IntroductionWhat Was the Virtual?
Did filmgoers really jump out of their seats when they saw a train pulling into the station? This famous story about the first screening of Auguste and Louis Lumière's Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) tells us that audiences panicked and raced for the exits as if they were about to be run over (figure I.1). Film historians will tell you that this never happened.1 Why would people accustomed to magic lantern shows, technological optical illusions, and the moving pictures of the Mutoscope respond to projected moving images with terror? Did you run screaming the first time you saw a three-dimensional (3D) film or put on a virtual reality (VR) headset? Nineteenth-century spectators were no more naïve than we are. Their visual and technological media culture had trained them in an aesthetic principle that was comparatively new at the time but already deeply rooted—a principle that you may recognize as conditioning your own practices of media spectatorship. That is, Victorian media taught people how to see things that are not there.
Figure I.1. Film still from Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumière, 1896.
This book is a cultural history of virtual aesthetics before the arrival of that first train and, with it, the beginning of cinema. It tells the story of when, how, and why the experience of “seeing things” became an indelible part of Victorian mass culture that set the terms not only for early cinema spectatorship but also for how we relate to film, television, and digital media today. “Virtual aesthetics” is my term for the technological aesthetics of visual or perceptual encounters with things that are not really there, an aesthetic form and experience that became increasingly popular over the course of the nineteenth century both as an attraction in and of itself and an object of imaginative inquiry. Virtual aesthetics is not only the grounds for the visual and perceptual effects of cinema but also for the popular nineteenth-century media culture most often described as “precinematic”—a culture that included stereoscopes, zoetropes, flip-books, and optical stage magic. What holds these media together—and what distinguishes them from related forms of technologically produced visual media like photography or lithography that were on the rise during the same period—is that they all create virtual images. That is, they all exploit physiological and technological optics to create images that do not have a tangible form but that we can see all the same. Contingent and ephemeral, the moving images of the zoetrope and 3D images of the stereoscope come into being at the interface of a technological apparatus and a spectator's embodied visual perception. This book tells the story of how these virtual media collided with the practice of fiction—especially the novel—and how this collision produced an imaginary of the virtual as an experience and condition of mediation that continues to inform our lives today.
This book is both a history and a theory of virtual aesthetics, one that turns to an archive of literary, visual, and technological media to excavate an idea that was not yet fully nameable but could still be articulated through diverse frames—an idea in the messy and vigorous process of coming into being. This book is rooted in Victorian studies, and it argues that the “Victorian” is characterized by the emergence of the virtual. Between 1830 and 1900, a transformational period that spans the rise of optical technology as mass cultural entertainment and the invention of cinema, “seeing things” was redefined as an enlightened mode of spectatorship and a paradigmatic media aesthetic of Western modernity. Instead of a symptom of insanity or proof of supernatural forces at work in the world, seeing things that are not there was newly constructed as a reflexive, scientifically literate, and culturally sophisticated experience of technological mediation that brought spectators into contact with the mutually constitutive relationship between their perceiving selves and the world they inhabited. In this sense, “seeing things” was more than an aesthetic experience: it was an aesthetic expression of a civilizational ideal that defined the capacity to see but not believe, to be entertained without being deceived, as a sign of Western supremacy. In novels and short stories, popular science writing and travelogues, and the design and marketing of optical media, optical spectatorship offered the experiential and imaginative grounds for writers, inventors, and showmen to conceptualize virtuality as simultaneously a characteristic of and means through which modern people could apprehend modern life in an expanding global empire.
My account of Victorian virtual aesthetics is based in the analysis of nineteenth-century optical media culture, which was itself composed of a wide range of devices and exhibition formats. Of these, the best known today is probably the magic lantern, which was used by showmen in museums, lecture halls, and theaters to project painted or photographic slides that dissolved one into the next, effecting stunning visual transformations. With its shaky gray pictures, early cinematography literally paled in comparison with the virtuosic oil paintings executed by the best slide painters in mouthwateringly vibrant colors.2 But the magic lantern was only one of many Victorian optical formats to use light and lenses for visual transformations. Dioramas back-projected light onto a painted screen to create astonishing views that shifted from day to night, season to season, or scene to scene, and optical conjuring used light reflected or refracted from hidden lenses and mirrors to make objects appear and disappear. In the home, families could create virtual images with optical toys that included smaller-scale versions of theatrical equipment, such as the toy magic lantern or the polyorama panoptique, a perspective box for transforming views like those of the diorama, as well as an entirely new class of toys like the thaumatrope, kaleidoscope, and stereoscope that were designed to demonstrate principles of optics. For instance, thaumatropes are paper disks you can spin by twirling a piece of string attached at both ends between your thumb and forefinger. The act of spinning composites the pictures on each side into a single virtual image through an effect that nineteenth-century scientists attributed to persistence of vision.3 Phenakistoscopes and zoetropes exploited the same principle to create the first moving images. The stereoscope demonstrated the relationship between binocular vision and depth perception by adding an illusion of perspectival depth to photographs.
