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

Asking questions about vision has become something of a commonplace in Victorian studies. Who was placed under what kind of scrutiny, and to what end? How effective was the presumed panoptic eye of the state? What was seen by the flâneur, and might there be a flâneuse, who saw and was seen differently? How did physiologists and psychologists understand the operations of the eye, and the workings of human attention? And what might all these questions have to do with the expanding urban environment, and with technological developments?

In his brilliant new study, The Victorian Eye, Chris Otter deliberately and boldly shakes up many of the assumptions about Victorian visuality that have started to settle into place. He is, indeed, concerned with how Victorians saw their world, and how they, in turn were both illuminated and inspected. His aim, however, is to restore complexity and variability to forms of vision, and to rescue our understanding of these issues from what he sees as the tyranny – or at the very least the over-simplification – of the abstractions of the panopticon and the flâneur. Rightly, he shows how the concept of the flâneur is a peculiarly literary one, emanating from a particular moment in Parisian culture, and hence at best only an enabling metaphor rather than a historical figure; and he demonstrates how the idea of the panopticon rarely was carried into architectural practice. To be sure, he discusses how inspectability, and regulation, was an integral part of technological and urban life, but he shows the extent to which formal techniques and exercises of observation (whether of the amount of light shed by an incandescent lamp, or of the quality of carcasses in a slaughterhouse, or the amount of ventilation in a slum dwelling) were themselves subject to many variables. More than this, his masterpiece of a strategic move is to tie in the scrutinies carried out by sanitary and nuisance inspectors, and the ways in which the streets and homes of the Victorian city came to be lit by gas lamps or electric filaments, to the emergence of the liberal subject.

Many of the contradictions inherent within liberalism – the tug between commitments to economic dynamism and free trade on the one hand, and between health and sanitary reform on the other, for example – are played out through Otter's subject matter. The opacity of a London smog, for example, pits liberal commitments to pure vision – let alone to improving pulmonary health – against equally liberal commitments to permissive regulation when it came to manufacture. Otter gives fascinating, lovingly detailed, and copiously illustrated accounts of all kinds of technologies of vision, starting with the human eye itself – often imperfect, inaccurate, and inescapably subjective in its workings – and then documenting the developments of its prostheses: all kinds of meters, gauges, and other instruments designed to standardize the information received. Visual perception is, however, inevitably complicated by working in tandem with the other senses, whether these sniff out bad drains or escaping gas or hear the hiss of an arc light. Sightlines are compromised by the crooked shapes of streets or by the need to protect patients' privacy on wards. The ubiquity of vision often assumed by those who blithely write of the panoptic power of the gaze is considerably qualified by what inspection meant in practice: samplings of physical surroundings, the remoteness of certain locations, the secrecy of others, and the unreadability of what was happening behind a closed bathroom door or, indeed, within an inspected and recorded individual's mind.

One's ability to see is always affected, too, by the light that is available to see by – a fundamental point that is, nonetheless, rarely taken into account. The development and provision of infrastructures of gas and electric light, and the concomitant means of inspecting and regulating these - let alone the variables...