Chapter 2The Mirror of InkRealism, Orientalism, and Vision at a Distance

The Magic Mirror of Ink

The authoritative Western account of the magic mirror of ink was written by Edward William Lane, who saw the magician Sheik Abd al-Qadir al-Maghrabi perform it in Cairo in 1834. Lane's narrative of the experiment formed the centerpiece of a chapter on magic in The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians (1836), published in two volumes by Charles Knight, and it was almost immediately singled out by reviewers and readers as a significant point of interest in the text. In a review of The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians for Quarterly Review, Sir John Barrow devoted several pages just to discussing the mirror of ink, calling it “one of the most extraordinary feats of magic that have been recorded since the days of the Pharaohs.”¹² The mirror of ink quickly became an attraction to readers on its own merits. The narrative of Sheik Abd al-Qadir's trick was excerpted for publication in newspapers and magazines, mentioned in the Cairo edition of John Murray's guidebooks, and discussed openly as an example of a potentially supernatural phenomenon. It may have helped fuel the appetite for the three revised editions that kept The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians in print into the twentieth century—editions in which Lane added updated footnotes to his discussion of the mirror of ink to register his views on the growing public debate surrounding the trick.

Lane was a pioneering scholar of Egypt and, for Edward Said, among a handful of writers responsible for developing a British Orientalist scholarly tradition.¹³ An engraver's apprentice working in London, Lane was swept up by Egyptomania in the decades following Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign (1798–1801) and the West's discovery of Egyptian history, art, and culture.¹⁴ After studying Arabic and Egyptian history in London, Lane embarked on the first of three research trips to Egypt in 1825, fired up with the ambition to “throw myself entirely among strangers—to adopt their language, their customs, and their dress—and . . . to prosecute the study of their literature.” He settled in Cairo, took on the name of Mansur Effendi, and adopted the manners, customs, and dress of a Muslim, even praying alongside his Egyptian friends at the mosque.¹⁵ The fruits of this first trip, a historical manuscript called Description of Egypt, failed to find a publisher, but he managed to secure a contract for a different book that would focus on modern Egypt. Lane used his advance to return to Cairo in 1833 for additional research toward what would become The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. Within weeks of his arrival, he followed up on a lead he had received years before from Henry Salt. Salt was Britain's consul-general to Egypt and an avid collector of Egyptian artifacts, and during Lane's first trip to Egypt he confided that he had met a “magician of great power” who made images appear in a mirror of ink.¹⁶ Lane was keen to see this for himself, but Salt was unable to supply the magician's name or address. Between his two Egyptian sojourns, Lane conferred with fellow travelers in London who supplied this missing piece of information, and in February 1834, he secured an introduction to Sheik Abd al-Qadir. Within a few years, the sales of The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians would turn him into the famous “Cairo magician” sought after by European travelers.

“Description of Egypt” could be imagined as a sort of spiritual subtitle for The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, or an account of its literary method. In Orientalism, Said focuses on its exhaustive—and, quite frankly, exhausting—use of description, its ambition to “make Egypt and Egyptians totally visible . . . in swollen detail.”¹⁷ For Lane's readers, this was an asset. Lord Brougham, founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, praised Lane for his descriptive powers; The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians was meant to showcase this strength.¹⁸ The visuality of Lane's descriptive prose was enhanced by his use of a camera lucida, a pocket-sized optical technological drawing aid that superimposes an image of an object or scene onto the page so that it can be quickly sketched.¹⁹ In addition to allowing him to capture visual information efficiently for later analysis, his rough sketches served as the basis of the illustrations that Lane created for The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. Visualization is therefore more than a metaphor for Lane's ethnographic approach—it is both a practice and a process, one that yielded images as well as words. Lane's multimedia approach to “describing” Egypt—and the role of pictures in both mediating and supplementing his descriptions—is important context for understanding how Lane represented the mirror of ink as itself a synthesis of image and text.

The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians described the mirror of ink in characteristically minute detail. First, a boy of eight or nine years old was procured from the streets to act as a clairvoyant medium. (According to the Abd al-Qadir, “boy[s] not yet arrived at puberty” were among the select class of people capable of seeing in the magic mirror; the others were “a virgin, a black female slave, and a pregnant woman.”)²⁰ Lane chose the boy himself from the street and was confident there was no collusion between him and the magician. The magician requested of his host a reed-pen, ink, paper, and scissors, which he used to inscribe invocations to the genii Tarshun and Taryooshun. A charm “to open the boy's eyes in a supernatural manner” was also written out by Abd al-Qadir; the passage from the Koran—“And we have removed from thee thy veil; and thy sight to-day is piercing”—was placed inside the boy's skullcap (269). Throughout the ritual, the invocations were burned in a chafing dish prepared with frankincense, coriander seed, and benzoin. The final preparation was the titular mirror of ink. In the boy's outstretched hand, Abd al-Qadir drew a “magic square” consisting of Arabic numerals and, in the center, “poured a little ink, and desired the boy to look into it, and tell him if he could see his face reflected in it.” When the boy confirmed that he could see his face clearly, Abd al-Qadir kept hold of his hand and instructed him “to continue looking intently into the ink; and not to raise his head” (270).

The ritual proceeded in the form of a dialogue between the magician and the boy. As perfumed smoke from the chafing dish filled the air, Abd al-Qadir asked the boy if he saw anything in the mirror of ink. “Trembling, and seeming much frightened,” the boy reported that he saw “a man sweeping the ground.” When the man was done sweeping, the boy was instructed to ask him to bring a flag.

The boy did so; and soon said, “He has brought a flag.” “What color is it?” asked the magician; the boy replied, “Red.” He was told to call for another flag; which he did; and soon after he said that he saw another brought; and that it was black. In like manner, he was told to call for a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh; which he described as being successively brought before him; specifying their colors, as white, green, black, red, and blue. (271)

After this procession of flags came preparations for the sultan. The boy was told to ask the man in the ink to pitch the Sultan's tent and order the soldiers to come and set up camp around it. Once the soldiers slaughtered, cooked, and ate a bull; brought coffee to the sultan; and formed a court, the centerpiece of the illusion could begin. Abd al-Qadir “now addressed himself to me; and asked me if I wished the boy to see any person who was absent or dead” (272). Lane made a series of requests to the magician—first for Admiral Horatio Nelson, the British naval officer and national hero for his victories during the Napoleonic War; and then an acquaintance with a common Egyptian name—and Abd al-Qadir then instructed the boy to request of the sultan that the absent person be brought “before my eyes, that I may see him” (272). For Lane, this was the most exciting as well as most inscrutable part of the trick because it seemed to work. Unlike the case of the flags and the soldiers, which the boy might simply pretend to see, the boy was able to accurately describe the people Lane asked for as if they had truly appeared in the ink.

