The picture world of the nineteenth century, fantastical and concrete, realist and illusory, emerged out of the diverse, intimate printed objects on the Victorian domestic scene. Most middle-class Victorian parlors would have contained an illustrated family Bible, an album of photographic cartes de visite, and, as this chapter will pursue, a stereoscope with which to view a collection of stereographic cards. Stereoviews offered a doubled photographic image that, when viewed through the stereoscope, conjured the illusion of a three-dimensional view. While stereoviews depicted a range of photographic imagery, from comic genre scenes to still-lifes, most often they depicted views of places, both exotic and domestic.¹ Beginning in the late 1850s, these images captured whole new swaths of the world, from Egypt to Niagara Falls. This chapter analyzes how stereoviews extended and transformed Victorian aesthetic traditions of representing places. I show how stereoviews followed in the mode of the picturesque, a high-art landscape aesthetic of the eighteenth century. Though we might expect an aesthetic entwining nature and art to oppose new technologies, the chapter reveals their imbrication: the picturesque emerged from surprisingly technological roots, in devices that ranged from the Claude glass and camera obscura to the stereoscope. Seeing the picturesque as techno-enhanced does not mean that it was completely artificial or even proto-postmodern, as some scholars have argued. Instead, I show how the stereoscope functioned as a Victorian remediation of Romantic philosophy, a kind of organic machine and prosthesis attached to the spectator’s body that enabled an extraordinary, humanistic experience. The picturesque called the stereoscope into being, inviting the propagation and circulation of an alluring and highly marketable visual fantasy. Studying the stereoscope allows us to redefine our sense of what kinds of experiences a machine might allow: this photographic technology was seen to enable surprisingly authentic and embodied visual experiences in “nature.”

Stereoscopy emerged from a scientific experiment probing the nature of human optics. Charles Wheatstone wanted to prove that human depth perception was the result of the distance between our two eyes. He hypothesized that, if each eye were presented with a slightly different two-dimensional image, the eyes together could be tricked into seeing a figure in three dimensions.² To prove his theory he crafted the first stereoscope, an ungainly device with two protruding mirrors. Wheatstone is credited with proving the binocularity of human depth perception, but it was David Brewster who transformed Wheatstone’s experimental device into a marketable commodity. Brewster’s new lenticular model—housing the optical works in a papier-mâché casing—debuted at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition, where it was seen and admired by Queen Victoria. Brewster subsequently presented her with a gift model, setting off a craze that provoked the sale of 250,000 viewers in three months.³ Brewster’s viewer worked to standardize the size and shape of stereoviews, allowing for their production to number eventually in the millions. His model ushered in the era of the “parlor stereoscope,” as the device became a familiar fixture in Victorian homes. With its wood or inlay ornamentation, the stereoscope resembled a piano or a collectible art object more than a scientific instrument. The London Stereoscopic Company promised in advertisements “A stereoscope in every home,” aptly describing the device’s assimilation into the Victorian domestic scene (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1 Woman using a stereoscope. “The Stereograph as an Educator—Underwood Patent Extension Cabinet in a home Library.” Half of a stereographic photograph. Underwood & Underwood, 1901. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-7317.

Stereographic photographs, inexpensive and vastly circulated, constituted the most common way that people consumed photographs in the Victorian era. Yet these photographs occupy an ambiguous place in contemporary scholarship, owing to their category-defying status. Stereoscopy has been described by commentators as a scientific experiment, a philosophical toy; a parlor trick, a popular mass entertainment, a commercial triumph; a visual craze, and a curious byway in the technological march toward film.⁴ Art historians have not typically studied stereoscopy, for reasons inherent to the discipline: stereoviews epitomize qualities opposed to those of fine art, with their abundant, conventionalized imagery, their cheap accessibility, and their depth effects in an era prizing modernist flattening.⁵ Where the art history of photography celebrates the singular view of the master artist, stereoviews offer a problematic doubled image, often issued by a team of photographers.⁶

Despite the general lack of interest from art historians, however, stereoscopy still occupies an outsized place in contemporary accounts of nineteenth-century vision and aesthetics owing to a single, extraordinary work: Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990). Crary’s far-reaching history argues that a rupture in worldviews occurred around the turn of the nineteenth century, symbolized by the contrast between the early-modern camera obscura and the modern stereoscope. Before the nineteenth century, according to Crary, a classical model of vision defined human sight as singular, monocular, and objective, comparable to a camera obscura; eyesight was confidently aligned with the truthful perception of a stable external world, reflecting a broader philosophical belief in “the world in its fundamental unity.”⁷ Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, scientists discovered that human eyesight was itself based in an illusion, a series of cues from the nervous system and optical sensoria that might be tricked, flawed, and subjective. Vision was “no longer subordinated to an exterior image of the true or the right,” a philosophical development visualized in the proto-modernist painterly experiments of J. M. W. Turner and the French Impressionists (138). The stereoscope, dependent on a binocular understanding of human sight, thus epitomized a radical philosophical shift: its corporealization of vision signaled an early move toward the epistemologies of modernism, as transcendent visual Truth was dismantled and vision moved into the bodies of millions of individual spectators, eyes pressed to stereoscopes. Crary’s narrative takes its cue from Michel Foucault, seeing stereoscopes as ominously reflecting a modern capitalist drive to discipline potential workers. His account ultimately locates stereoscopes within a longer postmodern media history, since their illusionistic effects anticipate contemporary modes of the abstract, the virtual, even the cybernetic.

Techniques of the Observer has been tremendously influential, but also the subject of controversy. Laura Burd Schiavo rebukes Crary for offering a logic of the stereoscope independent of its cultural uses and consumption. While scientists did see the stereoscope as proving the arbitrary nature of human vision, by contrast, Schiavo argues, those who sold and consumed stereoviews invariably highlighted the device’s wondrous production of realism. In fact, stereoscopy’s link to scientific experiment cemented its popular associations with a positivist mode of transparent vision.⁸ For many Victorian commentators, stereoviews perfectly reproduced the experience of “being there,” capturing actual optical experience in all of its depth and richness. In this, critics were elaborating upon the positivist reception of photography more broadly. While Crary’s emphasis on binocularity works to separate the camera (single-lensed, stable) from the stereoscope (dual-lensed, illusionistic), Schiavo notes that this separation is an artificial distinction—in fact, stereoviews were marketed and sold alongside photographs in retail outlets and in mail-order catalogues.⁹ (And, unmentioned by Schiavo, stereoviews and photographs often pictured the same views at different price points: stereoviews offered cheap versions of images also produced as more lavish photographs.) Stereoviews constituted the dominant mode of consuming photography in the nineteenth century; if anything, the rhetoric of realism surrounding photography was exceeded by that of stereoscopy.¹⁰ The divergent accounts of Crary versus Schiavo capture a major conflict in contemporary notions of Victorian visual media. One strand sees the stereoscope as deconstructing vision, and therefore anticipating postmodern modes of the virtual and the posthuman; another strand aligns the stereoscope with photography, seeing both as positivist technologies contributing to the confident realist reproduction of the world.

In this chapter, however, I pursue a different idea from either of these.¹¹ A remarkable fact about the debate is that neither Crary nor Schiavo actually examines the particulars of what stereoviews depicted. They instead treat stereoscopy as an abstract technology, a matter of discourses and cultural practices. Their approach is typical for scholars of the device; William Merrin writes that “the stereoscope transcended its content as its subject was less important than the experience of its own effect.”¹² One implication is that mass-produced, conventionalized imagery is unworthy of close attention. Or, following the positivist account, if stereoscopes are aligned with the values of science, reason, and truth, then their faithful mimeticism might obviate the need for analysis. Either one of these narratives might explain why stereoviews have rarely been considered within aesthetic canons and histories. Crary links stereoviews to modernist painterly techniques, but this connection works through philosophy rather than through visual style, and it seems increasingly far-fetched when we examine what stereoviews actually depicted.

In fact, if we attend to the specificity of the stereoscopic image, a very different concept emerges: the stereoview was an essential object in the long history of the picturesque. This eighteenth-century landscape aesthetic combined the artifice of picturing with the authenticity of wild nature, a contradictory mix also characteristic of stereoviews. The new device heightened effects inherent in picturesque artworks, offering formulaic views while delivering enhanced sensations that were unexpectedly carnal and authentic. I situate the stereoscope within Romantic philosophy and art practice, thereby offering a contrasting narrative to more typical, forward-looking media histories. Scholars have often placed the stereoscope in a longer trajectory to describe the rise of film, modernism, and other twentieth-century visual developments. We usually assume that a technology’s innovative nature inherently orients it toward the future. Yet I see stereoscopy as a technology hearkening back to Romanticism, one that looks backward as much as forward. This new visual technology in fact proffered complicated aesthetic effects that were both cutting-edge and conservative, both virtual and embodied, both artificial and authentic, looking both to the future and to the past.

The chapter pursues the stereoscope’s embodied picturesque from Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey to John Ruskin’s Gothic cathedral. Whereas the actual ruined structures strewn across the British countryside might have suggested hard truths about Britain’s violent, arbitrary transformation from a Catholic into a Protestant nation, picturesque scenes instead presented history as natural, making Catholic ruins into aestheticized fossils. I show how the visual technology enabled corporeal fantasies across space and time, reflecting imperial power dynamics in capturing place-images from around the world. When stereoscopy emerged as a global mass visual culture in the late 1850s, it was already recapitulating the multicultural, world-spanning aspects of the picturesque implicit in the late eighteenth century. The stereoview’s fantastical operations in both space and time anticipate more modern forms of virtual travel, revealing how the picturesque still defines our desires for perfectly framed views in both life and art—even with our full knowledge of the picturesque’s artificial, illusory nature.

Technologies of the Picturesque

The majority of stereoviews depicted places, especially places that a British audience desired to visit. Stereoviews offered a form of virtual travel in transporting viewers to exotic or domestic locales without the ordeal of actual journeying—a convenience often mentioned by Victorian critics. (“Stereoscopes; Or, Travel Made Easy” is the title of an 1858 Athenaeum review.)¹³ Most stereoviews depicted tourist destinations in Britain, Europe, and America.¹⁴ Indeed, some tourist venues sold their own stereoviews at the gate, making the item into a souvenir of the touristic experience. From this perspective, the stereoview can be seen as a forerunner of the modern postcard, serving as a visual aide-mémoire and an idealized trophy of the travel experience.

Photographs or stereoviews of places hover indeterminately between the aesthetic and the topographic. Rosalind Krauss argues that stereoviews should be considered “views” rather than “landscapes,” protesting the idea that these machine-made items can be interpreted according to art-historical codes. Krauss notes that many of the earliest photographers worked with professional surveyors or geographers, especially in the American west.¹⁵ A topographic photograph would seem to be a mere transcription, map-like, mechanical, testifying to the exact details of a place’s dimensions and layout. Its function would seem more utilitarian than aesthetic, useful perhaps for commercial, military, or imperial purposes. The topographic photograph can be aligned with other visual realisms attached to the positivist, knowledge-gathering projects of the nineteenth century.

Yet the topographic photograph reads differently when it appears as a stereoview, consumed as popular entertainment and appearing as part of a range of Victorian fantastical imaginaries about place, whether English or foreign. Stereoviews were in fact the latest item in a long tradition of landscape art pre-dating the invention of photographic technology, and inseparable from the rise of British tourism and the picturesque. Stereographic images often depicted places already deeply inscribed by picturesque traditions, in objects that included paintings, engravings, poetry, guidebooks, and travelers’ accounts. The “stations” or “beauty spots” of the picturesque, many of them already canonized in the eighteenth century, were now transformed into stereographic views. These carefully chosen spots were framed across media according to familiar visual codes that omitted many of the gritty or discordant realities of nineteenth-century tourism. The stereoview extended the fictional tradition of the picturesque, ironically producing a romance of the countryside using a mechanical and mass-produced technology. This contradiction reflects a tension inherent in the picturesque itself: in fact, the picturesque was an unstable and shifting aesthetic idea whose paradoxes were exacerbated with each new technological reinvention.

The picturesque was initially codified as the art of landscape appreciation by leisured travelers in the British countryside. William’s Gilpin’s formative Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (1792) linked three quintessential behaviors associated with the picturesque: aesthetic appreciation, tourism, and amateur landscape sketching. In its earliest incarnations, the picturesque was already founded on a major paradox: theorists prized qualities of wildness and irregularity within scenes worthy of picturing, drawing upon the literal meaning of “picturesque,” “fit to be made into a picture”—hence artists sought out untamed, rugged, or unruly features of nature so as to shape them into well-composed, balanced scenes. If Nature herself did not offer the proper balance of wildness and order, then the artist was directed to rearrange accordingly. “[N]ature is most defective in composition; and must be a little assisted,” writes Gilpin. “I take up a tree here, and plant it there. I pare a knoll, or make an addition to it.”¹⁶ Picturesque theorists justified these transformations by recourse to nature’s own workings. As William Mason instructs landscape sketchers in his poem The English Garden (1782), “Be various, wild, and free as Nature’s self”—contradictory advice, telling artists to outdo Nature naturally.¹⁷ At its very inception, the picturesque depended upon an idea of Nature that was inextricable from the aesthetic form of Art, as both possessed qualities of artifice, shapeliness, and composition.

