The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910

386 Pages·2008·14.894 MB·English

by  Chris Otter

Contents
Illustrations vi
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Light, Vision, and Power 1
1 The Victorian Eye: The Physiology, Sociology, and
Spatiality of Vision, 1800-1900 22
2 Oligoptic Engineering: Light and the Victorian City 62
3 The Age of Inspectability: Vision, Space, and the
Victorian City 99
4 The Government of Light: Gasworks, Gaslight, and
Photometry 135
s Technologies of Illumination, 1870-1910 173
6 Securing Perception: Assembling Electricity Networks 214
Conclusion: Patterns of Perception 253
Notes 265 Bibliography 339 Index 365
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Illustrations
1.1 Horizontal view of the human eye 23
1.2 Cross section of the retina 29
1.3 Mosaic of cones in the fovea centralis and area 30
1.4 Diagrammatic section of the macula lutea 31
1.5 The mechanism of accommodation 33
1.6 Various kinds of cataract compared 36
1.7 Operation for strabismus (squinting) 37
1.8 Table ophthalmoscope 37
1.9 Pray's astigmatism test 39
1.10 Correct position for reading by lamplight 42
1.11 Incorrect position for reading by lamplight 42
1.12 Graph demonstrating the production of myopia in
school 44
2.1 Court with shared facilities 65
2.2 Narrow alley, without sunlight 66
2.3 View through a skylight 71
2.4 The same view, following the construction of an adjacent
building 71
2.5 General reading room, Anderston Library, Glasgow 76
2.6 Light curve for a diagonal street 80
2.7 The persistence of darkness 83
2.8 Prismatic basement lighting 88
2.9 Calculating the illumination provided by windows of
different aspects 89
2.10 Stayton's wood paving in Chelsea 94
2.11 Smoke from domestic chimneys 97
3.1 Meat inspection at Smithfield, London 111
3.2 Engineering visual accessibility: the access pipe 112
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ILLUSTRATIONS
3.3 Engineering visual accessibility: the inspection chamber 112
3.4 Model sanitary inspector's notes 114
3.s Functional differentiation of domestic space 125
3.6 Private slaughterhouse 129
3.7 Public abattoir 130
4.1 Gasworks 138
4.2 Equipment for laying gas mains 140
4.3 Fittings for tin and brass pipes 141
4.4 Governor for gasworks 143
4.5 Wet meter 144
4.6 Meter-repairing workshop 147
4.7 Collecting coins from a slot meter 149
4.8 Gas holder 152
4.9 Table photometer using the Bunsen system 157
4.10 Evolution of the wick and the chemical composition of the
candle 160
4.11 Illumination contour diagram for Whitehall, London 171
5.1 Bray reversible inverted burner with gas adjuster 176
5.2 Gaslight at Victoria Station, London 177
5.3 Brush-Vienna electric arc lamp 179
5.4 Farmer-Wallace arc lights at Liverpool Street Station,
London 180
5.5 Siemens-Schuckert transportable electric searchlight and
tower 188
5.6 Dioptric and catadioptric holophotal apparatus 191
5.7 Leiter's forehead lamp 195
5.8 Cystoscope illuminating bladder 196
5.9 Calculable illumination 198
s.io Reading lamps with shades and brackets 199
s.i 1 Gaslit printing machine room 202
5.12 Ventilating gaslights 209
5.13 Mercury vapor lamp used to treat rachitic children 211
6.1 Holborn viaduct subways 217
6.2 The Compton system of bare-strip copper mains 219
6.3 Franz Probst and triangular fault localization coil 221
6.4 Lighting-up chart 222
6.5 Light distribution diagrams for three different holophane
globes 225
6.6 Testing wagon for street photometry 226
6.7 Variety and unevenness in streetlights 229
6.8 Distribution diagram for armored insulating tube system 230
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ILLUSTRATIONS
6.9 Molera and Cebrian's system of piped illumination 233
6.10 Main laying in the Strand, Westminster 246
6.11 High-pressure incandescent gaslighting at the Mansion House,
City of London 249
vüi
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Acknowledgments
This book began in Manchester in the late 1990s and was
finished in the spring of 2007 in New York, thanks to a
generous fellowship from the International Center for Ad­
vanced Studies at NYU. Throughout the many years of the
book's slow gestation, I have received more help than I can
possibly acknowledge here. Special thanks to Patrick Joyce,
whose idea it was to "write a book about light" and whose
intellectual vigor and curiosity continues to be a great inspi­
ration to me. Special thanks also to James Vernon, who read
the entire manuscript and provided the most detailed, as­
tute commentary, and who also helped make the transition
to American academe a real pleasure. Over the years, many,
many friends and colleagues have offered generous insights
and advice, in response to draft chapters and papers airing
some of the book's many themes, or simply while chatting
over coffee or beer. Among them are Jordanna Bailkin, Jane
Burbank, Tom Bender, Neil Brenner, Herrick Chapman,
Harry Cocks, Lisa Cody, Steven Connor, Fred Cooper, Tom
Crook, Francis Dodsworth, Kate Flint, Elaine Freedgood,
Graeme Gooday, Manu Goswami, Simon Gunn, Stephen
Kotkin, Yanni Kotsonis, Andy Lakoff, Sharon Marcus, Mat­
thew McCormack, Frank Mort, Lynda Nead, Molly Nolan,
Susan Pedersen, John Pickstone, Nathan Roberts, John
Shovlin, Maiken Umbach, Daniel Ussishkin, Carl Wenner-
lind, and Caitlin Zaloom.
