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

We are familiar with the argument that there is nothing inevitable about the emergence of particular technologies, but we do not always place that emergence within a political history. In The Victorian Eye Chris Otter does just that, while at the same time maintaining a close focus on the environment and the material objects of lighting technologies.

Otter argues that "liberalism" provides the essential context for examining the growth and the limits to illumination. However, he does not define liberalism as a cohesive political creed; rather, he sees it as a body of beliefs focused on individual independence, lack of state interference, and ideas of conduct and character which were secured in a noncoercive manner through norms of behavior rather than laws. His explanatory framework thus combines liberalism with technological development and changing understandings of perception.

Otter starts with an examination of the eye's structure and physiology. He considers campaigns to protect sight by avoiding bad reading habits and maintaining proper ocular hygiene. This is set alongside the focus on "attention," on how to read the world and act properly within it, and how particular social spaces operated against the perception of, for example, the poor as anything other than dark, stinking, and desensitized. He examines the city environment and the degree to which spaces and streets were engineered to promote conditions conducive to clarity, brightness, and a due regard for privacy.

Such efforts were invariably imperfect, and yet the space and role of inspection steadily increased, with systems designed to be inspectable. Readers may be surprised by the instructions issued to inspectors on what were often intrusive visits: the admonitions against prying, the insistence on courtesy, the refusal to indulge in moral judgments. There were strict limits as to what inspectors could allow themselves to see, which made for toleration rather than outright hostility. While overwork, apathy, low pay, and confusion meant less than perfect regimes, our image of the Victorian inspector may need modification.

The second half of the book examines practices and instruments which quantified light, the unreliability of the "candlefoot" measurement, and the rise of photometry. Artificial light had to perform very different tasks; problems of measuring color, brilliance, or diffusion were legion. Not surprisingly, the picture was far from uniform. A resistance to system, so visible in the fragmented provision of electricity, was compounded by idiosyncratic local practices. However, Otter argues that we should read this as a story which was wholly characteristic of British liberalism with its sensitivity to the local, rather than as a history of the eventual triumph of system over many obstacles, as portrayed by Thomas Hughes.

Otter presents a complex range of material extremely well. He unpacks existing methodologies, arguing that these are limited or exaggerated: Michel Foucault's disciplinary panoptic vision and Walter Benjamin's focus on spectacle and the flaneur receive short shrift. He builds on Wolfgang Schivelbusch's innovative analysis of the industrialization of light in Disenchanted Night (1988) but draws from a wider range of thinkers. The "political" provides a fresh focus, and indeed there were places where politics were absolutely critical. The muddle of competing services in London was essentially a political problem, where the rights of private enterprise and distaste for competitive municipal services overrode considerations of improved efficiency, safety, and customer benefit.

The Victorian Eye introduces us to a host of forgotten writers and engineers and draws on an impressively wide range of sources. The emphasis is on developments after 1850 and especially after 1870. Otter places a welcome emphasis on the adaptability and tenacity of gas against the efforts made to persuade the public to switch to electricity. His perspective provides a sure sense of the interconnectedness of technological, social, and political change. He reminds us too of the subjective role played by the quality of light: the Park in Nottingham still provides gas lighting, and the experience of walking through...