At the heart of the book is my belief that Victorian literary culture and optical media can help explain each other and that by reading them together we can discover emergent conceptions of the virtual that are not legible in either archive alone. This book is a work of visual studies and media aesthetics that applies what W. J. T. Mitchell calls “the pictorial turn,” or “the rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality,” to the analysis of virtual images and the aesthetic, technological, and ideological discourses that shaped the way they were perceived.4 I follow in the footsteps of scholars of Victorian media aesthetics like Rachel Teukolsky, Susan Zieger, and Isobel Armstrong who offer us rich, capacious studies of visual culture by working across media, texts, and formats and treating literary production as an archive of theories of visuality.5 This book adopts a multimedia and mass culture approach to virtual aesthetics as, in Teukolsky's words, a means of recuperating “the actual cultural expression of nineteenth-century aesthetic phenomena” that is so often obscured by disciplinary fragmentation and the separation of “high” and “low” art forms.6 In addressing the heterogeneity of virtual aesthetics at the intersection of varied texts, objects, performances, and sites, I am not trying to advance a singular aesthetic of the virtual. I seek instead to describe a wide-reaching imaginary of the virtual grounded in the experience of optical spectatorship and conceptualized in a broad range of cultural production.
Although my archive encompasses a diverse set of materials, I have a particular interest in the novel and the way it reflects on and fantasizes about the aesthetics of the virtual image. My purpose here is not to position novels as master texts that can “explain” the aesthetics of optical technology or to position optical technology as “cultural context” for readings of novels but rather to generate theories of virtual aesthetics at the intersection of both media forms. I approach Victorian novels and other fictional and nonfictional print media as an archive of discourses about optical technology, and optical technology as a framework through which print media conceptualized the virtual. In this way, this book responds to Nicholas Dames's call for literary studies scholars to “reimagine the novel as a technology” by proposing that Victorian novels took up the mantle of optical technology to portray themselves as technologies of perception.7 Across the case studies in this book, we will see examples of how Victorian novelists not only elaborated imaginaries of the virtual that we find in optical media culture but also incorporated the embodied visual and perceptual effects of optical media as models for theorizing the novel's distinct media effects. In other words, the Victorian novel understood itself as a technology that produces virtual experience.
This book is thus part of a long tradition in Victorian literary studies that views the novel as a profoundly visual and intermedial genre. Many scholars have turned to Victorian “new media” like photography and telegraphy as models for how novels might, as Richard Menke puts it, “turn real life into pictures, reality into fictional information.”8 Scholars such as Helen Groth, John Plunkett, Joss Marsh, and Meegan Kennedy have looked at the relationship between nineteenth-century optical technology and literature, with an overarching concern about the relationship between the novel and technologies of visual projection like the dissolving views of the magic lantern, phantasmagoria shows, Pepper's Ghost, and the projection microscope.9 Meanwhile, a new strain of novel studies exemplified by the work of Alison Byerly, John Plotz, and Jules Law has taken up “virtuality” and “virtual reality” as key terms for exploring the immersive, participatory, projective, and imaginative qualities of Victorian fiction.10 It is surprising, however, that the notion of virtuality in Victorian fiction has still never been explored in the context of the visual media that created virtual images.11 This is where my book makes its contribution. To understand the novel as a technology of visualization, one that is attuned to the phenomenological affordances of narrative for constructing an imaginative visual experience, we must look to the novel's relationship to the virtual media that made the act of spectatorship central to the production of the image.
My account of virtual aesthetics is also grounded in the political work that its media formats, practices, and experiences performed. I argue specifically that the Victorian imaginary of the virtual comes into being through, and in service of, British civilizational ideology. Over the course of the nineteenth century, scientific writing, optical shows, and novels constructed virtual aesthetics as a product and crowning expression of Britain's civilizing empire. Optical technology was simultaneously a triumph of Western scientific advancement—a sign of British civilizational and epistemic superiority—and a sublation of the so-called native magic or superstition represented as characterizing the backward religions and cultures of regions conquered by the West.12 As I will demonstrate in chapter 1, the scientific literature that helped to popularize optical technology and stage magic relied on a binary view of spectatorship that used colonial and patriarchal frameworks to distinguish so-called rational spectators—those who could appreciate optical illusions while recognizing their technological basis—from superstitious fools. The first chapter lays out the case for virtual aesthetics’ civilizational politics, and the following chapters continue to trace the ways that the virtual spectator was constructed along colonial, national, racial, gendered, and class lines. Thus, my book not only reimagines the novel as an optical technology; it also reimagines optical technology as a kind of fiction that produced civilizational imaginaries through its content and modes of spectatorship.