This picturesque theory yielded a landscape art that was highly conventionalized. The picturesque formula divided the landscape into three distances: a darkened foreground, a strongly lit middle distance, and a dimmed, receding background. Mason’s The English Garden describes the convention: “… three well-mark’d distances/Spread their peculiar colouring. Vivid green,/Warm brown, and black opake the foreground bears/Conspicuous; sober olive coldly marks/The second distance; thence the third declines/In softer blue, or less’ning still is lost/In faintest purple.”¹⁸ Artists heightened the illusionary depth effect using a conventional repoussoir device, a framing foreground object, usually a tree or mountain placed at the image’s sides to direct the eye to the receding center. This depth effect often accentuated a central motif, either a looming natural feature or an impressive edifice of some kind. In Henry Gastineau’s 1830 steel engraving of Tintern Abbey, darkened foliage in the foreground sets off the glowing abbey, while mountains recede behind (Fig. 5.2). Picturesque theorists described these framing devices using terms taken from the London theater, such as “side-screens” and “off-skips,” which also described the wings of a stage set.¹⁹ For the picturesque spectator, the perceived scene itself became intertwined with its painted version, as both are stage-like, framed, and performed.

Fig. 5.2 Henry Gastineau, “Tintern Abbey.” Steel engraving by J. Tingle. From Wales Illustrated in a Series of Views, c. 1830. Courtesy Rare Books and Manuscript Library in The Ohio State University Libraries.

Eighteenth-century picturesque views therefore reduced and simplified the landscape into different visual planes positioned at varying depths in the picture frame. These effects are mimicked by the depth effects of stereoscopy. Peering into a stereoscope, the viewer experiences a profound and at times vertiginous sense of depth, as space recedes from foreground to background within the darkened theater of the eyepiece. The unrolling of space is not smooth but variegated, as different objects appear at different distances, like a series of cut-out receding planes. A stereoview creates an illusionary likeness of the landscape, but its visual effects also operate reductively, breaking the scene down into a crude series of irregular, retreating planes. In George Washington Wilson’s stereoview of Abbotsford (Fig. 5.3), the mansion of Sir Walter Scott is framed with trees and bushes and set off against the hillsides of the far horizon. Similarly, Elizabeth Wemyss Nasmyth’s 1823 landscape painting of Abbotsford (Fig. 5.4) also uses repoussoir devices of trees and bushes to frame the mansion in the middle ground, setting it against fainter hillsides receding into the distance. Wilson’s stereoview uses the foreground device of a winding road to lead the eye back toward the impressive house, while Nasmyth’s painting foregrounds a shining river. Joseph Wright of Derby paints Rydal Falls, in the Lake District, as a dynamic rush of water split across a large stone; the foreground offers a calmer pool of water, while the background produces a receding set of objects, including a footbridge and some artfully crooked trees (Fig. 5.5). A stereoview by H. Petschler of the same station similarly captures the water’s break around the great stone, with the pool in the foreground and the recessing trees and footbridge at the back (Fig. 5.6). Stereographic scenes were conventionally shaped to imitate picturesque paintings, aligning the stereoview with the fictionality of art.

Fig. 5.3 George Washington Wilson, “Abbotsford from the South East.” Stereographic photograph, c. 1850s. Collection of the author.

Fig. 5.4 Elizabeth Wemyss Nasmyth (attributed to), A View of Abbotsford from across the Tweed, oil on board, c. 1823. The Abbotsford Trust.

Fig. 5.6 H. Petschler, Rydal Falls, stereographic photograph, n.d. Collection of the author.

Indeed, the realism effect in stereoscopy was mutable and diverse.²⁰ Some landscape photographers amplified the stereoview’s depth effect by separating the two lenses of the stereo camera a number of feet, exceeding human interocular distance.²¹ These manipulations produced more sweeping valleys and more powerful waterfalls than were apparent to actual eyesight. Photographers were aware of the stereoscopic trick; an 1854 letter to the Photographic Journal complained of widespread “painfully exaggerated specimens, so repulsive to truth or good taste.”²² Despite the expert’s protest, the public was apparently eager to consume the variegated stereoscopic scenes that art had already conditioned it to desire. The picturesque visual formula appeared in paintings, engravings, lithographs and book illustrations throughout the nineteenth century, suggesting the way that stereoscopic conventions overlapped with those of other mass pictorial media.

Although the picturesque depicted scenes in nature, it was never really “natural.” In fact, it was deeply technological, mediated by an array of visual technologies. Eighteenth-century viewers used a Claude glass, a mirror-like optical device, to transform the landscape into a hazier, more sepia-toned, framed scene, so that nature was made to imitate the mellow browns of landscape paintings by Claude Lorrain (Fig. 5.7).²³ The camera obscura was another device that enabled picturesque sketching, as artists positioned themselves inside the apparatus to copy the projected views. And the book that began the vogue for the picturesque, Gilpin’s groundbreaking account of his journey along the Wye, came into being with the invention of the new aquatint process. The book is titled Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770, but was only published in 1782 after new aquatint technology allowed Gilpin to reproduce his ink-and-wash sketches as book illustrations.²⁴ New technology enabled new mediations of nature, affirming a contemporary sense that “the natural world,” seemingly pristine, organic, and untouched, is difficult to locate apart from the technology that was used to perceive it.

Fig. 5.7 Thomas Gainsborough, “Artist with a Claude Glass,” graphite on paper, c. 1750–5. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Not coincidentally, many of the well-known early-nineteenth-century landscape painters were also accomplished theater designers, most famously Philip de Loutherbourg.²⁵ Among his mechanical innovations on the stage, he crafted the illusion of running water using blue sheets of metal and gauze, mingled with loose silver threads.²⁶ Film historians have often pointed to de Loutherbourg’s “Eidophusikon” (literally, “image of nature”) as a precursor to film technology.²⁷ This commercial spectacle promised the public “various imitations of Natural Phenomena, represented by moving pictures,” as dramatized inside a miniaturized 6 × 8-foot theater. Less noted, however, is the fact that de Loutherbourg’s illusionistic environment, which utilized colored silk filters, clockwork automata, and illuminated transparencies, was also conterminous with a broader picturesque aesthetic interested in mimicking the wild yet shapely aspects of nature.²⁸ The eighteenth-century picturesque was a romance of the countryside that depended upon artificial, technological, and mechanical enhancements. Seen from this perspective, picturesque paintings logically anticipated stereoviews, as technology worked to produce aesthetic experiences via increasingly illusionistic spectacles of nature.

Prosthetic Eye in the Haptic Landscape

The picturesque’s manifestly artificial character has led some scholars to argue that it anticipates postmodern accounts of picture-making and representation. If Nature is understood to exist as a series of pictures, then any authentic prototype disappears into an ever-deferred distance. “[T]hrough the action of the picturesque,” writes Rosalind Krauss, “… [l]andscape becomes a reduplication of a picture which preceded it.” The picturesque thus emerges as a “beautifully circular” paradigm in which “the ever-present reality of the copy” is the “underlying condition of the original”: the original itself cannot be distinguished among a hall-of-mirrors of copies.²⁹ Geoffrey Batchen argues that writers around 1800 theorized the picturesque as “a practice in which the distinction between representation and referent dissolved into an endless circuit of representations and representations of representations.”³⁰ Batchen’s description appears in his groundbreaking study Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997). The book offers a brilliant revisionist history of photography’s invention: rather than looking to scientific experiments with light and chemistry, Batchen instead traces a history of cultural desires, of which the picturesque was the key motivator. While his study does not mention stereoscopy, his analysis is important for thinking through the categories of mind, eye, nature, and art that went toward constructing the culture of stereoscopy. However, my notions of both the picturesque and the stereoscope will ultimately diverge from Batchen’s, as his account lands on a postmodern, virtual, and deconstructive take on nineteenth-century aesthetics and technology. By contrast, I arrive at an idea of stereoscopy as embodied and integrative, a Romantic-inspired technology whose anachronisms point toward the haunting past rather than the cybernetic future.

Batchen’s study uncovers picturesque language pervading the writings of early photographic experimenters. Henry Fox Talbot famously arrived at the idea of photography in 1833 while vacationing on the Italian shores of Lake Como, channeling Gilpin’s picturesque tourist as he attempted to trace the projections of a camera obscura onto paper. Confounded by his fallible pencil, Talbot had his eureka moment, as recounted in The Pencil of Nature (1844–6): “How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!”³¹ Batchen observes that early photographers like Talbot struggled to articulate the action of the new technology, whose function seemed paradoxical—nature writing herself, combining both seeing subject and object portrayed, and partaking uneasily of both nature and culture. In Batchen’s vital insight, the confusions besetting commentators on early photography echoed conflicts already present in the rhetorics of the picturesque, itself an “unstable term” registering disjunctive binaries between an orderly and unruly nature, between objective and subjective views, between active and passive theories of perception (76). Batchen convincingly outlines the way that “the desire to photograph” emerged from a tradition of seeing landscapes artistically, with all of the fraught and bewildering qualities entailed by this desire (90).

In part, that bewilderment arose from a transformation in philosophical conceptions of nature emerging in the late eighteenth century. As traced by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (1970), the natural world no longer appeared to be a stable, divinely ordered clockwork; instead it seemed a chaotic, uncontrollable, and human-perceived reality. (This intellectual history also structures Jonathan Crary’s deconstructive account in Techniques of the Observer, in noting the shift from classical to post-classical models of vision around 1800.) Batchen focuses on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s writings, in particular, to exemplify the rise of a new philosophy of nature, one emphasizing the expressive, subjective view of the individual spectator. Nature’s “representation was no longer an act of passive and adoring contemplation but an active and constitutive mode of (self-)consciousness” (62). Batchen shows how the profound uncertainties arising from new philosophies of nature and self informed both picturesque theory and early photographic theory, as both of these pondered the thorny questions of individual perception in the external world.

Yet while these particulars emerge from a carefully historical account of aesthetics around 1800, Batchen’s narrative moves toward an arguably anachronistic end as it is shaped toward his own postmodern values.³² Even while he acknowledges the role of British Romantic philosophy in the creation of a new ideal spectator—a deep subjective self affirmed by perception in the natural world—that notion of subjectivity falls away as he assimilates the picturesque into the postmodern. The telos of Romantic-era realizations about human perception in nature turns out to be the postmodern truth of a wholly constructed external world. And so “by around 1800 landscape was no longer directly preordained by God but recognized as a specifically human construction … [N]ature as an originary source was removed from the equation almost entirely” (78). Batchen analogizes Romanticism’s subjective self to photography’s sensitive plate, describing “the sensitized mind’s eye of the individual human subject, a subject who views and, in viewing, constitutes both image and self” (78). His analogy between human and machine rehearses a familiar postmodern account of the subject, made explicit in the “Epitaph” to Burning with Desire: “Who can any longer say with confidence where the human ends and the nonhuman begins?” Invoking the 1982 film Blade Runner, Batchen announces, “We are all already replicants” (214). Picturesque theory and early photographic discourse both turn out to anticipate the deconstruction of the subject into a dematerialized, robotic, and “nonhuman” spectator.

This conclusion accords with a dominant narrative in media history, in works by scholars ranging from Jonathan Crary to Friedrich Kittler. They argue that the invention of new devices, machines, and technologies in the industrial age inaugurated a long posthumanist moment. Yet the rhetorics, practices, and imagery of the stereoscope suggest otherwise. In fact, the stereoscope’s reinvention of the picturesque did not indicate a machine-like or disintegrated subject—a cultural desire whose expression seems more apt for our own moment than that of the early nineteenth century. Instead, as I want to develop further here, the stereoscope functioned as an organic machine, a prosthesis intimately connected to the body of the viewer. The device in fact enabled a profoundly humanistic, embodied experience, which was imagined as the peak of Romantic subjectivity. This conception speaks to some of the deeply held values and desires of the early nineteenth century, desires that persisted in commodified form throughout the century. The bodied machine did not deconstruct the subject toward a fragmented automatism so much as it worked to construct the subject into a superhuman unity.

The human body played a key role in some of the earliest formulations of the picturesque, highlighting the aesthetic’s ambiguity as both a form of picture-making and a way of seeing, both mode of representation and mode of perception. The picturesque first emerged as part of a broader interest in aesthetics at large, understood as the study of received empirical sensations. John Macarthur contextualizes the rise of the picturesque within a new idea of taste as a matter of the individual body. “[T]he fact that English gardens of the early eighteenth century took their formal vocabulary from woods and meadows rather than from buildings and furnishings” reflects a “new freedom to understand art as an effect on the senses rather than the rule of a discipline.”³³ Aesthetic treatises placed a new emphasis on the body’s appreciation of art as a biological function, which inevitably heightened the role played by the individual perceiver—as opposed to notions of taste that were purely conventional or socially generated. Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), proposed that both the beautiful and the sublime worked by stimulating the sensorium of the perceiver. The visual forms of small, smooth, rounded things triggered feelings of calm or love in the spectator’s body, while the visual forms of vast, rough, and angular things inspired feelings of pleasurable terror. Burke founded his aesthetic theory on the elemental sensations of pleasure and pain, as experienced by the “fibres” of the “exquisitely sensible body.”³⁴ The picturesque emerged from a similarly embodied understanding. Uvedale Price followed Burke in theorizing that the picturesque worked by stimulating “fibres” inside the body. Price, along with other eighteenth-century theorists, positioned the picturesque as mediating between the beautiful and the sublime, combining elements of both harmony and ruggedness.³⁵ The picturesque shares an important link to the sublime, as both aesthetic ideals emerged as reactions against the manicured neoclassicism of the earlier eighteenth century, and both pointed the way toward the more individualist, embodied accounts of subjectivity and spectatorship associated with Romanticism.

