“Hocus Focus”: The Stereoscope and Photography

Potter, Jonathan

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-89737-0_6

“Hocus Focus”: The Stereoscope and Photography

Jonathan Potter³

Chapter
First Online: 23 September 2018

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

Abstract

This chapter uses popular fiction to uncover subjective experiences of the stereoscope within the middle-class home, detailing how the device provided a technologically controlled surrogate for potentially bewildering and chaotic sensory experiences. Technologies, which, on the face of it, seem to be further developments towards a technological realism, in some instances actually had the opposite effect and, like the magic lantern, subverted the premises of empirical rationalism. Using a selection of fiction and journalism from the periodical press, the stereoscope is here considered in terms of the domestic and everyday, as a device that facilitated and impelled imaginative visions, including daydreams and fantasies.

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Notes

1.
As quoted in John Plunkett, “Depth, Colour, Movement: Embodied vision and the Stereoscope,” in Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, ed. James Lyons and John Plunkett (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 122.
2.
Plunkett, “Depth, Colour, Movement,” 122.
3.
Plunkett, “Depth, Colour, Movement,” 122.
4.
To give an idea of the scale and reach of its continuous popularity, Jib Fowles suggests that in 1900, around half of all US households possessed a stereoscope. Jib Fowles, “Stereography and the Standardization of Vision,” Journal of American Culture 17 (1994): 89–93.
5.
Tom Gunning, “The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective,” boundary 2, 30, no. 1 (2003), 107.
6.
Anon. “The Stereoscope, Pseudoscope, and Solid Daguerreotypes,” Illustrated London News, 24 January 1852.
7.
Paul Virilio notes the importance of surface in early photographic technologies: “what you notice is not so much the scarcely discernible, colourless objects as a sort of luminance, the conduction surface of a luminous intensity.” See Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 19. The other obvious property of early photographs was the lack of colour which Lindsay Smith discusses in “‘Thinking blues’: the memory of colour in nineteenth-century photography,” Transactions and Encounters, 55–74.
8.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), 92.
9.
Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 44–46.
10.
Smith, Victorian Photography, 44–46.
11.
Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 125.
12.
Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 125.
13.
See David Trotter, “Stereoscopy: modernism and the ‘haptic’,” Critical Quarterly, 46, no. 4 (2004): 38–56.
14.
Anon. “Art. VII. — Sight and Touch: an Attempt to Disprove the Received (Or Berkleian) Theory of Vision. By Thomas Abbott, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Dublin. Illustrated with Woodcuts. London, 1864.” [Review], North British Review, August 1864, 225.
15.
According to Plunkett, the “nativist” approach adopted by Brewster claimed depth was an external property of material objects perceived directly by the eye, as opposed to the “idealist” approach which considered depth a construction of the mind. See Plunkett, “‘Feeling Seeing’: Touch, Vision and The Stereoscope,” History of Photography, 37, no. 4 (2013): 394.
16.
Henry Morley and William Henry Wills, “The Stereoscope,” Household Words, 10 September 1853, 37.
17.
Hankins and Silverman, 152.
18.
J.F. Mascher, “On Taking Daguerreotypes Without a Camera,” Journal of the Franklin Institute, 59 (1855), 346. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00160032/59/5
19.
Anon. “The Fancies of a Maiden Lady,” British Mothers’ Journal, n. d.
20.
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 138.
21.
Anon. “So Like Matrimony,” Vanity Fair, 7 July 1860, 18.
22.
Henry Morley and William Henry Wills. “Photography,” Household Words, 19 March 1853, 60.
23.
Lynda Nead, “Strip,” Early Popular Visual Culture, 3, no. 2 (2005): 138.
24.
Leslie Walter, “In a Stereoscope,” Sharpe’s London Magazine of Entertainment and Instruction for General Reading, August 1864, 89.
25.
Walter, “In a Stereoscope,” 86.
26.
For a useful discussion of memory as narrative (both psychological and textual), see Mark Freeman, “Telling Stories: Memory and Narrative,” in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 263–277.
27.
Walter, “In a Stereoscope,” 89.
28.
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 5.
29.
Patrizia Di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Aldershot, Hamps.: Ashgate, 2007), 145.
30.
Di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England, 72–74.
31.
Di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England, 74.
32.
See Jesse Hoffman, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bad Photographs,” Victorian Studies, 57, no. 1 (2014): 57–87.
33.
Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 133. The later Holmes stereoscope reopened the device so that the two images could be seen separately as well as combined through the eyepiece, but by this stage, the sense of magic in combining images had already become a part of the stereoscope’s cultural symbolism.
34.
Anon. “The Photograph,” Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, September 1859.
35.
This kind of training in genre conventions leads others to confused anxiety too, as Isobel Armstrong describes. See Victorian Glassworlds, 144–145.
36.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” in Atlantic Monthly, 1 June 1859, repr. in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, Conn.: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 77.
37.
Anon. “The Photograph,” Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, September 1859.
38.
Anon. “The Photograph,” Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, September 1859.
39.
Anon. “Talk,” All the Year Round, 15 April 1865, 284.
40.
Di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England, 60–61.
41.
Catherine Elizabeth Macready Dickens (Kate Dickens) married Charles Collins, an artist and writer, in 1860. After his death, she later married another artist, Carlo Perugini. Kate herself was an artist in her own right and exhibited her work at the Royal Academy. All of which is by way of pointing out that as an artist Collins was by no means naïve to issues of re-presentation and also that, as the example of his wife makes clear, artistic re-presentation was never the sole preserve of men.
42.
