Chapter 3Mountains of LightThe Koh-i-Noor at the Great Exhibition

Mountains of Light

We are accustomed to thinking of diamonds as rare and valuable objects, not as optical media. Most cultural and literary histories of nineteenth-century diamonds adopt the frameworks of material and economic history to consider diamond as “portable property” that originated in imperial extraction and circulated through systems of inheritance, courtship rituals, and property laws.¹¹ I follow this line of inquiry by reading diamonds as colonial commodities that symbolized India's status as British possession. India was firmly imprinted in the British imagination as the source of diamonds. This link was not purely imaginary: until the discovery of diamond mines in Brazil in 1725, and with the exception of black diamond crystals found in the mountains of Borneo, all the world's diamonds came from India.¹² Yet even after the late nineteenth-century South African diamond rush, the profound and historic connection between diamonds and Indian wealth, power, and prestige remained a fixity of British culture.¹³ This can be explained at least in part by the British East India Company's notorious plundering of diamonds for personal wealth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For Shashi Tharoor, “it was Indian diamonds, which the nabobs brought back to Britain with them, that made the Empire real to the British public.”¹⁴ Diamonds are therefore metonymic of Indian empire itself; to possess a diamond is not just to possess a piece of India, forged in the depths of the Earth and therefore of the land itself, but to possess India in miniature.

Yet diamonds are not just property or material culture or things. They are also visually spectacular; as Adrienne Munich puts it, diamonds have “the power to addict the eye.”¹⁵ I adopt a phenomenological approach to material culture that recognizes diamonds as optical media that create virtual effects through their unique reflection and refraction of light. To borrow Isobel Armstrong's formulation in Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, her cultural history of glass, diamonds are both material and medium.¹⁶ As we will see, Victorians described the materiality and medium specificity of diamonds in relation to glass, focusing not only on diamonds’ hardness and supposed imperviousness to shattering, but also their greater luminosity and capacity for magnification. Especially after 1851, when the Koh-i-noor, Daria-i-noor, and Hope diamonds were all exhibited in London at the Great Exhibition and seen up close by over six million people, diamonds “made the Empire real to the British public” not only through their circulation on British soil but equally through their strangely compelling visuality.

Nineteenth-century British consumers, spectators, and scientists recognized diamonds as aesthetic objects with medium-specific visual effects. Three effects in particular dominated the discourse. The first is that diamonds sparkle. They look like containers for light that are always overflowing, shimmering and glittering with excess luminosity that streams outward and engulfs them. This effect is the result of both the material properties of diamonds and the way they are cut. Diamonds naturally have a high refractive index and strong dispersion, allowing them to bend and break up light so that they sparkle brightly and give off a colorful glow. The shape into which a diamond is cut and the number, shape, size, and angle of facets determine how bright and fiery it will be. As Marcia Pointon explains, a diamond does not reveal its full beauty until it is modified by the human hand, the process of cutting and polishing transforming it from “precious raw material” to “acculturated artefact.”¹⁷

I propose that we think of a diamond's sparkle as a technological media effect. The introduction of steam-powered and motorized diamond-polishing machines in the nineteenth century meant that diamonds were funneled to Europe as raw materials mined in colonial territories like India, South Africa, and Brazil and then fashioned into commodities through modern industrial technology. Compared with the manual cutting and polishing of gemstones, these methods allowed for the creation of rounder and more brilliant diamonds—diamonds technologically designed to sparkle brightly.

The fascination with sparkling suggests that a diamond was not just something beautiful to see, it was also something to see with. Put more plainly, a diamond could be an instrument for seeing light that delights the eye by making light perform. It is not only a technological artifact—it is also an optical technological medium, akin to the magic lanterns, mirrors, and panes of glass used to throw pictures onto a wall or make specters appear on a stage. Diamonds worn as jewelry can act as lenses without images. What they make visible is light itself: light that sparkles, shimmers, glows. This quality leads me to a second medium-specific quality of diamonds in the Victorian imagination: their phosphorescence. Phosphorescence names the phenomenon whereby a material that has been exposed to light continues to emit light even after the source disappears. The Hope Diamond—a large Indian diamond that was displayed next to the Koh-i-noor at the Great Exhibition—famously glows a deep orange-red for up to a minute after the lights go out. As Adrienne Munich shows, Victorian lapidaries incorrectly believed that all diamonds were phosphorescent.¹⁸ Although we now know that only a small fraction of diamonds have this quality, the outsized status of phosphorescence in the nineteenth-century diamond imaginary underlines the construction of the diamond as a sort of machine for visual effects. Diamonds not only disperse light—they also store light, feasting on it like vampires to produce an uncanny afterglow.

Diamonds sparkle; diamonds phosphoresce; and finally, diamonds magnify. This third characteristic requires us to shift our context for diamonds from the ornamental to the scientific. At a moment when the laboratory study of optics was taking off, nineteenth-century opticians and physicists were fascinated by what the optical structure of diamond could offer to the creation of scientific instruments. Among them was David Brewster, the inventor of the kaleidoscope and stereoscope, whose popularization of optical technology and theory of virtual spectatorship was the subject of chapter 1. Early in his career, Brewster undertook an optical analysis of diamonds and other gemstones. In A Treatise on New Philosophical Instruments (1813), he wrote that the high refractive index of diamonds made them an ideal material for magnifying lenses, arguing that diamond lenses could improve the microscope by increasing its resolution. Brewster's plan was impractical—diamonds are, of course, very expensive—but it nevertheless inspired two men of science, C. R. Goring and Andrew Pritchard, to make and sell microscopes containing diamond and sapphire lenses.¹⁹ In The Microscopic Cabinet (1832), which includes a lengthy account of Pritchard's construction of the jewel microscope with illustrations by Goring, Pritchard argues that diamond's superiority to glass as a magnifier “must enable us to penetrate farther into [an object's] real texture than we can hope to do by any artificial arrangement whatever.”²⁰

By “must,” what Pritchard really meant was “should.” His theory of the diamond lens was not entirely supported by his experiments, which revealed that diamonds were finicky to work with and often flawed in a way that introduced new aberrations into the microscopic image. Nevertheless, the jewel microscope expanded the nineteenth-century diamond imaginary by making diamonds into functional optical technologies for scientific investigation. Pritchard's belief in what the diamond lens “must” make visible, in spite of evidence to the contrary, made the diamond's existing status as technological medium explicit by constructing it as a miraculous visual prosthetic.

Meanwhile, Brewster continued to fantasize about how to blend the ornamental use of diamonds in jewelry with their scientific use as magnifiers. In 1864, he again raised the possibility of replacing the magnifying glass with the magnifying diamond, this time in a report on the stanhope viewer, or bijou microscopique. The stanhope viewer is an optical technology that places microphotographs inside novelty souvenirs and pieces of jewelry. The photographs could be peeped at through a simple microscope made of a glass cylinder and embedded in the bijou (“jewel”).²¹ If a diamond was a readymade magnifying lens, Brewster thought, why not simply pair a diamond ring with a microphotograph so that a man may gaze at a private image of his beloved that adorns his own hand?

The organizers of the Great Exhibition failed to recognize that the Koh-i-noor diamond was not only a material artifact and a deeply significant piece of British property but also an optical medium. Nor did they consider that the spectators they lured to the Crystal Palace on the promise of seeing this famous diamond with their own eyes might expect to witness some of the rather spectacular visual effects they had been taught to expect from a diamond named “mountain of light.” Instead, the Koh-i-noor as a symbol of British imperial sovereignty was what was advertised for the Great Exhibition. Given pride of place as the third item listed in the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, and classified under “Articles Exhibited by her Majesty the Queen,”²² it was centrally located in the Crystal Palace's East Nave inside what one exhibition reviewer described as “a great parrot cage” topped with a British royal crown (figure 3.1).²³ There, the Koh-i-noor sat, resting luxuriantly on a red velvet cushion, between the Daria-i-noor (or Sea of Light), and the Hope diamonds.