Photography, stereoscopy, and other technologies of the picturesque appear differently when we read them as epiphenomena of the embodied subjectivities popularized with Romantic philosophy. Seeing the machine as subordinated to the body—a bodied machine, rather than vice versa—leads to a new understanding of early visual technologies. Jonathan Crary describes the stereoscope user as a “fully embodied viewer,” whose eyes are tricked into seeing depth effects by the device’s dual image (136). This new model of vision is abstract and homogenizing, signifying the nineteenth century’s “dissociation of touch from sight.”³⁶ Like Batchen, Crary theorizes the emergence of a spectator whose embodied effects are machine-like, disintegrated, ultimately immaterial and virtual. Yet early aesthetic theories of the perceiving sensorium point toward deeper embodiments in theories of vision and subjectivity, eye and mind. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the stereoscope is in its linking of visuality with tangibility, a connection embedded in its very name. “Stereo” means “solid,” “scope” means “seeing”: the conjoined Greek roots describe how the experience of stereoscopy makes the objects of sight into apparent objects of touch. Oliver Wendell Holmes (discussed further below) writes of stereoscopic looking in 1859 as a kind of solid-seeing that makes the eye into a proxy for the body:

By means of these two different views of an object, the mind, as it were, feels round it and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes, as with our arms, or with our hands, or with our thumb and finger, and then we know it to be something more than a surface.³⁷

Moving from arm, to hand, to thumb and finger, Holmes zeroes in on the grainy tactility of the three-dimensional illusion, the eye clasping the object as though with sensitive fingertips. More recent critics have also highlighted stereoscopy’s effects as they work on the body. Rosalind Krauss writes of the eye’s tiny muscular leaps as it navigates the stereoview’s diverse spatial planes; the eye imitates “what another part of the body, the feet, would do in passing through real space.”³⁸ The stereoscope offers a pleasurable confusion of eye and finger, or eye and foot, suggesting a prosthesis—a machine appendage to the body, one exhibiting all the organic and muscular qualities of a fleshly accessory. These facts suggest that the stereoscope can be understood as a kind of humanistic machine, whose prosthetic effects enhance and heighten the workings of the human body.

Krauss writes to contrast the stereoscope’s embodiments with the flatter effects of paintings on museum walls. But the opposition seems strained when we understand the stereoscope as a technology of the picturesque. Stereoscopy extends some of painting’s own desires, especially landscape paintings, whose three distances had already worked to create “depths” in the viewing experience. These painterly depths were not merely visual illusionism, but also coincided with Romantic notions of subjectivity developed in poetry and philosophy. While paintings occupy a vaunted position in aesthetic hierarchies, wrapped in an aura of apparently timeless beauty, they can also be understood as media, as material communicators with their own technical and even mechanical histories. A painting can in fact be placed on a spectrum of visual devices: its effects differ from those of the stereoscope, but perhaps more as a matter of extent than of kind. A picturesque landscape painting anticipates the haptic landscape of the stereoscope, as the stereoscope exaggerates certain bodily effects of depth, offering the body unique sensations of movement that are both actual (in the muscular movements of the eye) and virtual (in the imagined movements of the legs). Stereoscopy highlights the elements of the picturesque that focus on individual physical sensations, foregrounding the aesthetic experience in nature as a matter of the body.

The stereoscope figures as a Romantic prosthesis in three essential essays on photography by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–94). Poet, medical authority, and avid amateur photographer, Holmes was an early enthusiast for the new technology, inventing an inexpensive American stereoscope that became a best-seller. His three long articles, published in the Atlantic Monthly, appeared just on the cusp of photography’s mass popularity: “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” (1859), “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture” (1861), and “Doings of the Sun-Beam” (1863).³⁹ These essays constitute some of the nineteenth century’s most compelling writing on photography. While photographic writing of the era tends to be fairly dry—aimed at the practitioner, the experimenter, or the chemist—Holmes writes for the layperson, the owner of a parlor stereoscope. He transmutes technological know-how into a poetic, metaphoric account of photography’s social effects. Rather than seeing the new technology as cold or machinic, he imagines photography as the fleshly capture of visual “skins.” He develops this master-metaphor by citing the Lucretian theory that objects shed membranes of light, captured in the eye; photography works by fixing these skins or membranes of light on paper.

DEMOCRITUS of Abdera, commonly known as the Laughing Philosopher, … believed and taught that all bodies were continually throwing off certain images like themselves, which subtile emanations, striking on our bodily organs, gave rise to our sensations.… Lucretius has given us the most popular version [of the idea].… Forms, effigies, membranes, or films, are the nearest representatives of the terms applied to these effluences. They are perpetually shed from the surfaces of solids, as bark is shed by trees. Cortex is, indeed, one of the names applied to them by Lucretius. (124–5)

Human visuality in the world, for Holmes, is inherently bodied—indeed, the world itself consists of “bodies” that “throw off certain images like themselves,” linking all matter in a single web of organic “effluences.” Objects imprint themselves onto our sight via emanating “forms, effigies, membranes, or films.” These emanations of light take on the solidity of tree bark, as well as the organicism of plant life. Holmes’s tongue-in-cheek posture as “the Laughing Philosopher” does not undermine the organic qualities he ascribes to both the photographic plate and the human eye. Though the new technology might threaten to dissolve its subjects into dehumanized surfaces and pixels, Holmes’s layered metaphors re-embody photography, merging it with the organ of the eye and gifting it with qualities of living membranes or skins.

This theory leads Holmes to predict, presciently, that photography will usher in the separation of “form” from “matter” (161), in potentially vast future collections of images—such as those realized in twentieth-century slide libraries, or in today’s electronic visual array of Google Images. Yet Holmes’s notion of these massive futuristic “libraries” is not a postmodern virtual assembly, but rather a trophy-hunter’s collection of valuable skins.

Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth. (162)

Photography emerges here as a surprisingly authentic kind of illusionism, reflected in Holmes’s favored metaphors of “sun-painting” and “sun-sculpture,” which align photography and stereoscopy with the aura of fine art. For all of his mock-heroic pose as the Laughing Philosopher, Holmes nevertheless invokes a serious and sublime metaphorics in figuring photography as a Promethean endeavor. His organicist, authentic notion of photography underpins a grand, mythic vision: the advent of stereoscopy and photography have ushered in “a new epoch in the history of human progress,” one which “dates from the time when He who ‘never but in uncreated light/Dwelt from eternity—’/took a pencil of fire from the hand of the ‘angel standing in the sun,’ and placed it in the hands of a mortal” (165). Prometheus, the divine technologist eminently popular with Romantic writers, here comes to stand for the larger-than-life ambitions of a superhuman figure. He harnesses a “pencil of fire”—a radiant twist on Henry Fox Talbot’s more modest, photographic “pencil of nature,” and a blazing, embodied version of the nineteenth century’s technological sublime.

A Promethean idea undergirds Holmes’s famously stirring account of stereoscopy, in a passage that intensifies the picturesque visual experience into an almost hallucinatory journey—one enabled by the stereoscope’s prosthetic powers:

O, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of glass and pasteboard! I creep over the vast features of Rameses, on the face of his rock-hewn Nubian temple; I scale the huge mountain-crystal that calls itself the Pyramid of Cheops. I pace the length of the three Titanic stones of the wall of Baalbec,—mightiest masses of quarried rock that man has lifted into the air; and then I dive into some mass of foliage with my microscope, and trace the veinings of a leaf so delicately wrought in the painting not made with hands, that I can almost see its down and the green aphis that sucks its juices.… I stroll through Rhenish vineyards, I sit under Roman arches, I walk the streets of once buried cities, I look into the chasms of Alpine glaciers, and on the rush of wasteful cataracts. I pass, in a moment, from the banks of the Charles to the ford of the Jordan, and leave my outward frame in the arm-chair at my table, while in spirit I am looking down upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. (153–4)

Here Holmes explodes the cliché of stereoscopy as virtual travel, boosting the spectatorial “I” into a kind of Nietzschean Superman, omnipotent in movement, touch, and sight. The Promethean might of photography’s inventors now enables a Promethean viewing experience for the technology’s users. Holmes’s bird’s-eye view rehearses a common perspective in mid-century writing and seeing, from the expansive sightlines of the panorama to the omniscient narrator in Dickens’s Bleak House, moving effortlessly across London as the crow flies. But unlike these examples, Holmes’s virtual traveler has a body; his visual experience is rendered acutely tactile. The stereoscope’s haptic landscape bursts into sensory experience. The narrator scales pyramids, walks through vineyards and cities, and dives into foliage rendered in microscopic detail, almost getting his eyes scratched out in the process. (As he treks across the face of the Egyptian Ramses, Holmes’s virtual travel also evokes strongly imperial overtones, which I discuss below.) Stereoscopy’s prosthetic enhancements enable superhuman abilities, amazing feats of illusion, perception, and sensation.⁴⁰

A few striking conclusions here. First, Holmes does not firmly distinguish between photography and stereoscopy in these essays, associating both with a towering, heroic grandeur. Both kinds of photographs function as marvelous illusions based in scientific reality. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have aligned photography with nineteenth-century scientific techniques that pursued an emergent principle of “objectivity”: scientists wanted to use photography to develop impartial machines that could work without human hands, ideally escaping human error or biases.⁴¹ By contrast, Holmes portrays the stereoscope as generating an individualized, unique aesthetic-somatic experience; the technology creates a phantasmagorical self, a Promethean adventurer with all the qualities of the Romantic subject in nature. In an especially resonant phrase, he names photography “the mirror with a memory,” comparing the photographic plate’s capture of light to the human mind’s imprint of memories (129). These metaphors again give the machine a body, and perhaps even a soul; they move in the opposite direction to more familiar mind-machine comparisons, whether of the eighteenth century or the postmodern moment.⁴²

Holmes’s imagery of stereoscopy’s bodied machine is striking and emphatic, but it is not necessarily unique. A similar metaphorics of Romantic-infused technology now leaps out in Charles Baudelaire’s famous designation of the artist Constantin Guys as “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.” Baudelaire writes, in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863):

[Guys] enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an “I” with an insatiable appetite for the “non-I”, at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive.⁴³

Both Baudelaire and Holmes use a nineteenth-century visual technology as a metaphor to describe a Superman sensorium, the ultimate “I,” authenticating a powerful and deep subjectivity. Of course, the kaleidoscope’s fragmentation of the visual field sharply contrasts the more illusionistic totality of the photograph or stereoview. But kaleidoscopes and stereoscopes both served as philosophical toys that proved scientific principles of vision, even while their optical pleasures generated huge popular and commercial appeal. A “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness,” like the mirror with a memory, superimposes human qualities onto a vision machine. For both Holmes and Baudelaire, the bodied machine does not represent a posthumanist automatism so much as a profound and exceptional humanism, the ur-individual, the ideal sensorium.⁴⁴ Baudelaire’s kaleidoscope describes “the artist”; Holmes’s stereoscope describes the well-endowed spectator. Artistry itself comes to seem like a kind of enhanced spectatorship, producing “pictures more living than life itself.” What is surprising is how the device becomes a sensuous enabler of aesthetic experience, a prosthetic extension of the human sensorium, transforming our notion of what a mechanical device might have meant for its nineteenth-century users and theorists.

Revisiting Wordsworth’s Virtual Landscape

Oliver Wendell Holmes describes a Romantic avatar in the stereoscope moving boldly across scenes both natural and cultural. While these might seem to be distinct categories of photographic subjects, in fact they turn out to be closely connected, as “nature” and “culture” tended to blur together in the stereoscope. Picturesque views often featured an antique building or ruin, populating the middle distance with artful crenellations or crumbling archways. The following two sections will explore the phantasmagoric desires surrounding these edifices. Picturesque views in nature, for all of their apparent timelessness, also implied fictions about history and the British past, making human structures into fossils of time. This analysis will shed new light on Wordsworthian Romanticism in particular, whose ghostly abbeys and spiritual journeys in nature worked to produce surprisingly stereoscopic effects.

In Britain, picturesque buildings were most often castles or abbeys. The ruins were the visible signs of the nation’s emergence from its Catholic past, first in Henry VIII’s destruction of the abbeys and then in Cromwell’s ruination of castles during England’s Civil War. Both painters and photographers were drawn to architectural ruins, playing upon the eye’s visual expectation of wholeness confounded by breaks in a structure’s integrity. Picturesque imagery often juxtaposed wall and sky, sans roof. J. M. W. Turner’s painting of Tintern Abbey (1794) glories in the patterns created by the broken archways and twining ivy (Fig. 5.8). Paintings of abbeys, in particular, played upon the gloomy and Gothic associations of a corrupt Catholic spirituality. Turner’s 1822 watercolor of Melrose Abbey, in Scotland, even includes a quote across one of the ruined pillars from Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, admonishing readers to “visit it [the abbey] by the pale moonlight,/.… When the broken arches are black in night,/And each shafted oriel glimmers white.” Stereoviews similarly framed recessive Gothic arches to create aesthetic patterns whose ruined aspect invited feelings of pleasurable melancholy, as in a stereoview of Melrose Abbey by the Grenier brothers (Fig. 5.9). That melancholy was often also scripted by poetry: the stereoview of Melrose Abbey quotes Scott extensively in the label on the back of the card.