To develop its account of virtual aesthetics, this book employs mixed methods that allow the chapters to move fluidly across varied media forms. I pair literary studies with media archaeology, a branch of media history that values hands-on archival research as a way of excavating, historicizing, and analyzing the experiential dimensions of media objects and challenging the technological determinism that undergirds contemporary media discourse.13 While media archaeology encompasses diverse methods and approaches, Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo argue that the field is unified by “discontent with ‘canonized’ narratives of media culture and history” and the drive to correct such narratives with “alternate histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media that do not point teleologically to the present media-cultural condition as their perfection.”14 My study of nineteenth-century media of the virtual image, an archive of materials that could be characterized as ephemeral mass culture, is an example of this kind of “alternate history.” This book incorporates research conducted in British archives of nineteenth-century optical media, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Media Museum, and the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, where I saw and operated examples of many of the devices I discuss in this book.
This archival research could also reasonably be called play. I employ an experimental method of media archaeology that Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oeve call “re-enactment,” or handling, interacting, and playing with media technologies “to re-sensitize [the researcher] to the sensorial and performative dimensions of media use.”15 For me, this involved playing with optical devices—peering into them, spinning them, projecting from them—to document and interpret their range of visual and perceptual effects and the sensations and affects they provoked in me. Play is an especially critical method for what Meredith Bak calls “the ludic archive” of optical toys, toys that were designed for play and work by “‘play[ing]’ with the senses.”16 Building on Bak's work, I argue that optical media also constitutes a virtual archive, or an archive of virtual images that are only visible at the interface of the spectator and the apparatus and that therefore cannot be reduced to objective, material form. In other words, because virtual images do not exist outside the experiences of performance and play, performance and play are required to study them.
In addition to a means of visual analysis, archival play is a historical method. Rather than reconstructing historical media experience, I use the evidence of my own experience as a kind of raw and unprocessed secondary source. Archival play is how I know that the virtual image of the thaumatrope does not move but flickers; that your eyes get tired after looking through the stereoscope for too long; and, in one mortifying case, that a phenakistoscope can snap in half while you are spinning it. Rather than discussing such playful experiences directly in the chapters of the book, I have treated them as phenomenological data points that inform the way I write about virtual aesthetics. They help me make historical claims about how Victorian spectators interacted with virtual images that are attuned to the embodied experience of play and attentive to the range of visual, perceptual, and somatic effects that optical media can create. This ludic methodology has also allowed me to identify points of convergence between optical and literary constructions of virtuality by tracing aesthetic modalities like the composition of an image through spinning, the embodied labor of optical peeping, and the potentially destructive physical power of the spectator over the optical apparatus. Each of these insights has sensitized me to the operations of Victorian literary texts and allowed me to develop richer accounts of virtual aesthetics. For example, you will find that the dialectical relationship between stillness and motion, stasis and circling, in optical toys undergirds my reading of The Mayor of Casterbridge in chapter 5. You may catch a hint of both my stereoscope fatigue and my phenakistoscope accident in chapter 3, when I describe the mad scientist at the heart of Fitz-James O’Brien's short story “The Diamond Lens,” whose microscopic exertions lead him to fall asleep on top of his instrument and destroy it.
As these examples show, the question of what media “do” encompasses more than their objective technical capacities. I understand the affects, experiences, even fantasies that media produce as part of their history, a method of inquiry that media archaeologists like Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, and Eric Kluitenberg have called the analysis of “imaginary media.”17 My book is a cultural history not just of virtual media themselves but also of how virtual media are imagined—a cultural history of the virtual imaginaries that we find in optical spectatorship and representations of optical spectatorship alike. The stereoscope does not make it possible to leave the body behind and enter the virtual image's scopic field, but these imaginative affordances, evidenced in Victorian advertisements and cartoons, are still part of the history and culture of the medium. In this way, the methods of literary studies and media archaeology begin to converge. The close reading of imaginative texts like novels opens new archives of media discourse—new imaginaries of media—that are easily overlooked by more traditional media historians. In addition to the imaginary affordances of virtual media, my book discusses virtual media that are truly imaginary—impossible media that have never existed outside cultural discourse and that come into being to express and embody fantastical ideas about mediation. These, too, have a history, one that allows us to better understand what virtuality meant in the Victorian age and the cultural uses to which the idea of the virtual was put.
