Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception (review)

Martin Heidegger believed that the modern privileging of seeing over understanding helped to debase the senses. In contrast to the circumspect observation involved in "tarrying observantly," it led to restlessness and distraction, "the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters," so producing the distinctively modern experience of "never-dwelling-anywhere" (Being and Time [1927, 1962] 216–17). This distrust of the image typified criticism of the burgeoning "mass" culture of the early twentieth century, yet the assumptions on which it rests seem to have been relatively absent during the Victorian period. The contrast readily arises in reading through this valuable collection of essays on visual forms of popular entertainment in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Indeed, as one moves through the chapters, the marked difference of contemporary response to popular visual forms both then and now becomes quite striking.

Unsurprisingly, photography and early cinematography predominate among the topics of each chapter, but two of the most interesting divergences take up rather different visual technologies. The stereoscope was a photographically based medium but differed from photography in simulating three-dimensional experience. In his discussion of this hugely popular medium, William Merrin refers to Charles Baudelaire's contempt for photography and his concern for how it would affect artistic appreciation and expression. This is one of the few views cited in the book prefiguring later hostility to mechanically produced realism, and it is very much at odds with the enrapt popularity of the stereoscope. In taking his analytical cue from such thinkers as Heidegger and Jean Baudrillard, Merrin can only register, rather than imaginatively engage with, the profound response with which the stereoscope was first met. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example, spoke of "a dream-like exultation of the faculties" and of sailing away "into one strange scene after another like disembodied spirits" (163). In his chapter, John Plunkett writes of screen practice from the late eighteenth century, discussing how transparencies led to other optical recreations such as phantasmagoria, diorama, and cosmorama. Each of these early forms of screen entertainment stimulated new ways of imagining the relationship between self and world.

The book includes accounts of a traveling Victorian photographer, Punch's use of lantern slide lectures as a promotional technique, Robert Paul's "animated photography" and film exhibition in fin-de-siècle Brighton and Hove, the cross-linkages of postcards and moving image in early Bamforth films, the question of censorship and propriety in late-Victorian cinematography, the first screen kiss, the lineage running from penny dreadfuls to early film dramas, and the notion of the "knowing" spectator in relation to theatrical and cinematic performances of Dion Boucicault's The Long Strike (1866). Ine van Dooren and Amy Sargeant offer a fascinating—if abbreviated—foray into photographic and lantern slide representations of dead children and babies. In trying to pack in such a range of material, the editors have clearly had to restrict the length of individual chapters, when in some cases the material is crying out for more extensive treatment.

The major exception, in that it manages to compact so much into its allotted dozen pages, is Patrizia Di Bello's chapter on women and photography during the Victorian period. Nothing else in the book quite matches this opening chapter, which analyzes two nineteenth-century images: a wood engraving of Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice, published on the front cover of the Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times on 14 March 1863, and the photographic carte-de-visite that was almost certainly its original, taken by Chèmar Freres in Brussels. In both images Princess Beatrice is seated on her mother's knee, and one of the Queen's arms encircles her daughter round the waist and clutches the girl's dress with her hand. The Queen's other hand touches her daughter's as they both look down at an oval framed photograph of Prince Albert, who died in 1861. Di Bello develops an astute analysis of this remarkable...