Fig. 5.8 J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Interior of Tintern Abbey, watercolor, 1794. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Fig. 5.9 Grenier Brothers, Melrose Abbey. Stereographic photograph, n.d. Collection of the author.

Like picturesque paintings, stereoviews too highlighted visually striking reversals of the interiors and exteriors of ruins, where once-covered rooms were now open to the elements. In a stereoview of Tintern Abbey (Fig. 5.10), well-dressed tourists contemplate the building’s wreck, wandering on a grassy lawn of what should be the abbey’s tiled floor. The roof’s absence, letting in a brilliant sky, renders the windows obsolete. These confusions suggest how the ruined abbey was integrated into a picturesque aesthetic, as the building lost its original purpose and now functioned only as an aesthetic object, the centerpiece of a tourist-worthy view. The ivy-covered structure blurs the boundary between nature and culture, making the human-driven twists of history into the naturalized depredations of time. In the touristic formula of the picturesque, ruined castles or abbeys seamlessly merged into landscapes, blurring history into nature so as to make them seem interchangeable.

Fig. 5.10 Tintern Abbey, stereographic photograph, c. 1850s. Collection of the author.

I have been describing the stereoscopic picturesque as a tool for accessing the deep self of Romanticism. My account invokes notions of authenticity, subjectivity, and “nature,” but it does not presume that Romantic authors or artists themselves accepted these categories as natural or inevitable. Rather, I see them as fantasies and ideologies toward which thinkers themselves expressed self-aware or questioning attitudes—but which mass-cultural forms adopted and promoted wholesale. Elements of Romantic subjectivity and spectatorship became embedded in the picturesque’s conceptualization and practice. It will come as no surprise, then, that the figure of Wordsworth loomed large in stereoscopic imagery. Sites pertaining to Wordsworth’s life—itself closely associated with the Lake District—were among the most popular subjects in stereoviews.⁴⁵ It is a tantalizing fact that Tintern Abbey, titular subject of Wordsworth’s renowned poem, was also likely the single most stereographed site in Britain.⁴⁶ This fact might seem surprising, given that Wordsworth’s poetics usually connote an organicism and anti-mechanism that seem opposed to the stereoscope’s technological, hyper-realistic view. Yet Wordsworthian Romanticism, I will suggest, played a crucial role in Tintern Abbey’s stereographic fame, commodifying the landscape with a sensuous subjectivity augmented in the stereoview.

Wordsworth himself famously professed hostility to the picturesque. He disdained the eighteenth-century tradition of landscape art for its superficiality, its transformation of nature into a series of detached pictures, “comparison of scene with scene,” “meagre novelties/Of colour and proportion.”⁴⁷ Tim Fulford argues that Wordsworth was acutely aware of nature’s commodification in the picturesque, and hence worked to produce a deeper, more moral investment imbued with emotion, imagination, and memory.⁴⁸ As I’ve argued, the picturesque at its very inception already oscillated uneasily between a conventionalized nature-picturing and a more dramatic, sublime-inflected, individualized view. The difference between these two possibilities within the picturesque would seem to mirror the distinction between tourist and traveler, as one merely consumes a pre-packaged scene while the other confronts a new geography with a more wide-ranging, moral, and probing intelligence. Yet Thomas Pfau argues that Wordsworth’s innovations in nature perception were themselves just another step in the commodification of the picturesque. In Pfau’s telling, the middle-class Romantic subject wanted to distance itself from an eighteenth-century aesthetic associated with the landed gentry and its hedonistic materialism; hence the Romantic artist created a new mode of vision, more authentic, spiritual, inward, and labor-intensive. “While still destined for consumption, the aesthetic object had to be first experienced in an essentially productive manner, that is, as an intricate commodity demanding sustained interpretive care and thus generating a superior, because productive, form of subjectivity.”⁴⁹ The more heartfelt and thoughtful travelers, it turns out, were still producing and consuming the landscape-as-commodity, but one that was more “intricate” and affirming of the subjective self. We can trace this process into the later nineteenth century, when the enemies were no longer landed aristocrats but instead the nouveaux riches middle classes who consumed landscapes for class status rather than out of any authentic feeling. In William and Mary Howitt’s Ruined Abbeys and Castles of Great Britain and Ireland (1862), one of the earliest books to be illustrated by tipped-in photographs, the narrator convinces his comic travel partner, a rotund “great manufacturer” of the cotton industry, to forgo the boat to Tintern Abbey in exchange for the more Wordsworthian walk.⁵⁰ The narrator mocks his friend’s huffing and puffing and quotes a lengthy excerpt from “Tintern Abbey” to the ignorant industrialist.⁵¹ Consumerism and materialism continued to trouble middle-class spectators seeking an escape in nature, even as the landscape became increasingly accessible via tourism and inexpensive visual media.

Romantic modes of picturesque commodification found a quintessential expression in stereoscopy. Pfau notes that the new middle-class picturesque viewer maneuvered with a “seemingly unlimited imaginative mobility,” allowing him to deploy his deep sensibility—implicitly gendered male—on any scene, and creating a landscape sketch that was itself a “kind of ‘portable property.’”⁵² Stereoscopy followed this logic to an extreme: now the views were so mobile that they could be purchased at the corner pharmacist, and so portable that they could be transported to any home with a stereoscope. Landscape sketching was a kind of virtual possession of property, an assertion of the self through aesthetic appropriation; stereoscopy likewise made the act of appropriation even easier, as no knowledge of drawing was required, and one’s “property” (of views) could be neatly stowed in a purpose-built cabinet. The imaginative mobility granted to a Romantic tourist was magnified and expanded for the stereoscope owner, who could pursue the picturesque virtually around the world—a possibility to which I will return.

The Romantic commodification of landscape, while positioning itself as a deeper and more complex nature aesthetics, also played a part in the visual dominance of stereoviews. Why, indeed, was Tintern Abbey so enormously popular as a stereographic subject in Britain? The answer to this question produces a kind of cultural hall of mirrors, as captured in Catherine Sinclair’s rhapsodic 1838 travel account:

Who has not read, heard, and dreamed of Tintern Abbey, examined prints and copied sketches, talked and listened about its beauties, till they seem to have been haunting the venerable ruin all their lives; I scarcely felt as if a spot could be unknown to memory there, even when thus approaching it for the first time.⁵³

Sinclair writes in the year before photography’s invention, but her words describe the way that Tintern Abbey was already reproduced and widely disseminated within an intense media culture of copies. The Wye Valley in southern Wales, where Tintern Abbey is situated, had been a much-visited tourist destination in Britain since the eighteenth century, especially after the Napoleonic Wars closed off continental travel. Gilpin’s inaugural picturesque primer described a journey along the Wye river, and countless landscape painters and engravers had made the abbey into a familiar picturesque subject, among them J. M. W. Turner and Philip de Loutherbourg. Wordsworth’s poem about the abbey would seem to reject this picturesque tradition—after all, the abbey is a glaring absence in the “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798.” The poem has become an iconic expression of Romantic nature worship, rejecting urban clamor and mere visual pleasure in favor of the more profound, soul-enriching rewards of immersion in nature—“elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused.” Yet despite the poem’s omission of the abbey, and its implied elevation of the works of nature over those of man, Wordsworth’s lyric must be seen as a key document in the rise of the nascent British tourism industry, describing the kinds of authentic and transformative feelings a Romantic spectator would seek in embarking on a picturesque journey. These emotions imbue the site of Tintern Abbey itself with that tourist desire, making the ruin inseparable from Wordsworth’s poem and from the later Victorian travel experience of the Wye Valley—all infused into the virtual picturesque experience of a stereoview.

Certain stereoviews of Tintern Abbey mobilize striking visual techniques to produce what might be considered Romantic effects. These images over-expose the sunlight pouring in through Gothic windows, making light disrupt the integrity of the building’s structure in a brilliant explosion (Fig. 5.10). The piercing shafts of light invite symbolic interpretations, signifying perhaps the destructive forces of time eroding the abbey walls, or alluding to a divine presence channeled through Christian architecture, or even embodying human thought made visible in a kind of secular spiritualism. One stereoview (Fig. 5.11) emphasizes the way that a tree apparently grows through a large abbey window, so that the tree seems to be inside the building, again melding nature and culture. Here, the abbey is nature. The visual effects within these stereoviews, pushing against a neutral or objective transcription of the scene, create an affirmation of a deep subjective self in accord with the beautiful fictions suggested by Romantic poetry and painting.

Fig. 5.11 “Tintern Abbey, The Choir and East Window.” Stereographic photograph. Collection of the author.

Fig. 5.12 John Thomson (1778–1840), Conway Castle, oil on canvas, c. early nineteenth century. National Trust for Scotland, Falkland Palace.

Those Romantic fictions themselves appear differently when viewed through the lens of the stereoscope. In fact, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” produces effects that are surprisingly stereoscopic, anticipating the picturesque technology and articulating a desire that the technology fulfills. The word “deep” appears six times in the poem, dramatizing a penetration into nature that is physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual. The poem’s opening evokes a lone subjectivity adventuring into the natural scene, heightened by the resonant symbolic figure of the isolated Hermit, sitting in his darkened cave. And the poem itself narrates a return to the favored spot after a five-year absence; the speaker describes his obsessive memory of natural scenes over the intervening years, as he has called to mind the “beauteous forms” repeatedly on dreary city days. Now, too, five years later, “[t]he picture of the mind revives,” as the speaker restocks his mental archive with sublime nature imagery for a future day. The poem scripts the idea of a recollective return to a beloved place, describing the desire for a visual and somatic archive of nature to which one might return, again and again. The haptic landscape figures, too, in the poem’s intensely physical account of the speaker’s experience in nature. Though he disdains his former visual pleasure in nature as a mere animal “appetite”—finding now a more mature and “deeper” pleasure in his return—the speaker’s experience is still conveyed in terms strikingly sensuous. This “more sublime” feeling sends the speaker into a kind of trance, almost stopping “the breath of this corporeal frame/And even the motion of our human blood,” while creating “a living soul.” In this heightened perceptual state, body stilled, the eye takes over: “with an eye made quiet … /We see into the life of things.” The poem uncannily anticipates the effects of stereoscopy, as the speaker’s stilled body opens into a greater sensation of nature through the eyes, achieving new heights (and depths) of sensory experience.

In “Tintern Abbey,” then, we see how the picturesque calls stereoscopy into being. The stereoscopic picturesque highlights the way that Romantic subjectivity—even while privileging the Mind and its awesome powers—also has a body, and works through the senses. Just as eighteenth-century aesthetic theories founded themselves on notions of empirical perception, so too nineteenth-century versions of the picturesque adopted and extended this idea. Subjectivity expresses itself in sensuous depths, and the deep mind has a body. Yet even while “Tintern Abbey” prizes an authentic, immediate experience in nature, channeled through the senses, it also describes methods for mediating this experience, for storing it and replaying it. In fact, the poem is itself a kind of virtual technology, a portable, re-readable experience of the penetrative journey into nature, one which itself scripts a return to a glorious place.⁵⁴ The poem’s eventual address to the speaker’s sister makes her a kind of surrogate for the stereoscope viewer, who can return to the scene with the poem in hand as record of an earlier view. Both poem and stereoview exhibit qualities of portability, mobility, replayability, individual experience, penetrating depths, and recollective return. No wonder that Tintern Abbey was photographed for scores of stereoviews.

Stereoscopy actualizes picturesque desires: picturesque paintings offer the viewer the fantasy of penetrating into a landscape where every object exists for aesthetic delectation rather than any functional labor or production. Stereoviews heighten that experience, exaggerating the visual depth effects offered by the picturesque scene while the photographic medium offers a “you-are-here” illusion in miniature. Romantic landscape poems, meanwhile, incarnate an aesthetic subject responding to a natural scene with a deep and individualized vision. The stereoscope likewise emphasizes individual experience, offering a lone viewer a miniaturized world, often enhanced by a darkening eyepiece that obscures external stimuli and brightens the image projected through the lens. The result is a pleasurable immersion, a virtual voyage or escape wholly compatible with nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic experience. It’s worth remembering this argument’s counterintuitive aspects: Romanticism connotes originality, moody geniuses, and organic values; these all seem quite the opposite of the mass stereoscopic experience, with its crowd-pleasing illusionism, its machine-made reality effects, its reduction of the landscape into a series of formulaic squares. By showing how the picturesque and its Romantic inheritors called stereoscopy into being, however, we can see how the original painting and poetry were themselves already caught up in ideologies primed for mass expansion and marketing, whether in tourism or other, more virtual kinds of pleasure-based travel.

