The sensation phenomenon exploded onto Britain’s cultural scene in the early 1860s with remarkable excitement and vehement critical pronouncement. From “sensation drama” in the theaters to “sensation art” and “sensation novels,” numerous media were accused by Victorian critics of embracing lurid themes to stimulate an eager audience. Scholars today have mostly studied sensation as a literary phenomenon, analyzing its novels for their social climbers, bigamists, murderesses, and other outrageous characters and plotlines. Yet sensationalism in the 1860s was not limited to the literary sphere, and critics claimed to detect its nefarious influence in any person or event drawing a crowd—tightrope walkers, trapeze artists, criminals, even paintings and photographs. In this chapter, I expand our understanding of sensation by looking to its visual cultures, especially to a new type of photography that amplified sensation’s interests in the spectacularized female body.

The chapter focuses on cartes de visite, a form of mass portrait photography that became tremendously popular in the early 1860s, coinciding with sensation’s moment. Known as “cartomania,” the craze inspired Victorians to collect millions of small photographic portraits of both friends and celebrities. The idea of a “mania” seems appropriate to the sensation moment, connoting a fast-moving trend poised on the cutting edge of modernity—and fated for quick obsolescence. Some 300 to 400 million cartes were sold in England every year from 1861 to 1867, before their popularity began to wane in favor of other photographic products.¹ Scandalous public women appeared across a range of media in London in the early 1860s, but that array was multiplied in the carte de visite, especially in best-selling photographs of indecent or criminal women. Actresses, opera divas, prostitutes, even Queen Victoria: sensation’s visual cultures emerged from a new kind of female celebrity centered on image, eroticism, and a faddish temporality.

Both sensation novels and cartes de visite were denounced by critics for similar sins—for appealing across class lines, for implicitly challenging social hierarchies, and for depicting immodest, powerful women. By analyzing how sensationalism proliferated across genres—especially, and including, visual genres—this chapter aims to change how we define the phenomenon. Victorian critics saw sensational objects as electrifying the consumer’s body with a visceral immediacy; they often imagined a lone female reader closeted in her boudoir, devouring an illicit novel with unseemly abandon. Contemporary accounts have at times echoed Victorian critics in highlighting sensation’s body effects, seeing its objects as literally stimulating the reader’s sensorium.² Yet the chapter will show how “sensation” described artifacts that were constructed, mediated, and commodified—they pertained to a nascent mass culture, and hence were an inherently social phenomenon. Sensation in fact produced its body effects via a series of mediations, as critics and consumers generated the atmosphere of breathless fashionability and scandal that drove the market for these items. As such, the medium of portrait photography perfectly captured sensation’s dialectical investments in both brute embodiment and a framing sociality. Women on view in cartes de visite became sensations in one of the word’s other senses—as best-selling celebrities, hot properties marketed in legitimate capitalist enterprises. These female spectacles invited physiological response, as a woman’s body could be bought and sold and handled in card format. Yet this stimulation of the nerves took place via a technology of embodiment, a series of mediations that began with the ability to produce paper photographs in millions of copies.

Nineteenth-century photography also appears differently when it is read as sensational. These images have typically been read as part of the century’s broader empiricist drive, as photography produced a vast visual archive of faces and bodies, especially those belonging to Britain’s others, whether the urban poor or the subjects of empire. For many scholars, the ostensible realism of the photograph merely served to affirm stereotyped notions of otherness, buttressing imperial ideologies. Critics have therefore insistently looked past the image’s suspect qualities of materialization or embodiment, directing us instead to observe a photograph’s qualities of staging, artifice, omission, and illusion.³ Geoffrey Batchen, in his account of the carte de visite, goes one step further, undercutting the photograph’s illusion of presence by seeing it as a precursor to postmodern forms of visual abstraction and dematerialization. Batchen argues that the carte’s bourgeois repetitiveness avoids any humanistic depth or singularity, embracing that which is “impure, a copy of what is already a copy and nothing more … [The carte-de-visite sitter] is all surface and no depth.”⁴ While contemporary theories are convincing in their critiques of Victorian norms, philosophies, and politics of the image, they differ significantly from the historical reception of cartes de visite in the 1860s, when audiences responded to the flood of mechanized portraiture by focusing intently on the bodies that photography captured in realistic, graphic detail. The mass photographic portrait was indeed characterized by the illusionism and simulation described by contemporary scholars; but—fittingly, for the sensational moment—it also offered a new kind of embodied medium to its Victorian viewers, a powerful and unprecedented verisimilitude defined by its haptic qualities.

In creating “sensation,” cultural critics were appropriating a term from the nineteenth century’s new nerve science. Human beings, no longer creatures of reason and divine good, were being rewritten as irrational animals whose reflexive nervous sensations might short-circuit the brain entirely.⁵ When critics accused objects of courting sensation, then, they were applying a scientific term in the cultural realm, responding to the threat of a thrilling new mass culture that seemed to target the body for basely commercial purposes—a paradigm still familiar today, as I discuss in the chapter’s conclusion. Sensation’s implicit links to nerve science suggest that touch was the movement’s master-sense. Yet my account, focused on photography as a sensational medium, argues that mass culture in the 1860s targeted both touch and vision simultaneously, coupling the two senses. While photography scholars today have trained us to treat the medium’s transcriptions of reality with skepticism, Victorian critics often took a contrasting view, fixating upon photography’s primal touch of light to an exposed surface. The mythical purity of that exposure, for many Victorian viewers, imparted to a photographed body an inexorable materiality, no matter how mediated the image itself might have been. Photography’s new, haptic visuality inaugurated an eroticized celebrity culture organized around pictures of women’s bodies, a connection that has come to be definitive in our own contemporary media culture.

The carte de visite’s innovations extended beyond an unprecedented portrait verisimilitude. The mass portrait photograph also signaled the triumph of photographic reproduction on paper, a technological advance that showed the medium’s importance, in the words of Richard Menke, “not just for recording or representing reality but for disseminating it.” Menke speaks of Fox Talbot’s earliest experiments, as the photographic researcher came to realize that the new technology could potentially circulate images on an immense scale. Paper photography’s truly distinctive feature, distinguishing it from previous forms, was its iterability. From this perspective, as Menke notes, the paper photograph moved away from singular, unique media like paintings or daguerreotypes and toward the realm of the printed book.⁶ The carte de visite therefore belonged to a broader print culture, across word and image, that was defined by its unprecedented capacity to reproduce and circulate in vast numbers. The carte’s iterability invited a strongly politicized discourse: the portrait photograph oscillated between promoting individual celebrity and fostering a formulaic, mass experience. Sensational cartes encouraged the reproduction of identity (especially female identity) for an audience whose individual experiences were shaped by a mass visual culture, whether through perusing photographic shop windows or leafing through home albums. Sensation itself, I argue, depended on a dialectic between forces of celebrity—conferring an idea of the extraordinary, the unique, the exceptional, and the individual—versus forces of massification, in reproduction, repetition, democracy, universality, and interchangeability. Both of these forces, it should be noted, served as a challenge to traditional class hierarchies. This dialectic was especially apt for a decade that witnessed the mass enfranchisement of working-class men, and it figures in both sensation photographs and sensation novels, as the chapter will pursue.

Though sensation emerged as part of a new, broadly circulating mass culture, it was not completely cordoned off from realms of high culture. As befits a cultural phenomenon embraced by the Victorian middle classes, sensation was defined by its mixed, hybrid qualities, blending genres high and low. The carte photograph drew on conventions of eighteenth-century painted portraiture, and it often triangulated the diverse media of painting, photography, and theater. Sensation theater and sensation novels both crafted dramatic scenes in the form of shapely pictures, investing visual pleasure into the spectacular moment. Not surprisingly, these theatrical pictures often framed women’s bodies, arranging them in striking tableaux. Sensational novels and photographs confounded critics with their mixed-class associations: reviewers of sensation novels couldn’t agree on whether or not they constituted high art, and commentators on mass photography confronted portraits of actresses and criminals alongside those of bishops, Prime Ministers, and the Queen. The political and social-class transgressions of sensational objects expressed themselves as contraventions in the aesthetic realm, mixing genres and intermingling different types of media, new and old.

The chapter moves through a brief history of carte portraiture and its rhetorics of democratization before turning to the most sensational figures in the carte, those of improper or illicit women—prostitutes, actresses, and female criminals. I show how Eliza Lynn Linton’s notorious, conservative rant against “The Girl of the Period” (1868) reacted to the new, fashionable (photographic) visibility of the demi-monde, which, to Linton’s despair, the modern English girl was attempting to imitate. Cartes promoted a new kind of female celebrity, in which women became famous owing to a fashion or a provocative style rather than through a more traditional route such as aristocratic birth or class status. Actresses and opera divas personified this troubling new visibility, and actress cartes in particular brought together the media of theater, painting, and photography in combining old and new portrait traditions. Queen Victoria, the dour matron herself, makes a surprising appearance within sensation’s visual field as the female subject whose carte portraits were the most popular and highly visible, and whose example linked her to other, controversial kinds of female celebrity. I also examine the carte portrait depicting Sarah Forbes Bonetta, an African child adopted as a god-daughter by Queen Victoria, in order to investigate sensation’s inherent relationship to race, skin, and spectacles of human difference. The themes raised by carte photographs of women—issues of embodiment, visual display, and female self-determination—inflected the plots of sensation novels, especially Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. The photographic medium served as a lightning rod for questions of female conformism and female display: these questions rehearsed the larger, vexed political problem of the exceptional individual’s relation to the mass. While conservative critics lashed out when a woman made a sensation, became famous, or came to be deemed “extraordinary,” a voracious celebrity culture—which had its major instantiation here—encouraged and rewarded women for performing ambiguous feats of self-making via the image.

Making Sensation

What was sensation? Victorian critics saw sensational arts as producing a body effect, an agitated physiological response modeled by characters or actors and then mimicked by breathless readers or spectators. Sensation novels “preach[ed] to the nerves,” in H. L. Mansel’s memorable 1863 formulation. More than a century later, D. A. Miller similarly sees the genre “address[ing] itself primarily to the sympathetic nervous system, where it grounds its characteristic adrenalin effects: accelerated heart rate and respiration, increased blood pressure, the pallor resulting from vasoconstriction, etc.”⁷ Miller’s account echoes the nineteenth-century view, distinguishing the sensation novel for its stimulating biological effects on a lone perceiver’s body. Yet this physiological conception misses the way that sensation emerged out of an inherently group-oriented mass culture, marketed and packaged by both critics and consumers. Sensation’s fashionable, crowd-driven aspect is apparent in the commodities it inspired, such as those spun off from Wilkie Collins’s blockbuster sensation novel The Woman in White, which included toiletries, bonnets, songs, even a quadrille (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1 The Woman in White Waltz, by C. H. R. Marriott, lithograph cover of sheet music. London: Boosey & Sons Musical Library, [1861]. The British Library, London. © The British Library Board. h.842.a.(34).

Sensation’s objects belonged to a consumer culture that mediated between the individual and the group, relying, writes Lynn M. Voskuil, “on the arousal of individualized desire in a large body of potential buyers.”⁸ While sensation’s body effects appeared to be individualistic, involuntary, erotic, even masturbatory in their targeted pleasures, their apparent naturalness was belied by the fact that they occurred among large audiences witnessing formulaic plot structures and familiar character types. This clichéd quality was especially true of the sensation dramas that first ignited the sensation craze in Britain. As Voskuil notes, for all of sensation’s ostensible spontaneity, theater audiences knew beforehand how they were supposed to react to these kinds of plays.⁹

Sensation had some of its roots in America, where the term first became a buzzword. A Punch ditty of 1861 riffs on the sensational qualities of America, “that land of fast life and fast laws—/Laws not faster made than they’re broken.” This world of accelerated novelty is multifarious enough to include “[t]he last horrid murder down South,/The last monster mile-panorama;/Last new sermon, or wash for the mouth;/New acrobat, planet or drama.”¹⁰ Sensation encompassed any event or spectacle that drew a crowd, from murders to mouthwash, from panoramas to slavery. Punch gets comic mileage out of this incongruity, but Kimberly Snyder Manganelli argues that British sensation novels had their antecedents in American novels about slavery, a connection worth remembering as the chapter studies the spectacularized female bodies consumed on the British scandal circuit of the early 1860s.¹¹ The specter of race haunts all of these circulated bodies, as I pursue below.

While the British origins of sensational arts are multiple and diverse, the first cultural artifacts to be labeled as “sensation” took place on the stage. Sensation dramas featured stunning effects and breath-taking illusions, from crashing waterfalls to moonlit caves. These special effects were manufactured by ingenious stage technology, tying sensation dramas to other kinds of techno-enhanced illusionism considered in this book. (In Chapter 5, for example, I discuss how picturesque dioramas likewise used innovative stage technologies to fabricate their illusions of “nature.”) A sensation scene onstage usually dramatized a climactic narrative moment with an arresting, time-stopping tableau. Dion Boucicault’s sensation drama The Octoroon (1859) culminates in a thrilling slave auction scene, in which the sympathetic, mixed-race heroine Zoë is sold at market.¹² A reviewer in 1861 highlighted the scene’s spectacular visual qualities: “The slave auction forms the grand sensation scene of the drama, … and forms a most exciting tableau.”¹³ The Octoroon’s tableau is a quintessential sensation scene, featuring a light-skinned woman of ambiguous race, origins, and identity offered on a pedestal for sale, as well as for audience delectation. The climactic tableau points to the way that picturing itself was crucial to sensation, not only for the commodification implied in mass spectacle, but also for the characteristic mixing of media. Elements of both painting and photography informed the theatrical tableau, infusing visual pleasure into the dramatic moment.

Sensation novels, taking their label from sensation dramas, produced scandal-mongering plotlines often taken from journalism covering criminal trials and divorce-court proceedings. Earning the moniker “newspaper novels,” these books drew upon media events and modern tabloidism to become their own form of titillating media.¹⁴ For all of their Gothic twists, sensation novels were crucially sited in the modern Victorian drawing room, amid English characters and everyday life.

The man who shook our hand with a hearty English grasp half an hour ago—the woman whose beauty and grace were the charm of last night, …—how exciting to think that under these pleasing outsides may be concealed some demon in human shape, a Count Fosco or a Lady Audley!¹⁵

So writes Henry Mansel in 1863, in his famously scathing review. As Mansel’s words imply, sensation also depended on its opposite, the veneer of normality under which seething, subterranean forces raged. Tim Dolin writes of the social pressures that produced the sensation aesthetic, as the nineteenth century’s “cataclysmic social change” was “internalised and made secret”: the “deceptive blandness” of Victorian exteriors disguised “a violent suppression of difference, an effect of commodification, rationalisation, and standardisation in capitalism, consent in politics and class relations, Puritanism in religion, and respectability in everyday life.”¹⁶ As we will see, cartes de visite entailed a similar combination of the conventional and the extraordinary, as the repetitive uniformity of cartes poses and settings mirrored the formulaic quality of everyday middle-class life, even while certain cartes gained their allure by depicting transgressive celebrities.

Sensation emerged out of a nascent mass culture that is familiar today, a world of hype, puffery, gossip, tabloidism, and celebrity. Critics liked to stress the word’s double meaning as both a corporeal stimulus and a broader cultural vogue. “Nothing will stimulate the jaded appetites of the English populace, except what has been called a sensation,” opined a critic in 1863. His discussion goes on to attack sensation novels as part of a degraded exhibitionary culture catering to the basest human desires.¹⁷ In the vast critical commentary on sensation in the early 1860s, these objects were seen to capture the zeitgeist. Critics and satirists hurled the fashionable insult at anything that cultivated novelty. They produced their own echo chamber in periodical articles and poems by invoking a reliable set of recurring persons and things that qualified for the inflammatory label. Inevitable points of reference included the tightrope-walker Blondin and trapeze artist Leotard; Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, especially its “Chamber of Horrors”; novels such as The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret; the sensation dramas of Boucicault, especially The Colleen Bawn; the cartes de visite craze, in which photographs of known and unknown persons mingled promiscuously in albums and shop windows; also Julia Pastrana, a bearded woman whose mummified corpse was exhibited in London in 1862; Constance Kent, the teenage girl accused of murdering her four-year-old brother; and “Anonyma,” a nickname for Catherine Walters, a well-dressed courtesan who attracted great crowds when she rode her horse in Hyde Park. (All of these appear, for example, in the comic poem “Sensation! A Satire,” of 1864.)¹⁸ Not coincidentally, many of these sensational objects feature women of doubtful backgrounds or boundary-crossing identities, publicly displayed in prurient or eroticized contexts.