A Brief Word on Terminology
Although I focus on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, I will break with convention by refraining from labeling these optical devices and shows as precinematic. “Precinematic” is a misleading term for the visual media created before the invention of cinema because it implies that cinema superseded and replaced them. This is untrue: if you have ever played with a flip-book or kaleidoscope, you know that nineteenth-century optical technology is alive and well, finding new roles and meanings in contemporary life.18 To call these media precinematic is to imply that cinema was the obvious and natural end point of the nineteenth-century's explorations in virtual aesthetics and thus to close down avenues of inquiry that reveal the deeply noncinematic ways that these media created and conceptualized virtuality. This book seeks to recover a virtual aesthetics that was interrupted by cinema's ascension to the status of modernity's paradigmatic media technology.
In my book, you will encounter, among other things, exhibitions of ghosts, a magic mirror of ink, a diamond that is actually an optical technology, and a moving picture ouroboros that spins in a circle. All these media relate to the virtual moving image aesthetics of the cinema in some way; if I have done my job well, each of them will cast the history of cinema in a new light. But they will also compel diverse, sometimes conflicting conceptions of virtual aesthetics that challenge any clear narrative of technological or cultural development. I take cinema as a heuristic that opens a nineteenth-century culture of virtual aesthetics that is far stranger, richer, and more meaningful than the term “precinematic” will ever convey.
What Was the Virtual?
It would be easy to assume that my case for a Victorian media aesthetics of virtuality hinges on an act of strategic presentism, one in which I am (at best) reading the virtual interfaces, realities, and environments of our contemporary media ecology backward into the nineteenth century and (at worst) retrofitting Victorian aesthetics to the digital age. This is far from the case. I approach the virtual as a distinct media aesthetic of Victorian culture. I have generated my theory of Victorian virtual aesthetics from a historical analysis of nineteenth-century optical media technologies, practices of spectatorship, and cultural discourse, and I offer an account of the virtual that is deeply—to some extent, inextricably—placed within this context. How virtuality migrates and evolves and to what extent the aesthetic formations I discuss in this book prefigure or become the virtual technologies and experiences of today are fascinating questions beyond the scope of the book. My book is not asking what the virtual is but rather what the virtual was as an aesthetic and cultural framework in nineteenth-century British culture.
What was the virtual? As a way of answering this question, let me direct us to an essay published in The National Magazine in 1856 called “How to See Pictures.” “We assume it to be a self-evident truth,” the article begins, “that every man of healthy constitution, physical and mental, possesses a capacity for studying and enjoying works of art.”19 To explain how the average person might overcome the “artificial impediments” to their birthright of artistic appreciation, the author offers an analogy to another way of “see[ing]” another kind of “picture”: the image produced by an optical toy called the pseudoscope. This device, proposed by Charles Wheatstone just a few years before the essay appeared, reverses the user's depth perception so that convex objects appear concave and concave objects appear convex. “Yet the instrument has this further peculiarity,” the author of “How to See Pictures” remarks, “that its ordinary effect fails when you first look through it.” Only after a few moments, “by a flash of light, as though you had grown wiser under a miracle,” does the optical illusion occur, “the hollow of the cup bulging outwards.” This transformation in the spectator's vision is “exactly analogous to the change which takes place in the perception of a man in the interval after he has made some acquaintance with objects of art, and before he has become familiarized with any new school.”20 Anchored by this reassuring example of spectatorial perseverance, the essay goes on to instruct readers in how to overcome deficits in their artistic education by looking closely at works of art. Just as the hollow cup suddenly bulges outward, so will a painting in an unfamiliar style become beautiful, if only the spectator will patiently wait for the “miracle” of their own visual perception to make them wise.
My theory of virtual aesthetics also rests on the question of how Victorians saw pictures. Rather than how they saw paintings, I am interested in how they saw a kind of picture that, as the article suggests, was in many cases more familiar, more profoundly mass cultural, and offered an easier and more immediately gratifying experience of visual novelty. I call this kind of picture a virtual image, or an image created by optical technology. Readers of this book are probably more familiar with looking at paintings than playing with toys like the pseudoscope. In this respect, the central premise of “How to See Pictures”—that looking at a pseudoscope can help us understand how to look at paintings—probably seems somewhat strange, as if the premise itself should be viewed through the pseudoscope and so flipped inside out. Written in the first decades of the optical toy boom, when devices like the pseudoscope began to appear in middle-class homes just as televisions would a century later, “How to See Pictures” makes apparent how relatable and ordinary the experiences of using optical toys and seeing virtual images were for Victorians. By comparing virtual spectatorship to looking at painting, the article offers us an example of how the virtual image's particular configuration of technology, embodiment, and perception made possible new ways of thinking about aesthetic experience. In other words, “How to See Pictures” points to a mid-century virtual aesthetics that is grounded in but ultimately transcends the experience of seeing the virtual images of optical technology.