At the University of Chicago Press, Doug Mitchell has
provided enthusiasm and wisdom in equally large amounts.
I would also like to thank Mark Reschke, Joe Brown, Robert
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Hunt, and Timothy McGovern for their patience and assistance at var­
ious stages of this book's germination. An article serving as the basis
for part of chapter 2 originally appeared as "Making Liberalism Durable:
Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City," Social History 27, no. 1
(2002): 1-15.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. Tina Sessa has been the
sharpest reader, and greatest encourager, of my work for a long time.
Without her, this book would not exist. During the final year of the
book's completion, we were joined by our first son, Nicholas. This book
is dedicated to my parents, Eva and Patrick Otter, who inspired me to
read, think, and write in the first place.
X
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Introduction:
Light, Vision, and Power
This is a book about light, vision, and power in nineteenth-
century Britain. It argues that the ways in which streets,
houses, and institutions were lit, and the ways in which peo­
ple saw within them, have a political history. Who could
see what, whom, when, where, and how was, and remains, an
integral dimension of the everyday operation and experi­
ence of power. Yet the critical tools, concepts, and frame­
works usually used to analyze this visual form of power are
inadequate and misleading. The history of vision and power
over the past couple of European centuries is invariably
written as a history of either discipline or spectacle, or some
combination of both. This book rejects such an approach.
Instead, it argues that the nineteenth-century history of light
and vision is best analyzed as part of the histoiy of freedom,
in its peculiarly and specifically British form.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, artificial light
was routinely viewed as the supreme sign of "modernity"
or "civilization." In 1902, for example, the chemist William
Dibdin reflected on the previous century's advances in il­
lumination and nocturnal perception in tones simultane­
ously reverential and pensive: "The necessities of modern
civilization having to so large an extent turned night into
day both in the working world as well as in that of the world
of pleasure and social intercourse when the day's work is
done, a state of things has arisen in which artificial illumi­
nation holds the very first place, as without it the whole
scheme of present day society would at once fall to the
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INTRODUCTION
ground."1 This "modernity" of illumination systems, particularly electric
ones, and their capacity to "turn night into day," has become integral to
a narrative that (often tacitly) pervades cultural theory and history, not
to mention society more broadly.2 At its crudest, but also most powerful,
the European past is dark and gloomy, and its historical present, formed
over the nineteenth century, is glittering and radiant. Wolfgang Schivel-
busch, for example, describes the appearance of electric light as a visual
"apotheosis," an effulgence so shocking and radical that Parisian ladies
were forced to unfurl parasols to protect their delicate retinas.3 Electric
light was the "culmination” of a century's relentless drive toward specta­
cular radiance, generating a "fairyland environment" or "celestial land­
scape."4 Night, in turn, has been conquered, colonized, divested of my­
stery.5 The future, meanwhile, will be only more brilliant and starless:
"The urban landscape of the future will be characterised by an almost
perpetual illumination which practically defies the natural order of day
and night."6
Most of this scholarship is sophisticated and scrupulous, and I have no
desire to caricature it. Nonetheless, it is clear that twentieth-century cul­
tural historians have created a powerful, influential narrative that depicts
"Western modernity" in terms of the relentless expansion of illumination.
The production of illuminated, disenchanted modern space is, moreover,
invariably seen as integral to two specifically visual historical processes:
the rise of surveillance and the development of spectacle. In the former,
illumination is the means through which society is permeated by a nefar­
ious, anonymous, disciplinary gaze: light is a glittering trap. In the latter,
illumination is seductive and dazzling, creating the stage on which the
commodity makes its breathtaking appearance: light is deceptive and nar­
cotic. The cultural history of light and vision thus becomes inseparable
from two political histories, those of discipline and of capital. These two
paradigms, the disciplinary and the spectacular, are embodied in two fig­
ures, one architectural and one human: the panopticon and the flâneur,
both of which have developed a cultural and theoretical significance far be­
yond studies of illumination or visual culture. This book will complicate,
critique, and unsettle the paradigms of discipline/panopticism and spec­
tacle/flâneur, and the particular political histories that support them, by
arguing that the visual dimensions of space were, in general, engineered
with neither coercion nor seduction in mind. It aims to replace these
rather procrustean paradigms with a suppler and broader range of terms
that are both more empirically satisfying and more analytically useful
and, thus, to recast the political history of light and vision as part of a
material history of Western liberalism. The first thing to do, then, is to
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LIGHT, VISION, AND POWER
examine these hegemonic visual concepts and ask in what ways they are
unsatisfactory.