Figure 3.1. The Koh-i-noor diamond in its original display at London's Great Exhibition of 1851. Illustrated London News, May 31, 1851.

The rhetoric of the display was heavy-handed in its imperial symbolism. “The Koh-i-noor was a miniature crystallization of the [Indian] subcontinent enclosed in a cage,” Lara Kriegel writes, “a material reminder of Britain's hold” over India.²⁴ The cage was not only a metonym for Britain's empire but also for the diamond's new owner, Queen Victoria. As Danielle Kinsey points out, the arc of the diamond's cage evokes the hoopskirts worn by female spectators to the Great Exhibition. Seen this way, the cage is a representation of the queen: a golden hoopskirt in a crown.²⁵ The exhibit's location within the Crystal Palace was also significant. While its central location made it unmissable, its close proximity to the Indian Court—just across the hall from the East Nave—strategically linked this British treasure to its historic roots.²⁶ The Catalogue of the Great Exhibition's description of the Koh-i-noor as “The Great Diamond of Runjeet Singh, called ‘Koh-i-noor,’ or Mountain of Light,” identified the diamond not as Queen Victoria's property but as belonging to its prior owner, from whose treasury it was seized after the annexation of Punjab. Priti Joshi notes the conflicting language of the Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, which describes the diamond as “of” Runjeet Singh but “exhibited by” the queen.²⁷ Rather than an inconsistency in the presentation of the Koh-i-noor, this language reinforces the historical and geopolitical significance of the diamond's transition from Indian to British ownership. What is important is not that Queen Victoria possesses the “Great Diamond” but that she possesses “The Great Diamond of Runjeet Singh” and along with it his kingdom. The diamond's physical proximity to the Indian Court and identification as at once “of” India and belonging to Britain served to position India, like the Koh-i-noor, as Britain's most precious jewel. The message of the display was clear: the Koh-i-noor was not only a material embodiment of imperial history but also the star of the Great Exhibition's providential narrative of British supremacy over South Asia and, by extension, the globe. John Forbes Royle, the Anglo-Indian botanist who superintended the Indian exhibit at the Crystal Palace, summarized this position succinctly when he remarked that India was not just the jewel in the crown of the British Empire but “the Koh-i-noor of the British crown.”²⁸

As we saw in the opening paragraphs of the chapter, this narrative of the Koh-i-noor as “prize of Saxon valor” predated the exhibition by at least two years. Foremost among its architects was James Broun-Ramsay, better known as the Marquess of Dalhousie, who earned that title from Queen Victoria in appreciation for his personal efforts to acquire the Koh-i-noor for the British Crown. Dalhousie served as governor-general of India between 1848 and 1856, an interstitial but politically critical moment before the establishment of the British Raj. At this stage, India was a formal colony of Britain, but it was still under the administration of the British East India Company, a trading company acting as a trustee of the British Crown. Under Dalhousie's rule, the British East India Company generated revenue and consolidated British power in India through the ruthless expropriation of Indian land. Dalhousie's annexation of Punjab not only incorporated into British India a vast territory previously ruled by the Sikh Empire; it also placed the British East India Company in possession of the contents of the Lahore Treasury, including the infamous Koh-i-noor. As Dalhousie himself wrote of his success: “It is not every day that an officer of [the British] Government adds four millions of subjects to the British Empire, and places the historical jewel of the Mogul Emperors in the Crown of his own Sovereign.”²⁹

Dalhousie's description of his victory as “plac[ing]” the Koh-i-noor “in the Crown” reflects what turned out to be a controversial act. The Second Anglo-Sikh War ended when Duleep Singh, the ten-year-old ruler of the independent Sikh kingdom of Punjab, was forced by the British to sign a treaty explicitly demanding that “the gem called the Koh-i-noor . . . shall be surrendered by the Maharajah to the Queen of England.”³⁰ All at once, Punjab and Koh-i-noor became British property. This decision was criticized by the Court of Directors of the British East India Company. Some officials considered the Lahore Treasury as “prize-property,” war booty or loot seized in battle and traditionally sold at public auction and redistributed to the troops as bonuses according to their rank. The gifting of the Koh-i-noor to the queen denied the company its usual practice of enriching itself and its soldiers with spoils of war.³¹ Other British East India Company officials looked upon Duleep Singh's “surrender” of the Koh-i-noor to Queen Victoria as a performance orchestrated by Dalhousie to satisfy his own vanity or as an repugnant instance of plunder imperialism.³² In contrast, Dalhousie saw his overreach as strategic, not only for his own professional advancement but for nation and empire. “The Koh-i-noor had become in the lapse of ages a sort of historical emblem of conquest in India,” he explained. He was right: the Koh-i-noor has a sensational biography that includes tenure in the court of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan; its theft by Nader Shah, the Persian emperor who invaded Mughal Delhi in 1739; its gifting to Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Afghan Empire, in 1751; and its extortion from an exiled Afghan ruler by Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh in 1813.³³ Ranjit, who wore the Koh-i-noor on the front of his turban or in an armlet, went to great lengths to acquire the famous diamond for the Sikh Empire and transformed it into a symbol of Sikh sovereignty.³⁴ Dalhousie wanted the Koh-i-noor diamond to sit in Queen Victoria's crown as a sign of British sovereignty not only in Punjab but over the entire Indian subcontinent. The British crown would be “its final and fitting resting-place,” he wrote, where it would “shine, and shine, too, with purest ray serene.”³⁵ Although some press reports were openly critical of Duleep Singh's forced surrender of the diamond, most embraced the jingoism of this gesture. The Times account that I quoted at the beginning of the chapter, which calls the diamond a symbol of “the revolutions of ten generations” and “a fitting symbol of that supremacy that we have so fairly won,” shows the success of Dalhousie's narrative of the Koh-i-noor as “historical emblem of conquest” in the popular imagination.

Dalhousie was not an aesthete. He did not choose the most beautiful stone in the Lahore Treasury, nor the most brilliant; he chose the piece that had the greatest symbolic power.³⁶ Whether the diamond's rays were truly “pure” and “serene” was not his concern; the important thing was that the Koh-i-noor shone metaphorically as an emblem of British racial, imperial, and cultural supremacy. On May 1, 1851, the patrons of the Great Exhibition who strolled, rushed, even raced to the gold birdcage in East Nave to see the Koh-i-noor did not share Dalhousie's priorities. By the end of the first day, it was already clear that there was a problem: The diamond did not shine in a literal sense.³⁷ “The ‘Koh-i-noor’ is a great source of attraction to those who visit the Crystal Palace for the first time,” wrote the Illustrated Exhibitor, the illustrated guide to the Great Exhibition, “but it is at least doubtful whether it obtains such admiration afterwards. More than one spectator turns away disappointed from the sight of the precious jewel; and many more seem to think that a vast deal of pains has been taken to secure what is, after all, only a very fine specimen of charcoal.”³⁸ This reception of “precious jewel” as “charcoal” disenchants it through the logic of industrial capitalism. Precious jewels are the province of India, where Oriental despots sit in gemstone-crusted thrones—not commodities but treasures. In contrast, charcoal is the base fuel of the British industrial economy. The emphasis on the gross materiality of the diamond, its stubborn refusal to be anything more than a mere object, was common. Writers debased the Koh-i-noor by comparing it to “a thick piece” or an “egg-shaped lump” of glass, or in one memorable phrase, “a glasslike knob, about the size of a prolonged nutmeg.”³⁹ This comparison was validated by the presence of an actual glass replica of the Koh-i-noor at the Great Exhibition, manufactured by the British glassware maker Apsley Pellat and displayed in the North Gallery of the Crystal Palace, that “quite rival[ed] in brilliancy the two-million original downstairs.”⁴⁰

The stone that spectators saw in the gilded cage was not what they had imagined based on the feverish descriptions of the “Mountain of Light” they read in the press. However, their disappointment was not simply the result of the high expectations created by the media. The frequent comparisons between the Koh-i-noor and glass indicates that audiences thought the diamond was not sufficiently diamond-like and that it resembled a quotidian material, not the incalculably rare artifact Dalhousie and others swore it was. In other words, audiences evaluated the Koh-i-noor through the framework of medium specificity that defined diamonds by their not-glass-ness and valued them for their distinct optical effects. A diamond should be more than a “lump” or “knob,” more, that is, than its physical form or shape because the performance of light that it creates should overflow its material frame. Audiences did not expect to see a “thick piece” of anything; they expected that the physicality of the diamond would be lost in its glow. They did not come for a “specimen” but for a miniature light show.