Many scholars have focused on sensation’s obsession with women’s behavior, especially women behaving badly.¹⁹ Sensation novels portrayed women violating norms of both class and sex, usually at the same time. In an 1868 Punch cartoon titled “Sensation Novels,” a maid startles “a Lodger” in his private rooms to ask how the final volume of a sensation novel turns out—“how the ‘Markis’ found out as she’d pisoned ’er two fust ’Usbands?!” (Fig. 4.2).²⁰ The joke turns on the maid reading the same literature as her master, which leads her to invade his private chambers at night in a manner both unseemly and risqué. In the cartoon’s clever innuendo, the fictional wife’s crime of poisoning—presumably to climb up the ladders of wealth and rank—is analogous to the maid’s impertinent interruption. The cartoon’s visual format itself imitates a sensation scene, as the maid hovers like a ghostly, white figure at her master’s door. Maids inevitably recurred as key characters in sensation mania, inspiring both anxiety and desire; the uppity or emboldened female house servant perfectly typified domesticity gone awry.²¹ Yet even while sensation novels often demonized powerful, scheming women, they also granted them attractive qualities of intelligence, dominance, and sex appeal, offering an ambiguous twist on the contentious Victorian “Woman Question.”

Fig. 4.2 “Sensation Novels.” Punch, March 28, 1868.

The larger politics of sensation are similarly complicated. Some scholars have seen sensationalism as a conservative, negative response to the progressive shift in the 1860s that culminated in the 1867 Reform Bill.²² Most sensation novels conclude by vanquishing the villainous boundary breakers and class crossers, ensuring a safe return to social order. Other scholars, however, have noted how sensation novels jubilantly blurred class and identity boundaries, a confusion expressed formally in the novel’s mixing of literary genres with popular or working-class modes.²³ All of these contradictory accounts seem valid, pointing to sensation’s indeterminacy as a series of mixed cultural objects in many senses. A similar aesthetic and political confusion also surrounded the carte de visite, as I’ll now pursue: the new portrait photograph adapted eighteenth-century modes of aristocratic, painted portraiture to the everyday world of the modern bourgeois subject. If class boundaries in the 1860s were being destabilized in the political world by the enfranchisement of working men, a similar unhinging was occurring in the cultural world among the objects of entertainment, both novelistic and photographic.

Cartes de visite and Mass Portrait Photography

A confluence of technological and economic changes propelled the carte de visite to cultural dominance in the early 1860s. Before the carte, the most popular kind of photograph had been the daguerreotype, an expensive, one-of-a-kind image, printed on luminous reflective metal and contained in a decorative case (Fig. 4.3). In the 1850s, a new wet-collodion process using glass negatives enabled photographs to be made in multiple copies and printed on albumenized paper. Additionally, the innovation of a special multi-lens camera allowed for eight images to be created in a single sitting, reducing the cost and time needed to make the portrait photograph (Fig. 4.4). By 1860, as photographic historian William C. Darrah notes, all of the necessary photographic equipment—papers, lenses, chemicals, studio props—were being manufactured on a large scale, leading to photography’s massive commercialization and standardization.²⁴ These shifts led to the explosive growth in cartes de visite. The carte itself was a small photo, usually a portrait, mounted on a card of approximately two-and-a-half by four inches (Fig. 4.5). Unlike the daguerreotype, which was precious and unique, the carte de visite was cheap, easily reproduced, and existed in multiple copies. Despite its name, the carte was rarely used as a visiting card; instead it was collected, traded, and displayed in drawing-room albums. Portable and highly collectible, the carte epitomized a new kind of reproducibility and circulatability in the nineteenth century.²⁵

Fig. 4.3 Daguerreotype of Mary Lang Bailey (American), c. 1850. William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

Fig. 4.4 André A.-E. Disdéri, Uncut sheet of eight carte-de-visite photographs of an actress, c. 1860. Collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus.

Fig. 4.5 Two cartes de visite by an unknown artist from the V & A museum collection, albumen sheet, c. 1860–70. Museum numbers E.1740:1-1995 and E.1691:3-1995. © Victoria and Albert Museum.

For many critics in the 1860s, the carte de visite’s most salient aspect was its democratization of portraiture, which had previously been a privilege of the wealthy. The Photographic News writes in 1861:

Photographic portraiture … has … swept away many of the illiberal distinctions of rank and wealth, so that the poor man who possesses but a few shillings can command as perfect a lifelike portrait of his wife or child as Sir Thomas Lawrence painted for the most distinguished sovereigns of Europe.²⁶

Some critics found this leveling in the visual sphere to be amusing but also problematic, as women and men appeared in poses and props above their wonted station. An 1863 essay mocks “Mrs. Jones” and “Miss Brown” for posing themselves in front of grand, aristocratic backdrops with “park-like pleasure-ground” and “lake-like prospect,” even though their “belongings and surroundings don’t warrant more than a little back-garden big enough to grow a few crocuses.”²⁷ Cartes borrowed from the tradition of painted portraits, typically using luxurious furnishings and painted backdrops opening out onto imaginary properties. The carte de visite thus raised anxieties about the fakery of social class: gentility itself might ultimately turn out to be a combination of costumes and stage properties that could be easily simulated. Anxieties about the carte’s duplicity resonate with the recurring plotlines in sensation fiction where criminals counterfeit the appearance of respectability, or commoners impersonate more genteel characters. While sensation was seen as a phenomenon spreading from the bottom up, as it were, a disease caught from maidservants, cartes were imagined to move in the other direction, from aristocratic portraits of royalty down to working-class people in front of painted backdrops. But both kinds of cultural objects produced a class confusion surrounding persons and things.

The carte de visite often entailed an act of self-portraiture. Victorians had cartes made of themselves and then distributed them to friends, to be collected in albums and pored over during visiting hours. Geoffrey Batchen suggests that this vast, formulaic self-picturing has led modern art historians to disparage the carte de visite. Cartes, he writes, perhaps “too obediently embody the sensibilities, economic ambitions, and political self-understandings of the middle class”; in this sense, says Batchen, they might be said to represent “capitalism incarnate.”²⁸ Walter Benjamin, too, in his “Short History of Photography” (1931), mocks the carte de visite for its “absurdly draped or laced figures,” photographs stuffed into a “thick photograph album” displayed on drawing-room pedestal tables in “the most chill part of the house.” He acknowledges his own appearance in one such album among a series of formulaic children, dressed “as drawing-room Tyroleans, yodelling and waving hats against a background of painted snow peaks”—as, for Benjamin, the whole phenomenon bespeaks “a sharp decline in taste” within the history of photography.²⁹ While Benjamin’s gentle mockery is tempered by a sense of nostalgia, he ultimately agrees with Batchen’s assessment in denigrating cartes for capitalizing on a narcissistic kind of bourgeois self-love.

Yet cartes were notable for more than mere self-delineation. Victorian commentators focused on the carte de visite’s depiction of celebrities beyond the intimate circle of family and friends. “Cartomania” named the craze for collecting cartes of people one didn’t know, famous or notorious public figures constellating the world of gossip and conversation. The photo album on the drawing-room table served as a conversation piece for its collection of celebrity images, mediating between the parlor and the public sphere (Fig. 4.6). A critic in The Saturday Review described the parlor photo album as “at once a mild form of hero-worship and an illustrated book of genealogy. It does duty for a living hagiology, and it will supersede the first leaf of the Family Bible.”³⁰ In fact, the ubiquitous illustrated Bible was itself becoming a commercial and worldly art production, as I argue in Chapter 3; but the comparison of photo album to family Bible neatly and ironically characterizes the way that cartes de visite portraits of public figures were creating a new kind of commercialized celebrity, a form of secularized star worship that had previously been reserved for notables in the religious sphere.

Fig. 4.6 Album cover with five portraits by Camille Silvy, c.1860. Gold-toned albumen prints mounted in oval brass frames. Wilson Centre for Photography.

The mass-produced portrait found its perfect display venue in the photographic shop window, which attracted crowds eager to see cartes of politicians, priests, actresses, and courtesans (Fig. 4.7).³¹ Critics observed how these so-called “street portrait galleries” were admirably democratic; here, as one writes, “social equality is carried to its utmost limit.”³² Commentators dwelled especially on the way that shop windows or parlor albums juxtaposed cartes of incongruous celebrities. Descriptions of these odd mixtures are a humorous cliché and staple of cultural commentary in the early 1860s. Catholic bishops might appear cheek-by-jowl with Evangelical preachers, or respected politicans alongside actresses and criminals. The Daily Telegraph describes the photographic shop window as an outrageous side-by-side exhibition of “portraits of bishops, barristers, duchesses, Ritualistic clergymen, forgers, favourite comedians, and the personages of the Tichbourne drama … [alongside] tenth-rate actresses and fifth-rate ballet girls in an extreme state of dishabille.”³³ In the cartes de visite album, writes the Saturday Review, “the ballet and the pulpit, the senate and the prize-ring, the haut-monde and the demi-monde are alike laid under contribution for portraits.”³⁴ The rigidly divided and stratified Victorian social world became an alarming jumble in the photographic shop window or album, as both offered visions of a radically heterogeneous and mixed society.

Fig. 4.7 Henry W. Taunt, “Henry Taunt’s shop in Oxford,” c. 1874–94. Historic England Archive.

Critical fixation on the trope of unlikely carte juxtapositions amplified a progressive political rhetoric that had accrued to photography from its earliest beginnings. A comic song circulating in London in 1839 proposed that photography offered a radical, even revolutionary challenge to the precincts of British high art: “O Mister Daguerre! Sure you’re not aware/Of half the impressions you’re making,/By the sun’s potent rays you’ll set Thames in a blaze,/While the National Gallery’s breaking.”³⁵ Even though photographs in 1839 did not yet easily circulate or reproduce, they were already seen to harbor the potential to ignite what Allan Sekula calls “an incendiary leveling of the existing cultural order.”³⁶ Photography invited rhetorics of universality and democratization with its realistic, undiscriminating mode of representation and its increasing accessibility across the century—especially when compared with paintings, which remained mostly singular, expensive, and elite. No wonder, then, that critics used progressive political language to describe cartes de visite, especially in a decade leading up to the 1867 Reform Bill and the mass enfranchisement of working-class men. Carte photographs, arranged in an album or shop window, served as a useful platform for imagining a more leveled and horizontal social world—even if photography did not in any literal sense give rise to a more equal society.³⁷

In fact, despite the persistent tendency of Victorian critics to portray cartes displays as a hectic visual mishmash, the reality was not the classless free-for-all that they described. As William C. Darrah notes, the carte’s early history was “marked by the patronage of royalty and nobility and the well-to-do, which bestowed respectability upon the inexpensive, mass-produced photographic portrait.”³⁸ Aristocratic patronage of cartes subsequently waned as they became popular with bourgeois and working-class sitters. Juliet Hacking concludes that the history of photography in carte portraiture cannot therefore be seen as merely “a function of the rise of the bourgeoisie and of a teleological march towards democracy”—despite Victorian rhetoric to the contrary.³⁹ Indeed, the carte album itself gave lie to the notion of equalization with its conventional arrangement of portraits: albums usually opened with cartes of royal figures and other celebrities before proceeding to portraits of friends and family.⁴⁰ The carte album offered its owner the opportunity to lay out, in a specific, systematic format, the hierarchical shape of the collector’s known world. These facts suggest that the language of democratization surrounding the carte should be treated warily, even while—as we’ll now see—carte portraiture did allow certain new kinds of faces to enter the public sphere as part of a nascent mass media explosion.

The Girl of the Period

For many critics, the punchline in jokes about cartes displays often paired famous men with notorious women—prostitutes, actresses, murderesses, and other transgressors of Victorian female gender codes. In describing the “startling combinations” enabled by the carte album or shop window, critics allegorized social mixing through insinuations of women’s sexual sin or impropriety.⁴¹ Carte displays became especially sensational when they placed images of respectable gentlemen next to those of improper women. The 1864 poem “SENSATION! A SATIRE” complains of “A sweet republic, where ’tis all the same—/Virtue or vice, or good, or doubtful fame./ … Coarse ‘Skittles’ hangs beside a Spurgeon ‘carte,’/With stare, unblushing, makes the decent start./These are thy freaks, SENSATION!”⁴² Spurgeon was a noted British Baptist preacher, while “Skittles” was the nickname of Catherine Walters, a famous and successful courtesan known for her keen fashion sense and her affairs with powerful British men. Walters’s scandalous image was invoked ubiquitously in the early 1860s, in discussions of both cartes de visite and sensation novels—sometimes at the same time. As one reviewer of novels writes in 1863:

It is an unsatisfactory sign of the time when the photograph of an impudent courtezan [sic] is to be found among those of statesmen and bishops, and sells better than any of them; … [and] when a novelist in search of a sensation finds what he needs in this direction.⁴³

The courtesan’s photograph, mixing boldly with those of statesmen and bishops, implies a kind of social leveling whose impertinent boundary-crossing is itself a kind of sexual congress.

Despite Walters’s unseemly profession, she was also a marketing sensation, known for showing off her horse-riding prowess on fashionable Rotten Row in London’s Hyde Park, where she earned the suggestive nicknames of “Anonyma” and the “Pretty Horsebreaker.” Aristocratic ladies copied the tight-fitting cut of her riding habit and crowds gathered to watch her riding in the park, especially during the summers of 1861 and 1862.⁴⁴ She seemed to hover somewhere between high fashion and ignominy. Her photographic portrait became, for her critics, a prime example of her brazen sins, making her the ultimate symbol of a degraded image culture.⁴⁵ Certain conservative critics even accused Skittles’ photographers of making pornography:

[U]nfortunately the sensational taste which has of late invaded our literature and bids fair to degrade our stage, has also reached the photographer’s atelier. … [Photographs] which, if they had been exhibited in Wych-street, would … have been instantly confiscated by the police, are here displayed with a shamefacedness only too characteristic of the subjects which they portray.… One female aspirant of equestrian fame, … has allowed herself to be photographed in a costume which Lady Godiva would not have coveted.⁴⁶

Wych-street, notorious for dens of pornography, here becomes a byword for the ambiance of illicit visuality hovering over the entire carte format. The carte’s combination of cheapness, miniaturization, and easy dissemination ensured that it would be conducive to pornographic imagery. Yet cartes of Walters in circulation today are surprisingly tame, showing a woman posed in costumes that are form-fitting but not too salacious (Fig. 4.8). The overheated descriptions of her picture seem to have been more rhetorical than literal. Walters’s recurring role in both sensation and photographic commentary speaks to more than just Victorian prudery: the courtesan or improper woman, shamelessly on view and up for sale, becomes a perfect metaphor for the rise of commercialism itself, when all that matters is buying and selling—a cash nexus that implies the disintegration of more traditional channels of power.

Fig. 4.8 Sergei Levitsky, carte de visite of Catherine or Clara Walters, alias “Skittles,” c. 1859–64. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library.

The ubiquity of Catherine Walters’s carte de visite likely inspired Eliza Lynn Linton’s notorious 1868 rant against “The Girl of the Period,” a caricature of outrageous female behavior that is a key document of the sensation moment. Linton assails the modern English girl for styling herself after a high-paid courtesan, scorning the role of wife and mother for the more selfish pleasures of money, clothes, and fast living. The Girl of the Period is a “loud and rampant modernization”; “[n]othing is too extraordinary and nothing too exaggerated for her vitiated taste.”⁴⁷ Linton mourns the disappearance of the Anglo-Saxon girl of “innate purity and dignity … neither bold in bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be her husband’s friend and companion, but never his rival” (1). Instead, the Girl of the Period embraces “slang, bold talk and general fastness” and “the love of pleasure and indifference to duty,” displaying “dissatisfaction with the monotony of ordinary life” (5). While the essay does not mention cartes explicitly, it expresses anxieties about fashion, sexuality, image, and imitation that all seem apposite to the moment of mass photography:

The Girl of the Period envies the queens of the demi-monde far more than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously appointed …. They have all that for which her soul is hungering; and she never stops to reflect at what a price they have bought their gains, and what fearful moral penalties they pay for their sensuous pleasures. She sees only the coarse gilding on the base token, and shuts her eyes to the hideous figure in the midst and the foul legend written round the edge. (5)

Linton’s metaphor of coinage, in which the modern girl desires the gold token without acknowledging its debased, graven female figure, perfectly captures the idea of a circulating image that is both potent and “foul.” Linton fittingly goes on to assail the modern girl’s imitation of prostitutes using metaphors of mechanical reproduction: “She thinks she is piquante and exciting when she thus makes herself the bad copy of a worse original” (9). And “after all her efforts, she is only a poor copy of the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than the copy, because it is real” (7). In other words, Walters’s photographic fame becomes a metaphor for the way that her example transforms good English girls into copies of her fiendish self. The demi-monde is reproducing itself to create a terrifying, artificial image culture, a world of female copies. While Linton attacks the superficiality of a type of modern female dandyism, her essay shows how women’s participation in a new image culture also posed profound threats to Victorian gender norms. The courtesan represented a freedom from patriarchal family structures; as Judith Walkowitz points out in her history of Victorian prostitution, sex work itself entailed surprisingly feminist overtones in allowing women a measure of economic freedom and self-determination in a society with a restricted female labor market.⁴⁸ That a courtesan becomes one of the most-discussed figures in the carte de visite, then, points to more than mere squeamishness about sex. Walters becomes the sign of a new, problematic kind of female self-making.