While Lane insisted that he could not explain the trick, his eyewitness description is itself a kind of interpretation. Earlier in the same chapter of The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, Lane categorized the mirror of ink as Islamic natural magic that uses perfumes and narcotics to induce hallucinations (263). Because Abd al-Qadir burned strong-smelling spices and benzoin in his chafing dish, it would make sense for Lane to consider that they played a role in the trick. Lane insisted, however, that the trick was not somatic but something else entirely: a form of optical illusion. In his account, “I named Lord Nelson; of whom the boy had evidently never heard,” but whom the boy describes seeing in the ink as “a man, dressed in a black suit of European clothes: the man has lost his left arm.” The boy equivocates, however: “Looking more intently, and more closely, into the ink, [he] said, ‘No, he has not lost his left arm; but it is placed to his breast.’” Nelson did lose his arm in battle and was frequently depicted in paintings with the sleeve of his jacket pinned to his breast; Lane felt the boy's self-correction “made his description more striking,” even if less accurate, presumably because it implied he was looking closely at an image visible only to him and trying to interpret faithfully what he saw (272). Lane was also intrigued that the boy incorrectly identified Lord Nelson's left arm, rather than his right, as the missing limb. “Without saying that I suspected the boy had made a mistake,” he writes, “I asked the magician whether the objects appeared in the ink as if actually before the eyes, or as if in a glass, which makes the right appear left. He answered, that they appeared as in a mirror. This rendered the boy's description faultless” (273). Lane submits the boy's mistakes as evidence that the mirror of ink functioned like an optical medium that creates optical illusions through reflection. He literalizes the metaphor implicit in the name “mirror of ink”: the boy does not see visions of absent persons “as if” in a mirror, he sees them in a mirror that can reflect persons and things that are not really there.

Susan Zieger has argued that the nineteenth-century trope and practice of ink gazing fueled by The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians turned the materiality of ink into “a screen practice and a visual technology similar to photography and cinema” and a parlor game akin to optical toys like the thaumatrope.²¹ This dynamic transformation of ink into a medium of the virtual image is not only the result of its subsequent popularization in literary culture. When Lane disregards the evidence of his own research into narcotic magic to fixate on the reflective properties of the ink, turning ink into a mirror and optics into a property of ink, he is already conscripting the Western frameworks of optical technology and virtual spectatorship into his analysis. It is likely that his perspective is shaped by David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic, the treatise on scientific and technological magic that I discussed at length in chapter 1. Published four years before The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, Letters on Natural Magic would have offered Lane a framework for how lens- or mirror-based technologies could produce images of dead or absent persons, as in the hidden magic lanterns used to “conjure” apparitions in phantasmagoria shows. Like Abd al-Qadir's mirror of ink, the phantasmagoria also claimed to conjure apparitions of the dead or absent by request. Its production of spectral virtuality through what Noam Elcott calls “artificial darkness,” achieved through a dark room, invisible screen, and slides painted with lampblack, meant that the images of the dead appeared against a black ground. When Lane applies the concept of the mirror that produces virtual images, he also brings into view the ways that the hallucinatory darkness of the ink acts as a screen. While the registers of mirrors, projection, and darkness evoke the theatricality of technological optical magic, the drop of ink is a handheld medium that seems to technologize the body itself. When the boy gazes into his own hand to see visions, he reconfigures the media practice that Tom Gunning calls the manipulation of visual perception through the coordination of hand and eye.²² The thaumatrope, an optical toy invented by British physician John Ayrton Paris about a decade before The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians was published, was a printed disk with two pieces of string on either side that the user spins between the thumb and forefinger; the effect known today as flicker fusion results in the user seeing both sides of the disk at once in a virtual composite image. As the Egyptian boy looks “intently” and “closely” into his own hand to distinguish the finer details of the image of Lord Nelson, he recalls the fashionable men and women in British parlors whose hands and eyes worked in concert to create pleasurable visual illusions.

In other words, what Lane presented to the readers of The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians as an Oriental magic trick was in fact a repackaging and reimagining of Western rational recreation and popular visual entertainment. This was not lost on his readers. In his review of The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians for the Quarterly Review, Barrow believed that he could solve the mystery of the mirror of ink using the Western frameworks of optical technology and stage magic. He compared Abd al-Qadir's performance with a method for creating the technological apparition of “an absent or deceased friend” that Brewster presented in Letters on Natural Magic.²³ In this scheme, which I referred to in chapter 1 as an instance of Brewster's aesthetic imagination, a picture of the person is placed upside down and reflected by a concave mirror (figure 2.1).²⁴ The spectator sees neither the mirror nor the picture, but a spectral apparition in the opening in the wall, which Brewster represents in his illustration with an ornate frame. Brewster even suggests filling the frame with smoke “from a chafing dish, in which incense is burned,” so that the image appears reflected onto the smoke “in the same manner as a beam of light is rendered more visible by passing through an apartment filled with dust or smoke.”²⁵ Probably inspired by the similarities between the two tricks, both involving chafing dishes and incense, Barrow believed that Abd al-Qadir was performing a version of Brewster's illusion. It was most likely that the boy was not seeing the images in the ink, Barrow argued, but the reflections from a series of pictures “thrown from the surface of a concave mirror,” with the smoke from the chafing dish creating “a cloud of smoke . . . on which those images were received.”²⁶ This would explain why the boy saw a reversed image of Lord Nelson, with the wrong arm held to his breast.

Figure 2.1. A spectator sees an apparition in a picture frame produced by a concave mirror hidden behind the wall. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, John Murray, 1832.

Yet Lane himself insisted that “the boy [had not seen] images produced by some reflection in the ink.” In a footnote added in the revised third edition published in 1842, he rejected Barrow's theory that the images were produced through the use of optical technology.²⁷ He maintained instead that the performance was unexplainable, at least to him: “If the reader be alike unable to give the solution, I hope that he will not allow the above account to induce in his mind any degree of skepticism with respect to the other portions of this work.”²⁸ The mirror of ink was thus presented as an irreducible mystery at the center of a grand work of demystification. After all, The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians was considered a deeply informed Orientalist travelogue that sought to make Egypt comprehensible and knowable to British readers and to provide, through words, an imaginative tour of landscapes, cities, customs, and people. Lane's broader discussion of Egyptian magic, which involves a scrupulous taxonomic description and account of the use of narcotics to induce hallucinatory experience, is exemplary of this method. Lane's refusal to rationalize the mirror of ink even within the taxonomic framework he himself had created speaks to the modern British appetite for a mystical Orient in a text that otherwise eschews popular sensationalism. His “hope” that the trick not “induce . . . skepticism” toward the rest of the work insulates the mirror of ink episode as a singular event within the narrative, charged with supernatural potential that repels the author's ethnographic rationalism.

Why does Lane, the sober scholar, present the mirror of ink this way? Jason Thompson, Lane's biographer, describes Lane's attitude toward Egyptian magic as “ambivalent . . . yielding to the persistent human desire to believe something real lies behind the veil of the occult.”²⁹ This ambivalence is a powerful example of what Jason Ananda Joseph Storm, in The Myth of Disenchantment, calls “the haunting presence of magic in the very instances when disenchantment [is] itself being theorized.”³⁰ Lane collapses the binary of rationalism and superstition on which the pedagogy of disenchantment depends by applying its scientific and technological account of apparitions in the service of identifying an example of genuine supernatural magic. Instead of speculating about Lane's belief system, I want to propose that the decision to present the mirror of ink as a mystery allows it to play an important structural role in The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians as a double for the book itself. This doubling is evident on a very basic level of mediation and materiality. A printed story about ink as a magical medium cannot help but have reflexive affordances. This reflexivity becomes explicit in Lane's reproduction of Abd al-Qadir's magic square with the circular disk of ink at the center, lightly grained like a thumbprint and intoxicatingly illegible (figure 2.2). A copy of what Lane saw Abd al-Qadir draw in the boy's hand, the image is at once ethnographic document, illustration, and metatext, grounding the mirror of ink in the materiality of paper and ink and linking it to the processes of writing and printing. It is quite literally “made” of the same materials as the book and reflects the function of the book as something to read, look at, and hold in the hand.