We can intuit what audiences expected to see in that gilded cage from descriptions of the Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton's glass and iron structure inside of which “the works of industry of all nations” were exhibited. The Times reported that “with the bright sun shining on its ribs and sides,” the Crystal Palace “shone like the Koh-i-noor itself”—a merely speculative comparison because at this point no one but a small handful of imperial officials, exhibition organizers, and the queen had seen the diamond with their own eyes.⁴¹ The Times went on to characterize the Crystal Palace as “an Arabian Night structure, full of light, and with a certain airy unsubstantial character about it which belongs more to enchanted land than to this grossly material world of ours . . . the whole looks like a splendid phantasm.”⁴² The Crystal Palace was Koh-i-noor-like not only because it shone brightly but because it seemed to transcend matter to become light itself—immaterial, enchanted, phantasmal.

The diamond's failure to sparkle was more than a disappointment; it was a minor scandal. Exhibition organizers had assumed that displaying the diamond in a museum—the British answer to Ranjit Singh displaying it on his arm—would be sufficient demonstration of imperial sovereignty and authority in and of itself. Instead, subject to an aesthetic judgment that saw it woefully lacking, the Koh-i-noor became a mockery of Britain's imperial ambitions. As the Leader put it, “Destroy the diamond, and who would be inconsolable?”⁴³ Throughout May and June 1851, exhibition organizers attempted to salvage the reputation of Queen Victoria's diamond, the British East India Company, and the territorial project of empire building by resetting the diamond. Two chief problems emerged from these discussions: the diamond's cut and its setting. The Koh-i-noor had last been polished in the sixteenth century as a rose cut with a rounded oval top and flat bottom (figure 3.2). In their history of the Koh-i-noor, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand suggest that its unusual shape may have inspired its name: “it resembled a large hill or perhaps a huge iceberg rising steeply to a high, domed peak” with “short but irregular crystal trails or azimuths sloping off, like saddles or declivities falling from a Himalayan snow-peak.”⁴⁴ Its 169 facets, tiny gradations along the surface of the gem, were designed to emit a soft prismatic light that differed from the kaleidoscopic radiance of Victorian brilliant cut diamonds. The diamond's archaic shape was unfamiliar and disappointing to viewers because it refracted light in a manner they considered unspectacular. The problem was not the shape itself but its optical affordances; the large rose cut failed to produce the expected aesthetic effects. The Illustrated London News put this diplomatically: “The Koh-i-noor is not cut in the best form for exhibiting its purity and lustre, and will therefore disappoint many, if not all, of those who so anxiously press forward to see it.”⁴⁵ Others were less circumspect. “It is not set ‘à jour,’ & badly cut, which spoils the effect,” Queen Victoria wrote in her diary after the Koh-i-noor was presented to her by members of the British East India Company.⁴⁶ Gemologist Charles King called it “ugly and unskillful.”⁴⁷ Perhaps to justify the displeasure of British spectators, a rumor emerged that the Indian lapidary who cut the Koh-i-noor was executed for his incompetence.⁴⁸

Figure 3.2. The Koh-i-noor diamond, center, as it was presented to Queen Victoria of England. The Crystal Palace, and Its Contents: Being an Illustrated Cyclopedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations, 1851, 1851.

The second obstacle to the diamond sparkling was the conditions of its display in the East Nave of the Crystal Palace. This, too, was an optical problem. “In the spectra produced by broad luminous spaces [like the Crystal Palace],” David Brewster explained in the North British Review, “all the colours are recombined into white light, and hence the disappointment which every person has experienced at the sight of [the Koh-i-noor, Daria-i-noor, and Hope diamonds]. Were the same gems to be worn by a lady in a drawing-room, with numerous bright lights, their effect would astonish the company.”⁴⁹ At the Crystal Palace, the Koh-i-noor was as washed out as a daytime magic lantern show, bleached dull by the very luminosity that made Joseph Paxton's glass structure “shine like the Koh-i-noor.”⁵⁰ Brewster was frequently on site as a juror at the Great Exhibition, and he put his optical expertise to work by building a wooden cabinet that would house the Koh-i-noor and block out light streaming through the glass roof and windows of the Crystal Palace. Six gas lamps and twelve angled mirrors were positioned to light the diamond most advantageously. The results were inconclusive. Margaret Maria Gordon, Brewster's daughter and biographer, recalled that under these new conditions, the diamond “threw out a radiance of colored light which delighted all who saw,” a sentiment echoed by the London Daily Standard, which remarked on the Koh-i-noor's “extraordinary metamorphosis.”⁵¹ According to the Illustrated Exhibitor, on the other hand, “Whether the gaslight suits this Eastern gem better than sunlight is yet considered very problematical.”⁵² In spite of the positive press the new setting received, the Mountain of Light could not escape its reputation as, in Punch's memorable phrase, a “Mountain of Darkness.”⁵³

The Diamond Lens

To rehabilitate the Koh-i-noor as an imperial symbol, it was necessary to fulfill the popular imagination of Indian diamond as optical medium. Only one solution remained. When the Great Exhibition closed in December 1851, Prince Albert sought the consent of Parliament to have the Koh-i-noor diamond recut in the Victorian style. Expert Dutch diamond cutters were hired and a steam engine specially commissioned. “It seems since to have struck the parties interested,” Punch quipped, “that a precious stone which can’t shine and won’t shine, ought to be made to shine, even though a painful operation should be requisite.”⁵⁴ “Ma[king]” the diamond “shine” according to British tastes and expectations would require its technological transformation, a process that served as a kind of imperial theater. The recutting allegorized what Britain saw as a not only extractive but modernizing imperial project in India by depicting the Koh-i-noor as simply another Indian “raw material” that could be made profitable when fed into British industrial machinery.⁵⁵ Without Britain, India is obsolete—a “precious stone” that “won’t shine.” Punch developed this theme through a cartoon representing the Koh-i-noor as an enfeebled maharajah led paternalistically to the grindstone by the Duke of Wellington, whom Prince Albert invited to make the symbolic first cut (figure 3.3). In the cartoon in figure 3.3, the Koh-i-noor is drawn to resemble raw diamond, uncut and unpolished. By personifying the diamond as a maharajah held up by the former prime minister and current commander in chief of the British Army, Punch further depicted the Koh-i-noor as a puppet ruler installed by the British. The Koh-i-noor “aint never bin altogether Bright,” a woman commentates, a pun that correlates the diamond's failure to sparkle with the supposed intellectual inferiority and political dependency of Indians themselves. Punch draws attention to how the spectacle of the recutting sought to reclaim the Koh-i-noor's sparkle not as an exotic Oriental attribute but the result of Britain's modernizing and rationalizing imperial project, what Punch satirizes as British “surgery”—a term that captures all at once colonialism's biopolitical, civilizational, and technological ambitions. The Koh-i-noor's dullness, like India's backwardness, now justifies British possession and control. Only the British can make India sparkle.