The brilliant snarkiness of Linton’s essay propelled it into its own hugely popular phenomenon, spawning “Girl of the Period” periodicals, parasols, waltzes, satirical lithographs and—coming full circle—cartes de visite. While some of these commodities adopted Linton’s anti-feminist attitude wholesale, others took a more light-hearted or even sympathetic approach.⁴⁹ Photographs of the Girl of the Period (Fig. 4.9) depict Lydia Thompson, a successful burlesque performer, in the familiar costume with its mock-feminist accoutrements of monocle, cigarette, long braid, ridiculous squirrel-skin hat, and leather riding crop—making this figure a prototype of the New Woman, with her athleticism, smoking, and unusual fashion choices signifying a defiant femininity. The riding crop, in particular, aligns the Girl of the Period with other powerful horsewomen of the 1860s, including Catherine Walters.⁵⁰

Fig. 4.9 Carte de visite of Lydia Thompson as “The Girl of the Period,” c. 1868. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.

No surprise, then, that versions of Walters—as the prototypical dominant, erotic, and spectacularized woman—appear in the sensation fiction of the early 1860s. Walters’s story parallels that of Lady Audley in M. E. Braddon’s 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret. Both women are seen as having illicit power over respectable, wealthy men: Walters uses her sexual wiles to procure male patrons and even gets one to run away with her to America, while Lucy Graham entices kindly Lord Audley to fall in love with her and marry her so that she can become a “Lady.” Of course, as we learn in the novel, she’s also a bigamist, already married to another, less lordly man. Lady Audley uses her beauty to impersonate a high-class woman; the novel emphasizes her persona as a visual one by lavishing attention on her painted portrait, done in a garish, Pre-Raphaelite style. The painting itself becomes a plot point when it enables her first husband to recognize her true identity. While the life-sized, technicolor painted portrait seems very different from a hand-sized, black-and-white photographic carte de visite, both images present a scandalous female visibility in the form of full-length portraiture.⁵¹ Lady Audley’s portrait in fact approaches the carte de visite by virtue of its own mediation: it is not a painting but an ekphrastic reproduction, an image rendered in words that circulates via mass print in novel form. The visual culture of sensation presents mediated female spectacles which gain a fearsome power through both sexual display and a dominant mass visibility.

The notorious Catherine Walters also haunts the margins of M. E. Braddon’s sensation novel Aurora Floyd (1863). The novel stars a powerful horsewoman who defies standards of femininity in her preference for tomboyish, horsey pursuits—which include a cross-class marriage with a groom. Braddon generates sympathy for a heroine who dangerously courts female showmanship, a tendency inherited from her actress mother:

Aurora was her mother’s own daughter, and had the taint of the play-acting and horse-riding, the spangles and the sawdust, strong in her nature. The truth of the matter is, that before Miss Floyd emerged from the nursery she evinced a very decided tendency to become what is called ”fast.”⁵²

“Fast” girls, precursors to Linton’s Girl of the Period, combine an unfeminine love of speed with a desire for thrills, a combination inevitably fraught with sexual innuendo. I discuss further below how actresses featured as key figures in sensational cartes de visite; for now, it is enough to note that Aurora’s performative nature, her staged sexuality mingling “the spangles and the sawdust,” aligns her with other scandalous horsewomen on view in the early 1860s. In the novel’s most infamous scene, Aurora punishes a servant who has kicked her beloved dog by brutally horsewhipping him—a scene that identifies her literally with the “Pretty Horsebreaker,” the courtesan who tames men using her sexual dominance.⁵³

While the female body on display might have suggested a muted woman, disempowered and objectified as a visual commodity, these erotic female spectacles instead pointed in the opposite direction, intimating to Victorian viewers a wild sexual license and cultural dominance. A woman on view might claim an aggressive and illicit power over her spectators: she was, in a sense, both purchaser and purchased. Sensation’s powerful erotic woman operated within an ostensibly heterosexual paradigm—exerting her power over intimidated or ensnared men—but this female figure also spoke alluringly to a female audience. Indeed, the spread of sensationalism was often portrayed as a taboo erotic transaction between women. Reviewers of sensation novels often worried about the effects of the indecent literature on female readers:

[W]hat the mamma reads the daughter also will read, so that the romantic poison, if poison it be, finds its way all through the household, as well as into the mistress’s boudoir; for Miss tells her maid, who tells the housemaid, who tells the cook—and all pant over the forbidden page by stealth.⁵⁴

If sensation novels were figured as a contagious disease infecting readers, then women were seen to be especially susceptible, prone to the degenerate copying of the immoral female behavior depicted inside the novels. Likewise, cartes photographs also circulated within the province of women: not only were they featured in the feminized parlor album, but also, as Juliet Hacking notes, the majority of cartes patrons and sitters were female.⁵⁵ When Catherine Walters reigns in cartes iconography, then, we can understand why Eliza Lynn Linton worries about her influence on other women—an influence whose media effects intimated illicit homoerotic bonds between women.

Ghost, Copy, Self: The Woman in White

The themes of female visibility, portraiture, and copyism discussed in this chapter come to the fore in Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White. The novel’s meditations on these subjects are not focused around the medium of photography, and cartes de visite make no appearance in the novel. Yet the novel organizes itself around a series of repetitive female portraits, as it investigates the paradoxes surrounding female character and female exceptionality. These explorations focalize the novel’s larger political interest in the conundrum of the individual’s relation to the mass, a problem, as I’ll show, that the rhetorics of mass portrait photography also circled, without clear resolution.

The Woman in White announces its visual interests in the occupation of its protagonist, Walter Hartright, who serves as a drawing-master in a grand house. The novel portrays humble Walter’s rise to become the house’s owner, while the aristocrats scheming against him receive their just downfalls—a trajectory bespeaking strongly middle-class values. At a low point in the novel, when the main characters are forced to assume a working-class disguise, Walter becomes an anonymous engraver for cheap illustrated newspapers. William R. McKelvy argues that Walter’s engraving work proves the novel’s democratic sensibility, as it shows “an aggressive faith in the industrial arts.”⁵⁶ Yet the novel’s depictions of new visual media are not clearly democratic. Walter’s furtive work in graphic design, published anonymously, opposes the novel’s broader investment in a good name, reputation, lineage, and class propriety. By the end, he has escaped his demeaning engraving work to ascend as the fitting proprietor of Limmeridge House.⁵⁷ His high-art, aesthetic sensibility suits him for this genteel role, as evidenced by his identity as a drawing master well-versed in the singular arts of painting and watercolor.⁵⁸ Meanwhile, photography is the province of the villainous aristocrat and aesthete Mr. Fairlie, who makes photographic reproductions of his beloved art collections in a narcissistic act of self-promotion. If anything, the novel shows how the newer reproductive arts might work hand-in-hand with older, more singular kinds of artworks to promote hierarchy and social order. These conservative investments reflect the way that sensation itself, in both novels and photographs, existed uneasily alongside the language of “democratization” that critics applied to it—as a greater accessibility to mass arts emerged in what was still a highly unequal, hierarchical, and undemocratic society. The Woman in White gains affective energy from this conflict between hierarchy and democratization, mining the conflict in order to generate a sensational story, in particular through its use of the female portrait.

Collins’s novel offers a vexed politics of vision in its numerous portraits of women. A watercolor portrait of Laura launches Walter’s retrospective narration: this image is just one of a surfeit of female portraits, an excess that highlights the novel’s difficulty in characterizing women. Female characters are repeatedly transformed into image, often in scenes of sensational, spectacular display. The framing and flattening of women into pictures enables the persistent doubling, exchange, even interchangeability among certain female characters. When Walter first beholds the woman in white on a nighttime road to London, he describes the scene as a visual spectacle:

There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.⁵⁹

The sudden appearance of the ghostly figure is theatrical but also pictorial, a moment of splendid visual pause, almost a tableau vivant, as the whiteness of the woman’s clothes leaps out against London’s dark cloud. Walter’s narration nervously reflects the aura of illicit sexuality looming over the event, as he is solicited by an unknown woman on a public road at midnight.

This initial encounter is the first in a series of striking pictorial tableaux aligning women with an image culture that is both sensational and repetitive. When Walter realizes that Laura Fairlie is the spitting image of his mysterious stranger loosed from the asylum, the realization comes in the form of another picture, as Laura stands poised on the evening terrace:

There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight; in her attitude, in the turn of her head, in her complexion, in the shape of her face, the living image, at that distance and under those circumstances, of the woman in white!

The dramatic white spotlight of moon creates a sense of sculptural pause, setting Laura off as a “living image” against the dark evening. Laura’s existence as a living image, a copy of the woman in white, resonates problematically throughout the book: as the plot twists inexorably exchange Laura for Anne, resulting in Laura’s dispossession of her fortune and her sense of self, their interchangeability seems highly dependent upon the way that they have both appeared in the novel as a series of pictures. If sensation novels are known for inspiring hair-raising thrills in both characters and readers, these exciting moments of female pictorialism suggest that nervous response is inspired by a radical female visibility, encapsulated in the image. The female portrait presents an eroticized white body that triangulates desire between reader and spectating character.

Whiteness itself in the novel becomes a sign of female interchangeability and, unexpectedly, sexual immorality. White alludes to innocence, virginity, Englishness, and skin (or what the novel repeatedly refers to as a “fair complexion.”) But it is also an improper color for a woman to wear outdoors, intensifying the sensations inspired by the female apparitions. White clothes were considered especially appropriate for young women and girls, connoting interiors and domesticity.⁶⁰ All the more shocking, then, when Anne Catherick appears on the night road in the novel’s dramatic early scene wearing the white uniform of an asylum inmate. Her clothes signify a domesticity that is startlingly transported outdoors, turned inside out; whiteness heightens the effect of a transgressive female public visibility that iterates across the novel. Collins’s publishers cannily chose Walter’s nighttime confrontation with the white-clad Anne for the book’s cover illustration in numerous editions (Fig. 4.10). Sensation engages in a Victorian marketing campaign that packages an erotic whiteness for ready consumption, linking interchangeable women with the mass production of commodities, including books. No wonder that The Woman in White inspired commodities targeted at the boudoir, such as toiletries, perfumes, and, of course, white dressing gowns.⁶¹

Fig. 4.10 Illustrated cover for The Woman in White “yellowback” edition, published by Chatto & Windus, 1889. Courtesy of the collection of Andrew Gasson.

The novel’s parade of female “living images” suggests a problematic relationship between appearance and identity. When Laura starts to lose her identity, eventually to be transformed into Anne, the novel threatens to suggest that image is everything—at least, when it comes to Laura’s type of femininity. Sensation’s vexed engagement with “The Woman Question” manifests in the novel’s contradictory attitudes toward female empowerment. Collins’s novel promotes a familiar Victorian female type in Laura, demure, modest, self-effacing to a fault, and so weak that she almost begins to believe that she is another person. She offers a striking contrast to her sister, Marian, whose unique look combines darker skin and a masculine moustache with a strong female personality. Though Marian represents a more unusual, heroic feminine type, the novel ultimately relegates her to the role of spinster, while elevating Laura as Walter’s romantic love interest and feminine ideal. The Woman in White thus takes an ambivalent stance about the extent to which women should be original, unique, and nonconformist. The same issue is inherently raised by mass photography, especially as it enabled women like Catherine Walters to make their names.

Observing the trouble with female conformity in Collins’s novel helps us to understand the dialectical relations defining the sensational photograph, as the pictured woman wavered between mere copy and extraordinary individual. To be “extraordinary,” in our contemporary lexicon, connotes a marvelous originality. But for Victorian commentators, writing within a culture that prized female obedience to gender norms, to be extraordinary was to invite negative attention and even public censure. The extraordinary, like sensation itself, bordered on the freakish and the weird. Thus Linton’s Girl of the Period is distinguished by her “vitiated taste” for the “extraordinary,” while Robert Audley declares Lady Audley’s portrait to be “an extraordinary picture.”⁶² Walter Hartright regards the white-clad Anne Catherick as an “extraordinary apparition”: the word “extraordinary” appears in The Woman in White more than fifty times. The extraordinary shares similarities with the famous, as both concepts, though valued today, possessed darker meanings for nineteenth-century critics. Fame is not that different from infamy when it comes to the Victorian woman appearing in public, opening herself up to comment, visibility, and exposure.

To be extraordinary is to stand out from the crowd, to be original, different or unusual. When Catherine Walters becomes the epitome of daring style, however, she also becomes someone whom other women copied. The doubtful qualities obtaining to the “extraordinary” seem appropriate to the ambiguities of a decade when people were debating mass enfranchisement, questioning the rights of the one versus the many, and wondering about the benefits of being an original versus being a follower. John Stuart Mill defends individual liberties against the “tyranny of the majority” in 1859, right on the cusp of the sensation phenomenon. Eliza Lynn Linton courts contradiction when she attacks the Girl of the Period both for being attracted to the “extraordinary” and for servile copyism of the demi-monde.

A similar confusion governed the production of mass photography: everyone was doing it, yet certain persons became famous and collectible in the carte—one of the nineteenth century’s typical, yet paradoxical, combinations of exceptionalism and democratization. On the one hand, carte culture fueled a Victorian cult of the original self. The realism of photographic portraiture, one critic observed, reproduced “the very lines that Nature has engraven on our faces” such “that no two are alike.”⁶³ Many rhapsodized on the ability of the best carte portraits to “show the soul of the original [sitter]—that individuality or selfhood, which differences him from all other beings, past, present, or future.”⁶⁴ An 1863 article on the carte de visite was aptly titled “The Philosophy of Yourself.”⁶⁵ The collectible portrait photograph would seem to define par excellence the visual culture of liberalism, enshrining the singular face.

Yet these hymns to individualism emerged against the backdrop of photography’s vast industrialization and its acutely conventional, middle-class visual style. Geoffrey Batchen concludes that cartes photography “is all about the semiotics of typology and the sublimation of the individual to the mass.”⁶⁶ This assessment seems rather sweeping, given the celebrity culture surrounding the carte. Batchen’s art-historical sensibility perhaps leads him too quickly to dismiss the distinctive qualities attributable to a mass-produced item. After all, carte portraits would have been quite particular and diverse to the people who collected them. Though the similarity of pose and costume today might make these images blur together, Victorian viewers would have recognized the persons being photographed, whether celebrities or friends, creating a specific and unique viewing experience—just as, today, the mind-numbing repetitiveness of modern social media does not prevent our lingering over its platforms to observe the minutiae of small differences among our “friends.” Rather than seeing cartes photography as formulaic, flat, and perfectly interchangeable, as Batchen does, my analysis sees the carte de visite as part of a larger sensational dialectic invested in both extraordinary individuals and a democratized mass. The celebrity carte pushed these contradictions to an extreme, as a person gained a singular name and a distinctive image through the reproduction and sale of thousands of exactly the same picture. Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White helps to explain why women’s photographs, in particular, focalized this dialectic: the constraints of Victorian female gender roles made female conformity into both a desirable mandate and a fraught cage, states of being that the novel dramatizes via the divergent femininity modeled by its two female protagonists—one a formulaic beauty and the other an extraordinary heroine.

The Actress, the Diva, the New Public Face

The power bestowed by the carte de visite heralded a new kind of celebrity, one based on image, notoriety, and a fleeting kind of fame familiar to us from today’s tabloid culture. “No man, or woman either, knows but that some accident may elevate them to the position of the hero of the hour, and send up the value of their countenances to a degree they never dreamed of,” writes one 1862 critic of the carte de visite.⁶⁷ Unlike the English class system or political system, the carte system of value depended only upon a fame of the hour. By this free-market standard, a courtesan might be “worth” just as much as a bishop. In the sensation economy of the carte, image was everything—especially the erotic or sexualized image of morally questionable women. A carte’s value was assigned only by its exchange value on the capitalist market, equalizing and standardizing all figures within the image and format.

The types of female fame available in the carte are catalogued, humorously, by Jane Carlyle in an 1865 letter to her husband as she marvels at her own appearance in a photographic shop window: “[F]or being neither a ‘distinguished authoress,’ nor a ‘celebrated murderess,’ nor an actress, nor a ‘Skittles’ (the four classes of women promoted to the shop-windows) it can only be as Mrs Carlyle that they offer me for sale!”⁶⁸ Carlyle’s comment is funny because it reproduces the logic of interchangeability implied by the carte format: as photography lines up female bodies in a row, in similar dimensions and poses, a woman writer might become transposable with a courtesan or a female murderer. As Carlyle implies, any female fame might carry the taint of scandal because a woman’s image for sale, combining femininity and commercialism, would inevitably connote prostitution for many Victorians. Yet despite the disreputable tinge to female public visibility, Carlyle’s bemused pride suggests that celebrity itself was not completely unwelcome.