Figure 2.2. The mirror of ink, as drawn by Edward William Lane. The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Charles Knight, 1846.

Even as it foregrounds the materiality of the book, the mirror of ink also performs what Leah Price describes as the bourgeois disarticulation of book from text in Victorian letters. Price argues that, for Victorian novelists, “to take in a book is to tune out its raw materials,” so much so that absorption in the literary text is valorized as a forgetting of its physical medium, a construction that finds paradigmatic form in George Eliot's reflection on the book's “transfiguration” through the act of reading: “We no longer hold heavily in our hands an octavo of some hundred pages . . . but we seem to be in companionship with a spirit, who is transfusing himself into our souls.”³¹ The mirror of ink is structured by a similar kind of “transfiguration” of physical object into spiritual transfusion. Grounded in the physicality of ink in the palm, just as Eliot imagines the printed pages “held heavily in our hands,” the mirror of ink paradoxically effects a kind of mediation without materiality because the ink turns into a communication technology that “transfuses” dematerialized, virtual images into the mind (or soul). In Lane's illustration, the circle of ink at the center of the square simultaneously forecloses signification and figures the way ink marks on a page come to signify, through the act of reading, a process that turns words made out of ink into a sequence of mental images. It represents mediation itself.

The mirror of ink also has strong resonances with Lane's imperial literary project. The magician's unveiling of a hidden reality is strikingly similar to Lane's own personal vocabulary for his romance with Egypt. The verse from the Koran that Abd al-Qadir writes out as part of the ceremony—“and we have removed from thee thy veil; and thy sight to-day is piercing”—echoes the words that Lane himself wrote upon first arriving in Egypt in his initial unpublished manuscript. “As I approached the shore,” he wrote, “I felt like an Eastern bridegroom, about to lift up the veil of his bride, and to see, for the first time, the features which were to charm, or disappoint, or disgust him” (emphasis added).³² Lane's description of lifting Egypt's veil illustrates what Anne McClintock calls “male travel as an erotics of ravishment” that depicts knowledge as “male penetration and exposure of a veiled, female exterior.”³³ In the mirror of ink, the boy's “veil” is removed so that his vision can “pierc[e]” through reality into the supernatural realm; as a traveler, Lane removes Egypt's “veil” so that it will reveal itself to him fully, even carnally. The erotics of ravishment are not only epistemological, presenting the country as a mystery to be probed and rationalized through print, but also clearly imperial; a bride is, after all, the property of the bridegroom. In this sense, the mirror of ink may have reminded Lane of his camera lucida, the handheld optical instrument that allowed him to trace sights in his sketchbook. The camera lucida allowed Lane to hold Egypt in his hand and turn it into print, rendering a country and its people as media to be consumed by the Western gaze. In all these ways, the mirror of ink functions within the text as a figure for Lane's sojourn to Egypt and a metatextual representation of the reading experience that The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians seeks to create. After all, Lane also promised to “unveil” Egypt for the reader through a combination of words and pictures.

The inexplicable power of the mirror of ink—its status as optical magic that was somehow also occult—served to construct the mirror of ink as a hybrid figure for text and image, reading and seeing. In the 1840s and 1850s, commentators would turn to the mirror of ink as an explanatory framework for the “magic” of reading and of fiction. An 1842 essay in London's Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction advocating for the value of reading and writing proposed that “that strange illusion, the mirror of ink, of which travelers in Egypt speak with so much wonder . . . is no longer a juggle, as shewn in that most common and yet most amazing of all arts, reading. There truly is the ink as magic mirror.” To “look” into the inked words on the page is to “behold . . . those whom the wizard writer would conjure to our view,” a construction that is already implicit in The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians.³⁴ While the mirror of ink is a “juggle,” or a trick, reading is a “true” conjuring of images through ink. In other cases, the mirror of ink was conceived as an inexhaustible well of stories. “The boy evidently saw just such scenes as are depicted in the wildest stories in the Thousand Nights,” wrote the American evangelical William MacLure Thomson, “and I suspect that this very art was in greater perfection then than now, and that the gorgeous creations of that work were, in many cases, mere verbal pictures taken from the magic mirror of ink.”³⁵ In this construction, the boy “reads” the pictures he sees in the ink, which are then transcribed in ink as the text of the Thousand and One Nights. These figurative instantiations of writing as conjuring, reading as seeing, and fiction as magical apparition take their energy from the mirror of ink's apparent refusal to be explained.

Thus, the Borges story with which we began does not invent but simply makes explicit the imaginary surrounding the mirror of ink from the moment of its emergence in Victorian literary culture. By taking the optical potential of the ink to generate images as a figure for the travelogue as a descriptive literary mode, The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians offers the mirror of ink as an optical technology and infinite text, a figure for reading as a transcendence of the materiality of the codex that reconfigures it as pure perception. What is lost in Borges's story, however, is the account in The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians of descriptive writing as a distinctly Orientalist and imperialist mode that is not only analogized in but also troubled by the mirror of ink. Borges purports to quote a tale printed in Burton's The Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa, one in which Burton himself reproduces the story of the Sudanese magician in his own voice. Burton is therefore not a witness to the mirror of ink; he simply records the story reported by the magician. In The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, the mirror of ink is something that happens to the Orientalist and is held at a remove from him through the mediating role of the boy. Lane sees the trick happen, but he does not see the images appear.

In this way, the apparent kinship of the mirror of ink with the imperialist literary project of describing Egypt is also a source of disturbance because it threatens the specular logic that positions Egypt and Egyptians as the objects of the imperialist gaze. Lane the “bridegroom,” who “throw[s]” himself “among strangers” so that he can see and experience what other Europeans cannot, is startlingly disempowered by the magician's trick, stripped of his epistemological privilege to see and record. The mirror of ink turns on the boy seeing pictures where Lane only sees the hypnotic black circle. Here, it is the Egyptian child who has the power to see and to narrate, making the imperialist dependent on native knowledge that, in spite of his privileged status as “bridegroom,” he himself cannot unveil. While it serves as a figure for Lane's representational project, the mirror of ink also subverts what Mary-Louise Pratt calls the “imperial eyes” of nineteenth-century travel writing by creating a virtual scene foreclosed to all but the native subject.³⁶

Given this context, it is even more provocative that Lane's account of the trick centers on the boy's accurate description of Admiral Nelson. The naval commander responsible for bringing the Mediterranean under British control during the Napoleonic era, Nelson made Egypt accessible to Lane and to other British travelers and Orientalists. In a work that represents Lane's objectifying gaze on Egypt and Egyptians, what does it mean that an Egyptian boy can peer into what to Lane looks like a black void and see a British imperial hero? Lane looks at the boy, but through the mediation of the mirror of ink, the boy seems to look back. When he looks at Nelson, describing his costume and scrutinizing his war injury, he effectively meets Lane's imperial gaze. The mirror of ink allows the boy to claim what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls “the right to look”—a right that Mirzoeff reads as a claim to political subjectivity and a means of contesting the authority of imperial visualizations like Lane's.³⁷ The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians thus gives birth to a deeply ambivalent figure for the literary and visual culture of nineteenth-century British Empire, one that stands simultaneously for the Orient as the product of British representations and for its unrepresentability, for the Orient as object of British inquiry and for its inscrutability to British knowledge. If the infinite representations of the inkblot double the exhaustive visual descriptions of The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, they also threaten to supersede Lane's account and therefore to challenge his rhetorical and scopic enactment of Western hegemony.