What exactly Victorian virtual aesthetics looked like is a richly interpretive and historical question that the chapters of this book will endeavor to answer, each in their own way. But what virtual images looked like is comparatively simple and concrete, and I can explain it succinctly here. “Virtual images” refers to a class of images created at the interface of optical technology and a spectator's embodied visual perception. My use of the term is modeled on that of the film historian Tom Gunning, from whose profound body of work on nineteenth-century optical devices and spectacles this book takes inspiration.21 For Gunning, a virtual image is a technological and perceptual image that arises when one or more spectators use, play with, or are exposed to an optical device that manipulates their vision. A virtual image is ephemeral and contingent; “[its] existence consists in its appearance and effects rather than its materiality.”22 When I use the term “virtual image,” I am not projecting onto the optical culture of the nineteenth century a piece of contemporary jargon. I am challenging, as does Anne Friedberg, the assumption that “virtual” refers “only to electronically mediated or digitally produced images” as well as “its unquestioned equation with ‘virtual reality.’”23 Friedberg's work shows that the term “virtual” has been in use to describe the images seen through a lens or in a mirror since the seventeenth century; this English-language usage was popularized in the early nineteenth century by Sir David Brewster, the inventor of the kaleidoscope and lenticular stereoscope, whose writings on optical illusions and technology I discuss at some length in chapter 1.24 In A Treatise on Optics (1831), for instance, Brewster distinguishes between real and virtual images: real images are seen directly by the eye, whereas virtual images are seen through the mediation of a lens.25 While nineteenth-century optical usage referred primarily to lens- and mirror-based technologies, I follow Gunning in using the term more expansively to encompass all perceptual and technologically mediated optical illusions, like those created by paper-based optical toys such as the zoetrope and flip-book. Rather than reflecting, refracting, or projecting images, these toys create a stream of composite moving images.
To understand what a virtual image looks like in practice, let us turn to the stereoscope. The stereoscope was the better-known and more commercially successful sibling of Wheatstone's pseudoscope, the case study of virtual images used in “How to See Pictures.” It was refined in the middle of the nineteenth century by Brewster, who transformed it into a ubiquitous household toy that one scientific popularizer described as “a piece of domestic equipment without which no drawing room was thought complete” (figure I.2).26 While the pseudoscope reverses depth perception, the stereoscope simulates depth perception, allowing the viewer to see a flat picture as if it were 3D. This 3D image is an example of what I call a virtual image. It does not exist anywhere except in the encounter between the perceiving subject and the technological apparatus. You cannot touch the 3D image that you see through the lenses of the stereoscope because it is not really “there.” Yet it does exist, in its visual appearance and perceptual effects, for as long as you are looking through the lenses.
Consider the hand-colored stereograph of the fancy basket maker in Brighton (figure I.3). When you look at the image printed in the book, you see two seemingly identical pictures of an old man with white hair, wearing a white shirt and brown waistcoat, in the middle of a sea of wicker. Baskets hang over his head, piled on either side of him, and one partly obscures his face as he weaves it together. By touching the page, you can touch the picture—its existence is confirmed by its materiality. But if you place the page in a stereoscope and peep at the stereograph through its lenses, a different image appears—a singular image endowed with an illusion of depth and relief. The wicker fronds of the basket that the man is weaving open out toward you, like a static variation on the Lumière film and its onrushing train. The textures and dimensions of the baskets on the wall explode, vivid and sharp. The small distances between things, like the man's hands and the basket he is working on, expand as if they have suddenly been rendered on the receding planes of a pop-up book. The black void behind the man suddenly becomes visible in new ways; no longer just negative space, its contrast with the vital presence of the man and the baskets makes it seem almost concave, like a corridor. This is a virtual image, and if you reached out to touch it, it would not be there at all. You could touch the stereograph or the lenses of the stereoscope, of course. But you could not touch the inky depths of the corridor or the prickly edges of the wicker fronds. Their depths and dimensions are purely virtual effects.
Figure I.3. Stereograph of “The Brighton Fancy Basket Maker” by W. H. Mason, Great Britain, 1860s. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The stereograph of the fancy basket maker is a helpful case study because it grounds the virtual image in the materiality and corporeality of Victorian media culture. Stereographs, which usually consist of pieces of cardstock with two nearly identical photographs printed or pasted side by side, are examples of what Teukolsky calls “the small-scale printed matter of the Victorian media revolution.”27 The stereograph of the fancy basket maker is therefore illustrative twice over of what Bill Brown has termed the “material unconscious” of Victorian mass culture, both as an ephemeral media object and a representation of the thingness of Victorian life, wicker baskets and all.28 While the process of seeing through or with a stereoscope was often imaginatively associated with transcending time, space, and body—as if the spectator could become Ralph Waldo Emerson's “transparent eyeball” and roam across the Earth through a mobile virtual gaze—stereoscope spectatorship was in fact deeply corporeal. It involved not just the eyes but the hands, which hold the device and select the stereographs, and not just the body but its placement in the domestic environs of the parlor. Playing with a stereoscope is not just a way of seeing but also a form of doing that, like basket weaving itself, involves the work of hands and eyes.29 Our basket maker therefore reminds us that the immateriality of the virtual image is always in dialectical relation to the materiality of technology and vision, the fantasy of virtual travel to the armchair in which it occurs. At the same time, he foregrounds an aesthetic dimension of Victorian mass culture that is often elided in the many scholarly accounts of its profound, almost overbearing thingness: that such thingness both gave rise to and could be experienced through the dematerializing aesthetics of the virtual.