That photography captured portraits of many respectable, highly placed individuals in the Victorian world highlights its status as a mixed medium: the carte de visite traced its roots back to venerable painted portraits of the eighteenth century, even while offering a more intimate, modern view in mass-produced format. Photographic historian Christopher Pinney suggests that carte portraits have antecedents in eighteenth-century “swagger portraits,” images that elevated “public display” over “the more private values of personality and domesticity.”⁶⁹ Associated with continental European painters such as Batoni, Van Dyck, and Winterhalter, the “swagger” genre emphasized the sitters’ “glamour and theatricality.”⁷⁰ Unlike Rembrandt’s portraits, which probed the depths of sitters’ souls, these portraits instead offered a brilliant exteriority:

We are in the realm of theatre—elaborately coded fictions. The silks, satins and taffetas worn by these men and women, the ermine, braid that artists painted with such finesse and brio, are not clothes so much as costumes: signals of rank.⁷¹

Batoni’s portrait of Princess Ludovisi (c. 1758) abounds with rich textures of velvet, lace, fur, and sparkling gems, attesting to the performed rank of the sitter (Fig. 4.11). These signs also blend with the trappings of high art—marble bust, neoclassical pillar, harpsichord, lyre, and poet’s wreath. The symbolic items testify to the princess’s artistic accomplishments, while also affirming the portrait’s own aesthetic aura.

Fig. 4.11 A “swagger portrait”: Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Princess Giacinta Orsini Buoncampagni Ludovisi, oil on canvas, c. 1758. The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

The swagger portrait served as the recognizable template for the cartes de visite of aristocratic ladies such as those taken by Camille Silvy, often considered the greatest cartes photographer.⁷² Known in the 1860s as the major portraitist of the British upper classes, Silvy’s cartes depicted women in exquisite gowns, posed in rooms lavishly decorated with furniture, tapestries, and art objects. His “Beauties of England” series (1862–3) offered cartes of women at the height of Victorian society, posed with rich accoutrements and elaborate painted backdrops in visual codes that reached directly back to the eighteenth century. Silvy’s carte de visite of the Duchess of Wellington imitates a painted swagger portrait, directing the eye to the impressive, textured folds of her dress and the fine lacework of her shawl (Fig. 4.12). The photo conspicuously rehearses the visual formula of Batoni’s Princess Ludovisi portrait, positioning the woman amid neoclassical sculpted pillars and vases, and setting her before a landscape scene stretching off into the distance. Silvy’s photograph, however, perhaps unwittingly highlights the artifice of Batoni’s formula: the “landscape” opening out beside the photographed woman is a painting, rather than a window, and the neoclassical vase and pillar above her shoulder appear to be cardboard cutouts. Batoni’s painting itself assembles a neat arrangement of faux visual signifiers that likely did not coexist in life: the landscape backdrop is not a realistic window view so much as a symbol of the princess’s privileged relation to property. The clear artifice of the painted portrait tradition likely explains why Silvy’s carte, with its patently false cardboard props, still conveys an aura of gentility and aesthetic conviction—an aura that only flickers upon close scrutiny of the image.

Fig. 4.12 Camille Silvy, Carte de visite of the Duchess of Wellington, 1860. The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography.

While the painted portrait consolidated its auratic status in the nineteenth century, eighteenth-century portraits were not themselves uniform signifiers of privilege and gentility. In fact, some of the century’s most famous portraits depicted women with more daring or lower-class backgrounds. British actresses, in particular, used portraits to wage publicity campaigns to further their careers. Joshua Reynolds’s famous portrait, Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784) (Fig. 4.13), gained tremendous renown and played a definitive role in transforming Sarah Siddons into what Judith Pascoe calls “the most public woman of the day.”⁷³ Reynolds’s painting was still ubiquitous in the Victorian visual lexicon almost a century later, as seen when a carte de visite critic alludes to it—in this case, mocking a photographer for forcing a working-class female sitter “to take upon herself a Siddonian mien, as though just uttering the words, ‘Give me the daggers!’”⁷⁴ Siddons’s portrait here signifies an uncontested high culture, but the original painting itself was more mixed and ambiguous: it invoked the high arts of ancient tragedy and Shakespearean drama while limning an actress who performed live theater on a London stage. The scandalous sight of the actress’s displayed body is contained by the painting’s exalted historical framework, expressed in the woman’s grand gesture.⁷⁵ Scholars have documented how Siddons used portraiture to elevate her status to that of great tragedienne, laying claim to a respectability that was always under threat given the long-standing ties of actresses to prostitution.⁷⁶ Shearer West writes that eighteenth-century actresses were subjected to what she calls a “body connoisseurship,” “a kind of scrutiny of the body which could displace or confuse lustful voyeurism with cultivated admiration.”⁷⁷ The actress portrait therefore epitomized the actress’s uneasy oscillation between lofty idealization and ignoble embodiment. Siddons sat for more portraits than any other actress of her age, using painting as a key instrument to fashion a nascent form of modern celebrity.⁷⁸

Fig. 4.13 Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, 1784. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, CA, USA. © The Huntington Library, Art Collections & Botanical Gardens/Bridgeman Images.

The eighteenth-century swagger portraits or actress portraits, with their performative, exaggerated styles, found their inheritors in the photographic celebrity carte, especially those depicting female actresses and opera singers. These cartes epitomized sensational photographs, with their fleeting popularity and frank complicity with female theatrical display. While a singular, painted portrait might seem starkly different from a mass-produced, ephemeral photograph, both were engaged in the theatrical task of portraying a public face, creating the familiar, recognizable façade of the body. And, like their painterly forebears, actress cartes also used mixed effects from both high and low culture to create the female portrait. Sensation’s transgressions in the social and sexual realms also expressed themselves aesthetically, contravening the expected bounds of form and artistry. (Aesthetic confusion similarly governed the reception of sensation novels—as when reviewers of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White were flummoxed by the novel’s combination of melodramatic elements with an innovative and intricate plot structure. The novel thus served as a controversial site for debating what constituted high art versus mere entertainment.)⁷⁹ Sensational objects were both titillating and aesthetic, artforms themselves unmoored from traditional understandings of value.

These confusions are evident in the theater cartes of Camille Silvy, who first made his reputation in England by photographing actresses and opera singers.⁸⁰ His carte de visite portraits of the opera star Adelina Patti in the early 1860s sold more than 20,000 copies.⁸¹ An arresting 1861 photograph of Patti cultivates aspects of both gentility and sensation (Fig. 4.14). She wears an elaborate dress like those seen in cartes of aristocratic ladies, but she also appears among stage props that include a fake tree, a painted backdrop of a forest, and a taxidermied dog. Her open mouth and flirtatious pose pretend to catch her onstage, mid-aria, yet the scene has clearly been staged in the photographer’s studio. Silvy’s 1860 carte of Rosa Csillag as Orfeo similarly offers both high-art and sensational cues (Fig. 4.15). Csillag bears all of the familiar tokens of Orpheus, mythical master of music, with her lyre, toga, and crowning laurel. The mis-en-scène presents ruined arches and broken pillars—ruins that speak less of classical Greece than of neoclassical Old Master paintings, as well as a Romantic aesthetic privileging the fragment. Yet these high-art signifiers gain a frisson in the figure of Orpheus herself, a woman performing a man’s role, combining masculine toga with revealing tights and ballerina’s slippers.

Fig. 4.14 Camille Silvy, Carte de visite of Adelina Patti as Harriet in Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha, 1861. Bequeathed by Guy Little. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Fig. 4.15 Camille Silvy, Carte de visite of Rosa Csillag as Orfeo, albumen print, 184 × 117 mm, 1860. Private collection, Paris.

Both of these cartes point to the special role played by actresses in creating new forms of Victorian celebrity. To a much greater extent than in the eighteenth century, when Sarah Siddons reigned as the Tragic Muse, the Victorian world celebrated a passive, domestic, middle-class feminine ideal—one that the female performer contravened, despite her attempts to present herself as modest and familial. The actress’s “public existence seemed to preclude private respectability,” writes theater historian Tracy C. Davis: actresses challenged patriarchal norms in ways that resulted in their “social ostracism and vilification.”⁸² Victorian prejudices that linked acting to prostitution, Davis notes, went beyond the mere fact that both traded on the female body, offered in public for money. More fundamentally, both careers allowed women a rare economic self-sufficiency: “[N]o other occupations could be so financially rewarding for single, independent Victorian women of outgoing character, fine build, and attractive features.”⁸³ The actress onstage could command the gaze of an audience and hold it spellbound with her words. It is no coincidence that sensation narratives featured women with backgrounds in stage acting, while also favoring villainesses who were adept at nefarious forms of role-playing. The actress carte, then, like that of the powerful courtesan, also participated in a kind of female self-making, one that played upon the availability and visibility of the female body to create a brand and a career.

While photographic portraits as a genre always entail a kind of performance, cartes of Victorian actresses literalized and amplified that fact, with details of costume and pose creating a fantastical, desirable, and collectible persona. A single actress often appeared across a variety of cartes, staged in a phantasmagoric, mutable array of costumes, props, and settings. The opera singer Patti was featured in a carte series by Silvy documenting the six roles she performed at the Covent Garden Italian Opera in 1861, when she made her triumphant London debut at age nineteen. A carte “souvenir” offered a medley of those images, set off in oval frames, showing Patti as Lucia, Zerlina, and other leading operatic ladies (Fig. 4.16). These cartes are highly staged, ornamented, and narratively expressive. Critics used the language of high art and musicality to review Patti’s performances, but her portrayal in actress cartes shows how her performance was contiguous with other sensational female phenomena, reflecting the opera’s mixture of musicianship and eroticism.⁸⁴ In one of her famous 1861 roles, captured by Silvy, Patti played Violetta in Verdi’s 1853 opera La Traviata—a work whose title literally translates as “the fallen woman” and whose story features a beautiful young courtesan who dies of tuberculosis. (By the early 1860s, a “traviata” was a slang term for a prostitute—a term applied, predictably, to Catherine Walters in the poem “Sensation! A Satire.”)⁸⁵ Perhaps owing to the racy subject-matter, Patti’s Violetta in Silvy’s carte de visite appears perfectly chaste, costumed in a modest, high-necked white gown amid a domestic interior. By contrast, her portrayal as Amina, in Bellini’s La Sonnambula, is more daring: Silvy’s carte depicts her in the opera’s climactic scene, as the white-clad Amina—suspected of immorality after having been discovered in a Lord’s bedroom—unwittingly proves her virtue by sleepwalking over a treacherous, derelict bridge in front of gathered townspeople (Fig. 4.17). This carte seems especially apropos of the sensation moment, with its girl costumed in an ankle-baring white dressing gown, carrying a suspenseful candle, standing before a painted backdrop depicting the old mill wheel and the crumbling bridge. As in Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White, the imperiled heroine thrills with a risqué appearance in a white nightgown, outdoors, in public, at night.⁸⁶

Fig. 4.16 Ashford Brothers & Co., “The Patti Souvenir.” Carte-de-visite medley of photographs of the opera singer Adelina Patti taken by Camille Silvy, c. 1861. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Fig. 4.17 Camille Silvy, Hand-tinted carte de visite of Adelina Patti as Amina in Bellini’s La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), c. 1861. The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography.

Despite Patti’s high-art status as an opera diva, her cartes de visite adhere to the formula for actress cartes of all types, combining alluring costumes with scenes of high narrative suggestiveness. A similar formula governs the image in a carte depicting Lydia Thompson as the heroine in a version of The Colleen Bawn, the most sensational of the 1860s sensation dramas (Fig. 4.18). Thompson is costumed in Eily O’Connor’s iconic red cloak, its color apparent in the carte’s hand-tinted version. (The red cloak predictably became a fashionable commodity in the wake of the play’s success.)⁸⁷ Yet despite the carte’s sensational subject-matter, the image is surprisingly artful in portraying the actress amid the conventional portrait furniture of neoclassical pillar, rich drapery, even a classical bust. These respectable tokens are especially incongruous given that Thompson was starring in a burlesque adaptation of Boucicault’s play, in what was an even less reputable version of an already suspiciously “low” genre.⁸⁸ There is little to distinguish Thompson’s carte from those of Patti in her operatic roles, with the exception of the length of the woman’s skirt. All of these images suggest that the actress herself had something in common with the photographic carte, as both hovered ambiguously between sensation and respectability, commerce and art, the body and the pose.

Fig. 4.18 Hand-tinted carte de visite of Lydia Thompson as Eily O’Connor in The Colleen Bawn Settled at Last, c. 1862. The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography.

This discussion has been tracing a historical arc from eighteenth-century painted portraits to nineteenth-century photographic cartes. Yet photography was just one of the media of mass portrait reproduction; the engraved or lithographic print also served as a crucial visual vehicle for the female celebrity portrait. While it is beyond the chapter’s scope to encompass the full range of paper-based mass portraiture, I want to highlight one striking satire of the phenomenon. In Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1851–3), a poignant subplot follows the impoverished Mr. Weevle as he adorns his barren walls with cheap engraved female portraits—grandly named the “Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty,” and “representing ladies of title and fashion in every variety of smirk that art, combined with capital, is capable of producing.”⁸⁹ Writing in the moment just before the rise of the carte de visite, Dickens comically captures the distinctive portrait formula, inherited from the eighteenth century, and now cheaply remade for a mass audience: “the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty wears every variety of fancy dress, plays every variety of musical instrument, fondles every variety of dog, ogles every variety of prospect, and is backed up by every variety of flower-pot and balustrade”—an idiotic repetition that seems almost nihilistic in its empty formulaicism. Yet Weevle loves his portraits, and gains “unspeakable consolation” from tracking “the brilliant and distinguished meteors that are shooting across the fashionable sky in every direction.” In Bleak House, prints (in this case, “copper-plate impressions”) are the poor man’s portrait gallery, a sad echo of the more elevated paintings possessed by wealthier characters.⁹⁰ The “Galaxy of British Beauty” defines a familiar paradigm of modern celebrity, as Weevle feels like he knows the famous women who adorn his walls, even while the novel savagely ironizes the economic and cultural divides that make his presumptions absurd. It is only one step from Dickens’s satirical “Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty” to Silvy’s unironic photographic series “Beauties of England,” as female portraits of well-known women are mass-produced in ever greater numbers. The form mimics the content, in copper-plate print, fashion plate, or carte-de-visite photograph: each new reinvention of the fashionable portrait escalates the distinctive relationship between capitalism and time, by which the modern market demands a constant renewal of styles or trends, accompanied by inevitable obsolescence. Cartes portraits were just one of a range of visual contributors to a feminized realm of fashion, surfaces, and an embryonic mass culture.

The sense of trajectory from the fine to the popular arts, however, should not obscure the “mixed” reality of all of these media. Even while the opera diva Patti was captured in Silvy’s cartes, she also simultaneously appeared in collectible lithographs and engravings, as well as in an 1863 portrait by the celebrated artist Franz Winterhalter, court painter to European monarchs. Some of the engraved and lithographic portraits of Patti were modeled from photographs, a common Victorian practice—showing how the rise of visual media was not a one-way march but a hybrid and diverse patchwork. A Pears’ Soap advertisement from the 1880s uses Patti’s photographic likeness, along with her high-art, musical associations, to lend an aura of aesthetic seriousness to the soap brand (Fig. 4.19). (I discuss further in Chapter 6 how late-Victorian visual advertising appropriated fine-art subjects and styles to market new commodities.) The carte itself exemplifies media hybridity in its triangulation of painting, photography, and theater: it captures some of the theater’s most sensational aspects—with the embodied display of eroticized female types—while stilling and framing these elements before a painted backdrop, in styles and poses inherited from the painted portraits of a previous century.

Fig. 4.19 An engraved advertisement for Pears’ Soap featuring Patti, in an image copied from a photograph, 1885. Collection of the author.

The visual icon of the actress, from her eighteenth-century portrait to her Victorian carte, perhaps always entailed an element of what came to be called, in the 1860s, “sensation.” In the following section, however, I want to consider how the photographic medium also differed from previous visual media, with a realistic treatment of the body that was especially apt to the sensation moment.