Figure 3.3. “The Poor Old Koh-i-Noor Again!” Cartoon from Punch, 1852.

Once again, Britain's political theater of the Koh-i-noor had unexpected results in the cultural imagination. In their attempt to popularize the Koh-i-noor diamond as a historical symbol of empire and then to redeem their failure by making the diamond's sparkle contingent on British technological intervention, Dalhousie, Prince Albert, and other Great Exhibition organizers ironically popularized diamonds as “Oriental” optical media. The very public drama of the Koh-i-noor's refusal to sparkle in ways that Victorians expected was a primer in diamonds as light-based toys that produce visual effects only under particular optical conditions. At the same time, the drama made clear that the British East India Company and the British Crown were promoting brands of empire that were not speaking to the tastes and appetites of the British public. Rather than plunder empire or moral empire, the British public expressed a desire for an optical empire that would express itself through the diamond's virtual aesthetics. Spectators wanted to experience empire through the Koh-i-noor's medium specificity, as if the fiery shimmering of an Indian diamond or its phosphorescence could transmit or mediate the subcontinent for those in London. A diamond's sparkle remained, in the popular imagination, uniquely Indian.

The Koh-i-noor's display at the Great Exhibition thus unleashed literary imaginings of large colonial diamonds as technologies for “vision at a distance”—diamonds that made empire perceptible through their optical properties. Put another way, reception discourse produced the Koh-i-noor as an imaginary medium for the virtual perception of empire, one that seemed to combine the virtual effects of diamonds with the representational capacities of optical media like the magic lantern, diorama, and stereoscope. In the second half of the chapter, I will discuss two works of fiction that unfold this reception fantasy through stories about plundered colonial diamonds that not only sparkle brilliantly but make the far reaches of empire virtually proximate precisely through their optical effects. The first of these is a story called “The Diamond Lens” by the Irish-American writer and editor Fitz-James O’Brien. O’Brien was a curious and chaotic figure. Born in 1828 into a well-to-do landowning family in Cork, Ireland, he grew up in Limerick, where he had a firsthand view of the devastation caused by the Irish Famine of 1845. He published political verse in an Irish nationalist weekly but left for London as soon as he came of age, blowing through his considerable inheritance over four years before the end of a love affair with a married woman drove him out of the country. Emigrating to the United States in 1852, O’Brien mingled with men like Walt Whitman in the avant-garde literary scene and Bohemian drinking circles of Pfaff's Beer Cellar in New York, where he was as well known for his drunken brawls as his supernatural tales inspired by the work of E. T. A. Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe. He exchanged his Irish patriotism for antislavery and pro-Union politics, even enlisting in the Union Army as a volunteer. He died in 1862 from complications from a gunshot wound at the Battle of Bloomery Gap in West Virginia.

Although written in the United States, “The Diamond Lens” was inspired by O’Brien's sojourn in London and bears the imprint of O’Brien's experience seeing the Koh-i-noor at the Crystal Palace. O’Brien was no stranger to the Great Exhibition. In 1851, he served as editor and contributor for a periodical called the Parlour Magazine of the Literature of All Nations. A two-volume publication that anthologized international short stories, poems, and serialized novels translated into English, the Parlor Magazine of the Literature of All Nations presented itself as the Great Exhibition's literary counterpart, capitalizing on the public's enthusiasm for “the works of all nations.” In the words of the editors, the Parlour Magazine “pin[ned]” itself “to the skirts” of the Great Exhibition to drum up subscribers and make a profit.⁵⁶ Seven years later, in January 1858, O’Brien would publish a story in The Atlantic that unmistakably referenced the Great Exhibition's star exhibit.

“The Diamond Lens” is a scientific romance about the colonial theft of a large, spectacular diamond that is ground into a lens for the world's most powerful microscope. Admired by H. P. Lovecraft as a “masterful [tale] of strangeness and terror,” the story is told in the first person by a man named Linley, a Victor Frankenstein figure whose obsession with microscopy leads him first to a shattering scientific discovery, then to personal ruin.⁵⁷ Dissatisfied with the microscopes available to him, “those imperfect mediums,” Linley's object is to discover “the secret of some perfect lens” capable of “pierc[ing] through all the envelopes of matter down to its original atom.”⁵⁸ A spirit medium, Madame Vulpes, allows Linley to ask the ghost of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the seventeenth-century Dutch pioneer of microscopy, how to perfect the microscope. Van Leeuwenhoek's advice: “a diamond of one hundred and forty carats . . . will form the universal lens” (15). With his diamond lens trained on a single drop of water, Linley becomes the first person to see inside an atom and discovers within it a whole world in luminous, ethereal shades of purple, opal, and gold. A “Form” dwells in this landscape which Linley, following van Leeuwenhoek, calls an “animalcule” or single-cell organism; deciding it possesses “a female human shape,” he names it Animula and falls desperately in love (26). Forced to watch Animula “dying” as her waterdrop evaporates on its slide, Linley collapses and awakes “lying amidst the wreck of my instrument” (32). In the final lines of the story, Linley is a poor lecturer on optics known as “the mad microscopist” (33).

I read “The Diamond Lens” as a piece of Koh-i-noor fiction, one that speaks to the desire of Great Exhibition patrons for a diamond that would live up to its potential as an optical technology. There are many clues that Linley's diamond is meant to make readers think of the Koh-i-noor. Linley agonizes that the kind of diamond he is after can only be found “in the regalia of Eastern or European monarchs,” referring to famous gems like the Koh-i-noor that were expropriated from India by Western empires. The 140-carat diamond he finds is not Indian but is stolen from the mines of Brazil, the only other source of diamonds outside India and Borneo during this period. O’Brien was a staunch abolitionist and a subplot involving an enslaved miner in Brazil allowed him to embed into the story a critique of the Atlantic slave trade.⁵⁹ However, the diamond is named “The Eye of Morning” according to what Linley calls “Oriental practice,” a name that is calculated to remind readers of the Mountain of Light. Like the Koh-i-noor, it is described as “a vast rose cut.” Even if its provenance is a Brazilian mine, the diamond is ultimately stolen from the miner by his French overseer, an antisemitic caricature of a Jewish peddler, in an example of colonial plunder that recalls the Koh-i-noor's acquisition by the British.

Linley's diamond does everything that spectators dreamed the Koh-i-noor would. As a medium for light, it is visually spectacular: light “seemed to pulsate in its crystalline chambers” as it “shivered” the “mild lamplight . . . into a thousand prismatic arrows.” The diamond's ability to sparkle turns it, as its name suggests, into a kind of eye—a prosthetic that extends human vision. Just as mesmerism and optical technology are united in George Eliot's Adam Bede and The Lifted Veil, here the spirit medium and optical technological medium collide, both instruments for the perception of hidden or absent realms. Even before Linley grinds it into a lens, the Eye of Morning is described as something to see with, a medium that makes light “pulsate” and “shiver.” O’Brien draws on optical discourses of diamonds that were popularized by media reports of the Koh-i-noor's display at the Great Exhibition, but the story also betrays his deep knowledge of the history of the diamond microscope. Linley's desire for “some perfect lens whose magnifying power . . . should be free from spherical and chromatic aberrations” (9)—defects in the microscopic image that make the edges of the object indistinct and create a distracting rainbow effect—reflects the precise issues that beset the compound microscope in the early decades of the nineteenth century and that led Andrew Pritchard and C. R. Goring to experiment with creating magnifying lenses out of diamond. The “vast rose cut” that Linley ultimately acquires not only references the style of the Koh-i-noor before its recutting but reflects Pritchard's own choice of a rose cut for his diamond lens in The Microscopic Cabinet.⁶⁰

