 246
QueenVictoria’sIconicVisibility 259
WhitenessandOthers:SensationsofRace 265
StarCultureinPhotographicTime 270
TheTechnosexualWoman 274
SensationsintheNewMediaCommons 279
5. Picturesque
The Picturesque in the Stereoscope: Nature, Touch, Time 284
YouAreThere:Stereoscopy’sDeepView 284
TechnologiesofthePicturesque 290
ProstheticEyeintheHapticLandscape 297
RevisitingWordsworth’sVirtualLandscape 307
OrnamentandIllusion:GothicHistory 315
StereoscopicPoliticsandtheGlobalPicturesque 329
Tourism,Postcards,andtheKodakMoment 341
6. Decadence
Consuming Decadence: Advertising and the Art Poster 348
VisualCulturesofDecadence 348
PosterHistory:TheLanguageoftheWalls 355
TheStreetasArtGallery 360
AubreyBeardsley’sJapanee-RossettiGirl 371
ArtPosterasDecadentSymbol:TheMobileandDegenerateArt 380
PhilosophiesoftheDecadentCommodity 387
Surrealism,Dream,andtheArtsofSuggestion 390
PosterPantomime:TheTheateroftheSelf 397
Avant-GardismandIronyintheModernAdvertisement 403
Conclusion: Cinema in 1896 408
Bibliography 419
Index 443
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Introduction
Visual Culture in the Victorian Mediascape
Aphotographheld intheVictoria andAlbertMuseumopensonto theidealized
worldoftheVictorianparlor(Fig.0.1).Onthedisplaytable,luxuriouscommod-
ities signal the tasteful sphere of middle-class consumption: a stereoscope with
stereographiccards,anillustratedbookopeneduponitspictures,aphotographic
album,aframedengravedportrait,astatuetteofanangel,aneroticsculptureofa
girl bashfully concealing her nudity. The nineteenth-century viewer would have
perusedthisdoubledphotographthroughastereoscope,makingtheimageburst
forthintoanillusionofthree-dimensionaldepth.InthesceneofVictorianvisual
pleasure,thebodyofthespectatorenteredimaginativelyintothevolumetricspace
of picture, texture, and art. The photographed scene sustains Walter Benjamin’s
description of the parlor as a supreme expression of the nineteenth-century self,
constellating“theuniverseoftheprivateindividual.”¹
Benjamin theorized the parlor as an insular refuge from the chaos of urban
modernity, an upholstered, curtained shell devoted to protective self-fashioning.
YettheparlorwasnotquitethehermeticcasingthatBenjaminenvisioned,Iwill
suggest here, nor was it a site of mere idle luxury. With its profusion of visual
objects,theparlorcanalsobeseenasaportal.Itwashometothepicture-worldof
the nineteenth century, in the form of the mass-printed photographs, advertise-
ments, cartoons, and illustrations—ephemeral and often disposable—that flour-
ished in the era of mechanical reproduction. These alluring objects were
miniaturized spectacles that served as portals onto phantasmagoric versions of
“theworld.”Intheworld-interactivesiteoftheparlor,mediatingbetweenprivate
andpublic,familiesreceivedvisitorsanddisplayedobjectsasevidenceofacertain
cosmopolitanism: maps, globes, cabinets of stereographs with views of faraway
places,anillustratedBibleonastandwithscenesfromtheHolyLand,illustrated
newspapers and magazines on a table, prints and portraits on the wall depicting
figures from religious and political history.² The parlor’s objects did not merely
¹ WalterBenjamin,“Paris,CapitaloftheNineteenthCentury”(1939),inTheArcadesProject,trans.
HowardEilandandKevinMcLaughlin(Cambridge,MA:BelknapPress,1999),20.
² As Thad Logan writes, “The Victorian parlour—extraordinarily rich in detail, situated in a
central position within the theory and practice of Victorian culture—can be taken as a kind of
synecdocheforthatcultureitself,amicrocosmofthemiddle-classVictorianworld,miniaturized,as
ifunderglass”(xiv).Logan,unlikeBenjamin,highlightstheroleplayedbywomeninpossessingand
PictureWorld:Image,Aesthetics,andVictorianNewMedia.RachelTeukolsky,OxfordUniversityPress(2020).
©RachelTeukolsky.
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198859734.001.0001