Queen Victoria’s Iconic Visibility

In his study Celebrity (2001), Chris Rojek argues that the concept undergoes a historical shift in the modern age: monarchs and aristocrats—what he deems “ascribed celebrities”—have been displaced by upstarts or “achieved celebrities,” strivers of more modest backgrounds such as artists, actors, or certain politicians.⁹¹ The sensational 1860s offer an especially pointed moment in this history, as actresses and courtesans became the public faces of a new, achieved celebrity. Carte-de-visite critic Andrew Wynter wants to contend in 1862 that actress and dancer cartes are only popular with the French, who show a natural inclination toward portraits “aimed at sensual appetites.”⁹² Juliet Hacking, however, disproves Wynter’s claim by pointing to the survival of hundreds of British theater cartes.⁹³ We can easily understand why the critic would want to insist that the English prefer carte portraits of “our public men—our great lawyers, painters, literary men, travellers and priests”—rather than portraits of Britain’s public women, whose alluring faces courted taboo.⁹⁴ That the parvenu celebrities of the 1860s are mostly women stands as a counterpoint to the basic blunt fact of British patriarchy, encapsulated in the diverse male faces of Wynter’s “public men.”⁹⁵

This gendered divide is troubled, however, in the case of Britain’s most recognizable nineteenth-century celebrity, namely, Queen Victoria. The staid Queen, who appeared in cartes de visite in demure and highly respectable poses with her husband and children, might seem the opposite of the sensational women discussed in this chapter. Yet Queen Victoria was the focal point of a relentless publicity that utterly imbricated her in the sensation moment, as her photograph became the consummate collectible, bought, sold, and vastly circulated. As her portrait was reproduced across multiple pictorial media, including the carte de visite, the Queen attained an “iconic visibility”—the powerful visual familiarity typical of modern celebrity culture.⁹⁶ The cartomania craze in England was in fact touched off in 1860 when photographer J. J. E. Mayall marketed his “Royal Album” depicting the Queen, Prince, and their children; Mayall sold 60,000 sets in Great Britain, the Colonies, and the US.⁹⁷ Queen Victoria was herself an enthusiastic cartes collector and possessor of some thirty-six albums.⁹⁸ A lady-in-waiting wittily proposed in 1860 that “the Queen could be bought and sold for a Photograph!”—language that seems ironic, given that the Queen was indeed being bought and sold via her image in the carte.⁹⁹ Queen Victoria’s passion for cartes collecting was just one instance of her lifelong pursuit of photography; royal patronage helped to secure the broader commercial success of the new visual medium.¹⁰⁰ In her active consumption of photography, Victoria became both image and consumer, much like the courtesan Catherine Walters: she emerged as one more incarnation of the exemplary commercial woman.

Cartes of the Queen, unlike other cartes, have received considerable scholarly attention for illuminating Victoria’s vexed queenly status as both woman and ruler in a constraining Victorian age. Margaret Homans notes how Victoria paradoxically exerted her agency by disseminating her own image as a passive, middle-class wife and mother. “Posing as ordinary was Victoria’s mode of sovereignty: to put her ordinariness on royal display for popular admiration.”¹⁰¹ Victoria’s masterstroke of publicity, as Homans and others have observed, was to sit for portraits that eschewed any royal pomp or state symbolism, presenting herself instead in the conventional, submissive guise of a bourgeois wife and mother. Many of Mayall’s cartes show her sitting demurely beside a standing Prince Albert, eyes downcast; in other poses, she stands beside a seated Albert, looking upon him attentively and devotedly (Fig. 4.20).¹⁰² John Plunkett christens Victoria “the first media monarch,” arguing that she harnessed the democratizing, universalizing associations of photography in order to transform the monarchy into a more populist and progressive-seeming institution.¹⁰³ For Geoffrey Batchen, when the Queen poses as a bourgeois matron she loses her royal authenticity, becoming “visually equivalent to her subjects (who owned cartes of themselves in the same basic pose and studio setting).… No longer having a unique existence in time and space, she is only valued as and through reproduction. She becomes image, an imitation of herself, a ghostly ideological construct.”¹⁰⁴ This dematerialization is itself the very stuff of celebrity, feeding into a rage for royalty that would develop into Britain’s ravenous tabloid culture.

Fig. 4.20 John J. E. Mayall, “The Queen and Prince Consort.” Carte de visite, 1861. Bequeathed by Guy Little. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Yet I would not go so far as Batchen in stressing the ghostliness of these photographs. Appearing as they did in the early 1860s, in the heart of the sensation controversy, the Queen’s cartes also provoked questions about female embodiment and female publicity akin to those that followed other sensational images and objects. Even while Victoria styled herself in unassuming, middle-class poses, some critics objected to her depiction in carte-de-visite form, arguing that her humble and too-real appearance as a bourgeois wife and mother contravened her elevated royal status. The piercing realistic detail in the photograph deflated the more flattering generalities of a painted portrait, creating what some deemed “slanders upon the Royal Race.”¹⁰⁵ “A nervous partizan [sic] of monarchy might fear that so intimate an acquaintance with Royal physiognomies might be apt to produce the proverbial result of familiarity.”¹⁰⁶ The carte version of the Queen was accused of taking “familiarities” and “sin[ning] against propriety”—another problematic female display reminiscent of sensational indecorum.¹⁰⁷ Conversely, one critic assailed cartes of the Queen in mourning for Prince Albert as too theatrical, too unrealistic, exemplifying “bad taste” for invading and displaying “the very privacy of her grief.”¹⁰⁸ These “photographic impostures” are the unfortunate result of the typical English carte consumer “demand[ing] ‘effect’ above all things—something that will give him a sensation beyond his ordinary round of ideas.”¹⁰⁹ Sensationalism, for this critic, characterizes the carte’s unseemly crossing between private and public, as the image transforms what should be a private moment into a theatrical, commercial scene.

While Queen Victoria exemplified what Rojek terms an ascribed celebrity, gaining her power and fame via inheritance, she also became sensationalized in the carte de visite in the manner of an achieved celebrity—ironically enough—by crafting the ordinariness of her own embodied image. The very fact of the monarch’s celebrity treatment lent a sensational cast to an otherwise archaic, respectable source of power, a transformation that persisted and accelerated into the twentieth century in the media coverage of royal figures. If Victoria’s celebrity status worked to dematerialize her into an image, the carte photograph also humanized her into a real body, a problematic female incarnation whose semblance was supposed to signify the private, domestic sphere. The fact that the monarch was a woman opened her up to the problems of visibility troubling any Victorian woman who became a public figure and traded upon her own likeness for advancement.

The diverse kinds of female celebrities appearing in cartes were scandalous not only for their equalization—courtesan alongside Queen—but also for the impertinence of the photographic medium itself, which proffered realistic details about female bodies in a way that painted portraits did not. As I discuss further in Chapter 5, one of the nineteenth century’s most famous photographic theorists, Oliver Wendell Holmes, writes in “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” (1859) of the way that photographs use light to capture an object’s “membranes,” “visible films” or “skins.”¹¹⁰ (Roland Barthes expresses a similar impulse in Camera Lucida: “A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”)¹¹¹ From this perspective, a photographic portrait is not the mere mute objectification of a person, but a lingering engagement with that person’s intimate, unique surfaces, a literal touching of the body with light. This idea might help to explain why the photographic portrait seemed scandalous to some critics in the 1860s, especially when it was depicting the female body. Even though Queen Victoria’s portraits seem stubbornly tame, they became sensational, even sexualized, in photographic form: the medium itself was touching her. The carte thus offered a two-way street between sensation and perception, between the sitter’s body and the viewer’s body—mediated by a two-dimensional “skin,” to be collected and possessed in hand-sized cards easily touched or passed around. Unlike a painting or even a larger-sized print, the carte offered a unique experience of tactility and proximity, an im-mediacy whose tantalizing combination of presence and absence has become a familiar component of modern celebrity.¹¹²

This discussion of carte portraiture diverges from more familiar critical narratives about nineteenth-century photography, accounts that deconstruct its apparent realism, or even align it with postmodern modes of abstraction and dematerialization. Victorian responses to carte portraiture dwelled upon the materiality of the image, reflecting the way that the imagery concentrated in itself many of the Victorian desires and anxieties surrounding embodiment. The sensationalist carte partook of both the body and its mediated, simulated presence.

Whiteness and Others: Sensations of Race

Photography’s tactile qualities, its haptic realism, make it an exemplary medium for the sensation moment: the intimacy of a photographic portrait brings us close to the skin of the sitter, in a cartes format that is made for handling. Skin itself is the ground zero of sensation, the ultimate site of its experience, host to nerves, gooseflesh, blushing, or bruises. “I am unfortunate in having a skin which the slightest touch bruises,” says Lady Audley to Robert Audley, upon his noticing the “four slender, purple marks” on her wrist looking suspiciously like a man’s grasp. Skin is the place where characters feel, but it is also a part of the sensational spectacle, especially when the body being seen is female.

Questions of skin are inseparable from those of race, particularly at a time when some of the most sensational world events covered by the British media foregrounded racial difference—from the so-called Indian Mutiny in 1857, to the American Civil War in 1861–5, to the Jamaican revolt at Morant Bay in 1865. Most of the women inspiring controversy in the early 1860s were Caucasian—“women in white,” indeed—yet their racial purity or Englishness was often ambiguous, suspicious, or under threat. Both M. E. Braddon’s sensation novel The Octoroon; or, the Lily of Louisiana (1861–2) and Dion Boucicault’s sensation drama The Octoroon (1859) featured light-skinned, mixed-race heroines whose respectability was imperiled by their invisible “drop” of African blood.

Less obviously, some of the Caucasian women deemed sensational in the 1860s were seen to embody a kind of racialized whiteness, from the Girl of the Period, with her red-haired, obliquely Irish braid, to the opera star Patti, whose Italian descent would have aligned her with the type of the Mediterranean, Catholic, “Southern” woman. The famous French actress Rachel created the prototype of the tragic “Jewess” actress, a powerful yet vulnerable figure who recurs in sensation fiction from Esther Vanberg in Braddon’s Rupert Godwin (1867) to even the Alcharisi in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). As Kimberly Snyder Manganelli argues, the actress’s Jewishness confirmed her other troubling yet alluring qualities, as she enthralled her onlookers by exhibiting her body onstage.¹¹³ When conservative critics expressed anxieties about the fast modern English girl, they did so using predictable imagery of racial contamination. Eliza Lynn Linton’s Girl of the Period styles her hair “like certain savages in Africa … and thinks herself all the more beautiful the nearer she approaches in look to a negress or a maniac” (4). A critic in the London Review in 1860 similarly derides the English “fast young lady” for her love of bright, flashy clothes and ornaments, a taste she shares with “African savages.”¹¹⁴ Linton’s essay, in particular, is striking for its tone of national outrage: the Girl of the Period, with her red hair and offensive African style, is a travesty of the traditional English girl. In her imitation of prostitutes, she has sacrificed “all that once gave her distinctive national character” (6). While Lucy Graham in Lady Audley’s Secret presents herself as a blonde, blue-eyed paragon of English womanhood, the Pre-Raphaelite portrait depicting her with flaming red hair hints at the true, demonic nature lurking beneath her placid surface. In all of these cases, public or villainous femininity is rendered as a racial problem for the embodied, white-skinned women on view.

Sensation’s interests in racialized female bodies invite our consideration of a series of carte-de-visite photographs that both adhere to the visual formulae and also stunningly defy it. In 1862, at the height of sensation mania, Camille Silvy made a series of carte portraits of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, an African orphan who had been adopted as a god-daughter by Queen Victoria in 1850. The 1862 cartes depict the nineteen-year-old Bonetta in her wedding dress amid the familiar carte accessories of pillar, furniture, and painted backdrop (Fig. 4.21). Even while the images obey carte decorum, they inevitably evoke sensational contexts, beginning with Bonetta’s place of origin. Africa itself was cast in a sensational light in lurid travel books such as Savage Africa (1864) by W. Winwood Reade, in which a liberated explorer styles himself as a “young man about town” who aims “to flâner in the virgin forest, to flirt with pretty savages, and to smoke his cigar among cannibals.”¹¹⁵ (No wonder that a review attacks Reade for posing as a “sensational writer” and a “literary Don Juan.”)¹¹⁶ In this moment before Britain’s so-called High Imperialism, Reade’s sensationalizing narrative portrays Africa as a fantastical, homogenized place in which “savagery” is the automatic reference for a degraded, wholly embodied, sensual character.

Fig. 4.21 Camille Silvy, carte de visite of Sarah Forbes Bonetta in her wedding dress, 1862. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Bonetta’s life story was itself fraught with dramatic twists and a social leap worthy of a sensation novel.¹¹⁷ Though her actual ancestry is unknown, she was often called by Victorians an “African princess.” After her parents were murdered in a tribal war, she was enslaved at the court of the King of Dahomey (in what is now Benin), where she was found by Frederick Forbes, a naval captain on an anti-slavery mission. The King of Dahomey offered the child as a gift to Queen Victoria, which Forbes accepted, acknowledging the irony of the situation. Forbes baptized her after himself and his ship, the HMS Bonetta. In his 1851 memoirs, the captain emphasized her intelligence, her aptitude for English, and her beauty: “Her head is considered so excellent a phrenological specimen, and illustrating such high intellect, that M. Pistrucci, the medallist of the Mint, has undertaken to take a bust of her, intending to present the cast to the author.”¹¹⁸ Many portraits of Bonetta survive, in part due to the way that nineteenth-century portraits were used as phrenological or physiognomic evidence in Victorian debates about race. Her portraits by Silvy, however, also reflect her unusual, vaunted status as an educated Victorian lady and a god-daughter to the Queen.

That vaunted status makes Bonetta a complicated figure in the world of 1860s sensation. The Silvy portraits were made to commemorate Bonetta’s marriage to James Davies, a wealthy African merchant. Press coverage of the wedding, which took place in Brighton, noted the impressive number of carriages and the rich, fashionable costumes of those in attendance.¹¹⁹ Perhaps most sensationally, the wedding guests entered in mixed-race pairs, African gentlemen escorting English ladies and vice versa. Yet generally speaking, press coverage downplayed the unusual nature of the spectacle in order to derive an optimistic political message. The Brighton Herald celebrated

the spectacle of the natives of a distant Continent, separated from us by strong natural barriers, assembled under the wing of the Church of England, partaking of its rites, and recognised to all its privileges by a large party of fellow-subjects and fellow Christians, differing indeed in the colour of their skin, but asserting no social, religious, or natural superiority on that account.¹²⁰

While the Herald acknowledges the “spectacle” of the scene, its coverage subordinates the potentially sensational mixing of races to an overriding master-narrative of Britain’s paternalistic relationship to Africa. Bonetta’s wedding, and the cartes which commemorate the event, become the sign of Britain’s benevolent mission to Christianize and civilize “the dark continent.” That Bonetta and her husband were photographed by the Queen’s own photographer, in the same carte format as the Queen herself, speaks to Victoria’s self-fashioning as a maternal governor of empire, a monarch who rescues exceptional African children from savage, slave-trading despots back home and proves why Africans need British help. In the first instance, then, Bonetta’s visual performance as an aristocratic Englishwoman seems to affirm traditional hierarchies, including those of national and imperial difference.

Yet for all of the press coverage’s normalizing tone, it is difficult not to see Bonetta’s carte portraits as sensational, beginning with their determined adherence to the “Beauties of England” pattern. Like the other transgressive female portraits considered in this chapter, Bonetta’s cartes also exemplify the spectacle of a boundary-crossing woman who doesn’t fit into an assigned role in the British social system. In Fiction in the Age of Photography, Nancy Armstrong argues that photography established a range of visual types against which Victorians could measure their own faces. Identity itself was coded via photographic tropes, and “realism” in art emerged from an image’s relative proximity or distance to these typed expectations.¹²¹ If Bonetta had been photographed in the predictable Victorian visual imagery surrounding African women—as an ethnographic spectacle, in tribal dress, or akin to a Hottentot Venus—she would not shock in quite the way that the Silvy portraits do. It is when she appears in carte-de-visite format, styled as an aristocratic English lady, that the image gains its sensational qualities. Indeed, Bonetta becomes an important example of the sensational dialectic traced in this chapter, hovering somewhere between exceptionalism and massification: she is exceptional in her status as the Queen’s African god-daughter, but she is photographed in the generic setting typical of a wealthy Victorian woman. Her image defamiliarizes the carte formula by adhering to that very formula. She appears in an ordinary guise, but is extraordinary in that context. In some ways, this paradigm mirrors the cartes of the Queen herself, who also adopted the ordinariness of the carte format to her own, spectacular ends. Like the Queen, Bonetta was also an agent of her own image distribution. Her letters show her to have been meticulous as to points of costume and class etiquette; she enjoyed the fashionable aspects of being the Queen’s god-daughter, and welcomed the visual culture of elite Victorian womanhood.¹²² Though her cartes did not circulate to the same massive extent as those of the Queen, these photographs still confound Victorian visual paradigms, offering another unexpected form of female celebrity.

Star Culture in Photographic Time

The celebrity carte tradition invites a new theory of photographic temporality, one quite different from the familiar meditations on nineteenth-century photography by critics such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Roland Barthes. Each of these thinkers uses the early portrait photograph to create a very personal genre of criticism, ruminating on subjectivity and deep time. Barthes frames Camera Lucida around a portrait of his dead mother, taken when she was a girl; Kracauer looks to an antique image of his grandmother from her years as a young ingénue.¹²³ The nineteenth-century photo portrait, with its evocative, long-vanished face, compels these thinkers to meditate on photography’s relation to time, memory, mortality, and the historicity of viewing the past. Yet the temporality of early photography, in these accounts, strongly contrasts with the modes of time ascribed to the carte de visite. In fact, the carte introduces a new attitude toward Victorian portraiture and a new idea of photographic time, one compatible with the periodicity of sensation and celebrity.

