Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900, and: The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 (review)

In The Victorian Eye, historian Chris Otter shows why "who could see what, whom, when, where, and how was a profoundly important political question" (10). Subtitled A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910, Otter's book traces the advent and development of artificial illumination through an exhaustive examination of such mundane objects as spectacles and gas mains, and their effects on human bodies and culture in industrialized British cities.

For cultural historians, artificial illumination has been an underlying constituent of modernism. The creation of the starkly illuminated urban space, the turning of night into day in the factory, the piercing of tenebrous slums by electricity or gas have usually been theorized according to two visual paradigms: the notions of surveillance, where "society is permeated by an anonymous, disciplinary gaze," and spectacle, where light sets the stage "on which the commodity makes its breathtaking appearance" (2). Otter finds these paradigms and their representative figures—the Panopticon and the flaneur—limited. First materially: there were no Panopticons built in Britain, and the ironic and aloof flaneur was not representative of Victorian visual practice. Otter also sees analytical failings: among other things, the models do not account for emotional and affective experience. As an alternative, he provides "a suppler and broader range of terms that are both more empirically satisfying and more analytically useful to recast the political history of light and vision as part of a material history for western liberals" (2). He offers freedom—both visual and political—in the place of coercion and total knowledge.

Otter posits a liberal subject, the middle- and upper-class citizen of London, Manchester, and Leeds, who operated in a socially normative fashion and was concerned with the creation of character, "a deeply bodily enterprise that included the cultivation of cleanliness, sexual moderation, sobriety, physical fitness and good heath" (11). Such subjects felt they barely needed a state to govern them. Government, on the other hand, had to manage the tumultuous growth of modern technologies (including railway, gas, water, sewage, and electricity), funding, building, running, and regulating these systems. The interaction of the liberal subject and the state's increasing responsibility for new technologies and technological networks—in particular artificial illumination—is the substance of this book.

For Otter, this interaction is for the most part positive. He begins with an exhaustive history of perception in the nineteenth century, identifying the liberal subject with such visual practices as "attention to detail, recognition and reading" (19). Otter considers the deleterious effects of illumination on ocular physiology and the medical resistance to the light that flooded cities. But he shows that the development of eye exams, eye hospitals, and spectacles that diagnosed and corrected faulty vision, and the evolution of visual technologies such as pocket city maps and distinct street signs that allowed movement through the city, provided the ordinary citizen with greater autonomy.

Developing these themes, Otter proposes a pattern of collective perception that he calls an oligoptic visual economy in which "free, mobile and potentially self-aware individuals monitor one another" in spaces such as libraries and museums or gardens and streets (255). Such individuals increasingly demanded visual command over their environment, and Otter shows how street widening, smoke abatement, window glazing, and soundproof paving facilitated that desire. For Otter, the oligoptic spaces could be supervised—say, from the position of relative centrality held by a librarian at his or her desk—and inspected. Indeed, sanitary networks, gas pipes, and food and water delivery systems were increasingly built to facilitate inspection. Yet such practices were rarely coercive...