The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (review)

In The Victorian Eye, Otter provides a new political history of light and vision in nineteenth-century Britain, challenging the validity of both the Foucauldian panopticon and the Baudelairean/Benjaminian flâneur as a means for understanding the relations of vision and power during the period.¹ Combining political history with cultural geography and the history of science, technology, and medicine, Otter argues that although light was indeed used for discipline and display, a full politics of vision comes into view only when we also attend to the physical and technological elements of eyesight and illumination. The resulting account privileges thick local descriptions over broad, theoretical generalizations, but it nonetheless has a broad cultural narrative to offer: The story of the Victorian eye is a tale of the liberal subject, self-governing rather than scrutinized or spectacular.

In his opening chapter, Otter sketches a historical overview of nineteenth-century perception, arguing that urban environments gave rise to new visual practices and visual needs. Modern civilization and the modern city, contemporaries felt, were causing an upsurge in myopia. Ophthalmology developed in earnest, inventing devices for studying the eye and measuring vision and offering injunctions about appropriate postures and light levels for reading, whether at home or in schools. The visual traits of the self-governing liberal subject—attentive, observant, introspective, discerning, and literate—overlapped with, and reinforced, these practical, physical concerns.

Chapters 2 and 3 examine case studies relevant to public vision and inspection, respectively. Otter sees in the regulation of sunlight for buildings and in projects for street widening, smoke abatement, window glazing, and pavement soundproofing what he calls "oligoptic engineering"—the shaping of urban space to create networks of inspection and to encourage public self-observation, while also preserving appropriate, nonpanoptical levels of privacy. Such efforts never succeeded fully in achieving their aims, and sometimes were disastrous failures. But the attempt to balance visibility and privacy, Otter argues, was always prominent. Particularly striking is Otter's discussion of the systems of governmental inspection—of sanitation, food, lodging houses, and various domestic and industrial "nuisances." These systems were designed to be accessible at key points but preferably out of sight. Meters for measuring gas or electricity usage by individual houses were positioned outside the home, readable by inspector and owner alike. When inspectors had to enter private homes or businesses, protocols required them to be deferential and unobtrusive.

The next three chapters focus on the introduction of gas and then electric lighting to British cities, giving particular attention to the practical challenges and the networks of people and technology necessary to implement and sustain them. Turning light into a commodity was anything but straightforward. Even measuring light was deeply problematical: What was to be the unit of measure? How could it be reliably standardized, particularly when measurements depended on the subjective impressions of the notoriously varying and inefficient human eye?

Addressing the transition from electric to gas lighting, Otter argues that electric light's triumph was not inevitable, eventuated in different ways in different places, and occurred only after an extended period in which multiple forms of illumination coexisted. Electricity networks, like those for gas, were dirty, smoky, and often unreliable, but they carried the added element of invisible danger: Gas was smelly, but it signaled its presence, whereas shock or even electrocution occurred without warning. The whiteness of electric light, moreover, unsettled Victorian eyes and had to be shaped for different locations—parlors, public streets, offices, and factories. Whether gas or electric, however, light never flooded Victorian cities for the purpose of surveillance, Otter stresses; illumination was seen principally as a tool for sanitary engineering, though introduced in the cautious, piecemeal fashion consistent with British suspicion of governmental intrusion into personal privacy and autonomy.

By examining the ways in which light was actually produced, distributed, measured, inspected, controlled, and used—by individuals, businesses, and governments—Otter...