The contrast appears most strikingly in Walter Benjamin’s “Short History of Photography” (1931). Here he embraces the daguerreotype, the earliest portrait technology, for its mysterious and poetic qualities, burnished by its long exposure times. Studying the daguerreotype portraits of anonymous subjects taken by David Octavius Hill, Benjamin detects an “optical unconscious,” a magical, ineffable quality opposed to photography’s ostensibly rational aspects (7). Many of Hill’s portraits were shot in an Edinburgh cemetery, a suitably melancholy setting for a portrait capturing a slice of frozen eternity.¹²⁴ The daguerreotype’s special atmosphere emerges from its long exposure time, such that models “grew as it were into the picture” and “live[d] inside rather than outside the moment” (17). The longer timescale evokes a long-lost era, before the industrialization of culture. “Everything in the early pictures was designed to last,” writes Benjamin. Early photography’s beautiful long durée is best symbolized by the expressive folds of Schelling’s coat, captured in an 1850 portrait of the German philosopher. These folds are worthy “of the creases in the latter’s face,” such that the coat’s “immortality, too, rests assured” (17). Daguerreotypes connote folds in a hand-made coat, or the wrinkles in a philosopher’s face: the profound singularity of those creases, like that of the daguerreotype itself, evokes a timescale whose depth is analogous to that of the subjective self, the deep personhood evoked in the two-way communion between the living and the dead.

By contrast, Benjamin makes clear, the advent of the profit-driven, formulaic portrait photograph signals “a sharp decline in taste” (18)—one attachable to the quick click of an instantaneous snapshot, whose very ephemerality designates its lack of value. The snapshot “corresponds to that transformed world where, as Kracauer aptly remarked, it is the split second of the exposure which decides ‘whether a sportsman has become famous enough to deserve being photographed for the illustrated papers’” (17). The time-cycle of illustrated papers, with their shoddy production values, flash-in-the-pan celebrities, and quick obsolescence, also characterizes the temporality of the carte de visite. Benjamin mockingly describes the overstuffed photo albums of his youth, crammed with “absurd” portraits of family members in embarrassing costumes. The inanity of these pictures is symbolized by the six-year-old Kafka’s “almost deliberately humiliating child’s suit”—an apt contrast to the majestic folds of Schelling’s coat (18). Later, we should note, Benjamin would extend more magnanimity toward the products of mass culture, especially in his Arcades Project. Its précis models itself on Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life,” where Baudelaire had hailed “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” as the signs of an exuberant urban modernity, taking a more optimistic view of modernity’s accelerated timescale. Even still, though, in the Arcades précis Benjamin again insists that “the early photograph was artistically superior to the miniature portrait.”¹²⁵

Benjamin’s scorn for the new quick time of the carte de visite and its vapid formulae appears in an essay published in 1931, but his account echoes values already expressed by the critics of sensation in the 1860s. Margaret Oliphant blamed the demand for sensation novels on “[t]he violent stimulant of serial publication—of weekly publication, with its necessity for frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant situation and startling incident.” This degraded temporality, Oliphant concludes, “is the thing of all others most likely to develop the [sensational] germ, and bring it to fuller and darker bearing.”¹²⁶ Other critics assailed sensation novels as commodities pandering to readers’ lowest instincts—objects whose time would come and quickly pass. So writes Henry Mansel, using, like Benjamin, an imagery of clothing:

[N]o more immortality is dreamed of for [the sensation novel] than for the fashions of the current season. A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop. The public want novels, and novels must be made—so many yards of printed stuff, sensation-pattern, to be ready by the beginning of the season.¹²⁷

Schelling’s coat, Kafka’s child-suit, and here, ready-made dresses: fashion becomes an apt metaphor to describe forms of nineteenth-century time, from the immortality of the philosopher’s daguerreotyped face to the faddish obsolescence of the sensational commodity.

Fashion itself evokes a historicity typical of all commodity culture, including photography. As Sharon Marcus observes,

Since what is novel today is passé tomorrow, fashion allows those who follow its flux to be historical; it allegorizes history’s dialectic of old and new, eternal and transitory; and it becomes an index of history that identifies historical eras with clothing styles.¹²⁸

Photographic portraits have an intimate link to this fashionable historicity, as the sitter’s costume inevitably speaks of his or her historical moment. Kracauer notes, “Photography is bound to time in precisely the same way as fashion. Since the latter has no significance other than as current human garb, it is translucent when modern and abandoned when old.”¹²⁹ Photography tracks the passage of time as fashion does, marking the transition from the contemporary to the antique. It is no coincidence, then, that so many critics used fashion as a master metaphor to describe the time-sense of a cultural object, whether a novel or a photograph. Cartes de visite, in particular, had a special relationship to fashion, since, unlike earlier portrait photographs, they captured the full body of the sitter.¹³⁰ Given their small size, the resulting effect was to diminish emphasis on the face while focusing attention on the sitter’s costume. This effect is especially notable in Silvy’s “Beauties of England” series, where the ladies’ extravagant dresses create their own remarkable spectacle. In her study of Disderi’s cartes de visite, Elizabeth McCauley writes that the fashion plate was an important point of reference for the carte. Both objects, she suggests, emerged from France’s “flâneur society,” “in which clothes were the man, and character was evaluated on the basis of external appearances”¹³¹—a statement also applicable to Victorian Britain.

“Clothes were the man,” writes McCauley, yet even more so, they were the woman. Gender played a key part in the idiom defining the new temporality of the carte—just as gender similarly inflected the critical perception of sensation novels, and of fashion more broadly. An insistent and long-lived critical rhetoric has worked to gender different concepts of time itself, depending on time’s objects. The “immortality” of Schelling’s coat, with its masculinist, philosopher’s authority, offers a strong contrast to the “violent stimulation” of the sensation novel, with all of its druglike, addictive, feminized connotations. The carte de visite, selling its fashionable faces of the moment, also inhabits a sensational and feminized temporality, fluctuating through cycles of fame and oblivion.

We can understand why one strain of modern-day carte criticism judges its image-world as superficial and almost meaningless, bespeaking nothing but the mass staring lovingly into its own looking-glass.¹³² If the carte’s fashionable temporality made it incendiary in the 1860s, those images today will inevitably seem inert and irrelevant: yesteryear’s celebrities are largely unrecognizable to us. The carte de visite inspired a public mania, a collective thrill, provoking not introspection but titillation, desires evoked by potent surfaces. The star in the carte was worshipped in the present time, embodying the allure of instantaneity while ensuring the image’s own incomprehensibility to later spectators.

Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” offers a vision of celebrity style and visual time-sense that is surprisingly relevant to a theory of the carte de visite. Sontag outlines the attractions of a superficial, extravagant affect characterized by qualities of costume, theatricality, and artifice, not unlike the villainess in a sensation novel. While Sontag’s essay addresses itself to a queer urban subculture of the 1970s, it also looks back to nineteenth-century antecedents that are suggestive for the Victorian mass portrait. For instance, Sontag aligns Camp with exaggerated gender expression, the “corny flamboyant female-ness” of certain movie stars that can already be recognized in the carte—a stark gender dichotomy whose exaggeration was enforced by Victorian fashion, beginning with the corset.¹³³ Camp, says Sontag, responds to what she calls “instant character”—character “understood as a state of continual incandescence—a person being one, very intense thing” (286). Instant character, Sontag notes, is inimical to development and complexity, instead alighting on forms such as opera and ballet, in which character conveys itself immediately through visual cues, in the swift external transmission of identity. Likewise, in the carte, photography verges on theater, as the chapter has been tracing: character itself becomes instantaneous, incandescent, even rococo, and worthy of admiration and emulation in its external aspects. The carte, like Camp itself, favors most broadly what Sontag calls the “theatricalization of experience” (286). This sensibility is especially suited to the realm of culture after industrialization, drawing no distinction between originals and mass-produced items. As Sontag writes (injecting her own modernist feeling), “Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica” (289). In contrast to the more familiar moody poetics of early photo portrait criticism, Sontag offers a more sympathetic, if ambivalent, account of visualized personhood in the age of mass reproducibility—one dependent on an idea of radiant character in photographic time.

The collector of carte photographs also engaged in another, related temporality, one devoted to the carte’s passionate afterlife, however short-lived. Women, having had themselves photographed in certain poses, then distributed the pictures to friends, or licensed them for sale in photography shops. Other women, purchasing photos, arranged them carefully in albums to be perused by acquaintances during visiting hours. The carte thus entailed an aesthetic of the post-performance or re-performance, involving arrangement, decoration, and reiteration. The carte inspired forms of mediation in its after-effects, a fan culture that consisted of fervent audience response, photographs passed from hand to hand and collected in albums, and even replicated with copycat costumes or other photographs. These after-effects mirrored those of sensation more broadly, as it too (as I’ve been arguing) combined visceral spectacle with a generative afterlife—each critic vying to outdo the other in buzzy assessments of sensation, spiraling out into a full-fledged craze. Readers acquired red cloaks or white dressing gowns, using commodity culture to re-enact their favorite novels or dramas. Sensation’s dialectic between embodiment and mediation, in other words, also expresses itself in the dialectical temporalities defining the carte de visite, oscillating between cultures of the instantaneous and those of the re-performed or rearranged.

The Technosexual Woman

The carte album or shop window offered the configuration of a new kind of media commons, an archive of faces, bodies, and styles promising, on the one hand, a liberatory expansion of the public sphere and, on the other, a dark opportunity for state surveillance that was realized in the police files and mug shots of the 1880s. Photographers were already making cartes of criminals in the 1860s due to their profitability, a development assailed by critics as especially sensational. Articles on cartes often moved to condemn crime photos, usually those of the alleged teenage murderess Constance Kent. (Kent had been accused of hiding her four-year-old brother’s corpse at the bottom of a privy, a detail adapted and tweaked by M. E. Braddon in Lady Audley’s Secret.) Even before her 1865 trial, Kent’s photograph became a best-seller; her fame was confirmed when Madame Tussaud’s wax museum rapidly placed her wax effigy in its Chamber of Horrors. Both cartes and waxworks were often denounced within the same articles, as both kinds of reproductive media operated within the speeded-up temporality of modernity to capitalize upon the impermanent renown of a face, a look, or a surface appearance. In “Assassins’ Cartes de Visite” (1865), the London Review deplores both unscrupulous photographers who profit from criminals’ cartes and Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, whose wax effigy of Constance Kent is declared a “gross outrage upon decency” and a “public scandal.”¹³⁴ The criminal waxwork, like the carte, generated a form of achieved celebrity, conferring fame through act or deed rather than class, birth, or inheritance. Though the waxwork was a public entertainment and the carte photograph a domestic collectible, both functioned as a gallery of uncanny portraiture, creating sensation in the proliferation of pleasurable simulacra or skin (Fig. 4.22).

Fig. 4.22 Exhibition at Madame Tussaud’s, London. 1895. Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo.

The multiplication of public portrait galleries was a defining feature of the late-Victorian mediascape. Before the nineteenth century, the portrait gallery had signified exclusive privilege, with painted portraits housed in a private estate to represent an aristocratic family’s lineage and history. A popular counter-history of portraiture can be traced in the rise of the wax museum: already in the early eighteenth century, the “Moving Wax Works of the Royal Court of England” was a popular London destination.¹³⁵ During the nineteenth century, Madame Tussaud’s became the pre-eminent name in British wax portraiture—even though its major attractions, when it opened in 1802, were the likenesses of French royalty slain in the Revolution.¹³⁶ The wax museum gained its more official mirror, or competitor, in the National Portrait Gallery, which opened in 1856. Commentators on carte portraiture inevitably compared the new photographs to the more patrician institution; cartes, writes The Art Journal, “multiply national portrait galleries ad infinitum.”¹³⁷ Each of these public portrait collections contributed to nation-building imaginaries, as the body politic was concretized into a constellation of human faces.¹³⁸ The differences between each of these imagined communities, however, are revealing. The National Portrait Gallery skewed toward portraits that were male, aristocratic, and antiquated; Madame Tussaud’s, while still historical, also embraced the new, the sensational, and the female. The carte album fell somewhere in between these two, especially in its conventional ordering of figures: first came royal cartes, followed by those of politicians and artistic figures, and ending with local clergy, friends, and family.¹³⁹ Unlike the public portrait galleries that were housed in buildings and visited by London tourists, the carte album was distinguished by qualities of domesticity, personalization, and miniaturization. The trajectory the album traced, from royalty to oneself, situated the possessor in a linear progression from public to private, from national collective to a more intimate circle.

The media commons of cartes photography also featured women in ways that differed from other kinds of public portrait galleries, as their likenesses could be bought, circulated, and handled. Sensational photographs offered certain women an iconic visibility that was both powerful and controversial. Even while sitters usually only earned a single sum for the sale of their cartes (photographers and piraters pocketing most of the profits), women did gain a cultural power enabled by their image’s commercial success.¹⁴⁰ This kind of empowerment seems an ambivalent one at best; after all, women were being celebrated and commercialized for their surface appearances, a look or fashion that was often fleeting and hyper-sexualized. Even Queen Victoria’s case is not easily parsed, as her undeniable cultural power emerged from her savvy manipulation of image culture combined with her firm adherence to traditional Victorian gender norms. These questions persist today, when a woman’s success in an image-dominated culture might generate a financial windfall and cultural influence, but also might attract less desirable forms of public attention such as objectification or shaming.

Sensation’s woman problem might also be understood as the gendered projection of fantasies and anxieties surrounding a riotous techno-future, one in which transgressive women become the terrifying faces of new technology and mass media. Scholars have noted how the villainesses of sensation fiction made themselves cunningly familiar with new technology, expertly riding railways and sending off deceptive telegrams.¹⁴¹ Both sensationalism and its critics contributed to the broader, pejorative feminization of a techno-enabled mass culture, a recurring trope in the late nineteenth century. Andreas Huyssen writes of “the great divide” that separated a valorized, masculinized high culture from a more debased, feminized, popular culture produced in the wake of industrialization. Huyssen’s chapter “The Vamp and the Machine” studies the long tradition of the dreaded “woman-machine” that culminates in the diabolical, captivating female robot of Fritz Lang’s expressionist film Metropolis (1927).¹⁴² (Walter Benjamin, in The Arcades Project, similarly notes the nineteenth-century interest in “a woman-machine, artificial, mechanical, at variance with all living creatures, and above all murderous.”)¹⁴³ While carte photographs of female celebrities are not quite the same thing as murderous robots, I think that the 1860s controversy offers an early instance of a motif that would recur throughout the twentieth century, as artworks portrayed female sexuality and new technology coming together in frightening and potentially deadly ways.

In fact, the negative gendering of photography had already begun in the late 1850s. Although critics had hailed photography’s invention in 1839 with rhetorics of artistry, “sun-painting,” and wondrous magic, by the late 1850s the industrial transformation of the medium led to a new rhetoric emphasizing photography as a technology, a product of machines.¹⁴⁴ Elizabeth Eastlake’s canonical 1857 essay “Photography” marks the change, as she declares that photography is not an art form but a mere visual recorder, an “unreasoning machine” gendered feminine: “She [Photography] is made for the present age, in which the desire for art resides in a small minority, but the craving, or rather necessity, for cheap, prompt, and correct facts in the public at large.”¹⁴⁵ Eastlake subordinates a feminized photography to a masculinized high art, aligning photography with “cravings,” cheap products, mechanization, modernity, and the other feminized attributes usually attached to mass culture.

The seductive (mass-cultural) machine finds an overdetermined representative in cartes de visite depicting women’s bodies. Just as the carte hinted at a new, quasi-feminist power for women in the public sphere, so too new technology threatened to derange old hierarchies and more privileged modes of communication. Huyssen argues that the menace of Lang’s voluptuous robot lies in her manipulation of the male gaze; he sees her as an allegory of “male sexual anxieties” that include “vagina dentata” and “castration by woman.”¹⁴⁶ Yet this psychoanalytic account ultimately feels limited (and slightly dated), since—beyond the confines of Lang’s movie—the fears of a feminized, mechanized mass culture pervaded a modern world occupied by both men and women, and female writers like M. E. Braddon and Elizabeth Eastlake proposed these tropes just as seriously as male authors did. More convincing is Mary Douglas’s anthropological account in Purity and Danger, in which gender norms are a guarantor of cultural containment, boundedness, and social taboo. When a new technology threatens to reorder the boundaries of the social world, that threat is configured as a monstrosity of gender that must be punished and contained by all members of the tribe.¹⁴⁷ The figure of the frightening “technosexual” woman, or the futuristic machine as a deceptive, libidinous woman, continues to appear in modern film, from Her (2013) to Ex Machina (2015).¹⁴⁸ Yet it also seems fitting that modern feminism has appropriated the figure of the cyborg, who emerges—in the blurring of human, animal, and machine—to transcend more limiting, earlier versions of feminine embodiment.¹⁴⁹

Sensations in the New Media Commons

The carte de visite’s sensationalist moment, with its heady mixture of scandal, celebrity, and female display, suggests many possible afterlives. In 1997, “sensation” became the basis for a scandalous art exhibition with striking echoes of nineteenth-century controversies. Sensation was the name of the 1997 Saatchi Gallery show in London that introduced “cool Britannia” artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and other “Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection.”¹⁵⁰ Many of the artworks deployed the methods of Pop Art, gleefully repurposing artifacts from popular culture and modern media. The exhibition’s advertising poster, whose image was reproduced on the catalogue cover, presented a provocative symmetry: a human tongue touched point-to-point with an iron, each form mirroring the other (Fig. 4.23).¹⁵¹ The pink, viscid tongue, seen close-up, made an unsubtle allusion to female genitalia. The image deliberately punned on sensation as both bodily shock and media scandal, its parody of domesticity transforming the idea of a woman ironing into a graphic, violent act.