By fusing the history of the Koh-i-noor with that of the jewel microscope, “The Diamond Lens” constructs the Eye of Morning as an optical-imperial technology. Throughout the story, the diamond's technological use as a lens analogizes ocular discovery as territorial conquest, transforming the colonial diamond into a tool of colonization. Linley imagines himself as an “Alexander” who stands “trembling on the threshold of new worlds,” a metaphor that codes microscopy as empire building. Although Linley refers to the ancient empire of Alexander the Great, at the time one of the largest empires in world history, the resonances with modern imperial projects—especially that of Great Britain—are clear. It is therefore no coincidence that what Linley discovers inside the diamond is an impossibly lush territory fertile with natural resources ripe for extraction. Linley literalizes his own metaphor of new worlds when he describes the glowing orb within the atom as a natural environment characterized by “brilliant ether.” He sees an “illimitable distance” of “prismatic forests” and “vast auroral copses” filled with “leaves and fruits and flowers gleaming with unknown fires.” Linley's vision of the atomic particle is an allusion to the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis, “an illuminated chaos, a vast luminous abyss” that slowly resolves, with his “depress[ion] of the lens,” into the Garden of Eden, complete with a tree that, snake-like, hands Animula a piece of fruit. At the same time, this sublime terra nullius made visible by a colonial diamond recalls nineteenth-century constructions of the tropics as a new world characterized by its “luxuriant, dense, and fecund” landscapes.⁶¹ The forest's “cloud foliage” is not only dense with fruit, but with “many-colored drooping silken pennons” that evoke the military or naval flags of Euro-American imperial conquest from South America to South Asia. The construction of the waterdrop world as a prelapsarian garden further codes it as an unspoiled landscape to be colonized. Linley's melancholy exile from Eden—his inability to enter this forest of light except through his gaze—is itself represented as a form of resource extraction, as the drop of water slowly evaporates under the heat from his lamp. Linley's technological-imperial gaze uses up the waterdrop, feasting on it until Animula dies a withering death and her world disappears into nothing.

O’Brien breaks with mid-nineteenth-century expectations of the microscope when he describes this waterdrop world as “a beautiful chromatic desert”—a landscape. During this same period, at museums like the Royal Polytechnic Institution, the oxyhydrogen microscope made a popular spectacle of projecting onto a screen the myriad living animalcules inside a drop of water.⁶² Recall the cartoon “Microscopy for the Million” in figure 1.2 in chapter 1, in which the woman spectator at the Polytechnic fears that the microscopic monsters writhing and squirming in spectral and magnified form will break loose and attack. Linley reflects the popularity of such views while drawing attention to the story's deliberate withholding of them when he expects to see “some living organism” and when he compares the world's only “inhabitant,” Animula, favorably to the animalcules that readers would be familiar with—“the coarser creatures” seen in “the more easily resolvable portions of the water-drop.” Instead of the circular white projections of the oxyhydrogen microscope, signifying a kind of empty nothingness within which animalcules move, O’Brien imagines the microscope as a technology for virtual contact with a habitable environment. Although the story turns on Linley's scopophilic desire for this nonhuman organism, her inaccessibility is represented less as a function of her biological organization than it is of her confinement in the place that the microscope reveals, a place as far away as “the planet Neptune.”

A product of colonial resource extraction and plunder imperialism, the diamond lens is thus more than a microscope: it is an imaginary technology for virtual travel to the colonies that enables a form of scopic plunder. In this regard, it recalls another optical device that, like the Koh-i-noor, made its public debut at the Great Exhibition: the lenticular stereoscope. Invented by David Brewster, the man responsible for helping design a new display case for the Koh-i-noor, this simple handheld stereoscope transformed what was initially a cumbersome scientific instrument into a marketable commodity and launched what would become by the 1850s “a mass global visual culture.”⁶³ A stereoscope is an optical technology that allows a spectator to see a two-dimensional picture in three dimensions. Brewster's stereoscope is, at its most basic, a wooden box with two lenses. Against the back “wall” of the box, like a screen, is a slot where users can insert a stereograph, a card with two nearly identical photographs pasted side by side. When the spectator looks through the lenses and focuses their eyes, they see the scene represented in the photographs as a single virtual image endowed with an illusion of depth and relief. Queen Victoria's admiration of the new optical toy at the Crystal Palace set off a craze for the stereoscope that led to the sale of 250,000 copies in three months. Like Linley's microscope, which extends his gaze so that he can apprehend an otherwise invisible world, the handheld stereoscope was a visual prosthetic that enabled embodied and haptic visual experience of places around the world. Referencing the popularity of tourist views of Britain, Europe, and the United States in the late 1850s, The Athenaeum hailed the stereoscope as “travel made easy.”⁶⁴ At the turn of the century, Elmer Underwood and Bert Underwood's Travel Through the Stereoscope series would offer travel and around-the-world stereocard boxes accompanied by books that offered topographical, demographic, historical, and cultural context for each image—a virtual guided tour in a box.⁶⁵ O’Brien's diamond microscope is a kind of fantasy stereoscope for real-time visual access to the colonial scene.

Although O’Brien's story predates the stereoscopic tours that promised to take spectators “around the world in 60 minutes,” the context in which the stereoscope was introduced to the public immediately coded it as an imperial technology. Not only was it exhibited at the Crystal Palace, but the Crystal Palace and its myriad exhibits were the subject of some of the first stereoscopic photographs, linking what Tiago de Luca describes as the “encyclopedic” capacity of the stereoscope to the global and imperial aims of the Great Exhibition to catalog and display the works of all nations.⁶⁶ A stereograph from a mid-1860s world's fair makes this imperial and encyclopedic ambition explicit. At the center of the composition is Atlas's globe, its mirrored surface reflecting spectators, exhibits, the cascading arches of the ceiling, and the photographer himself as if in a fish-eye lens (figure 3.4).⁶⁷ The globe is a sign of the totalizing representation of the world in things exemplified in both the fair and the stereoscope. Both the Great Exhibition and the stereoscope offered, in Anne McClintock's terms, “new form[s] of commodity spectacle . . . a progressive accumulation of panoramas and scenes arranged, ordered and catalogued according to the logic of imperial capital.”⁶⁸ Both made possible virtual travel to places around the globe in order to authorize and articulate what Louise Purbrick calls “specular dominance” over other lands, cultures, and peoples.⁶⁹ “The Diamond Lens” not only draws on the Koh-i-noor, producing a science fiction version of the Indian diamond that makes explicit the colonial fantasies it generated, but it also draws on the broader context of the Great Exhibition's construction of Britain as a scopic empire. What is seen through the diamond lens is a virtual image of the colonial scene, a category of visual culture reminiscent of colonial and travel stereoviews. The vast fertile landscape inside a waterdrop made visible by an “Oriental” rose-cut diamond recalls Victorian constructions of India as, in Lara Kriegel's words, “the closest approximation of infinity on earth” because its “endless valleys and fields” could potentially supply the Western world's natural resources.⁷⁰

Figure 3.4. Stereograph of an international exhibition, 1865 or 1867, T. W. Woodhouse. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Linley's microscope is thus an imaginary medium: a diamond that is also a microscope, telescope, and stereoscope and that functions as a technology for imperial possession. Although the story seems to be about the impossibility of possession, as Animula cannot be claimed from her waterdrop world, it actually demonstrates that to see is to possess. Linley cannot be a colonial settler—he cannot inhabit the waterdrop world—but he can still extract sexual and affective value from that world from a remote distance. In this way, “The Diamond Lens” is a specular allegory of resource extraction economies. The diamond microscope facilitates a form of imperial technological gaze in which to see is to take ownership over and ultimately to exhaust a resource that is simultaneously finite and infinitely renewable—every waterdrop will have its own “prismatic forests,” its own Animula. With its abolitionist subtext, the story occupies an uncomfortable middle ground between colonial fantasy and anticolonial parable. O’Brien speaks to the widespread disenchantment with the Koh-i-noor by fictionalizing the colonial diamond both as a medium for a virtual aesthetic experience that makes the colony visible as pleasure dome and as a medium of colonization in and of itself.