Ornament and Illusion: Gothic History

The transition from eighteenth-century painting to Victorian stereoview points to a new interest in visual realism, detail, and accurate empiricist looking. Yet to accept the positivist rhetoric surrounding stereoviews is to ignore their participation in powerful Victorian fantasies about space and time. The stereoview used highly detailed, illusionistic scenes to present fantastical messages about modernity packaged for the virtual tourist. Almost never did stereoviews depict the modern Victorian factory, instead choosing the kinds of subjects described in the subtitle of The Stereoscopic Magazine: A Gallery of Landscape Scenery, Architecture, Antiquities, and Natural History (1858).⁵⁵ These images conveyed the fantasy of a pre-industrial, agrarian past—the rooftops of an old village, the ruins of a cathedral or castle, rustic peasants in “typical” dress. Stereoscopic space, in other words, also presented an implicit narrative about time and origins, as the modern viewer could peruse what appeared to be versions of his or her own picturesque pre-history. That historical sense appears in Lovell Reeve’s 1858 introduction to the first number of the Stereoscopic Magazine, which reproduced stereoviews alongside explanatory essays:

The temples in which our fathers prayed, and the fields upon which our fathers fought, for the liberty which we enjoy, may be impressed upon our minds without moving from our homes; and the child may be schooled into that love of country, which produced our Arthurs and our Alfreds, by the fond and intelligent mother, in the quiet of an English home, calling to her aid the magic power of the Stereoscope and the truthfulness of the camera-obscura.⁵⁶

Reeve’s strongly nationalist program grounds itself in the English landscape, reiterating the familiar picturesque notion that the countryside is the inherent site of Englishness. Beautiful landscapes embody the nation in their nostalgic celebration of the English agricultural world, hearkening back to a time before industrialism and urbanization. Ironically enough, it is the radically new stereoscope that links the modern Victorian child back to the “Arthurs” and “Alfreds” of history: the new technology is domesticated within the feminized confines of the English home.

We can track shifting picturesque narratives about time in a series of scenes representing Conwy Castle, another popular British tourist destination and familiar visual icon.⁵⁷ This medieval Welsh castle had been a ruin since the English Civil War, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it attracted many painters. The Scottish landscape painter John Thomson (1778–1840) frames the castle according to familiar picturesque conventions (Fig. 5.12): the edifice appears in the middle distance, forbidding and mighty in its island setting, bordered by encircling waters and a dark foreground of trees and rocky outcroppings. A group of tourists picnic in the front, contemplating the vast ruin before them. The image produces a fairy tale quality, as the castle rises mysteriously from the waters. The castle’s actual history—its ruination as a consequence of civil war, as Parliament faced off against Charles I—is nowhere apparent. In a stereoview by Francis Bedford (Fig. 5.13), the castle once again presents an imposing front, set off by its watery frame; only at the picture’s far-left side do we notice a new suspension bridge connecting the castle to the mainland. The stereoview minimizes the intrusion of this new technology, directing our attention to the foreground, where picturesque travelers are seated in a boat. The three-dimensional view heightens the sense that the boat is about to launch into the watery depths toward the castle. Never mind that the new suspension bridge makes the boat obsolete: the older mode of hand-driven transport conjures up the pre-industrial, picturesque past governing the stereoview’s visual conventions. The castle still rises up mysteriously out of the waters, whose shimmering distances are foregrounded by the quaint boat. The extent of the stereoview’s evasions are visible in a later photograph of Conwy Castle by the workshop of Francis Frith, whose oeuvre is discussed further below (Fig. 5.14). Frith’s 1906 image brings the bridge fully into view and delights in the contrast of old and new materials, juxtaposing the bridge’s metal handrails and suspension cables against the ancient stonework. And even this photograph obscures the full modernity of the setting, as new bridge pillars imitate the crenellations of a medieval castle, while the adjacent railway bridge is only barely visible. Contemporary photographs of the castle reveal a decidedly un-picturesque aspect, showing the full, ungainly intrusion of the railway bridge cutting across the old stone.

Fig. 5.13 Francis Bedford, “Conway Castle—General View and Shore.” Stereographic photograph. North Wales Illustrated series, n.d. Collection of the author.

Fig. 5.14 Francis Frith, Conwy, the Castle and Suspension Bridge. Photograph, 1906. Copyright The Francis Frith Collection.

Picturesque history in both painting and stereoscope is naturalized and aestheticized: forces of change seem inevitable, windswept, shapely, and organic. “Our Arthurs and our Alfreds” celebrated by the Stereoscopic Magazine merge seamlessly into the landscapes which they conquered. For an example of the kind of history omitted from stereoscopic images, we can look to William Howitt’s second volume of Ruined Abbeys and Castles of Great Britain and Ireland (1864), illustrated by tipped-in photographs. Though this book for the most part follows in the picturesque tradition, a rupture occurs when the text explains what has caused the ruin of Tynemouth Priory. As it happens, the abbey has been despoiled by “those worst of all dilapidators, men who look with covetous eyes on fine old buildings when they want to erect ugly new ones without the trouble of quarrying and squaring.” The guilty party is the local governor, whose house is “a model of ugliness, built of stone taken from the ancient walls.”⁵⁸ Here the abbey’s ruins have been caused not by the generalized erosions of time, but instead by the petty appropriations of local human actors.

More broadly, when the stereoview proposes through visual means that an abbey is nature, that vision also contains an implicit narrative about England’s transformation from a Catholic to a Protestant nation—a mythic shift that, according to the image, has occurred in the same way that ivy twines around stone pillars, rather than by means that might have been more arbitrary, uneven, and violent. Indeed, stereoviews played a crucial role in appropriating Catholic ruins for Englishness; if Catholicism might be understood as a former empire within Britain’s own borders, controlled from Rome, then the assimilation of the cathedral into the English picturesque rewrites that specific history into a more domestic, Protestant narrative.

The cathedral or Gothic church was a quintessential object in the stereoscope, especially in the first flush of stereoscopy’s popularity in the 1850s and 1860s. While these edifices were already established as canonical touchstones within a pre-photographic visual tradition, stereoscopy also amplified qualities of a pictorial, picturesque Gothic. This visual form of late Romanticism differed from the terror-inducing Gothic of the eighteenth-century novel. In the Gothic novel, writers projected haunted, terrifying, taboo, and corrupt plots onto Gothic structures, often with unsubtle anti-Catholic politics.⁵⁹ An abbey might be the site for murder, mayhem, even incest. In the picturesque Gothic, by contrast, writers and artists reasserted British values by investing the spectator with an elevated aesthetic vision. The picturesque Gothic produced a visual aesthetic in which the haunted past was not looking for modern-day remedy—it was not a political critique looking to right past wrongs—so much as providing a metaphor for a beautiful, naturalized, and undifferentiated History. Uvedale Price praises Gothic edifices in his 1794 treatise as displaying “the triumph of the picturesque”: “our cathedrals and ruined abbeys,” with their “turrets and pinnacles,” offer “an appearance of splendid confusion and irregularity.”⁶⁰ Price suggests that the source of Gothic picturesqueness is not religious feeling, as one might expect, but rather the “marked and peculiar effect of form, tint, or light and shadow”—such as one finds equally in an old mill, or hovel.⁶¹ The picturesque Gothic emerges as the sign of a certain sensibility, a visual appreciation of irregularity and time felt in the body of the perceiver.

This Gothic aesthetic became increasingly mainstream with its dissemination by new visual technologies. In particular, Louis J.-M. Daguerre’s Diorama, opening in London in 1823, made the picturesque Gothic into a mass-cultural craze, using effects that would strongly influence later media.⁶² Audiences sat in a pitch-black, rotating theater: slowly, they moved past an immense painted screen, as the play of light over diverse surfaces created an illusionary transformation. During the space of fifteen minutes, the audience might witness a ruined abbey, in sunlight under fleecy clouds, slowly morph into a haunted nighttime scene under pouring moonlight. Daguerre created the illusion by painting the image on semi-translucent material and then manipulating the lighting using invisible high windows covered with moveable blinds. The auditorium’s darkness ensured that no extraneous details would break the illusion of size and distance. The picture seemed to glow of its own accord. The entire show lasted for a half-hour, as audiences took in two different paintings, one a landscape and the other an architectural interior, usually Gothic in style. Richard Altick describes the Diorama’s subjects as “romantic topography, the stuff of picturesque art and of sentimental antiquarianism.”⁶³ Cathedrals and abbeys dominated at the Diorama: Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim note that Daguerre’s “Ruins of Holyrood Chapel,” exhibited in 1825, was “the most popular subject during the first decade of the Diorama’s existence.”⁶⁴ An extant painting by Daguerre reproduces the Diorama’s Gothic image (Fig. 5.15). While both the panorama and the Diorama offered mass visual entertainments to Romantic-era audiences, the panorama rendered timely subjects with topographical accuracy—hence its role as a news source, as I discuss in Chapter 2—whereas the Diorama opted for the ostensibly timeless subjects of Gothic ruins, in order to produce effects both atmospheric and aesthetic.⁶⁵ The Diorama was an essential technology of the picturesque Gothic. Its three-dimensional illusions of space within a darkened theater anticipated the more private, solid-seeming illusions within the stereoscope. It is no coincidence that stereoviews of Holyrood Chapel captured similar scenes to Daguerre’s Diorama (Fig. 5.16). Both visual technologies produced pleasure by evoking a vague, melancholy sense of time passing in the play of light and weather over antiquated structures.

Fig. 5.15 Louis J.-M. Daguerre, The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel. Oil on canvas, 1824. National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery. Reproducing the Diorama’s image.

Fig. 5.16 Holyrood Chapel. Stereographic photograph, n.d. Collection of the author.

The picturesque Gothic became popular in the Diorama and the stereoscope, but it also had an influential exponent in the high-flown art critic, John Ruskin. The link to Ruskin might seem surprising, given that the Gothic revival usually connotes the high-art realms of architecture or literature.⁶⁶ Yet—as this book has been arguing—the lived reality of Victorian aesthetic culture was deeply interfused with new media developments, and Ruskin’s Gothic is in fact inextricable from the mass-culture phenomena that preceded it and developed alongside it. Indeed, the innumerable stereoviews of cathedral ornaments on archways, doors, and pillars have been attributed to Ruskin’s influence, especially in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–3).⁶⁷ (Ruskin’s early promotion of a picturesque Gothic served to contrast his later, famous jeremiads against the picturesque for its immoral aestheticization of poverty, ruin, and dilapidation.)⁶⁸ If the Diorama offered Gothic ruins as an unabashed source of popular visual pleasure, Ruskin took that pleasure and deepened its alignment with aspects of Romantic philosophy.

Ruskin’s thought, in particular, works to code the Gothic cathedral as “nature,” an ideology also manifest in the stereoview. By the lights of Ruskin’s Victorian Romanticism, Gothic ornament mimics natural forms in an organic, moral, and spiritual way divorced from actual Catholicism. While most of the cathedrals Ruskin studies are located in Italy and France, his appropriation of the cathedral for nature allows it to transcend nationality, becoming (paradoxically) the foundation for a British picturesque Romanticism. Ruskin equates the structures of old buildings with that of vegetation, finding parallels between leaf structure and architectural form. In The Stones of Venice, “the mere shadow and ghost of the leaf” carved in stone is enough to bind architecture to nature.⁶⁹ The Gothic ornaments adorning Rouen cathedral in The Seven Lamps are “thicker and quainter than ever filled the depth of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates, trellised with close leaves; those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower” (8:53). The ornament achieves almost hallucinatory visual effects, as the twisting natural forms become figures for the labyrinth of the Mind, raised to exalted aesthetic heights in hallowed Gothic space. Ruskin’s poetic writing naturalizes the Gothic’s link between artifice and authenticity: the Gothic ornament moves like nature, evokes nature, crafting an illusion both dreamlike and true. That link is further forged in Ruskin’s accompanying illustration, a soft-ground etching from his own drawing, in which Gothic ornaments nestle alongside a thorny, twining thistle plant (Fig. 5.17).⁷⁰ The drawing is rendered with fine cross-hatching in Ruskin’s trademark realistic style, but the image’s effects are ultimately phantasmagoric. The ornaments float in a three-dimensional nowhere, hit by mysterious shafts of light and shadow, while a thistle plant grows improbably beside the hard stone. The organic intimations of natural ornament emerge from tricky light effects and impossible blends of culture with nature, creating a pleasurable illusion worthy of Daguerre.

Fig. 5.17 John Ruskin, “Plate I: Ornaments from Rouen, St. Lô, and Venice.” The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849.