Perhaps this is why Lane would disavow the mirror of ink so forcefully a decade later. In the pages of his sister Sophia Lane-Poole's The Englishwoman in Egypt (1845), he reported on a repeat visit to see the mirror of ink and declared the performances “ridiculous for their complete want of success,” accusing Abd al-Qadir of fraudulence and imposture.³⁸ As we will see in the following section, British discourse on the mirror of ink was in no way diminished by his disavowal. From Harriet Martineau to George Eliot, Victorian writers seemingly responded to the counterimperial rebelliousness of the mirror of ink, its refusal to be brought under British control, by rewriting it as a product of Western scientific knowledge and figure for realism in the novel.

Put Your Face to the Glass

What could the magic mirror of ink possibly have to do with the novels of George Eliot? A painstaking work of realist world building, Eliot's first novel Adam Bede (1959) relates the lives of a handful of characters in the fictional town of Hayslope at the turn of the nineteenth century. Among them are a Methodist woman preacher, an honest and hardworking carpenter, a careless young squire, and a coy dairymaid whose romantic entanglements and spiritual striving are the basis of the narrative. The novel's first setting, a carpentry workshop, reveals its preoccupation with the sturdy, the solid, and the well built, and its subsequent guided tour of farm, dairy, and woods with the provincialism of preindustrial English life. Its claim to being the first realist novel in the nineteenth-century British tradition rests, in the eyes of many scholars, on what the narrator calls “the faithful representation of commonplace things,” an aesthetic that the novel compares to the “pictures of a monotonous homely existence” in seventeenth-century Dutch painting.³⁹ Scholars generally draw on the aesthetics of realist painting to define Eliot's representational philosophy as a deliberate avoidance of sensationalism or the exotic—Cairo, say, and its magicians.⁴⁰ But those who know the novel well recall its famous opening lines, which unexpectedly conjure this narrative world into being through reference to Egyptian sorcery. The novel begins:

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance-comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799. (5)

The humble world of Adam Bede, beginning with the “roomy workshop” of a carpenter and builder faithfully represented in all its regional and historical specificity, comes into being through the Egyptian magic act that we have heard so much about. The lines announce, of all things, Lane's The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians as an intertext for this classic novel of English life.

Eliot follows Lane's lead in The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians by invoking the mirror of ink as part of a metaphor for the relationship between writers and their readers, one that figures the literary text in visual terms. The narrator, who presents himself as the author and is gendered throughout as masculine, is an “Egyptian sorcerer” who uses “the drop of ink at the end of my pen” in the same way that Abd al-Qadir uses the mirror of ink in the boy's palm: to reveal visions of the past, but in the novel, it is in the form of settings and characters. One imagines the ink pooling at the end of the pen and dropping onto the page, so shiny in its black opacity that it becomes paradoxically lucid with reflections. The reader is the “chance-comer,” a role that collapses the positions of the boy who witnesses the images in the ink and the Western traveler who witnesses the boy's magical visions. The identification of the reader as a traveler is a convention of realist fiction that Alison Byerly calls “virtual travel,” or the inscription of the reader's physical presence and mobility in a fictional world, a set of techniques that she links to the forms of direct address in guidebooks and other travel media.⁴¹ Yet Eliot's “chance-comer” is initially defined by their immobility. They do not physically travel but stand still to gaze into the mirror of ink, a process that seemingly transports them to other times and places. Eliot is comparing the novel's creation of a diegesis to the construction of virtual sight that we find in the imaginary of the mirror of ink. She conceives of the book as a virtual medium that uses the material technology of ink on paper—the printed word—to make images appear to the reader, an experience that itself stands for a fully embodied and multisensory immersion in a simulated world. After all, the carpentry workshop comes into being not only as a picture to be “shown” but also one that is smelled, heard, and felt on the skin as the scent of pinewood filters through the door, a worker sings in his strong baritone, and the afternoon sun falls hot on the workers.

Although the opening of Adam Bede is frequently discussed in scholarship on the Victorian novel, often in the context of the novel's metafictional use of mirrors as figures for literary representation, its articulation of fictional aesthetics remains insufficiently theorized.⁴² This is because, instead of the opening lines, critics have primarily focused on the novel's famous chapter 17, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” for Eliot to deliver a theory and a defense of literary realism. In this chapter, the novel-as-mirror is conceived as a means for truthful representation as the narrator strives to “give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind . . . as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath” (157). As Meegan Kennedy has shown, this construction is not of the novel as a simple reflection of nature but rather of the novel as legal transcription of the mind's optical mediation of everyday experience.⁴³ This “faithful account” of the ordinary Eliot further compares to the deidealized aesthetics of Dutch paintings, with their old women bending over flower pots and vulgar village weddings.⁴⁴ Both the mirror and Dutch painting are linked to practices of observation that are precise, humble, faithful, and hardworking, expressions of a scrupulous humanism deeply inflected with Protestant values of simplicity and self-abnegation. Without denying the importance of painting as among the novel's varied visual metaphors for literary representation, it is worth asking why Adam Bede begins not with a painted image but rather a virtual image—not with a mirror that reflects the real but one that creates it—not with what Rachel Teukolsky calls Eliot's realism of “authentic truth-telling” but instead a realism of exotic Oriental fabulation.⁴⁵ This is a different model of visuality than the one Eliot develops in chapter 17 of her novel and cannot simply be subsumed into it.

When critics do discuss the opening of the novel at length, they tend to provide, at best, only cursory treatment of the origins of the mirror of ink metaphor in Lane's The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, overlooking the larger context of its circulation as a figure for optical magic, perceptual illusion, and the imperial gaze. Yet this context is of critical importance to an analysis of Adam Bede as a theory of representation in novel form. Without understanding what exactly the mirror of ink was, how can we fully appreciate what Eliot imagines the novel to do? For example, when J. Hillis Miller analyzes the mirror of ink metaphor as a reflexive figure for mimesis, he argues that “the ink drop is a mirror that is no mirror” but “a transformation of the material world into another realm, the realm of performative writing that creates what it seemingly only describes. In that realm one encounters something outside the optic laws of reflection . . . that is, some of the problematic aspects of language.”⁴⁶ This analysis relies on a misunderstanding of both the conjurer's mirror and the mirror of ink as figures in Victorian literary culture. First, Miller assumes that the mirror's “optic laws” are mimetic, drawing on an equivalence between a mirror image and verisimilitude that elides the mirror's relationship to optical magic and virtual images in nineteenth-century culture. Second, he assumes that Eliot is turning the Egyptian mirror of ink into a figure for literary technique and the phenomenological operations of a literary text in producing or creating reality for the reader, overlooking the fact that Eliot draws on a longer history of the mirror of ink as a trope for that “transformation of the material world into another realm,” reconfiguring it for her own purposes. We know that these opening lines are more than a pithy play on words—they are part of a tradition of figuring the act of reading as seeing immaterial images. If the mirror of ink serves as a metaphor for Adam Bede's narrator “creating” what he “seemingly only describes”—the workshop of Jonathan Burge, the world of the novel—then it is in a precise echo of the optical technological properties and imaginary virtual capacities that the mirror of ink had come to stand for: not the optic law of reflection as one-to-one reproduction of the external world as image, but the use of lenses and mirrors to create, through images, something that was not there before.