Charles Allston Collins, “Her Face,” All the Year Round, 28 August 1858, 258. Subsequent in-text page citations are to this edition.
43.
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 148.
44.
David Trotter suggests that there were a large number of women viewing such images as well as men. See Trotter, 51. See also Colette Colligan, “Stereograph,” Victorian Review, 34, no. 1, (2008): 75–82; Linda Williams, “Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the ‘Carnal Density of Vision’,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 3–41.
45.
Anon. “What Is An Obscene Picture? A Delicate Query At Cardiff Police-Court,” Western Mail, 2 June 1899.
46.
Anon. “What Is An Obscene Picture?”
47.
Morley and Wills, “Photography,” 56.
48.
David Brewster had suggested that the use of double exposures to create spirit-like transparency was inspired by an image taken as early as 1844, and, as Bill Jay observes, there was no shortage of similar techniques for recording a spirit-like image on a photograph, even if spirit photography itself did not begin as such until the 1860s. See Bill Jay, Cyanide and Spirits: An Inside-Out View of Early Photography (Munich: Nazraeli Press, 1991), 33.
49.
Brewster, “On the Form of Images,” quoted in Hankins and Silverman, 158.
50.
Anon. “The Photograph,” Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, September 1859.
51.
Thomas Carlyle, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 18 June 1846, in Literature & Photography: Interactions, 1840–1990: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jane M. Rabb (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 18.
52.
His letter is quoted and translated by Marit Grøtta in Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (London: Bloomsbury 2015), 50–51.
53.
E.W.F. “The Daguerreotype, The Photograph, and the Stereoscope,” The Ladies’ Treasury: A Household Magazine, 1 July 1876.
54.
Jarenski makes the point that, in the United States at least, photographic practices separated “racial and economic others from white, middle-class, American ‘subjects’” to stabilise “a middle-class, white subjectivity” (18). Jarenski gives a detailed account of nineteenth-century media and race in her chapter on Frederick Douglass. As a contemporary observer, Douglass provides cogent and powerful insights on race and racism in nineteenth-century media practices (see 71–116). Further discussion of race and photography can be found in Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 167–174.
55.
Anon. “The End of the World,” All the Year Round, 14 January 1860, 273.
56.
Anon. “A New Portrait Gallery,” All the Year Round, 31 August 1867, 231.
57.
Anon. “A New Portrait Gallery,” 231.
58.
Gisèle Freund, Photography & Society (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980), 35.
59.
Anon. “A New Portrait Gallery,” 229.
60.
Morley and Wills, “Photography,” 55.
61.
Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 23.
62.
Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, 542.
63.
Daniel A. Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 48.
64.
Anon. “Imperilled by a Photograph,” Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin, 4, no. 2 (1873): 42–44, quoted in Novak, 48.
65.
See Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 69–113.
66.
Alexander Welsh, “Writing and Copying in the Age of Steam,” in Victorian Literature and Society: Essays Presented to Richard D. Altick, ed. James R. Kincaid and Albert J. Kuhn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 37.
67.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1994), 1.
68.
It is worth noting that the subjectivity of binocular vision was mirrored humorously on numerous occasions in Punch by textually presenting the same event or idea in two different ways side by side on the page. For example, see Anon. “A Derby Stereoscope: Being Two Views of the Same Event,” Punch, 11 June 1859.
69.
It is this kind of attention to difference that, for instance, allowed the stereoscope to be useful in identifying fraudulent bank notes. See Anon. “The Stereoscope and Forged Bank Notes,” Edinburgh Evening News, 27 March 1886, 2.
70.
See Sheenagh Pietrobruno, “The Stereoscope and the Miniature,” Early Popular Visual Culture, 9, no. 3 (2011): 171–190; Fowles, 89–93.
71.
Hoffman, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bad Photographs,” 65.
72.
Di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England, 145.
73.
Hoffman, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bad Photographs,” 65.
74.
For a useful discussion of this process in relation to writing, see Freeman, “Telling Stories.”
75.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 7 December 1843, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford 1836–1854, ed. Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan (Winfield, Kan: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, The Browning Institute, Wedgestone Press, and Wellesley College, 1983) vol. 3, 357–358.
76.
Helen Groth, Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2.
77.
Warner, Phantasmagoria, 215.
78.
For more on this, see Smith, The Politics of Focus.
79.
As Warner points out, such focal disruptions are reminiscent of the “way in which images in memory lack definition […] how mental picturing possesses uncanny clarity and presence while simultaneously jumping and wobbling and eddying” (217).
80.
W.J.T. Mitchell gives an importance account of temporal-spatial relations in image and text. See Mitchell, Iconology, 95–115.
81.
Mark Currie makes the point that oral fiction, especially if invented on the spot, has a more open future available to it. Currie draws attention to the ontological difficulties of narrative as a model for time which suggests some interesting avenues for considering the narrative relations of self-images in the stereoscope. See Mark Currie, About Time Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 17–18.
82.
George Henry Lewes, “Dickens in Relation to Criticism,” Fortnightly Review, February 1872, 144.
83.
Adelaide Anne Procter, “Pictures in the Fire,” Household Words, 10 Sept 1853, 36.
84.
Morley and Wills, “The Stereoscope,” 37.
85.
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Adrian Poole (London: Penguin, 1997), 37–39; 218. Subsequent in-text page citations are to this edition.

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Potter, J. (2018). “Hocus Focus”: The Stereoscope and Photography. In: Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89737-0_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89737-0_6
Published: 23 September 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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