Speaking of Daguerre: many scholars have noted how Ruskin’s visual style, in drawings and watercolors, showed the influence of the daguerreotype. Ruskin used an assistant to create hundreds of daguerreotypes in Europe, mostly of architectural subjects, before his early enthusiasm for photographic technology waned (Fig. 5.18).⁷¹ Like the daguerreotype, Ruskin’s drawings produced a hyper-realistic effect, capturing architectural elements in stunning detail. Yet Ruskin’s art, like his writings, expressed a picturesque Gothic to which Daguerre’s Diorama was just as relevant as the daguerreotype. In fact, both inventions contributed to the pleasures of the stereoscope, as both can be considered technologies of the picturesque. Even though the Diorama and the daguerreotype were invented by the same person (seventeen years apart), scholars have not really discussed their relation.⁷² This omission likely reflects assumptions about Romantic versus Victorian visual cultures, as encapsulated by the contrasts between the two technologies. The Diorama was illusionistic, painterly, mass-cultural, spectacular, and dependent on the fleeting effects of light over time. The daguerreotype, by contrast, fixed light into a unitary object, with a metallic, mirror-like form; it was rigorously accurate, chemically produced, quasi-scientific, smaller, and more private. The Diorama epitomizes stereotyped qualities of Romantic visual culture, with its investments in landscape, fragment, the Gothic, magic, and illusionism; the daguerreotype epitomizes stereotyped qualities of Victorian visual culture, with its investments in realism, positivism, and scientific endeavor. Despite these easy oppositions, however, both kinds of visual technologies shared elements of the other. The Diorama demonstrated scientific ingenuity in its proto-cinematic effects, while the daguerreotype engaged in illusionism and portrayed picturesque subject-matter. And, of course, the daguerreotype served as a precursor to the mass visual culture of photography. Aspects of the Diorama and the daguerreotype came together in the stereoview, which was both mass-cultural and scientific, fantastical and realistic. The stereoview melded the positivist realism of the photograph with the pleasurable, volumetric, and mass-cultural illusionism of the Diorama.

Fig. 5.18 John Ruskin, Porch of St. Maclou, Rouen, c. 1854. Daguerreotype (image reversed). © The Ruskin—Library, Museum and Research Centre (University of Lancaster).

These qualities all attach to Ruskin’s drawings of Gothic ornament, which capture effects familiar to stereoscopy. Both Ruskin’s art and the Gothic subject in the stereoscope articulate a similar cultural desire, one based in the qualities of touch and time intrinsic to picturesque visuality. Ruskin’s two-dimensional images of cathedral ornaments produce arresting effects of depth, shadow, and brilliant prominence. The ornament comes alive in his watercolor rendering, even while reproducing details with scrupulous accuracy (Fig. 5.19).⁷³ While impressively mimetic, however, Ruskin’s drawings exceed mere mimeticism. They demonstrate that the pleasure of Gothic ornament is supremely tactile, the watercolor giving body and touch to sculptural forms. This effect comes to fruition in the stereoview, which exaggerates the volume and haptic qualities of the Gothic artifact, bringing out the organic textures of moss, stain, fracture, and decay. In George Washington Wilson’s stereoview of Roslin Chapel (Fig. 5.20), the ornamented pillars burst forth in hand-carved textured stone, twining with the encrustations of history. Gothic ornaments in the stereoview offer the tantalizing pleasures of touch, incarnating what touch looks like, creating the illusion of texture and time superimposed upon an idea of the human hand that has carved the ornament.⁷⁴

Fig. 5.19 John Ruskin, “Plate V: Capital from the Lower Arcade of the Doge’s Palace, Venice.” The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849.

Fig. 5.20 George Washington Wilson, Roslin Chapel (Scotland). Stereographic photograph, n.d. Collection of the author.

The cathedral in the lens of the picturesque Gothic emerges as a multifaceted Victorian symbol, overflowing with contradictory associations. It might serve as a futuristic, utopian symbol of community, lost amid modern urban atomization; it might beckon as a European architectural wonder, part of the Grand Tour in France and Italy; or, conversely, it might function as the visual and spiritual anchor of a local village within a domestic British landscape, transformed now from Catholic to Protestant. Finally, it might loom as a medieval ruin, a fossil of history, site of gloomy Gothic feelings and romantic histories—ready to be reproduced in mass-cultural form, as a pleasurable illusion. Even in this latter function, however, the picturesque Gothic is not a projection of foreignness and otherness so much as the creation of a privileged position within British spectatorship. In Ruskin’s Gothic, the visual form becomes “ours,” an aesthetic claim for irregularity, jaggedness, nature, authenticity, individual expression—as against false symmetries, slavery, or mindless mechanism. Whereas the eighteenth-century picturesque initially arose as a reaction against the rigorous symmetries of classicism, Ruskin’s picturesque now seems to react against the mechanical forms produced in the Victorian factory, anything straight, grid-like, smooth, regular, or rationally arranged. These new associations explain how structures formerly associated with transgressive Catholic sins became the basis for a desirable English style, spurring Gothic Revival architecture in Victorian institutions like museums, universities, Protestant churches, and halls of municipality. (It seems deeply appropriate that these buildings often clad Gothic-style stonework on modern iron framework, creating yet another example of Gothic illusionism.) Stereoscopy was not an ancillary event to this development but a crucial motivator, as it served as one of the most direct and popular vehicles for the picturesque Gothic in the Victorian home.

Stereoscopic Politics and the Global Picturesque

To see a cathedral as an efflorescence of nature is to obscure some of the more mundane and unsightly realities surrounding these buildings—in the way that they housed bodies, servants, kitchens, toilets, horses; in their uneven, often slapdash repairs and renovations made over the centuries by local officials; in their use of modern building technologies; in their deep involvement with local politics, such that the troops of a reigning lord might be stabled in a nave; and in the violent conflict and death swirling around them over the course of local history. The suppression of these realities produced a familiar, conservative Romantic politics portraying culture as organic, and abrupt change as unnatural.

In a similar way, the picturesque framing of landscapes insisted on an apoliticism that was everywhere political. Scholars have delved deeply into the issues of land and labor underpinning landscape aesthetics, beginning with Britain’s eighteenth-century Enclosure Acts. Whereas the British landscape once consisted of vast commons areas, shared alike by lords and peasants, enclosure fenced off common lands as private property, consolidating farms for agriculture reforms—so as to enrich local landowners, while displacing rural workers who had been subsisting on the land. Ann Bermingham notes that the entire Romantic idealization of “nature” needs to be seen against the background of its increasing disappearance across the eighteenth century. The Enclosure Acts tamed the commons and transformed them into fields; the taste for wild and irregular nature thus accompanied the willful destruction of such landscapes, even while they were being recreated in the shapely gardens of wealthy landowners like Uvedale Price. As Bermingham writes: “The aesthetically pleasing landscape was not the economically productive one.”⁷⁵ John Macarthur notes that enclosure in the 1790s deliberately targeted restive rural workers, depriving them of their livelihoods and making them into dependents on wage labor. In Macarthur’s summation, “Those people who were developing an aesthetic appreciation of the landscape of Britain”—picturesque theorists and landowners like Price and Richard Payne Knight—“were also in a state of low-level civil war with its inhabitants.”⁷⁶ Contemporary scholarship has pursued a Marxist critique of the picturesque, following Raymond Williams and John Barrell, observing what Barrell calls “the dark side of the landscape.”⁷⁷ Landscape aesthetics emerges, for modern scholars, as a largely oppressive visual power wielded by the privileged. These compelling assessments raise some pointed questions about the way that the picturesque still defines Western practices and experiences of the landscape today, questions to which I will return in the chapter’s conclusion.

Stereoscopy also followed in the politics of picturesque paintings and prints. Stereoscopic scenes naturalized labor, made it aesthetic; the landscape was shaped magically by invisible hands. If a rural worker did appear in a landscape scene, he or she was idle, following Gilpin’s dictum that lazy “rustics” are more picturesque than industrious ones. Nostalgic scenes of a picturesque British countryside looked back yearningly to a time when rural labor prospered—in contrast to the reality, when Enclosure Acts and a changing economy were driving workers to migrate to urban factories. Tintern Abbey, the quintessential picturesque subject in the stereoscope, existed downstream from a roaring ironworks whose emanations disturbed Romantic tourists. These realities did not impinge upon picturesque stereoviews.

Traditional accounts of the picturesque, focused around paintings, have seen the rural British landscape as a central locus for Britishness, an epitome of national belonging and history. More recently, art historians have challenged this phantasmatic idea; as Michael Rosenthal asks, how can the rural landscape possibly contain a “quintessence of Englishness” when Britain’s “multicultural population” in fact “lives mainly in towns, estates, cities, and suburbs?”⁷⁸ The claiming of the picturesque for Englishness has been challenged by scholars noting the already-global dimensions of the aesthetic, from its influence in the eighteenth century by Japanese and Chinese landscape traditions, to its European models in the paintings of Claude Lorrain (a French painter of Italian landscapes), to its deployment by eighteenth-century British painters working in India.⁷⁹ The art history of a global picturesque suggests that the concept of artful landscape framing was portable, flexible, and transnational even while it was being coded as an especially British way of seeing.

When the picturesque appears in the stereoview, the new technology expands and augments these already global aspects of the aesthetic. While my discussion has so far focused largely on British stereoviews that followed in a domestic tourist tradition, I want to turn now to consider stereoscopy’s global ambitions, as it capitalized upon the appeal of virtual travel to distant lands. Marshall McLuhan argues that new nineteenth-century media networks like telegraphy imploded the size of the world, conquering spatial divides to create a kind of “global village.”⁸⁰ William Merrin suggests that other media, too, contributed to this shrinking of the globe, especially popular visual illusions such as the Diorama, panorama, and stereoscopy.⁸¹ The world-mediation of stereoscopy participated in a larger media expansion in print and visual culture, encompassing museums, world exhibitions, and other geographical simulations constituting the Victorian “picture world” explored in this book.

Britain’s tourist track canonized certain stations and views that were multiplied exponentially in the stereoscope, until every British town and county had its own stereographic record. The London Stereoscopic Company catalogue shows the profoundly geographical orientation of these views, as each country and region had its own series of established virtual tours with titles such as “Monmouthshire Illustrated” or “Views of Yorkshire.”⁸² These photographic series reproduced many of the same views as those found in pre-photographic illustrated books such as John Britton’s The Beauties of England and Wales, published in eighteen volumes from 1801 to 1815, and organized geographically by county. Stereoviews continued the nineteenth century’s ongoing, methodical process of mediatizing the world, standardizing and organizing global geography into an atlas of views stored in a parlor cabinet. It is fitting that the commercial stereoscope had its debut at the Great Exhibition of 1851, an important point of reference for global stereoscopy. The Crystal Palace divided its halls into different national displays, each hall offering the particular ornaments, styles, and objects of a country within a standardized and regularized architectural format. Similarly, millions of stereoviews translated wide-ranging global variation into stylized, conventional views and prospects, many of them functioning under the codes of the picturesque. Each stereocard was the same size and shape, each with twinned photographs cut to the same proportions. It seems almost overdetermined that stereoviews themselves were used to document the various national halls of display in World Expositions across the later nineteenth century.

The global picturesque in the nineteenth century affirmed a way of seeing and framing foreign places that was imbued with the power dynamics of imperialism. W. J. T. Mitchell, writing in the collection Landscape and Power (1994, 2002), hypothesizes that the practice of landscape aesthetics burgeoned in tandem with imperial power, from China in the tenth and eleventh centuries to Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Mitchell puts it, landscape art registers “the ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism.”⁸³ That dreamwork comes into visibility in the stereoscopy essays of Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted above. Holmes hails stereoscopic technology for endowing the spectator with miraculous powers of virtual travel; all of the terrains he conquers—Egypt, Italy, France, Boston, Jerusalem—meld together in a single, magical tour, creating the fantasy of a hyper-mobile, world-spanning omnipotence. While picturesque sketching allowed tourists to possess a scene on paper, Holmes’s passages on stereoscopy portray a more brazen and invasive kind of appropriation, as he scales a pyramid and crawls across the face of an Egyptian king. This invasive imagery is fitting for an era when swashbuckling European anthropologists were excavating foreign monuments and transporting them home for triumphant display in the museums of the metropole. (I discuss this process in Chapter 2, as it informed Bible illustrations: not surprisingly, the Holy Land was a popular destination in the stereoview, reflecting the broader appropriation of Middle-Eastern geography for the visual practices of British and American Christianity.) Holmes’s dominant metaphor of stereoviews as “skins,” globally available to be plucked and then assembled in an immense image library, creates an idea of stereoscopic looking as an imperialistic kind of hunt. The trophy will be the virtual possession of the entire world, arranged in a cabinet of views. In voicing a fantasy of omnipotent travel, Holmes reflects the nascent imperial ambitions of America as well as the broader, pan-Western imperial eye made available in the stereoscope.

I want to pursue some of the complicated twists of the global picturesque by moving to examine stereoviews that, at first blush, would seem to fall outside of picturesque visual codes. These contrasting stereoscopic series, depicting America and Egypt, numbered among some of the most popular views of the 1850s and 1860s. While the stereoscopic views of Britain—dominated by rural landscapes and Gothic edifices—seem worlds away from the wilds of America or the pyramids of Egypt, a global picturesque still governs the framing and reception of these exceedingly diverse scenes. These stereoviews push us to observe the picturesque as a way of seeing rather than simply a place of seeing, conferring powers of subjective, embodied vision and elevated aesthetic sensibility via images both thrillingly foreign and safely domesticated.