We can understand Adam Bede's reflexivity more fully if we consider its place in responding to and shaping the imaginary of the literary text as a machine for virtual perception—an imaginary that unfolded, among other places, in writing on the mirror of ink. By the 1850s, the mirror of ink had a life of its own in British letters and belonged to Victorian popular and scientific culture as much as it did to Lane's travelogue. Eliot's mirror of ink is not exactly Lane's mirror of ink, but a trope reconfigured by two decades of writing that associated it with scientific and technological explanations for how people see things that are not really there. This included work on optics, as we saw in the preceding section, but also on sciences of mind, especially the highly popular and much debated science of mesmerism. Adam Bede's mirror of ink thus registers a variety of techniques for enabling ordinary people to see things that are not there. By unpacking these contexts, I will demonstrate that Adam Bede imagines the writer as part optical showman and part mesmerist, the reader at once as spectator at an optical show and clairvoyant medium. What this shows us is that Eliot turns to the mirror of ink as part of her theorization of a virtual literary aesthetics: an account of the aesthetic experience of reading the novel as seeing things that are not there.

The mirror of ink does not appear again in Adam Bede, but neither does it exactly disappear. It haunts the novel's other strange mirrors, all of them strangely flawed, from the burnished dining room table “turned up like a screen” in which the vain milkmaid likes to admire her reflection (67) to the narrator's famous assertion that he will “give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind,” even though “the mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines . . . disturbed, the reflection faint or confused” (159). The opening lines of the novel establish a metaleptic motif associated with readerly visualization that weaves its way through the novel. Metalepsis is the literary device through which a text acknowledges and draws attention to its own artifice. The opening lines of the novel are examples of what Monika Fludernik calls the “metaleptic metaphor” because metalepsis is folded into the extended metaphor of the mirror of ink.⁴⁷ When the narrator says, “This is what I undertake to do for you, reader,” he breaks the illusion of the fictional world, addressing the reader directly and reminding them that it has been manufactured for them by the writer. As Fludernik notes, however, the effect of this metaleptic metaphor is not to “[disrupt] immersion” but instead to “deepen the reader's involvement in the fiction.”⁴⁸ This is an effect that Eliot employs repeatedly in book I of Adam Bede, a volume that takes the form of a virtual tour of the town of Hayslope and what will become its narratively significant locations: the carpentry shop, the hall farm, the dairy, the woods. For example, the narrator says invitingly, “Let me take you into that dining-room, and show you the Rev. Alolphus Irwine, Rector of Broxton, Vicar of Hayslope, and Vicar of Blythe.” He invites us to “enter softly” and “stand in the open doorway” so we do not awaken “the glossy-brown setter who is stretched across the hearth” (50). Later, we are enjoined to “[put] our eyes close to the rusty bars of the gate” of the Hall Farm and to “peep at the windows,” trying to see inside the house (64–65). The narrator instructs: “Put your face to the glass panes in the right-hand window: what do you see?” (65) These are all examples of metalepsis that intensify the diegesis rather than rupturing it and that instantiate the act of reading as virtual visual perception. To read is to be taken into rooms and to have characters shown to us, to look and see—acts that are all performed in relation to, and under the direction of, the narrator.

Adam Bede's mirror of ink is thus not an opening gimmick that is quickly discarded nor is it simply part of a broader motif of mirrors, reflections, and optical visuality. It is an instantiation of the novel's metafictional exploration of narration as a representational technique. In his analysis of the mirror of ink metaphor in Adam Bede, Neil Hertz argues that, “after the opening paragraph, Eliot does not so explicitly or elaborately thematize her text's relation to its readers.”⁴⁹ What I am endeavoring to show here is just the opposite: Eliot sustains the reflexivity of the mirror of ink motif through these instances of metalepsis, which figure the relationship between narrator and reader as shared spectatorship of a virtual scene, one that is created by the narrator but only enacted through the process of reading. Jacob Romanow has argued that metafiction is a representational technology intrinsic to Victorian realism—an “essential means of rendering realism realistic.”⁵⁰ Eliot's metafictional practice exposes the reader to the novel as a representational technology for making us see things. By insisting that the novel's scenes are made visible to us through a magic mirror, Eliot codes Adam Bede as a feat of optical conjuring in which the showman astonishes his audience by making images appear through the use of hidden mirrors and lenses. She makes explicit the role of writer as optical showman and magician who “show[s]” us and makes us “see.” Eliot's metafiction thus opens into a theory of literary mediation that makes the reader's imaginative visualization central to producing realism's realness. She asks us to see ourselves seeing, to visualize the reading experience as itself an act of visualization.

Eliot's commitment to narrative world building as a kind of show-and-tell also points us to the political significance of her allusion to The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. Although an Orientalist travelogue may seem an unlikely intertext for a novelistic retrospective on British national origins, Eliot's guided tour of Hayslope recalls the very genre that Lane is working in as well as his addiction to descriptive excess. Rachel Teukolsky and Alison Byerly have compared Adam Bede to forms of travel literature like the travelogue and war journalism, both focusing on how the second chapter is focalized through the perspective of an anonymous traveler.⁵¹ While Byerly rightly argues that this device grounds the novel in “a traveler's perspective, the view of someone who stops briefly, makes judgments, and then moves on,” I wish to draw attention to the ways that this choice of focalization participates in the novel's broader conceptualization of what Teukolsky calls ethnographic witnessing. For Teukolsky, the figure of the traveler stands for someone like the Crimean War journalist tasked with “sending back visual evidence of foreign customs taken on the spot.”⁵² As we have seen, this is also the task of an ethnographer like Lane, albeit at a slower and more deliberative pace, and it is equally the task that Eliot's narrator describes himself as undertaking through an allusion to The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. Like Lane in Cairo, unveiling Egypt for the common reader, Eliot's narrator wants to “show you” a particular time and place; while Lane takes us into the mosque and public bath, down streets and past fountains, Eliot takes us into the hall farm, the dairy, and the woods. The writer is sometimes the tour guide, making things visible by inviting us to notice them. Sometimes he instructs in the imperative tense, the scene unfolding through the language of command: “See them in the bright sunlight, interrupted every now and then by rolling masses of cloud” (64). By coding the diegesis as a mirror of ink, Eliot makes explicit what is only implicit in The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians: the conceptual similarity between the writer's world-building ambitions and the conjuring of images. At the same time, the reference to The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians makes explicit what is otherwise only implicit in Adam Bede: provincial realism's adoption of the imperial gaze to reenchant the sights and scenes of English life. If the narrator is “like the Egyptian sorcerer,” he is also something like the British Orientalist ethnographer. Eliot adapts the techniques of the Orientalist travelogue to conjure English history as an apparition and make it alive in the present.