This book explores two types of optical mass culture that created virtual images. The first is the optical show, with examples such as optical conjuring, optical ghost shows, and cinema. These were public spectacles that used optical technology, sometimes exhibiting the device as a key part of the attraction and other times obscuring the process of technological mediation to create a sense of mystery and magic. The second type of optical mass culture is the optical toy, or household optical device, a category that includes the stereoscope, phenakistoscope, and flip-book. Optical toys are a kind of philosophical toy, an early modern nomenclature meant to distinguish instruments of measurement (mathematical instruments) from those that facilitate the study of nature through distortion.30 Optical toys distort vision to reveal the properties of vision: the stereoscope and pseudoscope demonstrate the principles of depth perception, while the zoetrope and flip-book demonstrate an illusion of motion that nineteenth-century scientists called persistence of vision. Although they originate in experimental science, the toyness of optical toys was evident in their commercialization and use as playthings both by adults and children.31
The historical parameters of the book reflect the period when these toys and spectacles became part of Victorian mass culture. Some of the devices and shows I discuss existed before 1830—in chapter 4, we will even take a substantial detour back to the 1790s—but in the 1830s, several of the most formative optical devices and formats of the nineteenth century would be invented. The 1830s also saw the rise of a new mode of scientific popularization embodied in commercial museums of science and technology like London's National Gallery for Practical Science, Blending Instruction and Amusement (founded in 1832) and Royal Polytechnic Institution (founded in 1838), and in optical treatises and showmen's memoirs that sought to explain optical illusions for a broad audience with the aim of defeating superstition. While optical magic and technology had a place in the eighteenth-century home, it was usually confined to the education and amusement of elites.32 The 1830s saw a concerted effort to democratize optical literacy and optical play by bringing it into middle-class homes and bringing the middle classes into the hallowed halls of scientific endeavor—all for a reasonable fee. Over the course of the next few decades, the virtuality of optical media would become so common that it began to generate new ways of seeing and thinking about seeing in the culture at large. It is not a coincidence that many of the novels I discuss in this book were, like “How to See Pictures,” published in the 1850s, roughly a generation after the optical popularization efforts of the 1830s. The ease with which “How to See Pictures” explains painting by reference to virtual spectatorship is not the result of the mere existence of optical toys but the cultural saturation of virtual aesthetics in everyday life.
My emphasis on optical media as mass culture is therefore notably different from the approach taken by Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer, his landmark study of nineteenth-century technological vision.33 Crary understands the technological reconstruction of visual experience undertaken by optical devices like the phenakistoscope and stereoscope to signal a new form of perception distinct to Western modernity, a regime that he calls “subjective vision.” For him, the rise of virtual images creates a sudden and seismic rupture in the historical experience of vision. This line of argument has been justly critiqued for positing a single historical spectator without consideration to gender, race, or class and for overlooking the aesthetic and technological continuities between nineteenth-century technologies and earlier forms of visual media.34 It also overstates the cultural significance of elite scientific discourse by relying for its primary evidence of epistemic transformation on a handful of men reporting on their laboratory discoveries. My book does not make the case that the invention of virtual image technologies overturned dominant models of visual perception by making vision untrustworthy for the first time in history. It makes the more modest and empirically supported claim that, by the mid-nineteenth century, the popularization of optical technologies that create virtual images and the democratization of theories of optical perception offered writers and showmen a new set of frameworks for thinking about aesthetic experience in terms of visual and perceptual mediation. The media I explore not only generated many ways of seeing virtual images but also many ways of thinking about seeing as a virtual experience. Instead of collapsing these different practices and ideas into a singular model for Victorian virtuality, my chapters survey a variety of virtual media imaginaries to show how they are distinct as well as some of the ways that they intersect.