A Moony Gleam in the Dark

Ten years after “The Diamond Lens” was published in The Atlantic, All the Year Round and Harper's Magazine serialized an imperial romance by Wilkie Collins called The Moonstone that once again imagined the Koh-i-noor as a virtual technology of empire. The novel tells the tale of a plundered Indian diamond, one that Collins claimed in the preface to have “founded” on the Koh-i-noor.⁷¹ This diamond narrative is a mystery that begins with a series of strange events that occur when the Moonstone falls into the hands of Rachel Verinder, the young heroine, on her eighteenth birthday. Three Indian men appear at the front door posing as traveling magicians. The diamond disappears. A maidservant, a formerly convicted jewel thief, starts to behave oddly and then drowns herself in quicksand. Was the diamond stolen by the Indians, Brahmin guards tasked with restoring the Moonstone to its rightful place in the Temple of Somnauth? Did the ex-thief strike again? Or did Rachel steal her own diamond, as Detective Cuff of Scotland Yard supposes, to pay off secret debts? The solution to the mystery turns out to be something else entirely, and instead of the detective, it is a half-Indian, half-English medical assistant named Ezra Jennings who uncovers the truth. Franklin Blake, Rachel's beau, was unknowingly given laudanum by another guest at Rachel's birthday party, causing Franklin to sleepwalk into Rachel's room and take the diamond for safekeeping out of fear that the Brahmins would attack her in the night. In an unconscious state, Franklin hands the Moonstone to Godfrey Ablewhite, his rival for Rachel's affections, who keeps it for his own and plans to have it cut into smaller gems and resold to pay off his gambling debts. The climax of the novel sees the Indians murder Ablewhite and repatriate the Moonstone to Somnauth, where it forms the third eye in an idol.

The Moonstone's status as third eye is our first clue that, like the Eye of Morning, this diamond has something to do with vision. Lavish descriptions bear this out by positioning the Moonstone as a medium for optical virtuality and identifies the capacity of optical technology to make visible what is beyond the ordinary range of human perception with Indian “magic.” This racialization of the virtual, and in particular its construction as “Oriental,” recalls the mirror of ink in chapter 2, and, as we will see, the mirror of ink actually makes an appearance in The Moonstone as another form of Indian magic. More specifically, Collins's quasi-mystical description of the Moonstone's phosphorescence—its ability not only to shine with the borrowed light of the sun but also to feed on the life force of those with whom it comes into contact—redeems the Koh-i-noor's poor reception at the Crystal Palace by animating the fantasy that its optical effects could offer spectators virtual contact with India.

Although Collins claims in his preface to have based the Moonstone on the Koh-i-noor, we do not have to take his word for it. Allusions to the Koh-i-noor are made quite explicitly throughout the novel. The Moonstone is described as a “Yellow Diamond” sacred to the Hindus and “set in the forehead of the four-handed Indian god who typifies the Moon” (3), a variation on the legend that the Koh-i-noor originated in the forehead of an Indian god.⁷² The Moonstone also comes with the “superstition” that it “feel[s] the influence of the deity whom it adorned” (4). These include a curse “predict[ing] certain disaster to the presumptuous mortals who laid hands on the sacred gem, and to all of his house and name who received it after him” (4), implying that the “disaster[s]” that occur to a range of characters may be the work of the diamond itself. This also came directly from a rumor that flourished in the British press that the Koh-i-noor was cursed to bring ruin upon the emperors and rulers who possessed it. The Moonstone transfers its curse to the British when the rapacious John Herncastle, a soldier in the British Army, steals it during the Storming of Seringapatam (1799), the climactic final battle in the Anglo-Mysore Wars that secured British control over the last remaining Indian territory in the hands of Mughal rulers. This scene of violent bloodshed and plunder displaces Dalhousie's theft of the Koh-i-noor at the culmination of the Second Anglo-Sikh War onto an earlier colonial war. Like Dalhousie, who bestowed his plundered Indian diamond on Queen Victoria, Herncastle wills the Moonstone to his niece Rachel on her eighteenth birthday. In case the historical parallels are not clear enough on their own, Rachel is literally described as a “queen” and pins the diamond to “the bosom of her white dress” as a brooch, just as Queen Victoria was known to wear the Koh-i-noor (70).

Collins clearly does more than model his fictional Moonstone diamond on the Koh-i-noor. He bases the plot on the history of the Koh-i-noor's possession by Britain, thinly veiling the plunder by Dalhousie in the prefatory story of Herncastle in Seringapatam and analogizing imperial conquest as a “curse” that backfires upon the conquerors. The idea may have come to Collins from his research on the Koh-i-noor. Among his gemology sources was Charles King's Antique Gems (1860), which describes the Koh-i-noor as a “fatal gift” that caused the “degenerat[ion]” not only of the Mughal Empire and the subsequent Eastern empires that possessed it, but also the British Empire. The presentation of the Koh-i-noor to Queen Victoria, King wrote, led to “the Sepoy revolt, and the all but total loss of India to the British crown,” a reference to the Indian Uprising of 1857–1858.⁷³ Collins follows King by telling the story of the Indian Uprising as a moral and geopolitical consequence of Dalhousie's plunder of the Koh-i-noor for Queen Victoria. If Rachel represents Queen Victoria, the rapacious Indians who seek the Moonstone, three unnamed men who “care just as much about killing a man, as you care about emptying the ashes out of your pipe” (78), clearly stand in for the Indians rebels who revolted against British rule. When Rachel stands on the terrace of the country house, “innocent[ly] . . . showing the Indians the Diamond in the bosom of her dress,” the racialized threat of sexual violence against her—and, by extension, the threat to the integrity of the British Empire—references the sensational accounts of the Indian Uprising in the British press as the systematic rape of white women by Brown men.⁷⁴ As Gabriel Betteredge, the country house steward who narrates this portion of the novel, puts it: “our quiet English country house” is “suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond.”

Because it portrays Indian violence toward English people as a direct response to the violence of empire, many scholars read The Moonstone as a critique of colonialism. Among the most sophisticated and compelling of these readings is Ian Duncan's analysis of “imperialist panic,” or the novel's tendency to generate suspense through the threat of thinly veiled anticolonial violence. Duncan argues that the novel attributes to the imperial project a kind of reverse colonial effect in which Britain takes on an Asian, rather than English, cultural identity. The diamond inheritance plot opens England to the empire, in the process diminishing its power: “When a conventional English domestic order is finally restored it appears reduced, artificial, bright but fragile, while the horizons of the world around it . . . are sublime and alarming.”⁷⁵ I follow Duncan in reading the novel as a fantasy of England taken over—“invaded”—by Indianness, but I offer a different interpretation of the affective conditions and political stakes of this fantasy. The Indian “invasion” of the English country home—an invasion represented through the gift of an Indian diamond—is certainly tinged with the threat of violence, but it is also figured as drawing room entertainment and associated with the media aesthetics of optical toys, magic, and opium. The diamond's hold over the British characters—a state of tension and suspense not unlike that which the novel creates for its readers—is not a death sentence. It is a temporary state of thrill characterized by pleasurable fears but devoid of real danger; a recreational experience, in other words, made possible by colonialism. Rather than reading The Moonstone solely as an expression of “panic” over the loss of English identity, I read it as a positive statement of the transformation of English identity in the age of empire—Englishness enhanced and enriched by its ability to take on, at will, what it has constructed as Indian affects and perceptual states. The Moonstone celebrates colonial media and their pleasures.