Questioning Visual Concepts: Panopticism and the Flaneur
Over the past three decades, drawing on the foundational texts of Fou­
cault and Benjamin, scholars have produced a rich, interdisciplinary
body of work on the historical relations between vision and power.7 The
panopticon and the flaneur loom large in such analyses. No lexicon of
contemporary cultural theory would be complete without them. Nei­
ther, however, is particularly useful when attempting to understand the
politics of light and vision in nineteenth-century Britain, and they are
of probably as equally limited use elsewhere.
Bentham's panopticon, devised between 1787 and 1791, was, according
to Foucault, a cogent solution to several pressing contemporary problems
of government, relating to crime, health, and morality: "A fear haunted
the latter half of the eighteenth century: the fear of darkened spaces, of
the pall of gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and
truths___A form of power whose main instance is that of opinion will
refuse to tolerate areas of darkness. If Bentham's project aroused interest,
this was because it provided a formula applicable to many domains, the
formula of 'power through transparency,' subjection by 'illumination.'"8
The architectural details of the panopticon will probably be familiar to
most readers.9 The inmate, according to Bentham, should always "con­
ceive himself to be" inspected from the panopticon's central watchtower,
even if the inspector was actually absent. He would be "awed to silence
by an invisible eye" and rendered compliant and docile. The windows of
each cell would be "as large as the strength of the building... will per­
mit," while firm partitions prevented inmates from seeing each other.
As dusk fell, lamps would "throw the light into the corresponding cells,
[which] would extend to the night the security of the day."10 Blinds or
lanterns prevented the inspector from being detected in his lodge while
allowing him to read or work there. One could never verify whether one
was not being watched. The panopticon produced total asymmetry of
vision: a gallery of illuminated inmates helplessly "subjected to a field of
visibility," imagining themselves to be permanently watched by an om­
niscient, invisible, and possibly absent, inspector.11 This was, Bentham
declared, an "instrument of government," and he began his Panopticon
Letters with a list of the moral and physical benefits of his “simple idea in
Architecture!"u
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INTRODUCTION
This was asymmetrical "subjection by illumination," in which light
is used as a direct, coercive instrument of power. Since the publication
of Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1977), with its memorable analysis
of Bentham's "simple idea," panopticism has become the dominant
paradigm for understanding the visual operation of power in post­
Enlightenment Europe. It is "the universal optical machine of human
groupings," a model, or "diagram of power," used to structure not just
prisons and schools but even whole cities and societies.13 The panopti­
con was "a type that flourished for a century" and might, in the later
twentieth century, be in the process of mutating into something perhaps
even more pernicious, a telematic or computerized society of "control,"
typified by conduct so predictable that the massive, forbidding para­
phernalia of panopticism has become obsolete.14 Other scholars, how­
ever, see in the early-twenty-first-century world of CCTV (closed-circuit
television), Internet surveillance, and nightsun helicopters nothing less
than an intensification or a perfection of panopticism, through far more
sophisticated, pervasive, and miniaturized, even nanopanoptic, tech­
niques: "The Panopticon is 'present' nearly everywhere."15 Nowhere is
this statement more correct than in academe, where a cursory search
of databases and books finds panopticism being used to explicate the
politics of photography, physical appearance, the Internet, CCTV, car­
tography, children's playgrounds, consumer space, sport, incest, audit
culture, travel, and the novels of Charles Dickens.16
The resulting narrative, again, will be familiar: the past two hundred
years have witnessed the rise of malign, insidious surveillance.17 Modern
brightness is inescapable. Illumination, and the gazes it makes possible,
traps us all, not just the prisoner in the cell. The tacit premise of much
of this literature—that vision and power are symbiotic and have taken
specific forms over the past two hundred years—is indisputable. But these
forms have almost invariably not been panoptic. Panopticism has been
emptied of meaning to the point where it simply refers to any con­
figuration of vision and power, any technological or architectural ar­
rangement designed to facilitate the observation of some humans by
others. We have seen the retrospective panopticization of a Western
society that was, historically, not panoptic. As Lauren Goodlad states,
the contemporary obsession with panopticism has made us, ironically,
historically myopic: we think, talk, and write "more about panopticism
than [ask] why it was that nineteenth-century Britons declined to build
any Panopticons."18
This last point is obvious but deceptive. There were several failed at­
tempts to build panopticons: for example, at the Edinburgh Bridewell
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