Third Year Special Subject with Lindsay Smith Spring 2015
Technologies of Capture: Photography and Nineteenth Century Literature
The photographic image is ubiquitous; its presence has morphed into many twentyfirst century cultural manifestations. Most obviously, in digital form, the photograph
has become a staple of social networking sites and other visual modes of
communication. Yet, at its invention in 1839, the status and future of photography
was far from clear-cut. Known as ‘the black art from France’ owing to its miraculous
transcription of the visual world, photography was frequently aligned with magic.
Indeed, owing to its causal connection to its referent, a photograph had the status of
an imprint as well as an image. People also delighted in seeing themselves the right
way round, as it were, as the photograph corrected the lateral inversion of the familiar
mirror image. At the other end of the spectrum, however, photography’s ‘birth’ was
considered by some enough to bring about the ‘death’ of painting.
In the nineteenth century, the presence of the camera radically affected major social,
aesthetic, and philosophical categories.
While photographs variously revolutionised representation, their relationship to
existing visual and verbal forms was a rich and complex one that raised many
questions. What did it mean, for example, to speak about literary ‘realism’ in the
context of Fox-Talbot’s new negative/positive process? How did post-mortem
photographs affect literary portrayals of death and the spirit world? What was the
impact upon Victorian institutions such as the asylum of the new genre of the
photographic ‘mug-shot’ ? What form of translation occurred when a twodimensional photograph recorded the three-dimensional form of sculpture? This
module explores the emergence and development of the photographic medium in
relationship to a range of literary texts. Beginning with the ‘pre-history’ of
photography as manifest in a range of optical toys, gadgets, and visual spectacles, it
traces the emergence of various photographic forms as they intersect with literary
ones. Students have the opportunity to engage, in the context of nineteenth century
fiction, poetry and non-fictional prose, fascinating material and conceptual changes
that occur in the wake of the advent and popularization of photography.
Topics for discussion include: the Picturesque; photographing sculpture (the case of
the Parthenon Marbles); Pre-Raphaelitism; post-mortem photographs; spirit
photography; photography and science; collecting and cartes de visite; the camera in
colonial encounters; photography and disciplinary institutions; detective fiction;
photographing children.
No prior experience of photography or other visual media is required simply a
readiness to engage visual technologies and images in addition to literary texts.
Course Outline
Week 1: Introduction – the pre-history and invention(s) of Photography
The announcement of the invention of the daguerreotype in Paris in 1839 represented
the culmination of a long pre-history of proto-photographic inventions. We will begin
thinking back through the history of photography and it theoretical positioning with
the help of key texts by Barthes and Benjamin. Throughout subsequent weeks, we
will return to these texts and the issues raised here.
Core reading:
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Hill and Wang, 1980)
Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’ One way Street and Other
Writings
Francois Brunet, ‘Inventing the Literary Prehistory of Photography: From Francois
Arago to Helmut Gernsheim, History of Photography, Volume 34, No. 4, Novmber
2010: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2010.514808
Supplementary:
Week 2: Photography and fiction: the Daguerreotype
We examine the ‘presence’ of photography in the novel. Emily Bronte’s novel
Wuthering Heights does not include photographic technology in any conspicuous
form but arguably it registers the presence of the new medium. Hawthorne’s novel, on
the other hand, features the character of a daguerrotypist. Our discussion will focus
those ways in which fiction incorporates photography at this early point in the
medium’s development.
Core reading:
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Lady Eastlake, Photography
Supplentary
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Daguerreotype’, Alexander’s Weekly Magazine, January 15,
1840.
Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: the Legacy of British Realism
(1999), especially Chapter 4.
Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire, the Conception of Photography (MIT, 1997)
Week 3: Photography, Identity and detection
Building upon the previous week’s reading we explore the links between photography
and detection.
Core reading
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852-3)
Charles Dickens, ‘Busy with the Photograph’, Household Words (22nd June, 1854),
245.
Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: the Legacy of British Realism
(1999), Chapter 3, Foundational Photographs: the Importance of being Esther’
pp.124-166.
John Payn, ‘Photographess,’ Household Words 16 (10 October 1857): 352-54.
Supplementary
Henry Morley and W.H. Wills, ‘Photography’ Household Words 16 (10 October
1857): 55.
Ronald R. Thomas, ‘Making Darkness Visible: Capturing the Criminal and Observing
the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction’, in Victorian Literature and
the Victorian Visual Imagination eds. Carol. T. Christ and John O. Jordan (California,
1995, pp.134-168.
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue’ 1841
Week 4: Seeing and Believing – the medical eye
It remains to some extent the case that modern readers asume that the Victorians
simply believed the empirical ‘truth’ of the medium of photography. The uses of
photography in medicine appear to confirm this view. However, in various complex
ways photography undermined and revoltionised acts of seeing and early practitioners
played upon the power of the camera to lie. The double, a popular figure of Romantic
literature was altered by photography as dramtised by Collins’s novel. At the same
time, early cameras were turned to the mentally ill in attempts to classify and
understand various ‘invisible’ conditions.