So far, my reading of Eliot's mirror of ink has emphasized the relationship between her philosophy of realism and practices of optical showmanship that produce virtual images. I turn now to how Adam Bede's metafictional exploration of the narrator's perceptual control over the reader's vision engages with mesmerism. Mesmerism was a science of mind believed to allow one person to transfer their energy, or “vital force,” to another person by inducing a trancelike state.⁵³ Although I have argued that Lane's account of the mirror of ink was influenced by Western frameworks of optical technology and the creation of virtual images, by the late 1840s, mesmerism replaced optics as the prevailing explanation for the mirror of ink in British discourse. The connection had already crossed Lane's mind when he was writing The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. Noting that Abd al-Qadir maintained physical contact with the boy throughout the performance, he remarked in a footnote that “this reminds us of animal magnetism,” using another term for mesmerism.⁵⁴ But it was another Cairo travelogue, Harriet Martineau's Eastern Life, Past and Present (1848), that definitively changed the way Victorians understood the mirror of ink. Martineau was a chronic invalid and the author of Letters on Mesmerism (1845), which detailed her experience treating her illness with mesmerism. Shortly after the success of her mesmeric cure, she undertook a vigorous tour of Egypt and the Near East, stopping in Cairo to see the magician that The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians had made so much of.⁵⁵ “I have brought away a very clear and strong impression of the whole case,” she wrote in Eastern Life, Past and Present.⁵⁶ The mirror of ink was mesmerism: Sheik Abd al-Qadir made his assistants see images in the ink by mesmerizing them. When the trick worked—which, in her opinion, it rarely did—it was not because of the magician's mesmeric skill but because his assistants were clairvoyant.

Clairvoyants were those capable of “see[ing] events, people, and places at a geographical or chronological distance” while mesmerized.⁵⁷ Their powers included predicting the future and seeing into the past, and they were even known to diagnose illnesses by looking beneath the skin and to travel to overseas colonies from their own homes.⁵⁸ Although it strained the credulity of even many proponents of mesmerism, clairvoyance was not considered to be a supernatural power. As Martineau explained, “human beings have, under certain conditions, a power of Prevision and Insight, altering with ordinary states of mind.”⁵⁹ For believers, clairvoyant vision was as natural and rationally explicable as ordinary vision, but it was only accessible when mesmerized. Martineau's insistence that she had returned from Cairo with a “clear and strong impression” of the mirror of ink as mesmerism was racialized, contrasting her presence of mind with what she characterized as the “susceptibil[ity]” of “the Hindoos and the negroes,” but it was also clearly intended as a riposte to Lane's inability to explain the trick in The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians.⁶⁰ As a careful student of mesmerism, she was, like Lane, struck by the physical contact between the magician and the boy and its resemblance to the “mesmeric passes” used to induce a trance state. The boy's quivering eyelids, meanwhile, signaled to her “the presence of mesmeric action.”⁶¹ To prove her theory, Martineau insisted on taking the boy's place in the experiment. She reported seeing “such odd things in the pool of ink,—it grew so large before my aching eyes, and showed such strange moving shadows and clear symmetrical figures and moving lines.”⁶² Ironically, Martineau's “clear and strong impression” is authenticated by her weak and fuzzy vision.

Martineau's explanation of the mirror of ink was widely accepted in the second half of the nineteenth century. Proponents included Richard Francis Burton, the explorer to whom Borges credits the mirror of ink tale. In his own Cairo travelogue, published less than a decade after Martineau's, Burton scoffed at Lane's sensationalized version of the mirror of ink as well as his claim that the trick had “excited considerable curiosity and interest throughout the civilized world.” How could the “civilized world” be so fascinated when “in London, Paris, and New York, [they] might have found dozens studying the science”?⁶³ What Burton meant was that Lane's supposed discovery of the mirror of ink was really just a rediscovery of mesmerism, repackaged as Egyptian magic. Burton elaborated on this point more than twenty years later in a talk on “Spiritualism in Eastern Lands” (1878) by emphasizing the similarities between the mirror of ink and hypnotism.⁶⁴ Hypnotism was a technique developed by Scottish surgeon James Braid, who argued that what others called mesmerism was a voluntary state created when the patient chose to focus their mind on an external sensory stimulus. Burton cited an account of a hypnotic variation on the mirror of ink that used a white earthenware plate covered with geometric figures and cabalistic words in an echo of Ab al-Qadir's magic square. The subject would focus their sight on a particular point until they began to see “a black spot in the middle of the plate [that] grows larger, changes in shape, and transforms itself into different apparitions, which float (or rather pass in procession) before the subject.”⁶⁵

Martineau's reframing of the mirror of ink as mesmerism also influenced mesmeric demonstrations themselves. Mesmerism and hypnotism were popularized through public demonstrations that recalled sorcery, with mesmerists directing insensible subjects to stand, sit, or swing their arms “as if by the wand of a magician.”⁶⁶ As early as the 1850s, these performances began incorporating references to the mirror of ink. In a demonstration reported on by novelist Wilkie Collins in a series of essays for The Leader titled “Magnetic Evenings at Home,” a “black mirror”—a piece of wood shaped like a hand mirror with polished coal in place of a looking glass—was used as a surface or screen on which the mesmeric clairvoyant visualized the sights and scenes directed by the guests.⁶⁷ While the mesmerist claimed that this object was the “wishing-stone” of astronomer John Dee, the performance clearly reimagined the mirror of ink by substituting for the ink drop another black substance posing as a mirror. It is certainly clear that Collins took it this way. His report not only inspired a short story, “My Black Mirror,” that portrayed John Dee's mirror as a virtual technology that visualizes “the image of my former travels” on “the surface of the cannel coal,” it may also have influenced his famous portrayal of the mirror of ink in The Moonstone (1868).⁶⁸ As we will see in chapter 3, which discusses The Moonstone at some length, the novel's mystery turns on a trio of Brahmins who perform the mirror of ink on a young English boy, using him as a medium to predict future events. Collins's representation of the trick breaks its association with Egypt and Islam but shows that he, like Martineau and Burton, understood it as mesmerism: details like “the Indian . . . touching the boy's head” and the boy standing “like a statue” reflected the physical contact required to induce a trance state, while the use of the trick to see the future puts Martineau's theory of clairvoyance into practice.