“America in the Stereoscope” was an expansive series created by the British photographer William England and issued by the London Stereoscopic Company in 1859. Offering British audiences the first mass-produced photographs of American scenery, the series generated tremendous interest in Britain.⁸⁴ While picturing a few North American cities, including Boston, Montreal, and Washington, DC, the stereoviews overwhelmingly looked to American nature scenes, especially those featuring water. A London Times reviewer notes condescendingly that American cities “afford little matter for pictorial illustration” when compared to more Easterly metropolises. “The artist therefore has, with much tact … flown to those scenes on the Delaware, the Hudson, and the St. Lawrence which seem always new.”⁸⁵ In fact, most of the 1859 American stereoscopic views depict that most sublime of natural features, the waterfall. Waterfalls were especially popular subjects for the stereoscope because of their astonishing depth effects, taking viewers to the brink and conveying a pleasurably safe vertiginousness. Many of these scenes pictured blurred water, suggesting a rushing temporality of speed and wildness. At least ten different views of Niagara Falls and its environs appeared in the stereoscopic series, labeled simply “The American Fall”—Niagara itself embodying American-ness. One hand-tinted version heightened the sense of forceful waters by juxtaposing the falls with ice-encrusted branches jutting into the foreground (Fig. 5.21). A London reviewer in 1861 responded to American sublimity:

The Horseshoe Fall [of Niagara] affords a good idea of the awful power of the mass of descending water; we can almost hear the deafening roar. The effect of viewing this little photograph in the stereoscope is to make one giddy.⁸⁶

Fig. 5.21 William England, “American Fall, Niagara—Winter Scene.” Hand-tinted stereographic photograph. America in the Stereoscope Series, London Stereoscopic Company, 1859. Robert Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, The New York Public Library.

By focusing on waterfalls to the exclusion of more cultural American productions, British stereoviews exaggerated the stereotypical contrast between the two nations. America seemed to epitomize a sublime wilderness, as opposed to the picturesque cultivation of Britain. This contrast was scripted by the edifying labels on the backs of the stereocards, as when one says of Niagara Falls: “The roar of these mighty waters has been heard at a distance of 40 miles.” The labels quoted liberally from Nathaniel P. Willis, an American nature writer with deep transatlantic connections.⁸⁷ Willis laid out the essentially cliché distinction between British and American landscapes in his book, American Scenery, or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature (1840), published in London for a British audience:

Certain it is that the rivers, the forests, the unshorn mountain-sides and unbridged chasms of that vast country, are of a character peculiar to America alone—a lavish and large-featured sublimity … quite dissimilar to the picturesque of all other countries.⁸⁸

The stereoview series heightened this contrast by moving seamlessly from American to Canadian waterfalls; a three-dimensional view of the Rideau Falls in Ottawa sends a protruding spray of water toward the spectator against a stark rocky backdrop (Fig. 5.22). These scenes described a larger North American continent in which Canada and America blurred together into a single, sublime New World—a world too new to have culture as Europe did. The stereoviews downplayed more time-bound cultural creations; for instance, they avoided the quintessential picturesque American subject, namely, the Southern plantation. None of the British images acknowledged the sectional fracturing between North and South that was already evident by 1859. The American sublime was manifest in a waterfall wilderness, unified in its rude, uncultivated state.

Fig. 5.22 William England, “The Rideau Falls, Ottawa, Canada.” Stereographic photograph. America in the Stereoscope Series, London Stereoscopic Company, 1859. Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library/University of Georgia Libraries.

Yet even while the stereoviews seemed to affirm the conventional difference between a sublime America and a picturesque Britain, that contrast quickly starts to break down on closer inspection. As I’ve noted, the sublime was not completely separable from the picturesque, since both emerged as part of a broader turn in aesthetic ideas toward individual, subjective experience felt in the body. The wild, rugged aspects of picturesque landscapes complemented the raw, overpowering qualities inspired by the objects of the sublime. Stereoscopic views, enabling heightened corporeal experience, could produce embodied effects that contributed to emotions both picturesque and sublime. Moreover, both of these aesthetic modes encoded a politics of land domination or control. Picturesque landscapes offered scenes of perfectly framed cultivation, implying a shaping done by subordinate hands. Sublime landscapes, meanwhile, which appeared to be vacant and untamed, in fact implied the offer of resources to be harvested, extracted, or conquered by an army of unpictured miners, railroad builders, loggers, and others. This narrative was conveyed in photographs of American natural features crossed by trains or magnificent suspension bridges—implying that this nature might yield tremendous resources when subjected to human technological might. Rhetorics of a sublime American nature perfectly accommodated a familiar Manifest Destiny politics of conquest and expansion.⁸⁹

In other words, the categories of “picturesque” and “sublime” are actually unstable, mutable, and overlapping. This fact might explain why the same nineteenth-century landscapes were variously described as both picturesque and sublime. Waterfalls in “America in the Stereoscope” are sublime in their awesome effects, but also picturesque in their artfully framed scenes. Even Nathaniel P. Willis, advocate for American sublimity, uses the word “picturesque” to describe several scenes on stereocard labels in the American series. A waterfall in the stereoscope exhibits a domesticated sublime, the thrill of a waterfall miniaturized and safely contained within a frame—echoing its relationship to Romanticism, as a private, embodied experience becomes widely available with mass reproduction. The stereoscopic waterfall might be either picturesque or sublime, depending on the moment of seeing or writing. This instability was not necessarily particular to waterfalls, nor even to America; British subjects also oscillated between the picturesque and the sublime. Salisbury Cathedral, subject of numerous picturesque stereoviews, became, in the account of Oliver Wendell Holmes, “[v]ast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, … pervad[ing] the vast landscape over which it reigns, … like Niagara and the Alps” (“Sun-Painting,” 202–3). The stereoscope elevated the ambiguities between the picturesque and the sublime, combining perfect order and visual formulaicism with dizzying body effects and a pleasurable sense of derangement.

The nineteenth century’s most famous stereoviews would seem to offer an even greater challenge to the visual paradigms of picturesque or sublime. These were Francis Frith’s stereoviews of Egypt, produced between 1857 and 1859 and issued by the stereoscopic company Negretti & Zambra.⁹⁰ Photographic historian William Darrah writes that these views are “probably the most lavishly praised and famous series in the history of stereography.”⁹¹ For the British armchair traveler, peering into a stereoscope, Egypt epitomized the ultimate virtual destination, as the arduous and expensive journey was out of reach for most, while the iconic pyramids and desert ruins offered an appearance wholly unique. Indeed, the African desert landscape—barren of water, trees, or mountains—seemed to be entirely alien to Western landscape conventions. Frith’s stereoviews capture this sense of foreignness; with their clean lines and austere shapes of rock, ornament, sand, and shadow, these stereoviews produce an almost modernist sense of stripped-down form.⁹² A scene of the Sphinx and Pyramid at Giza sets these visual wonders in the distance, behind crumbling rock and blowing sands (Fig. 5.23). In a view of Koum Ombos (Fig. 5.24), the sculptural fragments are scattered across the various picture planes in random patterns that seem almost avant-garde in their abstraction. To contemporary eyes, these images suggest a more nihilistic or devastated worldview than the comforting natural homilies of the English picturesque, or the awe-inspiring prospects of the American sublime.

Fig. 5.23 Francis Frith, “The Great Pyramid and Head of Sphinx.” Stereographic photograph, 1859. © National Science and Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library.

Fig. 5.24 Francis Frith, “Temple of Koum Ombos—Columns in the Portico.” Stereographic photograph, 1859. © National Science and Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library.

Yet while Frith’s stereoviews seem almost modernist in one sense, they also follow stereoscopic conventions by editing out any signs of Egyptian modernity. The picturesque emerges in Frith’s depictions of Egyptian natives, shown in postures of reclining laxity or contemplative wonder while dwarfed by giant ruins they cannot comprehend. These images might lack the water and vegetation of the English countryside, but the narrators of Frith’s photo books insistently use the word “picturesque” to describe Egyptian scenery, especially when Egyptian or Middle-Eastern people appear. In the opening pages of Frith’s 1862 photo-book Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia—a book marketed with a special “compactly folded” stereoscope—the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi describes a Cairo street scene that sets the defining note for the subsequent images. Seated outside a Mosque, a “public reciter” narrates tales from the Arabian Nights “surrounded by a picturesque group of listeners,” including “naked children sitting on the ground,” “the Turkish soldier; the Greek; the Copt; the half-naked water-carrier; the camel driver; [and] the Arab of the desert, with his bournous over his mouth.” In the background are the “picturesque dwellings of the commonalty; then the Nile, and at last the horizontal line of the Libyan desert.”⁹³ This scene does not appear in Frith’s images but is nevertheless described as though it were a picture, or even a stereoview, with its receding planes. It earns the term “picturesque” twice for its markers of foreignness that include men of dark-skinned races, unusual costumes, and a titillating male nakedness. One presumes that the picturesque houses mentioned in the background are conventionally dilapidated. The Cairo scene outlines a familiar politics of the picturesque, as native peoples perform a premodern, oral culture for the consumption of the educated Western spectator.

The Egyptian picturesque is especially suited to the stereoscope for reasons inherent to the technology. Romantic subjectivity meets pleasurable embodiment in the kinds of fantasies described by Oliver Wendell Holmes as he crawls across “the vast features of Rameses, on the face of his rock-hewn Nubian temple” (153). Linda Nochlin, in her groundbreaking essay “The Imaginary Orient,” uses the term “picturesque” to describe all the ways that Orientalist art offered up delectable visual fantasies while obfuscating the modern realities of late-nineteenth-century Egypt.⁹⁴ She notes that both paintings and photographs of Egypt pretended to a timeless and voluptuous antiquity, carefully omitting the presence of Westerners while offering fantastical scenes disguised as “realist.” (A classic example is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer, painted in the late 1870s, in which a nude, snake-draped boy performs in front of a spellbound group of dark-skinned men. Edward Said used the painting for the cover of Orientalism, though his book does not study the visual arts.) While Nochlin does not mention stereoscopy, she does foreground the way that the body features as a crucial aspect of Orientalist fantasies—most familiarly, in lurid French paintings portraying naked Turkish female slaves or bloodlusting Assyrian kings. As Nochlin points out, many of these paintings couched their fanciful scenes in a realist idiom, with scrupulously researched wall tiles or sharply illusionistic architectural settings. That same pleasurable illusionism, I would suggest, inflects Frith’s Egyptian stereoviews: here the visual pleasure comes not from a glimpse of a naked snake charmer, but from the titillating depth-effect of the stereoscope’s prosthesis. The body of the spectator, vividly evoked by Oliver Wendell Holmes, enjoys the physical sensation of contacting and occupying the foreign past, rendered with startlingly visceral detail. The stereoscope enables the intrepid viewer to touch the rock-hewn face of history.

In addition to their picturesqueness, Frith’s Egypt stereoviews also proffered an aesthetic of the sublime, as defined by Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias”—not coincidentally, another Romantic poem scripting what would become a mass visual experience in the later nineteenth century. Oliver Wendell Holmes quotes Shelley’s sonnet, predictably enough, to describe the Egyptian stereoviews (“Sun Painting,” 222). The sonnet gives us the iconic stone legs and “shatter’d visage” lying in the sand, and the pedestal inscribed with the words: “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’/Nothing beside remains. […]/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Shelley’s poem describes a kind of historical sublime, in which the stark, flat emptiness of desert space connotes a vertiginous stretch of time passed, aeons over which empires have risen and fallen. The reception of Frith’s stereoviews in Britain confirms that viewers comfortably fit them into previously received schemas—in poetry, engravings, and lithographs—already in circulation since the late eighteenth century.⁹⁵ In fact, Frith’s views of Egypt showed surprising visual similarities to stereoviews of Britain owing to mirroring historical conditions: just as Britain’s history had produced a picturesque landscape scattered with ruined abbeys and castles, so too Egypt’s long history had produced a landscape littered with the wrecks of previous empires. These historical resonances manifest in the matching tiny figures in the foreground views of both Tintern Abbey and the Egyptian ruins: both sets of figures are dwarfed by giant fossils of naturalized culture. A stereoview of the façade of the Temple of Abou Simbel carefully places the small human figures as visual comparisons to the impressive, massive stone bodies of the Egyptian gods and kings (Fig. 5.25). The action of the stereoview itself speaks to this simultaneous flattening of history and accordion-like stretching of a historical sublime—shaping scenes from Britain or Egypt into standardized format, while offering the dizzying visual pleasures of deep time rendered in receding space.

Fig. 5.25 Francis Frith, “The Great Rock Temple at Abou Simbel. Entrance.” Stereographic photograph, 1859. J. Paul Getty Museum. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

For all of Egypt’s apparently barren and unpromising landscape, it had been the site of ongoing European colonial invasions and intrigues since the eighteenth century. Its framing within familiarizing Western visual codes, whether picturesque or sublime, therefore inevitably connotes the process of othering typical of colonial domination and control. These facts might prompt us to wonder about how this process works, given that the picturesque still entails a strong association with Englishness. How is it possible for a visual code to connote both the home nation and its foreign others? The answer to the question brings us back to the tricky, shifting nature of the picturesque; indeed, many of the most canonical picturesque scenes signifying Englishness were to be found in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, places already othered and marginalized within colonial Britain (Tintern Abbey, the most popular picturesque stereographic subject, is located in Wales.) Rather than outlining a stark politics of colonial alterity, then, we might conclude that the picturesque entails some uneasy combination of self and other, in which a sense of national affiliation is grounded in a landscape populated by a more primitive version of the self, signaled by ruins: time is made into space, history made into geography. The stereoscope amplifies this paradigm, making space into a pleasurable, volumetric viewing experience, and carving up the world and its histories into geographical numbered sets.