Fig. 4.23 Sensation—Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, 1997. Advertising poster image and cover of the exhibition catalogue. Design: Why Not Associates. Photography: Rocco Redondo and Photodisc. Royal Academy of Arts, London.

The show’s most controversial artwork resonated back to the sensationalism of the 1860s. This was Marcus Harvey’s painting Myra, a giant portrait reproducing an iconic mug-shot photograph of Myra Hindley, Britain’s notorious late-1960s child murderer (Fig. 4.24). The painting appeared to copy the portrait photograph in blurry pixels, but its units of black and gray were actually small handprints made from the cast of an infant’s hand. Just as critics in the 1860s attacked cartes de visite for glorifying images of courtesans and female criminals, so too critics in 1997 attacked Sensation for its glamorous reimagining of the sexy, female child-killer. The painting, with its child’s handprints, worked to re-corporealize the photograph’s mediation, enacting a familiar dialectic between the embodied and the reproduced, the near and the far. Other controversial objects in the show also seemed to speak back to the Victorian media world, most notably the waxworks mannequins by Jake and Dinos Chapman. These effigies mocked the British wax tradition by eschewing public figures in favor of deformed children, bodies fused together, some with penises growing out of their noses. The Victorian public wax-portrait institution was demolished in this perverse reimagining of the figurative tradition. Artists in Sensation drew upon mass cultural ideas and objects to deliberately blur the lines between high and low art, presenting the lurid and violent “cravings” typical of tabloid newspapers and modern advertisements as the sensationalist subjects of high art.

Fig. 4.24 Marcus Harvey, Myra, acrylic on canvas, 1995. At the Saatchi Gallery Sensation show, 1997. PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo. © Marcus Harvey. All rights reserved, DACS, London/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020.

Sensation’s exhibition catalogue directly invoked Victorian antecedents on its title page with a full-page reproduction of W. P. Frith’s painting A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 (1883). The painting prominently features Oscar Wilde in the art crowd. Frith’s image appeared as a ghostly negative, implying an overturning of old-fashioned, Victorian values. Yet while Sensation positioned itself as cutting-edge and revolutionary—the reverse of a moribund Victorianism—it did not quite achieve the liberated postmodern breakdown of old assumptions it wanted to claim. The original sensationalism of the 1860s took an ambivalent stance toward female self-fashioning, as this chapter has been tracing, villainizing and objectifying powerful women even while hinting at a proto-feminist escape from restrictive gender roles. The 1997 show also expressed a similar ambivalence about female sexuality and female power. Some of the artworks staked a feminist claim via sexual liberation, such as Tracey Emin’s tent installation “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995.” Yet the British conversation about the show was dominated by Harvey’s painting of Myra Hindley, which ultimately seems closer to a murderous robot than a self-making woman. The image offers an eroticized, violent female body for delectation in a technologized world of media thrills. In other words, both sensational moments featured artworks that posed critiques of restrictive female gender norms, even while they exploited a titillating and objectifying female eroticism to market themselves.

The art milieu of the 1990s seems almost quaint when compared to the internet-fueled media landscape of today. Carte-de-visite culture can claim many new media descendants, from photographic selfies captured on hand-sized devices, to celebrities “of the hour” famous for reasons hard to define, to queens and porn stars appearing side-by-side in the same tabloid magazines. The carte de visite’s promise of a more horizontal media landscape is now magnified in the contemporary technological field, where miniaturized devices capture self-portraits that can be quickly uploaded into an infinitely vast media commons. Carte-de-visite albums offer a remarkable premonition of Facebook, a latter-day, digitized book of faces. Just as Victorian visitors gathered around the photographic portrait album to gossip about pictures of friends and celebrities, so too virtual communities today create networks of affiliation and gossip around formulaic, mass-circulated portraits. The Victorian carte album mingled everyday faces with those of royalty, patriarchal authorities, and arriviste celebrities—inaugurating a breakdown between self and celebrity that has accelerated today in “reality” television shows, which purport to reflect the TV audience back to itself. Sensation’s dialectic between extraordinary individuals and a democratized mass is amplified in an internet age, when unknown people have many more channels by which to become famous, if only for a fleeting window of time.

These links between Victorian new media and our own raise questions about the qualities typically ascribed to the contemporary postmodern image. The shift from paper to pixel has been characterized as a move from the solid to the abstract, from the tangible and proximate to the dematerialized and virtual. Jonathan Crary, in Techniques of the Observer, writes that computer-driven visual techniques “are relocating vision to a plane severed from a human observer.”¹⁵² Yet, as this chapter has been tracing, to “become image” does not completely evacuate the presence of the human body. The sensationalism of the 1860s, a forerunner to the sensations of today, shows us that modern mediated celebrity still grounds itself in the body, whether in forms of visual perception, eroticism, aesthetic pleasure, or the imitative afterlives of fandom. In our own sexualized female image culture, newer forms of illusionistic bodily representation occupy the lived world in ways both incarnate and unreal: this duality is apparent in everything from the high-definition transmission of stars’ bodies to the colossal and diverse archive of online pornography. A sensation today still encodes the linked ideas of physical pleasure and ephemeral, mass-culture success, a connection that is inherently paradoxical for being both based in the body and transcendent of corporeality. Both kinds of sensation ground themselves in the same modern temporality, in which a passionate intensity ends in inevitable obsolescence. Contemporary posthuman media theories at times imply a progressive timeline from the misguided nineteenth century to the enlightened now, when dematerialized, digitized futures promise an escape from irrational, embodied, sexualized states of human existence and desire. The ongoing relevance of sensation’s dialectics suggest otherwise, however, modeling ways that technology can simultaneously corporealize and mediate the human form.

Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media. Rachel Teukolsky, Oxford University Press (2020). © Rachel Teukolsky.

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198859734.001.0001

¹ William C. Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography (Gettysburg, PA: W. C. Darrah Publishing, 1981), 4.

² Nicholas Daly argues that sensational artworks worked to acclimate “consumers to the speeded-up, stimulus-saturated world of Victorian urban modernity; they [sensation novels and dramas] provided a species of temporal training, a form of shock-lite that inoculated the subject against hyperstimulus.” Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 90. Nicholas Dames analyzes how Victorian theorists of the novel saw reading as a physiological practice that also trained readers for an industrial age; while his study does not foreground sensation fiction, his model of Victorian embodied novel-reading (a precursor to today’s cognitive theories) echoes the claims typically made for sensation fiction. See The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007).

³ See, among others, Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Daniel Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

⁴ Geoffrey Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes de visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. J. J. Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch (New York: Routledge, 2009), 80–97: 86.

⁵ Jenny Bourne Taylor, in In the Secret Theatre of the Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988), writes that critics of sensation novels “articulate[d] anxiety about imminent cultural decline … by assuming a set of nervous responses that had become pathological by their very susceptibility to intense excitement and reaction” (4). See also Sally Shuttleworth, “Preaching to the Nerves: Psychological Disorder in Sensation Fiction,” in A Question of Identity: Women, Science, and Literature, ed. Marina Benjamin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 192–244. The history of nineteenth-century British neurophysiology is explored in Ruth Leys, From Sympathy to Reflex: Marshall Hall and His Opponents (New York: Garland, 1990).

⁶ Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 143. While Menke only briefly discusses the history of photography, he uses the medium to produce a radically original understanding of George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil.

⁷ [H. L. Mansel], “Sensation Novels,” The Quarterly Review 113 (April 1863), 481–514: 482; and D. A. Miller, “Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,” Representations 14 (Spring 1986), 107–36: 107.

⁸ Lynn M. Voskuil, “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere,” Victorian Studies 44:2 (Winter 2002), 245–74: 249.

⁹ Ibid., 262.

¹⁰ “Sense v. Sensation,” Punch 41 (July 20, 1861), 31.

¹¹ Kimberly Snyder Manganelli, “Woman in White: The Tragic Mulatta and British Sensation Fiction,” in Transatlantic Sensations, ed. John Barton, Kristin N. Huston, and Jennifer Phegley (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 137–52.

¹² The play premiered in New York in 1859, and was first performed in London at the Adelphi Theatre in 1861.

¹³ “The Theaters,” Illustrated London News, November 23, 1861. Quoted in Voskuil, 253.

¹⁴ Richard D. Altick analyzes the “age of sensation” via the press coverage of two dramatic criminal trials in Deadly Encounters: Two Victorian Sensations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press [1986], 2000).

¹⁵ H. L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” 489.

¹⁶ Tim Dolin, “Collins’s Career and the Visual Arts,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7–22: 17–18.

¹⁷ “Modern Novel and Romance,” Dublin University Magazine 61:364 (April 1863), 436–42: 438.

¹⁸ Anonymous, “Sensation! A Satire,” Dublin University Magazine 63:373 (January 1864), 86–9. Reprinted in Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction: 1855–1890: Volume 1, Sensationalism and the Sensation Debate, ed. Andrew Maunder (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 88–95.

¹⁹ See Lyn Pykett, The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

²⁰ “Sensation Novels,” Punch, or the London Charivari 54 (March 28, 1868), 140.

²¹ See Elizabeth Steere, The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: “Kitchen Literature” (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

²² The argument is first proposed by Jonathan Loesberg in “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction,” Representations 13 (Winter 1986), 115–38. It is further developed by Nicholas Daly in Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s. Daly writes that sensational arts “can be linked to largely reactionary fantasies about the crowd in the years of Reform” (5).

²³ Cannon Schmitt argues that sensation novels “depend upon figurative miscegenation at all levels,” in Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 111. Deborah Wynne notes how the sensation novel had its roots in Gothic fiction, stage melodramas, and halfpenny fiction, even while appealing to “respectable” readers. See Wynne, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 14.

²⁴ Darrah, Cartes de visite, 2.

²⁵ In A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), Elizabeth Anne McCauley studies the interplay between the carte de visite and nineteenth-century French painting. Also useful is a chapter on cartes de visite by Steve Edwards, “A Photographic Atlas: Divisions of the Photographic Field,” in The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 67–116. Edwards takes a Marxist approach, focusing especially on the conditions governing carte photography’s production.

²⁶ Quoted in Helmut Gernsheim, A Concise History of Photography, 3rd rev. edn. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1986), 56.

²⁷ Andrew Wynter, “Photographic Portraiture,” Once A Week 8:188 (January 31, 1863), 148–50: 149.

²⁸ Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life,” 81. Alison Hearn argues that the carte de visite was a forerunner of contemporary modes of self-promotion in “‘Sentimental “Greenbacks” of Civilization’: Cartes de Visite and the Pre-History of Self Branding,” in The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, ed. Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West (New York: Routledge, 2013), 24–38.

²⁹ Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13:1 (Spring 1972), 5–26: 18. Further quotations refer to this edition parenthetically in the text.

³⁰ “Lord Derby’s Carte de Visite,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 11:288 (May 4, 1861), 446–7: 446.

³¹ A typical description of the photographic shop window appears in “Looking in at Shop Windows,” All the Year Round 2:28 (June 12, 1869), 37–43: 42. “Does an individual achieve celebrity? He or she is to be seen photographed all over town within a week. Notoriety? Same result. Infamy? Same result. Be a thief on a sufficiently large scale, and you shall have a prefix to your name. As ‘Mr.’ Higgs. Men and women of all classes, of all ranks, and of all sorts of characters may be studied from the pavement” (42).

³² Andrew Wynter, “Cartes de Visite,” Once A Week 6:135 (January 25, 1862), 134–7: 135.

³³ Quoted in Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography, 81. The Art Journal similarly writes of the “startling combinations” produced in the photographic shop window, where cartes of Lord Shaftesbury, Cardinal Wiseman, and the French Emperor stand “side by side, with those of Florence Nightingale and Blondin and Professor Owen forming a trio” (307). “Cartes de Visite,” Art Journal 82 (October 1, 1861), 306–7.

³⁴ “Lord Derby’s Carte de Visite,” Saturday Review, 446.

³⁵ Quoted in Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986), 3–64: 4.

³⁶ Ibid., 4.

³⁷ As Elizabeth Anne McCauley writes, in Disdéri and the Carte de Visite, “The carte, with its uniform size and limited compositional range, became a great equalizer … [e]ven though this visual equality was socially and politically more specious than real” (3).

³⁸ Darrah, Cartes de Visite, 10.

³⁹ Juliet Hacking, “Camille Silvy’s Repertory: The Carte de Visite and the London Theatre,” Art History 33:5 (December 2010), 856–85: 858.

⁴⁰ Robin Wichard and Carol Wichard. Victorian Cartes de Visite (Princes Risborough, UK: Shire Publications, 1999), 45.

⁴¹ “Cartes de Visite,” Art Journal 82 (October 1, 1861), 306–7: 307.

⁴² Anonymous, “Sensation! A Satire,” 94.

⁴³ “Modern Novel and Romance,” Dublin University Magazine 61:364 (April 1863), 439.

⁴⁴ A letter to The Times in July 1862 describes the phenomenon: “Expectation is raised to its highest pitch; a handsome woman drives rapidly by in a carriage drawn by thoroughbred ponies”—attired in fashions made famous by “Anonyma”; “but, alas!, she causes no effect at all, for she is not Anonyma; she is only the Duchess of A—, the Marchioness of B—, the Countess of C—, or some other of Anonyma’s many eager imitators.” “H.”, “Anonyma,” The Times (July 3, 1862), p. 12. See Katie Hickman, Courtesans: Money, Sex and Fame in the Nineteenth Century (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) and Henry Blyth, Skittles, The Last Victorian Courtesan: The Life and Times of Catherine Walters (London: Hart-Davis, 1970).

⁴⁵ A full chapter on Walters, titled “Anonyma: or The Pretty Horsebreaker,” appears in Sensation Trials, or Causes Célèbres (Chiefly in High Life) (London: Murray, 1865), 183–97. The author is a pseudonymous “Civilian.” The controversial chapter is omitted from the book’s second edition, also published in 1865. A complaining letter-writer is quoted: “As ‘Miss Walters,’ her photographed carte de visite has been long exhibited by respectable West End shopkeepers … cheek by jowl with virtuous English matrons, [exemplifying] … the modern theory of juxtaposition in photographic portraiture” (190).

⁴⁶ “Photography,” London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, and Science 11:264 (July 22, 1865), 86–7: 87.

⁴⁷ Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Girl of the Period,” Saturday Review 25:646 (March 14, 1868), 339–40. Reprinted in The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays, vol. 1 (London: R. Bentley, 1883), 1–9: 9, 3. Further citations will refer to this edition parenthetically in the text.

⁴⁸ In Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), Judith R. Walkowitz writes that “sexual activity was one of the few avenues of revolt open to a working-class girl” (21).

⁴⁹ See Kristine Moruzi, “Fast and Fashionable: The Girls in The Girl of the Period Miscellany,” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 14:1 (2009), 10–28.

⁵⁰ For more on the burlesque performer Lydia Thompson—who visited New York City in 1868 with a troupe of “British Blondes”—see Maria Elena Buszek, “Representing ‘Awarishness’: The Theatrical Origins of the Feminist Pin-up Girl,” in Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 27–68. Thompson performed in a proto-feminist burlesque themed around “The Girl of the Period”; she became notorious in America when she and a fellow actress horsewhipped a Chicago theater critic who was hounding the troupe with sexist reviews (Buszek, 55–61).

⁵¹ Sophia Andres argues that M. E. Braddon considered sensation novels akin to Pre-Raphaelite paintings, as both challenged accepted views of art in order to achieve new effects and critical notoriety (4). Andres’s argument thus reduces the distance between an elite, exclusive painterly form and a mass-circulated sensation novel. See Andres, The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Challenges to Visual Gendered Boundaries (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005).

⁵² M. E. Braddon, Aurora Floyd, 3 vols. (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1863). Quoted from vol. 1, Project Gutenberg edition, <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48020/48020-h/48020-h.htm>.