Adam Bede participates in this genealogy of the mirror of ink as mesmerism. Its account of the novel as a mirror of ink, and the narrator as an “Egyptian sorcerer,” presents it as an apparition that is at once optical and mental—a “black spot” that “transforms itself” into pictures through the mediation of the text. Eliot would have learned about mesmerism from her partner George Henry Lewes, a student of physiology and psychology who believed in mesmerism's more modest claims but scorned the existence of clairvoyance, a point he made in a scathing response to Collins's “Magnetic Evenings at Home.”⁶⁹ It is reasonable to assume that she, like Lewes, would have read Collins's articles on clairvoyance and made the same set of connections between the black mirror, the mirror of ink, and mesmerism that Collins did in his own literary work. However, Eliot also had direct experience of mesmerism. In the summer of 1844, she was mesmerized by a dinner companion; as her friend Cara Bray described it, “she could not open her eyes, and begged [the mesmerist] most piteously to do it for her.”⁷⁰ It is not clear whether Eliot was asking to awaken from the mental images that some mesmeric patients describe or simply to regain control over her own body. Either way, Adam Bede's reflexive commentary on the relationship between the writer and the reader mimics this relationship between the mesmerist and the mesmerized by placing the reader's vision under the author's control. When the narrator instructs the reader to “put your face to the glass panes in the right-hand window” and asks “what do you see,” he makes the power to look and see dependent on his narration, on what he directs her to see through the images he makes appear: “A large open fireplace, with rusty dogs in it, and a bare boarded floor” (65). To say, as the narrator does in the opening lines, that “I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge” is also to say that your vision is in my power.

The narrator's metaleptic directions evoke even more specifically a clairvoyant practice that blended the practices of ethnographic travel writing with mesmerism. Sometimes called “traveling somnambulism,” this kind of clairvoyance involved people under mesmerism “travel[ing] . . . to distant places, where they could stroll around, see local sights, and enter houses.”⁷¹ Traveling somnambulism was as locomotive as it was visual in that mesmerized subjects “experienced actual movement to a destination,” where they would then verify their clairvoyant travel through visual descriptions of architecture, interior decoration, and people.⁷² It was also deeply narrative, a kind of travel literature executed collaboratively by the mesmerist and the mesmerized person. As Emily Ogden explains, “Somnambulists could transport themselves in imagination to other cities only if those in rapport with them first convinced them, through narrative, that they were really traveling,” a process of interactive storytelling that involved “regularly following the somnambulist's suggestions and negotiating with her sense of the plausible.”⁷³ The narrator's injunction to “put your face to the glass”—to “look” and “see”—reflects actual narrative techniques used by mesmerists to send clairvoyants on journeys of the mind.

Through the metaleptic metaphor of the mirror of ink and its discursive connections to mesmerism and optical technology, Adam Bede imagines the literary text as a medium by which human vision can be extended. My use of the term “medium” here is meant to capture both of its meanings as an image-producing technology and a spiritualist practitioner. The novel presents itself as a kind of optical mesmerism on the reader, managing and even controlling their perception like a mesmerist while making them see a series of images like an optical showman. In this imaginative synthesis, Eliot's variation on the mirror of ink most closely resembles an obscure science called psychography, or the writing of thoughts, that brought mesmerism and optics together to posit the existence of telepathic communication. In the early 1840s, an American physician and mesmerist named Robert Collyer published a pamphlet in which he argued that Lane's description of the mirror of ink in The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians proved that human beings could transfer their thoughts to one another. Ink itself was not required—“any dark fluid will answer to the same purpose”—and Collyer advocated using a bowl of molasses placed between the two subjects. The “recipient” and “operator” both look into the molasses. “When the angle of the incidence from my brain was equal to the angle of reflection from her brain,” Collyer explains, “[the recipient] distinctly saw the image of my thoughts at their point of coincidence.”⁷⁴ Collyer illustrated this explanation with a diagram that broke down how the optic laws of reflection applied to the transference of thoughts, portraying two men with broken lines representing the angle of incidence flowing from their brows (figure 2.3). With their matching mutton chops and the same head of hair brushed into slightly different shapes, operator and recipient are themselves mirror images, as if the psychographic process has turned them into twins.

Figure 2.3. Psychography in action: the bowl of molasses experiment. Robert H. Collyer, Psychography, or, the Embodiment of Thought, Redding, 1843.

The nearly identical men in Collyer's illustration also recall photographic doubles. This is not a coincidence: Collyer described psychography as “a mental photographic process” that is “nearly identical with the daguerreotype process,” which had just been invented. In 1836, Lane described the mirror of ink as similar both to optical technological magic and mesmerism. In Collyer's version of the mirror of ink, any distinction between optical technology and mesmerism collapses. Images are thoughts and thoughts are images. Like light, thought image is a physical property that can be reflected and refracted, mediated and manipulated. While light writing, or photography, produces light images, psychography, or thought writing, produces thought images. Adam Bede conceives of the relationship between writer and reader in remarkably similar terms. The novel is a mirror of ink that allows the reader to “see” the images that have “mirrored themselves” in the writer's mind—a technology of thought transference that expresses itself in images. This is not a mimetic realism that aspires to duplicate the world in images but a psychographic realism that transforms the world into mental images that can be communicated between reader and writer.

Scholars frequently turn to Adam Bede's metaphorics of mirroring to understand what the novel has to say about fictional representation, guided by the assumption that mirrors are simple reflecting devices that create a one-to-one equivalence between image and representation. Yet as I have endeavored to show, mirrors were so much more than this in the Victorian imagination, from spectral technologies and conjuring surfaces to mesmeric and telepathic media to imaginary portals to other times and places. A mirror need not be a looking glass; it could also be the concave mirror favored by magicians. It might even be a drop of ink or bowl of molasses or, as in Adam Bede, a burnished oak dining table. Adam Bede uses multiple visual metaphors for the novel, both painterly and optical, and my aim here is not to offer the mirror of ink as a master key to Eliot's theory of representation that cancels out the others. Rather, I wish to demonstrate that when Eliot compares her novel to images in a mirror of ink, she is not engaging with the mirror's verisimilitude but rather the mirror's virtuality. When we read the novel through its imperial and technological metaphorics, it becomes clear that Adam Bede envisions the realist novel as a kind of optical-perceptual machine that aspires to the condition of the virtual image.

Eliot spelled out this aspiration even more clearly in The Lifted Veil, the novella she wrote just after finishing Adam Bede. The Lifted Veil is often read as an outlier in Eliot's oeuvre because of its explicit investments in Victorian “new media” and sciences of mind.⁷⁵ A work of gothic horror narrated by Latimer, a man gifted (or cursed) with clairvoyant powers, its fantastical account of the prophetic visions that flood his sight “like the new images in a dissolving view” certainly breaks stylistically with the scrupulous realism with which Eliot is most associated. As a result, it has become common to read The Lifted Veil as an experimental riposte to Eliot's realist novels. For instance, Richard Menke argues that the novella constitutes an “alternative model of visual realism” that “challenges or inverts” what he conceives of as Eliot's painterly theory and practice of realism in Adam Bede.⁷⁶ While Menke compares this model of realism to photography, Eliot's use of optical technological figures like that of the dissolving view to describe the psychic and visual mechanics of Latimer's clairvoyance suggests an altogether different set of media references. A dissolving view is a magic lantern projection effect created with two or more lenses so that one projected image dissolves into another on the screen. Latimer's visions are like the “new image” that slowly supplants the first, “canceling out and replacing his consciousness of his surroundings” in what Jules Law calls “the mode of virtual or alternate reality.”⁷⁷