My media archaeological approach to optical mass culture also distinguishes this book from existing studies of the virtual in Victorian fiction. The last fifteen years have seen a burst of scholarly works in Victorian studies that define the properties of Victorian fiction as forms of “virtuality,” “virtual reality,” “virtual travel,” “virtual aesthetics,” and “virtual play.”35 These terms are often defined in reference to contemporary digital media, internet culture, and video games to generate descriptive accounts of the fictionality of Victorian novels or the phenomenological affordances of narrative. For instance, Alison Byerly draws on contemporary formulations of virtual reality to conceptualize Victorian realism as a technology of “virtual travel” that facilitates “a transference of imaginative experience into a perception of physical experience” and “a projection of the self into a fictive environment.”36 Byerly's definition of “virtuality” is robust, particular, and induced from the media effects of both novels and travel media like guidebooks that “generate an almost physical sense of presence within the fictional world—a sense of locatedness and embodiment—that depends on a strategic positioning of the reader.”37 Not all accounts of Victorian virtuality are so crisp. Jules Law calls the virtual “a specific form of representation that both foregrounds and requires the mediation of technology”; John Plotz makes it synonymous with a state of “semi-detachment” that positions the reader of novels simultaneously in the real world and the world of imagination; and Timothy Gao defines it as “fictional experiences and actions, or fictional realities which can be experienced and acted upon.”38 As a media effect of Victorian novels, the properties of virtuality are difficult to distinguish from those of existing literary critical terms like “realism,” “fictionality,” “imagination,” “representation,” “reflexivity,” and “mediation.”
This book offers greater conceptual and historical precision by presenting the virtual as a category of image production and visual experience grounded in the optical culture of the mid-nineteenth century. This kind of precision also makes it possible to think more capaciously about the imaginative uses to which the virtual was put by novelists, showmen, travel writers, and scientific popularizers, from writers like George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle, who identified the media effects of the literary narrative with those of optical technology, to those like Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, who conceptualized the virtual as a framework for forms of civilizational affect and imperial ways of knowing. It may be true that “the categories underpinning our current concept of virtual reality were elaborated in the middle of the nineteenth century,” as Law writes.39 But rather than moving backward from this current concept, itself so slippery, so overdetermined, so impossible to define neatly, the five chapters that make up this book describe a Victorian aesthetic of the virtual without worrying too much about how it does or does not relate to the intensely technologically mediated world we live in today. I hope this refusal of historical determinism, as well as the delight this book takes in obscure, obsolete, and imaginary media experiences, makes my account of what the virtual was even more generative for readers who want to figure out what the virtual is.
Victorian Virtual Aesthetics: Five Ways
The five chapters of this book each offer an account of virtual aesthetics that I find at the intersection of nineteenth-century optical media culture and literary production. Each chapter centers on an optical media format or performance, a set of Victorian literary texts, and a political framework in which they resonate. Chapter 1 sets the scene for this study by arguing that scientific popularizers invented an aesthetic of the virtual when they sought to teach readers and audiences how to divorce the apprehension of optical illusions from the belief in magic. Through readings of popular scientific treatises and works on rational magic, I identify the construction of a discourse of virtual spectatorship that I call the pedagogy of disenchantment and analyze how it defined and justified virtual aesthetics according to a civilizational logic. The pedagogy of disenchantment mobilized the colonial, racial, and patriarchal specter of magic panic—or irrational and superstitious fear at the sight of virtual images—to portray disenchanted virtual spectatorship as a practice of epistemic self-sovereignty. We see this dynamic play out in Cranford (1853), Elizabeth Gaskell's novel about a community of unmarried and widowed women in northern England, in which a traveling magic show inspires a female-specific magic panic in the town. I argue, however, that Gaskell subverts what she reads as the masculinist pedagogy of disenchantment by exposing the patriarchal and racial logic that undergirds it. Instead portraying magic panic as an intrinsically feminized moral and intellectual failing, the novel makes visible the ways that the pedagogy of disenchantment deployed the aesthetics of optical magic in the service of imperial domination.
The next two chapters continue to explore the relationship between virtual aesthetics and empire by asking how imaginary virtual media expressed the cultural fantasy of seeing across time and space. Chapter 2 centers on an Egyptian magic trick popularized in English letters by the Egyptologist and travel writer Edward William Lane. The mirror of ink supposedly allowed a boy to see images of dead or absent persons in a drop of ink poured into his hand, an illusion that Lane immediately understood through the technological framework of lens- and mirror-based optical magic. In the hands of Victorian writers and thinkers like Harriet Martineau and Richard Francis Burton, the mirror of ink was explained through sciences of mind like mesmerism, hypnotism, clairvoyance, and telepathy that enable persons to see things that are not there in the form of mental images. By reading these imperial and racializing constructions of the mirror of ink as a medium for virtual sight, I argue that it also generated an imaginary of the novel as a technology of virtual visual experience. In Adam Bede (1859), a novel that many literary scholars read as a theory of realist verisimilitude, George Eliot compares the reader's visualization of the diegesis to the traveler's visualizations in the mirror of ink. In other words, like Eliot's more experimental gothic tale The Lifted Veil, Adam Bede brings together the optical, mesmeric, and imperial attributes of the mirror of ink to imagine the realist novel as a virtual technology that makes the reader see things that are not there.