To understand this, let us look at how the Moonstone diamond is presented to the reader. The scene of the diamond's first appearance in England responds to the fantasies about Indian diamonds that attended the Koh-i-noor's display at the Great Exhibition. In 1851, David Brewster had written that, although the Koh-i-noor disappointed at the Crystal Palace, it would “astonish the company” if “worn by a lady in a drawing-room, with numerous bright lights.” This is just how Collins presents the Moonstone to the reader in a counterfactual scene that reenchants the diamond's British display. In effect, Collins rewrites the unveiling of the Koh-i-noor to the British public as a triumph that fulfills the desire for a diamond that would act as a virtual portal to India. This scene is narrated by Gabriel Betteredge, steward to the Verinder country house, and takes place in “the small drawing-room,” where dinner party guests gaze reverently and desirously upon the diamond (66). Two women kneel before the Moonstone, “[screaming] with ecstasy,” while Ablewhite “clap[s] his hands like a large child” (66)—reactions of awe and amazement that were expected from Great Exhibition patrons but that the Koh-i-noor apparently failed to deliver.

The Moonstone unites all three optical characteristics that Victorians expected from a large and rare Indian diamond like the Koh-i-noor: it sparkles, magnifies, and phosphoresces. Betteredge's description of the diamond as “about the size of a plover's egg” paraphrases common descriptions of the Koh-i-noor at the Great Exhibition as “the size of a pigeon's egg.”⁷⁶ While the Koh-i-noor was satirized as an egglike lump of glass or, in the Punch cartoon, a raw piece of unpolished diamond, the Moonstone transcends its own materiality through its interaction with light. It “flashed . . . in a ray of sunlight that poured through the window” and “stream[ed] with the light of the harvest moon”: a true mountain of light. In addition to sparkling, the Moonstone phosphoresces. After being exposed to sunlight, it “shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark.” This turns the diamond into a “yellow deep” that “[draws] your eyes” inward: Betteredge reflects that “this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves” (67). These “unfathomable” depths are another optical illusion because the diamond creates a virtual effect of endless interior space when light refracts through its facets. Like “The Dimond Lens,” Collins reflects the discourses surrounding the Koh-i-noor's display at the Great Exhibition when he presents the diamond as an optical toy. Like many parlor room optical toys, the Moonstone is structured by visual paradox. Just as the thaumatrope makes two pictures on either side of a card appear simultaneously, a phenakistoscope makes static pictures move, and a stereoscope makes a flat picture three-dimensional, the diamond makes substance insubstantial. It is a small hard object that, when held up to the window, becomes an infinite visual field of pure light. While Latimer turns his large rose-cut diamond into the lens of a microscope, Rachel, Betteredge, and the other members of the party conduct their own kind of optical experiment with the Moonstone by placing it in the sun and then shutting the light out of the drawing room to watch the diamond phosphoresce. The Moonstone is a miniature light show you can play with.

The Moonstone's phosphorescence not only fulfills what Victorians understood as the medium specificity of diamonds but also turns it into a metonym for colonial India. In British hands, the Moonstone is not so much a third eye as a devourer of vision. Although the women at the party are described as “devouring the jewel with their eyes,” its racializing “yellow” glow and hypnotic depths suggest that the opposite effect is at work. The diamond is an optical toy with agency, one that subverts the instrumental logic of the optical technology by turning the human body into an instrument for its own ends. We can read this dynamic in the descriptor “yellow deep,” with its racial and optical connotations. The phrase pairs yellow, the “color” of Asians according to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century race science, with what Edward Said terms “the distant Oriental deep,” mystifying and enchanting India through the metonym of the diamond.⁷⁷ At the same time, “yellow deep” expresses the diamond's phosphorescent power to seemingly pull the sunlight into it, charging like a battery. These two meanings come together when the diamond is described as feeding on the gazes around it. The yellow deep swallows the subject's vision, “drawing your eyes so that you saw nothing else.” This effect recalls the hypnotic medium, a concept developed by the surgeon James Braid to describe how an ordinary sensory stimulus like a candle flame or pendulum can induce a trance state. The Moonstone seems to draw the eye the way it draws light, however, feeding on those around it for its power. Later, Betteredge remarks that “there was a miserable lack of life and sparkle” at the dinner party and exclaims that the party is “possessed” by “the Diamond” (75). The Moonstone has drawn its light not only from the sun but from the English, siphoning their “sparkle” for itself.

In other words, the Moonstone's optical qualities of sparkling and phosphorescing are racialized as violent and sinister forces that act upon unsuspecting English admirers. While “The Diamond Lens” presented the diamond as an instrument for bearing witness to the colonial scene, The Moonstone reverses the logic of optical spectatorship by presenting the diamond as an optical medium that mediates its spectators. Just as its phosphorescence turns sunlight into a “moony glow,” the diamond grows in power by turning its spectators into objects for its own use. In this sense, the Moonstone behaves like a colonized subject that exercises sovereignty over its colonizers. Looking at the Moonstone is not a sovereign act but an abdication of self-sovereignty. To look is to be possessed by India.

I will not deny that this construction sets up the diamond as a figure for the Indian Uprising, as Duncan argues. But if the Moonstone represents a counterimperial “invasion” of England by India, it does not figure physical violence so much as the ability of Indians, and India, to “[lay] . . . hold” of English consciousness for a time, an experience that is characterized as both thrilling and temporary. The diamond's phosphorescent glow will fade; the English spectators’ ordinary perceptual state will be restored. In the meantime, this laying hold of consciousness is rendered as exciting, frightening, and not wholly unpleasurable. Rachel holds the diamond in her hand “like a person fascinated,” a condition that implies she is not only enthralled but rooted in place. In the nineteenth century, the term “fascination” described the way a snake entrances its prey by means of its gaze, and “fascinated” was used as a synonym for being mesmerized or hypnotized.⁷⁸ The Moonstone looks back at Rachel, fixing its spectator as the object of its gaze. Following the logic of predator and prey, it could be argued that the diamond fascinates the English spectator so that they will be unaware of attack by the Indian guards who will come to reclaim it. Yet it seems significant that the person the Indians do kill, Ablewhite, is “the only one of us who kept his senses” before the Moonstone—the only one, that is, not to be fascinated. The diamond's ability to fascinate is ultimately not predictive of its capacity for violence but its capacity to entertain.

Rather than an instrument of Indian counterinsurgency, I think of the Moonstone as an Indian optical-perceptual entertainment that lays hold of the conscious mind temporarily through its intoxicating visual effects. This becomes clearer when we consider how the Moonstone is doubled by two other Indian recreations: the mirror of ink and opium. The Moonstone's Indian guards are first seen in England performing the mirror of ink on an English boy. The subject of chapter 2, the mirror of ink was a clairvoyant magic trick performed by a Cairo magician named Sheik Abd al-Qadir al-Maghrabi and made famous in Britain by the Egyptologist Edward William Lane. Although Collins transposes the trick from Egyptian Muslims to Hindu priests, it would have been instantly recognizable to readers from Lane's original description. As I discussed in chapter 2, eminent proponents of mesmerism like Harriet Martineau argued that the trick's centerpiece—a boy was made to see persons and places unknown to him by looking into a circle of ink poured in his hand—was achieved through clairvoyance, with the magician making “mesmeric passes” over the boy's body to mesmerize him. Collins describes the mirror of ink in this way. “Black stuff, like ink” is first poured “into the palm of the boy's hand.” The performance proceeds:

The Indian—first touching the boy's head, and making signs over it in the air—then said, “Look.” The boy became quite stiff, and stood like a statue, looking into the ink in the hollow of his hand.

. . . The chief of the Indians said these words to the boy: “See the foreign gentleman from foreign parts.”