Given the case I have made for Eliot's realism as part of the mid-century imaginary of virtual sight, I wish to challenge the assumption that The Lifted Veil operates according to an alternative model of visual realism to that of Adam Bede. Latimer's visions are simply a rethinking of Eliot's mirror of ink, and Adam Bede and The Lifted Veil are both media theories of the novel as a technology for producing the real as virtual visuality. The similarities are evident in Latimer's first clairvoyant vision, which he experiences when his father describes to him an upcoming trip and leaves “my mind resting on the word Prague, with a strange sense that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me.” He sees “a city under the broad sunshine,” “the time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories,” and “a patch of rainbow light on the pavement, transmitted through a colored lamp in the shape of a star.” This last he recalls with “special intensity” and will recognize when touring a synagogue in Prague's Jewish quarter as a projection in the shape of a Star of David, an image that mirrors Latimer's comparison of the vision itself to the dissolving projections of the magic lantern.⁷⁸ The spoken word, the clairvoyant vision, and the optical technological illusion are closely linked, just as the written word, mesmeric experience, and optical technology are closely linked in Adam Bede. The prominent place of Jewish iconography both in Latimer's vision and his later verification of the vision is not a random detail but a reinscription of the Orientalism that undergirds Eliot's account of realism's virtuality in Adam Bede. The symmetry between the “dissolving view” of Latimer's vision and the “colored lamp in the shape of a star”—two technologies for light-based projections—grounds the capacity for virtual sight in the exotic otherness of European Jewry, just as Adam Bede associates virtual sight with Egyptian Muslims.

The title of The Lifted Veil draws us back to The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. The title is usually sourced to Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet that begins “Lift not the painted veil that those who live / Call life,” and it seems to describe both Latimer's condition and the highly dramatic scene in which a scientist lifts the “dark veil” of a woman's death through a blood transfusion that temporarily brings her back to life.”⁷⁹ While I do not contest this reference, I agree with Neil Hertz that Eliot may also be thinking of another lifted veil, that of the Koranic verse recited and transcribed by the magician in Lane's description of the mirror of ink trick: “And we have removed from thee thy veil; and thy sight today is piercing.”⁸⁰ Latimer is like the reader of Adam Bede whose sight has been unveiled by the optical-mesmeric narrator and can “pierc[e]” into other places and times. In his suffering at these involuntary visions, we can hear echoes both of Eliot plaintively crying out to her mesmerist to regain control of her eyes and her narrator's mesmeric control over the reader's sight when he directs them to “put your face to the glass.” Rather than reading The Lifted Veil as a deliberate breach of Adam Bede's realism, I propose that the tale's gothic conceit simply allows Eliot to extend her phenomenological inquiry into the novel as media technology that creates in the reader's mind what Peter Mendelsund calls “a continuous unfolding of images.”⁸¹

Real Vision at a Distance

This chapter has endeavored to show how the fantasy of reading as “watching a film,” in Peter Mendelsund's words, actually predates the invention of cinema. From Lane to Eliot to Borges, writers have turned to the changing landscape of virtual image media to imagine the literary text as a technology for transmitting images into the reader's mind. My object in making this case is not to lay claim to the mirror of ink as a protocinematic figure, as if cinema were the fulfillment of the nineteenth century's dreams of new technology, or to say that novelists imagined the cinema before its invention. The version of virtuality that we find in the mirror of ink is significantly different from the one we find in cinematic spectatorship, and I do not mean to conflate them. Instead, I have endeavored to reveal certain striking continuities between cinema and the virtual aesthetics of the mirror of ink. These continuities are not an invitation to read the mirror of ink as protocinematic but instead to read the cinematic as a post–mirror of ink formation.

We see the legacy of the mirror of ink, for example, in one of the best-known and most frequently cited accounts of early film spectatorship. In 1896, playwright Maxim Gorky saw cinema for the first time at the Nizhny-Novgorod All-Russia Exhibition in Moscow. “If only you knew how strange it is to be here,” he wrote. “Here” is not the Théâtre Concerto Parisienne, the notorious theater and brothel where the cinematograph was on display, but the dominion of cinema itself, what he called a “Kingdom of Shadows” that existed within the films of the Lumière brothers. Cinema is a place that opens a phantasmal world within the world that Gorky describes as a trance: “You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim.”⁸² Your body is in the theater, but your eyes are in the far-off places framed by the screen—an external world that also becomes an inner vision that “invade[s] your mind.” Adam Bede's reading-as-seeing-moving-pictures becomes, in early film spectatorship, seeing-moving-pictures-as-reading-Adam Bede. Like Eliot's narrator, who tells the reader to “put your face to the glass panes of the right-hand window,” the images on the screen direct the spectator in what and how to see, a process that Gorky renders in the free indirect discourse of the Kingdom of Shadows itself: “You are forgetting where you are.” Cinema has a voice, and it is the voice of a hypnotist—a voice like the narrator of Adam Bede.

The Victorian origins of this conception of reading as a technological extension of vision also make it clear that the fantasy of seeing at a distance of time and space is inextricable from the project of empire. The mirror of ink is, in The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, a figure for the literary project of making visible and knowable to British readers a nation that they had formally occupied thirty years earlier and in which they had ongoing geopolitical interest. This is why it is no accident that Lane's telling of the trick hinges on the appearance of Admiral Nelson, a visualization of the imperial history that made this encounter between Lane and Abd al-Qadir possible in the first place. The ongoing fascination with the use of ink as a mirror, seen not only in Adam Bede but also in its re-creation by British and American mesmerists as black mirror and molasses, testifies not only to its reflexive potential as metaphor for writing or its conceptual link to the dark screens onto which magic lanterns throw their spectral images but also its racializing of darkness as a source of mystery and occult knowledge. The colonial resonances of the trick are only heightened when the American Collyer proposes switching one colonial commodity for another: black ink—called in Britain “Indian ink” for its source in the colonial trade with India—for molasses, derived from sugar and historically sourced by the United States from West Indian sugar plantations.⁸³ These dark portals to other minds, times, and places are haunting figures for the colonial scene and its absent presence in Western life.

Seen in this way, the mirror of ink can be read as a figure for the dislocations of nineteenth-century empire, the way it demands that we live in one place while governing or being governed by another. The same year that Gorky first saw the Lumière films, H. G. Wells published a short story called “The Remarkable Case of Mr. Davidson's Eyes” about a London man whose eyes are on “a little rock to the south of the Antipodes Island.”⁸⁴ While he walks around his home, he sees a beach, penguins, and a ship in the distance—“an altogether phantasmal world.”⁸⁵ This is not an imaginary scene but a real place that Davidson sees in real time, “his sight mov[ing] hither and thither . . . about this distant island” as he moves “hither and thither in London.” Davidson's eyes “are the best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance.”⁸⁶ “It may be possible,” the story concludes, “to live visually in one part of the world, while one lives bodily in the other.”⁸⁷ “The Remarkable Case of Mr. Davidson's Eyes” takes the imperial virtual aesthetics of the mirror of ink to its logical extension, removing the medium of the magic mirror and embedding the visual prosthetic in the eyes themselves.⁸⁸ At the same time, “real vision at a distance” names the conceit of a work of Orientalism like The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians or a realist novel like Adam Bede that purport to “show” us a time and place that is real but simply exists at an otherwise insurmountable remove, a way of seeing that the global reach of the British Empire seemed to demand of Victorians.⁸⁹ In chapter 3, I consider how the display of plundered Indian jewels at London's Great Exhibition in 1851 gave rise to new desires for vision at a distance—specifically, for diamonds that, not unlike the mirror of ink, would visualize through their fantastical glow the pleasures and dangers of colonial India.