Chapter 3 continues this exploration of virtual aesthetics as an extension of vision—what H. G. Wells, in a short story from 1896, calls “real vision at a distance”—this time by focusing on the imaginary affordances of a real object. In 1851, a legendary Indian diamond called the Koh-i-noor was put on display in the Crystal Palace as part of the Great Exhibition. By tracing the history of audience disappointment with the diamond exhibit (audience members were disappointed by the Koh-i-noor's reported refusal to sparkle or shine), I excavate a discourse of diamonds as optical media that operate through the reflection and refraction of light and argue that it fueled an imaginary of colonial diamonds as media for virtual contact with the scenes of empire. This imaginary is made explicit in two literary works inspired by the display of the Koh-i-noor at the Great Exhibition. “The Diamond Lens” (1859), a short story by the Irish American writer Fitz-James O’Brien, imagines a plundered colonial diamond that is ground into a microscopic lens so powerful it reveals a world inside a drop of water. In The Moonstone (1868), Wilkie Collins’ detective mystery, a stolen Indian diamond intoxicates its English spectators, creating frightening and pleasurable new visions and sensations. Both stories appropriate the effects of real optical devices like the stereoscope to reimagine the Koh-i-noor as a technological optical medium that acts as a visual prosthetic for the apprehension of colonial spaces through its sparkling surfaces and virtual depths.
The final chapters of the book move from the visual culture of empire to ask how virtual aesthetics shaped representations of the nation. Chapter 4 asks how the phantasmagoria—one of the most famous optical shows of the nineteenth century—became a figure for French revolutionary history and populist nationalism in both French and British thought. Invented in Paris on the cusp of the Reign of Terror, the phantasmagoria used a hidden magic lantern in a dark room to project images that seemed to move among the audience. In the context of mass violence and public execution, the phantasmagoria was often portrayed as a ghostly assembly where the living could encounter the historical dead returning to life. I trace the genealogy of the phantasmagoria as a figure for the historical return of the repressed in the work of three men who wrote about the French Revolution: Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, the Belgian showman who claimed credit as the inventor of the phantasmagoria in Paris and portrayed his spectral moving images as a resurrection of those killed in the revolution; Thomas Carlyle, who used the phantasmagoria as a figure for revolutionary historical change in The French Revolution: A History; and Charles Dickens, who read both Robertson and Carlyle closely before writing A Tale of Two Cities, a novel set during the Reign of Terror in which the historical past is “recalled to life” in ghostly form. All three writers conceptualize nationalism and national history in phantasmagorical terms.
Chapter 5 turns to the invention of moving pictures in spinning optical toys. I focus on the phenakistoscope, the first toy to create virtual moving images in a circular and repeating format, an effect that would be reproduced over the course of the century in new devices like the zoetrope and praxinoscope. These are typically read as precinematic media that led to the creation of cinema through their transformation of static pictures into an unbroken series of virtual moving images. I argue that this perspective overlooks a fundamental fact about the history of moving pictures: that it does not begin with the unfolding linear action we associate with the cinema but instead with the representation of repetitive and cyclical action. This format, with its distinctly ahistorical temporality, deserves to be theorized on its own terms. By reading the phenakistoscope alongside the novels and short stories of Thomas Hardy and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1934), I trace an alternative genealogy of moving pictures focused on the virtual aesthetics of the loop and argue that the phenakistoscope's circular format gave rise to an imaginary of capitalist labor structured by recursion and repetition that challenged modernity's logic of industrial progress. After several chapters tracing the use of virtual aesthetics to represent the far reaches of empire, express Orientalist imaginaries, and stage the epic dramas of nineteenth-century European history, Hardy returns us to where we began with Cranford in chapter 1: the hyperlocal time and place of mid-century provincial England. His engagement with optical toys and the emergent culture of cinema offers us a virtual aesthetics of everyday life.
A brief epilogue returns us to the film with which we began—Auguste and Louis Lumière's Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, a film that is commonly understood to announce the arrival of cinema on the world stage. By this point, I hope you will be able to see cinema's arrival in a new way. Rather than a radical break with the technological and visual culture of the nineteenth century, my book recontextualizes cinema as an epiphenomenon of Victorian virtual aesthetics. Cinema is one outcome of the vibrant nineteenth-century cultural imaginary of the virtual—one format out of many that turned the experience of seeing things that are not there into a paradigmatic expression of Western modernity.