The boy said, “I see him.” (22)

Collins makes clear that the trick is an example of mesmeric clairvoyance by emphasizing the relationship between the anonymous Indian's hands, which both touch the boy's head and make “passes” over it, and the boy's ability to “see.” In her account of witnessing the mirror of ink in Eastern Life, Past and Present, Martineau argued that Abd al-Qadir was an “unconscious mesmerizer” who did not know that he was performing a fashionable and sophisticated Western medical practice.⁷⁹ Collins mimics this colonial dynamic between the unconscious and inept Oriental magician and the enlightened British observer: While “the Indians looks upon their boy as a Seer of things invisible to their eyes,” the English characters explain that the “boy is unquestionably a sensitive subject to mesmeric influence” who “no doubt reflected what was already in the mind of the person mesmerizing him.”

The racialized epistemic divide between white observers and Brown mesmerist also reflects the British fashion for the mirror of ink and mesmeric demonstrations as forms of entertainment. Martineau visited Abd al-Qadir because his performances of the mirror of ink had become a required stop on any British traveler's Egyptian itinerary, while mesmerism was not only a therapeutic cure but a popular parlor entertainment that invited attendees to speculate on whether they were witnessing authentic clairvoyance or a sophisticated hoax. The mirror of ink thus prefigures the unveiling of the Moonstone in the drawing room several chapters later. Both are forms of visual and perceptual entertainment that turn on a medium—the ink, the diamond—that “draw[s] your eyes” and makes you see things either that are not actually there (visions in the ink) or as they are not (the diamond's virtual depths). Both link visual illusion to Orientalized and racialized practices of perceptual control, as the “yellow” diamond and “black” ink exert epistemic and bodily power over British people. The English boy's “stiff[ness]” as he “[looks] into the ink in the hollow of his hand” and “sees” will recur both when Rachel stands “like a person fascinated” gazing at the diamond in her hand and when Betteredge perceives “the heavens themselves” in a jewel held “between . . . finger and thumb.” The racializing yellow of the diamond has its double in the racializing blackness of the ink, both colonial figures for a kind of Indian savagery that infects British consciousness and invades the white body.

Finally, the Moonstone diamond's visual and perceptual powers are represented through opium, the Indian commodity par excellence that eventually offers the solution to the mystery. Although the diamond reaches the villain Ablewhite, who pockets it to pay his debts, it is the hero Franklin Blake who takes the diamond from Rachel's bedroom while sleepwalking under the influence of opium. Like mesmerism, opium shows up in the novel to express the way that the Moonstone diamond takes control of consciousness. Ezra Jennings, an opium addict who solves the mystery with Franklin's help, explains that opium has “intensified” the Moonstone's perceptual power over Franklin: “The latest and most vivid impressions left on your mind—namely, the impressions relating to the Diamond—would be likely . . . to become intensified in your brain, and would subordinate to themselves your judgment and will” (400). In other words, Franklin is anxious that Rachel's life is threatened by the Indians who wish to recover the diamond—an anxiety sparked by seeing them mesmerize the English boy—and under the influence of opium, this overtakes his conscious mind and leads him to steal the Moonstone himself to protect her from harm. Opium most clearly resembles the “black stuff, like ink” that the Indians pour into the boy's hand; it has a similar capacity to “subordinate” a person's “judgment and will” and allow them to “see persons and things beyond the range of human vision” (54). To take Jennings's scientific explanation at face value, however, opium also functions as an “intensif[ication]” of the diamond's “vivid impression” on the mind, releasing the diamond's power over the subject—a power prefigured in its optical effects. At the same time, opium's “intensifi[cation]” of Franklin's impressions turns Franklin into a kind of phosphorescent diamond. He has looked at the diamond, taken in an impression of it, and stored those impressions within him even after the original stimulus is gone.

Are we to understand this perceptual invasion of English minds by Indians and their media—diamonds, magic, opium—as an expression of imperialist panic in the post–Indian Uprising age? Rather than foreclosing this interpretation, I want to propose that we take seriously the representation of Indian “invasion” of British domestic life as Victorian popular entertainment. India enters the English home in the form of theatrical magic, mesmerism, optical spectatorship, and recreational drugs—the arena, put simply, of fun. These media experiences constitute what Susan Zieger has called “the novel's implicit advocacy for irrational states of mind.”⁸⁰ It is frightening to surrender your body and mind to the mystic emanations of the diamond, but it is also thrillingly desirable—a “sublime intoxication,” as Ezra Jennings writes of Franklin's opium high. In this sense, the Moonstone's ability to act on English perception with its “yellow” glow returns us to the Great Exhibition. There, the Koh-i-noor's rude materiality demystified what the British East India Company and the British Crown hoped to present as the wonder of British India. The Moonstone's representation of the Indian diamond as a spectacular medium for virtual encounter with India not only reenchants empire but fulfills the desire for a technological medium that acts on British spectators, providing them with “Indian” experiences of savagery, wonder, and romance. Doubled in opium and the mirror of ink, part Indian commodity and part Indian magic, the Moonstone acts on perception by allowing the English people who possess it to phosphoresce—to take on, temporarily and recreationally, what the novel portrays as Indian self-states. Duncan argues that the Moonstone's invasion of England with Indianness signals a “loss of [English] character,” and it is true that the language of loss and enervation recurs throughout the novel as characters are drained of energy after looking at the diamond, lose sight of their own surroundings to see in a drop of ink, and forget their own actions while sleepwalking. But Rachel, Betteredge, the English boy, and Franklin are not emptied out so much as they are filled for a time with new and exotic perceptions, just as the Moonstone is filled for a time with the light of the sun. If the diamond, like opium and Indian magic, “subordinate[s]” to itself the “judgment and will” of the English characters, it is as a form of intoxication that temporarily weakens the body even as it brings the novelty and pleasure of a colonial encounter. This state of possession is a “fever,” to borrow Betteredge's word for his irrepressible enthusiasm for detective mysteries, one that will in time burn itself out.

Viewed this way, The Moonstone offers a retelling of the Koh-i-noor's possession by the British that sublimates the racialized dangers of India and Indian people as optical and perceptual aesthetic experience mediated by a diamond. The Moonstone's “invasion” of English minds through its phosphorescent optical powers, a reimagining of what King called its “malignant lustre,” is less a manifestation of violence than it is a playful harnessing of the trope of Indian savagery for the purposes of wonder and thrill. To be “invaded” or “possessed” temporarily by the Indian diamond—to surrender oneself temporarily to Indianness—is not a sign of waning English sovereignty but rather one of the privileges of English sovereignty in the age of empire, a mode of cultural imperialism comparable to the purchase of tea, shawls, opium, stereographic tours, or admission to a magic show. The Indianization of the optical spectator is an encounter at once as “intensely physical” and embodied as E. M. Collingham describes the English experience of India and as fantastically dematerialized as Bengal tigers and the Taj Mahal seen through a magic lantern.⁸¹

This chapter has endeavored to show how the aesthetics of virtuality—of seeing what is not there, of experiencing the remote as proximate—informed the way British citizens felt themselves to be part of empire and experienced supremacy over other peoples and places without ever visiting them. The story of the Koh-i-noor's failure to impress spectators at the Great Exhibition and its reenchantment in literary works like “The Diamond Lens” and The Moonstone is the story of the emergence of virtual aesthetics as a meaningful framework for making sense of empire's absent presence in everyday life in the metropole. Like the cultural history of the mirror of ink that I offered in chapter 2, the Koh-i-noor diamond functioned as an imaginary medium for “vision at a distance.”

In the remainder of this book, I will turn my attention from empire to home by asking how virtual aesthetics shaped representations of the nation. Chapter 4 asks how the phantasmagoria, among the most famous optical shows of the nineteenth century, offered a framework for representing nationalist revolution in French and British culture. Rather than vision at a distance, the phantasmagoria seemed to promise vision through time as the ghosts of history were conjured by a magic lantern in a dark room. In the literary imaginary of the phantasmagoria, the virtual aesthetics of historical copresence is what creates the nation. If participation in the British Empire required the capacity to see and experience other places without ever leaving home, participation in the British nation meant being haunted by ghosts.