Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century by Susan E. Cook (review)

Susan e. Cook's Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century (2019) argues that the photographic negative, while marginalized in the history of the photographic medium, is central to Victorian literary culture as evidenced by the distinct responses that negatives and experimental photographic techniques elicited in literature and popular culture. The increased attention to visual information that Cook notes as having characterized the Victorian era became a source of anxiety among (literary) celebrities, as the technology was used for image reproduction. The multiplicity of images that photographic negatives allowed, Cook argues, "[f]ar from bringing the celebrity closer to the viewer … instead holds the celebrity at a greater remove" (xxvii). Cook examines how as photographic technology became integrated into Victorian society, the ways of seeing the world that photography promised—while not always delivered on—significantly impacted Victorian literature.

In chapter 1, Cook reads Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Dickens's own ambivalence about his image, using daguerreotype photography as a device to highlight the simultaneous presence of past and present. The chapter details how even though Dickens courted celebrity by posing for photos, he was also concerned with controlling his photographic image, as reflected in his keen interest in writing about photographic technology. Cook argues, "the daguerreotype is itself an image caught between the time of capture and the moment of its viewing" (12) to highlight how Dickens's novel addresses the present by means of a story about the past. Cook's attention to detail extends to original illustrations used in the novel, through which she demonstrates how Dickens upends what we think we know about the properties of light and dark (e.g., light as obscuring versus revealing truth and the contrast of darkness providing, rather than hiding, more perspective on something).

Cook's exploration of light and dark segues into chapter 2, in which she reads Dickens's Little Dorrit (1857) through the solarized photographic negative. Cook questions readers' connotations of visual darkness and light as she demonstrates how Dickens's work challenges the conventional thinking behind how photographic images work (i.e., as providing objective truth). Cook further considers how fine the line is between light and dark. For example, she examines how Dickens treats with distaste both the extreme light of the Marseilles sun and the extreme dark of the Marshalsea, a debtor's prison in which Little Dorrit is raised. Furthermore, Cook highlights how Dickens makes this point clear as Dorrit eventually is easily able to cross the contextual boundaries of dark and light. This unsettling of visible boundaries of light and dark, represented by Dorrit's evolving social mobility, perhaps also speaks to the easing of social barriers in the Victorian era that accompanied the growth of the market economy. Cook's discussion leads the reader to question how visual technologies allowed Victorians to envision new social realities and more mobility.

Questions of photographic objectivity are a bridge for Cook into chapter 3, in which she reads Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "A Case of Identity" (1891) via forensic photography and the cabinet card (i.e., the story concerns a scandalous celebrity photograph). The fictional Holmes would, at first glance, seem to be an advocate of photography in the pursuit of truth, yet Cook elucidates that, ultimately in the story, the written word is accepted as a greater proof than is photography. Cook argues, "Holmes presents a theory about the discretion and artistry of details. This, he suggests, is what grounds his own detective practice—not the sheer volume of those details" (48). Cook juxtaposes Holmes's skeptical regard of photography with Doyle's support of spirit photography despite ample evidence of fraud in the production of these images. Ultimately, Cook argues, Holmes regards the photograph as a hollow fetish object unable to contain...