Reading Girlhood in Victorian Photography

Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.

—Susan Sontag, On Photography (23).

The purpose behind my interdisciplinary seminar, which combined the "Origins and Developments" with the "Radical Visual" strands of CLISS, was twofold: to practice reading photographs and to examine examples of Victorian photography's construction of girlhood. In this essay I will provide a snapshot of the seminar's texts and concerns and then a brief close reading of one of its central issues: the relationship between poetry and portraiture.

Preliminaries

To prepare for in-depth discussions of the photographs that would form the core of the seminar's texts, participants were asked to read selected essays that situate Victorian photography in general, and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson¹ and Julia Margaret Cameron in particular, within cultural and ideological parameters: Lindsay Smith's chapter on "The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photography Theory" in The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth-Century Photography (1998); Elizabeth Heyert's "The Victorian Amateur" from The Glass-House Years: Victorian Portrait Photography, 1839–1870 (1979); and Julia Margaret Cameron's autobiographical fragment, "Annals of My Glass House" (1874). In addition, participants were asked to read two poems: Carroll's "Beatrice" (1862) and Cameron's "On a Portrait" (1876). Suggested secondary reading (see Works Cited) included critical works that offer additional analyses of Dodgson's and Cameron's photography, a reevaluation of the meanings of Victorian photography in contemporary life, and Roland Barthes's classic essay, "Rhetoric of the Image" as a piece that provides vocabulary and a theoretical framework to assist in thinking critically about the images.

Introducing Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Julia Margaret Cameron

These readings provided a substantial introduction to both Dodgson's and Cameron's photographic work. Although everyone knew Lewis Carroll's Alice books, of course, the details of his hobby were not well known to all (though very well to some of the Japanese participants). Similarly, Cameron's work was well-known to some but not to others. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's interest in photography as a hobby was piqued in 1856 by watching a favorite uncle taking pictures. Between 1856 and 1880 (when he stopped taking pictures in part because he did not like the new dry-plate process), Dodgson used his camera to help him in making child friends—sometimes by way of pleasing their parents through the offer of photographs of their children—and in meeting notables of the day such as the Rossettis, Ellen Terry, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. He filled album after album with portraits. Though an amateur who exhibited only four photographs during his lifetime, Dodgson has been called one of the most outstanding child photographers of the Victorian age (Gernsheim, Lewis Carroll 28).

Julia Margaret Cameron enthusiastically embraced the art of photography after her daughter and son-in-law gave the forty-eight-year-old a camera in late 1863. She transformed the chicken coop at her home on the Isle of Wight into a glass-house (Dodgson had one built on the roof over his rooms at Christ Church, Oxford). Cameron exhibited her photographs widely at home, internationally (she won numerous prizes) and in one-woman shows. Although also considered to be an amateur, Cameron became quite famous for her portraits and sold her work as prints, often in series. After moving to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) with her husband in 1875 to be near her sons who maintained the family's tea plantations, she took very few photographs. Both Dodgson and Cameron used the wet collodion process (described below) to make their portraits.

Locating Ourselves

Given the many differences between the seminar participants in age, nationality, and degree of familiarity with children's literature (they were master's or doctoral candidates, independent scholars, and professors in their respective countries), as well as the vast span of time that separated every participant from the historical moment of the photographs we were...