Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons by Martin Willis (review)

Martin Willis’s Vision, Science and Literature provides a fresh account of modern visualities in the overlap between scientific and literary cultures. Willis launches the book with the point that the Victorians understood vision as a dialectic between sensation and imagination. “The porous boundaries of seen and unseen, and of image and imagination, led to a new epistemology of vision that held the actual and the imagined in fragile suspension,” Willis says (5). These kinds of negotiations were galvanized particularly by the telescope and microscope, which gave rise to heated debates about what they revealed in direct proportion to refinements in the technologies themselves. The two instruments form central components of the book, as do biological and ophthalmological theories of the eye and optic nerve drawn from Hermann von Helmholtz and others. But Willis also surveys a range of other scopic practices drawn from realms such as archeology, spiritualism, and stage magic. As Victorians gazed on the contested truths of the eye—everything from dust motes and microbes to the surface of Mars—vision became conceived as a distinctive product of inference and ideation, the end result of looking at things that resisted any more perfect stare. Willis’s aim is to correct the narrative of nineteenth-century visuality defined by Jonathan Crary, Lorraine J. Daston, and Peter Galison, which located a set of rapidly hardening oppositions between subjective and objective modes of observation in the period. Willis shows that vision was at once a product of multiple mediations—physiological, technological, and social—and as a primary ground for how we define and experience the real.

The book elects to avoid the subject of photography, which has been worked over assiduously in recent studies of nineteenth-century visual culture. There is strikingly little to be found on painting and the other visual arts, either, or on cultural luminaries like George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. Instead, Willis introduces a wonderfully eclectic cast of characters and things, and allows the argument to build through their gradual accretion. We meet scientists like the poetry-scribbling astronomer Percival Lowell (brother of Amy Lowell) and the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, who were in dialogue with the likes of H. G. Wells and H. Rider Haggard. The book’s argument against a paradigm shift in vision results in an arc that is largely thematic rather than historical, and the four major sections (“Small,” “Large,” “Past,” and “Future”) are meant to reflect this synchronic understanding of its subject. In each chapter, Willis exhibits a fine sense of the conjunctions between scientists and non-scientists on vision. In the second chapter on infection theories, for example, he links gothic fictions like Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) to a nascent germ theory of disease; both discourses suggest a threat of infection from particles too small for the naked eye, in agents (respectively, the microbe and the vampire) that emanate from dark and unclean corners. The fiction of the germ, here, helped to create the conditions for its acceptance as fact. As Willis contends, the same language of gothic infection also served to structure debates between scientists and the British public at large—notably, in popular lobbies against the British Institute of Preventative Medicine in the 1890s, as protesters invoked the discourse of invisible infection to denounce both the literal and moral pollution thought to seep out from the institute.

These kinds of topical case studies form a major attraction in the book, which is broad by design. Readers will be especially intrigued to learn about the friendship between Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini in the last two chapters. As a trained ophthalmologist who studied with the medical expert Edmund Landolt in Paris just prior to his literary career, Doyle was well primed to write about vision. What could be a droll reading of detection and surveillance, however, turns into a more distinctive look at illusions, misdirection...