⁵³ Gina M. Dorré argues that Braddon’s Aurora Floyd reflects the popularity of “horsebreaking,” an arena show in the late 1850s and early 1860s in which equestrians tamed wild stallions. Dorré notes that Catherine Walters, the “pretty horsebreaker,” was a celebrity who made horse-taming into a metaphor for female sexual dominance over men. An 1859 Punch cartoon captures the metaphor’s ubiquity: titled “Husband-Taming,” the cartoon depicts an eager female audience gathered for the arena spectacle of husband-breaking (76). See Gina M. Dorré, “Horsebreaking and Homemaking: Horsey Heroines and Destabilized Domesticity in the Sensation Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon,” in Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 63–94.

⁵⁴ “The Criminal Novel,” London Review 7:180 (December 12, 1863), 620–1: 620. The author later refers interchangeably to “a criminal or sensation novel” (620).

⁵⁵ Hacking, “Camille Silvy’s Repertory,” 878.

⁵⁶ William R. McKelvy, “The Woman in White and Graphic Sex,” Victorian Literature and Culture 35:1 (January 2007), 287–308: 299.

⁵⁷ Ann Cvetkovich argues that The Woman in White’s sensational moments obscure for readers the novel’s real subject, which is Walter’s rise in social class. See “Ghostlier Determinations: The Economy of Sensation and The Woman in White,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 23:1 (Autumn 1989), 24–43.

⁵⁸ Wilkie Collins abandoned a youthful career as a painter to become a novelist. Scholars have studied his relationship to the fine arts. Tim Dolin and Lucy Dougan analyze Collins’s representation of the artistic enterprise in Basil (1852): “Fatal Newness: Basil, Art, and the Origins of Sensation Fiction,” in Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins, ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 1–33. Dennis Denisoff argues that Collins works to masculinize the figure of the artist across all of his novels in “Framed and Hung: Collins and the Economic Beauty of the Manly Artist,” in Reality’s Dark Light, 34–58; and Sophia Andres, in The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel, argues that Collins’s approach to gender was conditioned by Pre-Raphaelite examples.

⁵⁹ Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (London: Sampson, Low, Son, & Co., 1860). Project Gutenberg online edition, <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/583/583-h/583-h.htm>. Further citations will refer to this edition.

⁶⁰ Aileen Ribiero, “Fashion and Whistler,” in Whistler, Women, and Fashion, ed. Margaret F. MacDonald, Susan Grace Galassi, and Aileen Ribiero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 45.

⁶¹ S. M. Ellis, Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu, and Others (London: Constable, 1951), 29–30.

⁶² M. E. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1862). Quoted from Project Gutenberg edition: <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8954/8954-h/8954-h.htm>. Further quotations will refer to this edition.

⁶³ Wynter, “Cartes de Visite,” Once a Week (1862), 135.

⁶⁴ Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the Pencil (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott, 1864). Quoted in Darrah, Cartes de Visite, 26. Similarly, the French photographer Disdéri writes that in a carte portrait “one must be able to deduce who the subject is, to deduce spontaneously his character, his intimate life, his habits; the photographer must do more than photograph, he must ‘biographe.’” Quoted in Batchen, 82 and McCauley, 41.

⁶⁵ “The Philosophy of Yourself,” All the Year Round 9:217 (June 20, 1863), 391–4.

⁶⁶ Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life,” 88.

⁶⁷ Wynter, “Cartes de Visite,” Once a Week (1862), 135.

⁶⁸ Letter from Jane Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle, July 30, 1865. I Too am Here: Selections from the Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Alan Simpson and Mary McQueen Simpson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 65–6.

⁶⁹ Pinney is quoting from the art historian Andrew Wilton, whose notion of a Continental “swagger portrait” tradition contrasts with a more sober, British portrait style. See Andrew Wilton, The Swagger Portrait: Grand Manner Portraiture in Britain from Van Dyck to Augustus John, 1630–1930 (London: Tate Gallery, 1992), n.p. Quoted in Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), 74. Pinney analyzes painted portraits in order to illuminate styles of cartes de visite made on the Indian subcontinent.

⁷⁰ Pinney, Camera Indica, 74.

⁷¹ Sarah Kent, “Portrait of an Ego,” Guardian (October 27, 1992), 7. Quoted in Pinney, Camera Indica, 74.

⁷² Darrah praises Silvy as the greatest of the Victorian carte portraitists in Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography, 26. For details of Silvy’s career, see Mark Haworth-Booth, Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010).

⁷³ Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 7.

⁷⁴ “Photography and Bad Taste,” The London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, and Science 6: 143 (March 28, 1863), 326.

⁷⁵ Scholars have noted that Siddons’s gesture in Reynolds’s painting imitates that of Michelangelo’s Isaiah, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. See Gill Perry, Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art and Theatre, 1768–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 35.

⁷⁶ See the essays collected in Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1812, ed. Robyn Asleson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2003). Most of the essays touch on Siddons, either directly or indirectly.

⁷⁷ Shearer West, “Body Connoisseurship,” in Notorious Muse, 151–70: 161.

⁷⁸ Robyn Asleson, “Introduction,” Notorious Muse, 1–21: 4.

⁷⁹ The Saturday Review, discussing The Woman in White, admitted that the author was “a very ingenious constructor; but ingenious construction is not high art, just as cabinet-making and joining is not high art” (83–4). The Spectator subsequently published a rejoinder, defending the novel’s aesthetic worth: “Is a landscape-painter to be condemned as incapable of high art because the figures in his picture are not…done after the manner of Raphael or Michael Angelo?…Or is there, in fine, only one style of work worthy of high esteem in any given brand of art, whether painting, poetry, or literary fiction?” (94). Both of these reviews are found in Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Page (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). For a more in-depth analysis of aesthetic debates surrounding sensation novels see Rachel Teukolsky, “White Girls: Avant-Gardism and Advertising After 1860,” Victorian Studies 51:3 (Spring 2009), 422–37, especially 432.

⁸⁰ Hacking, “Camille Silvy’s Repertory,” 860.

⁸¹ Wynter, “Cartes de Visite,” Once a Week, 136.

⁸² Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), xiv, 99.

⁸³ Ibid., 84. As Davis also notes, despite the fabulous success of a few fortunate actresses, most earned only modest sums and struggled to make a decent living. See Actresses as Working Women, xiii.

⁸⁴ Critics used the language of sensation to describe Patti’s unexpected debut: Once a Week raved that “a new prima donna created a vast sensation last week” (“Last Week,” Once a Week 4:100 (May 25, 1861), 614–16: 616). But once she was established, Patti’s performances typically garnered a high-art critical language. The London Review writes that Patti is a “true born artist”: “Nothing is studied, forced, or exaggerated; everything flows naturally from the one source of musical instinct.” “Royal Italian Opera—Mdlle. Patti,” The London Review 2:48 (June 1, 1861), 640. For more on the nineteenth-century female opera star, see Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

⁸⁵ Anonymous, “Sensation! A Satire,” 93.

⁸⁶ By contrast, male somnambulism does not produce the same kind of sensational image: Franklin Blake, in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), never appears as a picture of erotic delectation during his sleepwalking adventures.

⁸⁷ Townsend Walsh, The Career of Dion Boucicault (New York: The Dunlap Society, 1915), 79–80; see also Henrietta Mary Ada “Mrs. E. M.” Ward, Memories of Ninety Years, ed. Isabel G. McAllister (London: Hutchinson, 1924), 182.

⁸⁸ The 1862 burlesque was titled The Colleen Bawn Settled at Last. See Kurt Ganzl, Lydia Thompson: Queen of Burlesque (New York: Routledge, 2002), 52.

⁸⁹ Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853). Project Gutenberg online edition, <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm>. Further citations will refer to this edition.

⁹⁰ I analyze Bleak House’s politics of portraiture in “Pictures in Bleak Houses: Slavery and the Aesthetics of Transatlantic Reform,” ELH 76:2 (Summer 2009), 491–522.

⁹¹ Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 17–20. Rojek’s thoughtful book traces a historical trajectory of celebrity from eighteenth-century beginnings to the modern day. He singles out cartes de visite, in particular, as important artefacts in the visual staging of nineteenth-century celebrity (see 125–9).

⁹² Wynter, “Cartes de Visite,” 137.

⁹³ As Hacking writes in “Camille Silvy’s Repertory,” “The demand for such portraits [of actresses, dancers, and singers] was so great that by 1864 Adolphe Beau had established himself in Regent Street as a photographer specializing in the genre” (881).

⁹⁴ Wynter, “Cartes de Visite,” 137.

⁹⁵ Some men, too, emerged as new “achieved” celebrities in the 1860s—mostly sportsmen of working-class backgrounds, such as the boxer Tom Sayers and the acrobats Leotard and Blondin.

⁹⁶ Alison Hearn uses the phrase to describe today’s celebrity culture (“‘Sentimental “Greenbacks” of Civilization,’” 24), but her term also seems apt to characterize the sensation moment.

⁹⁷ Darrah, Cartes de Visite, 6.

⁹⁸ Robin Wichard and Carol Wichard, Victorian Cartes de Visite (Princes Risborough, UK: Shire Publications, 1999), 36.

⁹⁹ The longer quotation is: “I have been writing to all the fine ladies in London, for their or their husband’s photographs, for the Queen; … I believe Miss Skerrett is right when she says ‘the Queen could be bought and sold for a Photograph!’” Eleanor Stanley Long, Twenty Years at Court … 1842–1862, ed. Mrs. Steuart Erskine (London: Nisbet & Co. Ltd., 1916), p. 377. Quoted in Darrah, Cartes de Visite, 6.

¹⁰⁰ See especially the exhibition catalogue by Anne M. Lyden, A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2014).

¹⁰¹ Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 55.

¹⁰² Homans analyzes the royal cartes imagery in-depth in Royal Representations, 43–57.

¹⁰³ John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 163. Plunkett cites Juliet Hacking’s PhD dissertation, ‘Photography Personified: Art and Identity in British Photography’ (Courtauld Institute, 1998), 26.

¹⁰⁴ Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life,” 90.

¹⁰⁵ Wynter, “Photographic Portraiture,” 149.

¹⁰⁶ “Cartes de Visite of Celebrities,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 14:361 (September 27, 1862), 371–2: 372.

¹⁰⁷ Wynter, “Photographic Portraiture,” 149. Press attacks on royal photographs are described more fully in Plunkett, Queen Victoria, 175–81.

¹⁰⁸ “Photography and Bad Taste,” The London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art and Science 6:143 (March 28, 1863), 326–7: 327.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 327.

¹¹⁰ Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly (June 1859), 738–48. Reprinted in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 71–82: 72, 81.

¹¹¹ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 81.

¹¹² Sharon Marcus, “Salomé!! Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, and the Drama of Celebrity,” PMLA 126:4 (October 2011), 999–1021: 1000. Marcus provides a more in-depth exploration of celebrity in The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). She also chooses “sensation” as one of her book’s keywords, analyzing the term as a broader function of modern celebrity across centuries. “Sensation” for Marcus names the dynamic by which stars dominate over ecstatic fans and deprive them of their “autonomy, reason, and individuality” (51). The chapter focuses on the passionate acting techniques used by Sarah Bernhardt to manipulate the feelings of her audiences.

¹¹³ See Kimberly Snyder Manganelli, “‘I Wonder What Market He Means that Daughter for’: The Beautiful Jewess and the Tragic Muse,” in Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 92–127.

¹¹⁴ “Modern English Women.—No. II. The Fast Young Lady,” The London Review and Weekly Journal of Politics, Literature, Art, and Society 24 (December 15, 1860), 568–9: 568.

¹¹⁵ W. Winwood Reade, “Preface,” Savage Africa: Being the Narrative of a Tour in Equatorial, Southwestern, and Northwestern Africa; with Notes on the Habits of the Gorilla; on the Existence of Unicorns and Tailed Men; on the Slave Trade; on the Origin, Character, and Capabilities of the Negro, and on the Future Civilization of Western Africa (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1864), n.p.

¹¹⁶ “Savage Africa,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 17:444 (April 30, 1864), 542–3: 542.

¹¹⁷ My account of Bonetta’s life has been compiled from the following sources: Caroline Bressey, “Of Africa’s Brightest Ornaments: A Short Biography of Sarah Forbes Bonetta,” Social & Cultural Geography 6:2 (April 2005), 253–66; Joan Anim-Addo, “Queen Victoria’s Black ‘Daughter,’” in Black Victorians/Black Victoriana, ed. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 11–19; and the biography written for children by Walter Dean Myers, At Her Majesty’s Request: An African Princess in Victorian England (New York: Scholastic Press, 1999).

¹¹⁸ Frederick E. Forbes, Dahomey and the Dahomans: Being the Journals of Two Missions to the King of Dahomey, and Residence at His Capital, in the Years 1849 and 1850, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851), ii:208–9.

¹¹⁹ See “A Negro Marriage in Brighton,” Examiner 2846 (August 16, 1862), 519; also Bressey, 258–60.

¹²⁰ The Brighton Herald (August 16, 1862), 2. Quoted in Bressey, 259.

¹²¹ Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

¹²² Bonetta’s letters are quoted throughout the biography by Walter Dean Myers, At Her Majesty’s Request.

¹²³ Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 46–63.

¹²⁴ I’m grateful to Daniel Novak for suggesting to me that Benjamin’s cemetery is a striking counterpoint to the milieu and temporality of the carte de visite.

¹²⁵ Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Exposé of 1935,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6.

¹²⁶ [Margaret Oliphant], “Sensation Novels,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91:559 (May 1862), 564–84: 568.

¹²⁷ H. L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” 483.

¹²⁸ Sharon Marcus, “Reflections on Victorian Fashion Plates,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14:3 (Fall 2003), 4–33: 9.

¹²⁹ Kracauer, “Photography,” The Mass Ornament, 55.

¹³⁰ Later cartes focused on the bust, but the earliest cartes were full-length.

¹³¹ McCauley, Disdéri and the Carte de Visite, 36.

¹³² Jean Sagne writes of the carte’s effect as one of “conformist tyranny” in “All Kinds of Portraits: The Photographer’s Studio,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot (Cologne: Könemann, 1998), 114. Naomi Rosenblum observes in A World History of Photography (New York: Abbeville Press, 1997) that “carte portraits offered little compass for an imaginative approach to pose and lighting as a means of evoking character” (63). Geoffrey Batchen, in “Dreams of Ordinary Life,” writes that the carte “in both subject matter and form” “embodies the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie and its systems of social and economic life” (86).

¹³³ Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966), 275–92: 279. Further citations will refer parenthetically to this edition.

¹³⁴ “Assassins’ Cartes de Visite,” The London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, and Science 11:269 (August 26, 1865), 219–20: 220.

¹³⁵ See Walter George Bell, Fleet Street in Seven Centuries (London: Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1912), 536–7.

¹³⁶ After first occupying the Lyceum in London in 1802, Madame Tussaud’s wax exhibition toured Britain and Ireland until 1835, when the wax museum became a permanent establishment on London’s Baker Street. Richard D. Altick discusses Madame Tussaud’s in The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 333–8. See also Pamela Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003).

¹³⁷ “Cartes de Visite,” Art Journal 82 (October 1, 1861), 306–7: 306.

¹³⁸ Christopher Rovee analyzes Romantic portraiture’s contributions to concepts of British nationalism in Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

¹³⁹ Wichard and Wichard, Victorian Cartes de Visite, p. 45.

¹⁴⁰ Michael North, “The Picture of Oscar Wilde.” PMLA 125:1 (January 2010), 185–91: 187. Some lucky celebrity sitters did earn a percentage of profits from the sale of their cartes; the ex-slave Sojourner Truth supported herself by selling her carte portrait (Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life,” 91). This practice does not seem to be the norm, however; as Elizabeth Anne McCauley notes, when French photography studios were sold, they listed among their assets the rights to reproduce all negatives, suggesting that sitters gave up control over their images when they left the studio (Disdéri and the Carte de Visite, 82).

¹⁴¹ See Louise Lee, “Lady Audley’s Secret: How Does She Do It? Sensation Fiction’s Technologically Minded Villainesses,” in A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 134–46.

¹⁴² Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 65–81.

¹⁴³ Benjamin’s note is a quotation from Roger Caillois, “La Mante religieuse: Recherches sur la nature et la signification du mythe,” Mesures 3:2 (April 15, 1937), 110. [Z2a, 1]. In The Arcades Project, 696.

¹⁴⁴ Mary Warner Marien discusses how photography’s earliest rhetoric was not one of mechanism but instead one of beauty, nature, and art. See Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3.

¹⁴⁵ Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography,” Quarterly Review 101 (April 1857), 442–68: 466, 465.

¹⁴⁶ Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 77.

¹⁴⁷ Mary Douglas writes, “I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created.” Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, [1966], 2003), 4.

¹⁴⁸ I take the term “technosexual” from Janet Lungstrum, “Metropolis and the Technosexual Woman of German Modernity,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina Von Ankum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 128–44.

¹⁴⁹ See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81.

¹⁵⁰ Many thanks to Grace Lavery for recommending the Sensation exhibition to me.

¹⁵¹ Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1997).

¹⁵² Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 1.