Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850 - 1970

Chapter 1: Promiscuous Vision: The Visual Affinities of the Home Aquarium

chapter 1 promiscuous vision: the visual affinities of the home aquarium The wonders of the ocean ›oor do not reveal themselves to vulgar eyes. —h. noel humphreys, Ocean Gardens H. Noel Humphreys assured his English and American readers that, to engage the full potential of the aquarium, “it is the seeing that is everything.”1 But when it came to the home tank, seeing was not simple . As the preceding epigraph attests, this was not a matter for “vulgar eyes.” It was not enough to merely look. The allure of spectacle might sustain the public tank, but to maximize the bene‹ts of this rational amusement in the parlor, one had to pay attention; one had to observe. Thus, seventy- ‹ve years after Humphreys’s admonition against vulgar eyes, William Innes, one of the pillars of the American hobby, used an editorial in his journal, the Aquarium, to reiterate the importance of the perceptual and cognitive synthesis intrinsic to properly observing the home tank. This little editorial is a plea for the overlooked possibilities, particularly in very simple and sparsely stocked aquaria, where the ‹eld at ‹rst sight seems quite limited. Has the owner really seen all that can be seen, learned all there is to know? Hardly. These are not foolish questions. They have direct scienti‹c bearing, but most of all, they are intended to bring out the fact that observation needs to be systematized, so that it can be increased and made more valuable. It is pleasant to believe one’s self a person with the power of seeing everything at a glance, but in aquarium study (and I suspect elsewhere) “there ain’t no such animal.” 15 If this exhortation seems excessively disciplinary for a leisure activity, Innes assures his readers that “perpetual progress” as an aquarium observer “becomes permanent pleasure.”2 Innes’s mid-twentieth-century supplement to Humphreys’s mid-nineteenth -century assertion of the visual pleasures of the aquarium and their inaccessibility to vulgar eyes underscores a key feature of the tank as an exemplary rational amusement. Its enthusiasts’ emphases on systematic observation as key to intellectual pro‹t and progress link the hobby to the core operation of American modernity: the ability to pay attention. Humphreys’s and Innes’s assertions reinforce the aquarium’s place in the ongoing construction , management, and domestication of modern attention, which, as Jonathan Crary observes, is the operation central to the functioning of a capitalist consumer economy.3 What, in its British antecedents, begins as an appeal to a cultivated aesthetic and theological vision, one mark of distinction against the merely vulgar, morphs over time into surveillance as leisure. The inculcation of systematic discipline as crucial to the hobby transports the hobbyist from an earlier romantic ethos, one in which the re‹ned soul sees in the tank a solidarity with lyric poets, to an entrepreneurial, managerial one ever on the alert to overlooked possibilities for increasing value. Yet the aquarium was not only an activity to which attention must be paid. It was also a distraction, a site of seeming respite from the need to pay attention, as J. E. Taylor argued. Invalids, or people of sedentary habits, who are much con‹ned within doors, might ‹nd comfort and enjoyment from keeping an aquarium. The antics of its little inhabitants, and the little care required to keep this miniature world in a healthy condition, will draw off their attention from many an hour of suffering or care, and unconsciously develop a love for God’s creatures.4 The aquarium did not just demand the heightened vigilance and cultivated engagement required of the modern subject; it was also the antidote to them. Whether as a task to be effectively managed or a refuge from such tasks, the home tank was part of a Foucauldian “network of permanent observation,” one in which concentrated attention, its re‹nement and recalibration, increasingly colonized leisure time.5 How did the home aquarium so easily accommodate these two seemingly incommensurable visual operations—focused attention and respite—within a larger construction of attentiveness? This chapter examines the perceptual dynamics of the home aquarium through its visual af‹nities. The aquarium’s uncanny ability to draw on a 16 parlor ponds wide range of such af‹nities and their operations is crucial to understanding its social work and its enduring popularity. These af‹nities inserted the tank, its residents, and its...