Victorian Media Re-Viewed: Literature and the Politics of Visual Representation in Britain, 1839-1879

Abstract

Victorian Media Re-Viewed: Literature and the Politics of Visual Representation in Britain, 1839-1879 examines Victorian theater, photography, and literature as forms of media that responded to their political milieu through formal assimilation. I use the term media in relation to Victorian objects to both situate my work within the broader discourse of media history and foreground social interactions with and interventions between different modalities of cultural production. At the center of this dissertation is an exploration of the politics of viewing as it relates to power differentials between middle-class viewers and working-class and poor subjects. Throughout, I investigate the tension between who or what was represented in and occluded from a variety of visual and textual forms. As such, this dissertation approaches Victorian objects through the framework of social reading and viewing practices. In examining interactions with and interventions between forms, I reveal what I call blind spots, in other words what cultural producers of these objects may have missed or obscured in their representational practices and what scholars have overlooked in reviewing these objects. Moving chronologically through the middle of the century, I demonstrate the ways in which these blind spots in different modalities of cultural production mediated sentiments of discontent, facilitated pathways for resistance, and negotiated authenticity and truth based not only on what was written, but equally, on what was and was not observed. Through a series of case studies, Victorian Media Re-Viewed presents a model for reading nineteenth-century objects with an eye for the peripheral, unseen, and underrepresented. Consequently, each chapter focuses on a different type of object: a novel, a social text, a play, and a collection of photographs. Chapter 1 explores the significance of the “sketch” in British literary and photographic contexts by way of introducing the notion of the “literal photograph” in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848). Through both visual and textual analyses of Thackeray’s sketches, I discuss the political significance of the “literal photograph” as I relate it to the broader themes of poverty, class, and revolution. Chapter 2 expands on the visibility of poverty, revealing the ways in which the laboring class’s engagement with theater, photography, and illustrated periodicals aided in the performance and mediation of class culture in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Transitioning from the political affordances of performance in Mayhew’s serialized text, Chapter 3 turns to the photographic stage by examining Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon (1859, 1861). In analyzing the photographic elements of the drama, audience reception, and the alternate British ending, I argue that Boucicault frames the diverging paths of British and American nationalism around the question of liberty while reconstituting a critique of the British nation and its civilizing mission in the empire. Chapter 4 revisits the relationship between the literal and the photographic. It explores the genre of what George Eliot calls “literary photographs” as a point of comparison between Julia Margaret Cameron’s allegorical works and her concluding photographs taken during her time in the British colony of Ceylon. I argue that Cameron’s photographs from Ceylon embody the theatrical exchanges emblematic of her earlier “literary photographs” while marking a difference in the way her exported practice was confronted by resistance to English photographic and aesthetic practices.