Core reading:
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, (1859)
Photographing the asylum
Week 5: Photographing ancient sculpture – the Parthenon Marbles
Core reading:
William Hazlitt, ‘On the Elgin Marbles: The Illisus’; ‘On the Elgin Marbles’;
‘Prose Style and the Elgin Marbles’, Collected in William Hazlitt, On the Elgin
Marbles, (London: Hesperus Press, 2008) also in Collected Essays
John Keats, ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’
‘To B.R.Haydon, with the foregoing sonnet on the Elgin Marbles’
George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18) especially Canto 2
Drawings by Benjamin Robert Haydon (British Museum available at
Roger Fenton, Photographs of the ‘Elgin marbles’
Supplementary
Mary Beard, The Parthenon (London, 2002)
Christopher Hitchens, The Parthenon Marbles (London, 2008)
Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999).
Lindsay Smith, ‘Roger Fenton’s Nature Morte’, History of Photography, (November
2013)
Week 6: Pre-Raphaelite poetry and the image text relation: the early photo-book
In painting, the case of the Pre-Raphaelites is frequently cited as exemplifying a
‘photographic style’ and in this session we explore the complex relationship between
Pre-Raphaelitism and photography. In particular we focus on the Arthurian legends as
represented in poetry by Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and in photographs by Julia
Margaret Cameron.
Core reading:
Alfred Tennyson, (1856-1885) with photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron
Supplementary
Marcia Pointon, ed. Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed (MUP, 1989)
Lindsay Smith, ‘The Seed of the Flower: in Marcia Pointon, ed. Pre-Raphaelites ReViewed (MUP, 1989)
Lindsay Smith, Pre-Raphaelitism: Poetry and Painting (Northcote House, 2013)
Week 7: Reading Week
Week 8: Photograping the urban poor – dirt as racialising
Core reading
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor
Hannah Cullwick, The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant , ed. Liz
Stanley (1984)
John Thomson, Street Life in London (1877)
Supplementary:
Richard l. Stein, ‘Street Figures: Victorian Urban Iconography’, Victorian Literature
and the Victorian Visual Imagination eds. Carol. T. Christ and John O. Jordan
(California, 1995), pp. 233-263.
Supplementary
‘Seeing the Unseen: Pictorial Problematics and Victorian Images of Class, Poverty
and Urban Life’, Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination eds.
Carol. T. Christ and John O. Jordan (California, 1995), pp. 264-288.
Week 9: Photographing children
Core reading:
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Lewis Carroll, ‘Photography Extraordinary’ (1855)
Lewis Carroll, ‘A Photographer’s day Out’
Carroll’s photographs
Post-mortem photographs
Supplementary:
Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: the Legacy of British Realism
(1999), Chapter 5 ‘Sexuality in the Age of Racism: Hungry Alice’.
Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus (1998)
Week 10: The photo-text: death and spiritualism
Georges Rodenbach’s haunting novel set in Bruges is somewhat pioneering as a
fictional text that incorporates photographs. Dealing with the protagonist’s obsession
with the memory of his dead wife it raises many questions about photography’s
relationship to mourning and memory in the period. We study it in the context of
contemprary late nineteenth century spiritualists’ intersts in photography as a means
of communicating with the other side.
Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (1892) English translation.
Spiritualism
Georgiana Houghton, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance (1870-1881-, ed Sara
Williams
Supplementary:
Paul Edwards, ‘The Photograph in Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, Journal of
European Studies, XXX/117 (2000), 71-79.
Daniel Wojcik, Spirits, ‘Apparitions and traditions of Supernatural Photography’,
Visual Resources: an Internationsl Journal of Documentation 25: 1-2, 109-136.
Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (Yale, 2007).
Week 11: The dectective as Camera /science fiction and the android
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
(1892)
Auguste Villiers de I’isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve (1886)
Supplementary
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (1922)
Constance Crompton, ‘Dissimulation and the Detective Eye: Female Masculinity in A
Scandal in Bohemia’ Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, Issue 7. 3 (Winter 2011)
Allison de Fren, ‘The Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow's Eve’, in Science Fiction
Studies 36, no.108 (2009) pp. 235-265.
Asti Hustvedt, ‘Science Fictions: The Future Eves of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and
Jean-Martin Charcot’, in The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion
from Fin-de-Siecle France, edited by Hustvedt, New York: Zone Books/MIT Press,
(1998) pp. 498-518
Week 12: The fin de siecle
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1896)
Thomas Hardy, ‘An Imaginative Woman’ (1844)
Nadar, ‘My Life as a Photographer’ (1900)
Additional secondary
Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture
1790-1860 (Oxford, 1991)
Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: the Legacy of British Realism
(1999)
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York, 1981)
Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: the Conception of Photography (MIT, 1997)
Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography: One Way Street and Other
Writings,
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936),
Illuminations (New York, 1973)
Carol Christ and John o. Jordan, Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual
Imagination (U. California Press, 1995)
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer; on Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (MIT, 1991)
Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (CUP, 2000)
Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian
Photographs (Duke U. Press, 1995)
Carol Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden
(Duke University Press, 1999)
Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions (Leicester UP, 1999)
W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, 1993)
W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? (Chicago, 2005)
Marcia Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (Reaktion, 2012)
Mary Price, The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space (Stanford UP 1994)
Larry Schaaf, Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot and the Invention of Photography
(Yale, 1992)
Heinrich Schwarz, Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences (Chicago,
1985)
Lindsay Smith, Nineteenth Century Photography, Painting and Poetry (CUP, 2005,
rept 2008)
Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth Century
photography (MUP, 1998)