One unifying fact about the subjects in the stereoview, regardless of geographical location, is that these scenes rarely depicted sites of modernity, industry, hard labor, factories, or technological cities. The Ozymandian Egyptian desert, scripted by Shelley, might have coded as both sublime and picturesque, but an Egyptian canal or Westernized city would not. The stereoview archives I consulted contained only a single depiction of a modern factory scene, from an American stereographic series dating to the early twentieth century. These facts underline stereoscopy’s striking role as a Victorian technology remediating Romantic and picturesque aesthetics. Its backward-looking gaze problematizes any teleological account of nineteenth-century visual technologies moving inevitably toward modernist or postmodernist futures.

Tourism, Postcards, and the Kodak Moment

Picturesque stereoviews expanded the effects of a globalized viewing practice that was already portable, conventionalized, and ready for sale. Sites in the global picturesque were commodified to an extreme, overwritten by a flood of different visual and verbal media, not least of which were millions of nineteenth-century stereoviews. A key figure in this expansion was the photographer Francis Frith. After Frith returned to England from Egypt in 1862, he committed himself to creating a photographic series documenting the minute aspects of every town and village in the United Kingdom.⁹⁶ Frith’s career might seem schizophrenic in its move from the sand-swept deserts of Egypt to the provincial picturesque of Britain. Yet his unerring sense of the visual marketplace, linking seemingly disjunctive sites of Victorian visual pleasure, points to the ambitious and all-encompassing scope of the global picturesque. Frith went on to become a major figure in the modern industrialization of photography, responsible for the mass production of millions of photographs and stereoviews. In the words of one biographer, he aimed to document “every possible city, town and village in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, including famous beauty spots, beach scenes, churches and historic monuments, parks and palaces, country trades, rivers, waterfalls, triumphs of industrialisation, festivals, ceremonies and pageants.”⁹⁷ Frith created a giant photographic printing factory at Reigate, Surrey, and hired a team of photographers to capture the views.⁹⁸ The company created “masters” for photo-cards to be sold by agents to newsstands, tobacco stores, and sweet shops (see Fig. 5.14).⁹⁹ Appropriately enough, Frith designated these images as the “Universal Series,” unwittingly echoing Oliver Wendell Holmes’s futuristic, world-capturing vision for photography. By the turn of the twentieth century, Frith’s firm was one of the largest photographic producers in the world. His images are often seen as postcard prototypes, hovering somewhere between art and curio.

Frith & Co.’s archive of views is still alive today, marketed by an extensive website offering “local old photos, maps & memories” of Britain.¹⁰⁰ Not only does the website sell photographs, but it also invites viewers to submit online memories of the documented places. In March 2012, the BBC aired a ten-part television series titled Britain’s First Photo Album, in which the host tracks down the places depicted in Frith’s Victorian images. The show aims to make a poignant contrast between the place “as it was” for Frith versus as it is today. But the comparison ultimately seems somewhat ironic given that Frith’s views were already fantastical, a nineteenth-century look back on an even older imagined history.

Even while stereoscopy was superseded by later mass visual media, from the postcard to today’s YouTube video, it remained popular throughout the twentieth century, no doubt due to its pleasurable combination of art and artifice, landscape and technology, freedom and form, destabilizing depth effects and reassuring miniaturization. Many adults today remember the “View-Master” of childhood, a red plastic device that could be inserted with a round disc of tiny photographs; a peep into the eyepiece revealed amazing, three-dimensional scenes from travel spots or fairy tales. In becoming a device associated largely with children, the twentieth-century stereoscope occupied a nostalgic place between magic and obsolescence, associations that did not obtain in the nineteenth century, when the device was marketed to all ages with the associations of an exciting new technology.

The cultural demotion of stereoscopy to mere child’s toy reflects a similar trajectory for the picturesque, an aesthetic mode that has now fallen into disrepute. John Macarthur notes that the term today invites two contradictory meanings, one indicating an esteemed eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and the other calling up a debased modern-day visuality, connoting “aesthetic failure, trivial cultural products and naïve tastes.”¹⁰¹ The OED doesn’t assign a date to the moment when the adjective “picturesque” started to take on these negative connotations. The dictionary defines the term as

Having the elements or qualities of a picture; suitable for a picture; spec. (of a view, landscape, etc.) pleasing or striking in appearance; scenic. Now frequently in weakened sense (sometimes depreciative or ironic): pretty in an undeveloped or old-fashioned way; charming, quaint, unspoilt.

Already in the early nineteenth century, fashionable picturesque tourists were being mocked by everyone from Jane Austen to Dr. Syntax. Quaintness, too, was a new connotation very distant from the eighteenth-century picturesque. Pictures of Romantic ruins once conveyed something to eighteenth-century spectators that they no longer offer us today. The picturesque originally described a freshness of the eye, a new way of seeing; now it entails a sense of stale views, to be treated ironically. From this perspective, stereoscopy can be seen to have led more or less directly to the picturesque’s downfall, serving as a mass medium for the marketing and ever-increasing circulation of a hackneyed mode of aesthetic appreciation.

The contemporary figurative sense of the picturesque amplifies its tensions, as outlined in the OED: “Of language, narrative, etc.: strikingly graphic or vivid, colourful; (ironically) careless of the truth, esp. for effect. Also of a person: using language of this sort; behaving in a striking or unusual manner.” Post-eighteenth-century usage emphasizes the picturesque as a kind of inauthentic pose, transferred from landscapes to other kinds of objects or persons, dramatic, eye-catching, and untrue. “Picturesque history is seldom to be trusted,” observes a religious historian in 1868, in one of the OED’s helpful examples.¹⁰² The other example, from the art critic Robert Hughes writing in 1993, is more startling: “During a picturesque career as a sexual hustler, addict and juvenile artstar, [Basquiat] made a superficial mark on the cultural surface.”¹⁰³ Hughes generates a frisson by aligning the picturesque with prostitution and drug use; he implies that Basquiat’s fame owed less to his artistic skill than to the inauthentic commodity created by his unconventional lifestyle. The genius of Hughes’s insult is to imply that the outré behavior is itself humdrum, just another way to sell oneself and one’s artwork. The picturesqueness of the outrageous makes it boring, unoriginal, derivative.

The picturesque has also had an afterlife in postmodern theory, a link this chapter has sought to critique. Postmodern accounts have taken the picturesque’s acts of framing and distancing as incipient signs of the inauthentic and surface-based qualities of all picturing. These accounts reflect a broader trend, as scholars from Batchen and Crary to Kittler and Krauss have looked back to the nineteenth century to locate the origins of our postmodern condition. These scholars position the past as a mirror to the postmodern present, arguing that new media technologies produced disintegrated subjects, machine-like humans, copies of copies. I’ve instead wanted to evoke a sense of anachronism in our understanding of nineteenth-century media theories and technologies. While contemporary media theories imagine that technology might enable us to escape from mortal, flawed bodies, Victorian media theories, by contrast, imagined that some machines might situate us even more firmly in our bodies. A prosthetic machine like a stereoscope could take on corporeal, somatic qualities while offering an augmented, superhuman experience of perception. Nineteenth-century writers and artists theorized organic concepts of subjectivity and desire even while they were confronting new technologies that produced increasingly abstracted, virtual relations between self and world. The nineteenth century’s profound embodiments provoke a sense of discomfort today: by siting identity and culture so deeply in the body, Victorian thinkers often supported ideologies that bolstered inequality, racism, and imperialism. The postmodern, posthuman body, like Haraway’s cyborg, stripped of any markers of difference, seems a distant ideal to the embodied truths presumed by the nineteenth century.

A more compelling sense of continuity characterizes the concept of the picturesque itself: though the term serves as a mark of disdain for cultural critics, a picturesque aesthetic still governs our modern sense of landscape beauty, in everything from tourism to architecture to the contemporary media of place. Geoffrey Batchen and Rosalind Krauss describe the eighteenth-century picturesque as a hall of mirrors, pictures superimposed upon pictures—a visual archive that has multiplied exponentially today, with a vast array of electronic landscapes now at our fingertips. Journeys near or far are now scripted by the multitude of pictures that travelers can consult in advance. Online media create our anticipatory desires: we travel in search of pictures, and then, upon arrival, take more pictures. This touristic behavior reproduces that of eighteenth-century tourists with a startling similarity. Already in the eighteenth century, confusions of art and nature governed touristic landscape behavior. Pictures viewed at home incited picturesque desires and forays into nature; once a picturesque scene was located, it was captured in a sketch, affirming the tourist’s aesthetic sensibilities. Likewise, for tourists today, viewing a scene on a home computer will never equal seeing the actual place in nature. Tourists still travel to famous beauty spots and photograph them, even though a postcard in the gift shop captures the same view. The tourist track involves a paradoxical combination of reality and imitation, authenticity and artifice, as we walk into natural places to find something known in advance. Now, as in the past, tourists still report a range of actual viewing experiences—from disappointment in the scene not living up to its framed antecedents, to pleasure at achieving such a storied view.¹⁰⁴

This is a striking truth about the picturesque, despite its hackneyed, clichéd qualities: many people, even cultural critics, still seek certain familiar, iterative sites of visuality, both at home and away, in order to achieve transcendent states of perception and emotion. The beauty spot still holds its sway. Framing “the Kodak moment” is an ongoing cultural value, even while the idea today invokes qualities of fakeness and inauthenticity. “The Kodak moment”—a phrase first coined in mid-twentieth-century Kodak camera advertisements, but today woven into popular slang—is defined by an online Urban Dictionary as “[a] moment that is so beautiful, incredible or downright hilarious that it deserves to be preserved with a picture, and yet no one present has a camera with them.”¹⁰⁵ The definition calls up the eighteenth-century picturesque, which similarly sought scenes in nature worthy of picturing, regardless of whether or not a picture was actually made.¹⁰⁶ The Kodak moment, like its picturesque predecessor, also describes the perfect conjoining of space, place, bodies, and time that functions as a definitive, framed object of desire. On Facebook, Instagram, or other shared-media platforms of mass visuality, the picturesque world appears in a life curated through pictures. Life twines with art twines with life: both the experience and the picture of that experience might be manifestly scripted and commodified by the overfamiliar imagery of previous media, yet they also might still generate profound emotions in either participant or observer.

The legacy of the Victorian stereoscope, with its tantalizing illusions of place and touch, manifests in the ongoing popularity of 3-D illusionism. That popularity persists despite a longstanding hostility among cultural gatekeepers. Bolter and Grusin, in Remediation, trace the history of visual immediacy from perspectival painting onward to photography and virtual reality; they note that many twentieth-century theorists dislike this tradition and deny its efficacy, subordinating the visual to the textual.¹⁰⁷ That dislike has been pronounced in the discipline of art history. According to an older modernist narrative, Western illusionism conveyed a hegemonic bourgeois politics that could only be shattered by a heroic, experimental avant-garde.¹⁰⁸ Ironically, the high-culture hostility to the tricks of illusionism has its roots in the Victorian era, which also looked suspiciously on any visual style deemed to be too sensational, too corporeal, too much about pleasure and not enough about edification. (Illusionism and bodily pleasure came together most definitively in the pornographic stereoview, which flourished in the later nineteenth century. All of the stereoview’s fantastic, tactile qualities could be concentrated in the volumetric view of the naked body.)¹⁰⁹ A similar narrative today looks askance at the special effects in Hollywood movies for appealing too patently and crassly to the spectator’s sensorium.

From the Diorama, to the stereoscope, to film: all of these visual technologies feature a darkened chamber magnifying the illusions of a central brightened image.¹¹⁰ The stereoscope’s special depth effects also produced an early form of virtual reality; the device disguised its own exteriority, providing an immersive experience that made its presence invisible. Today’s virtual reality goggles create a similar effect, as an apparatus attached to the head tricks the eyes into having experiences created wholly inside the machine. Likely the most widely consumed mode of virtual reality today is the 3-D film, another pleasing eye-trickery made into mass entertainment. In the 1950s, 3-D glasses lent a gimmicky aspect to thrilling or horror-themed movies; 3-D films have now roared back into profitable popularity. James Cameron’s 2009 movie Avatar, filmed using special stereoscopic cameras, is one of the top-grossing movies of all time, as of this writing. Avatar was hyped for its breakthrough film technology, which enabled a visceral, corporeal viewing experience. Like the stereoview, the movie uses 3-D imagery to transport the audience to another world: its pleasures seem scripted right out of the nineteenth century.

Avatar proposes an allegory for its own new illusionistic technology, even while it depicts a recognizably Victorian fantasy of penetrating into a haptic landscape. The movie’s protagonist is a soldier paralyzed from the waist down, a grim circumstance reflecting the cramped and limited sensorium of the future. Jake Sully has been crushed by the sterile, lackluster world he inhabits. But new technology allows him to magically transport his subjectivity into a new body, vigorous and unbroken, belonging to an alien on a lush distant planet. Some of the movie’s most thrilling scenes involve Sully testing his new body within the wonderland of the planet’s biosphere, leaping from branch to branch—as these protrude sharply from the screen toward the viewer—in the midst of glowing flowers and weird creatures. The movie implies that Jake’s miraculous transport to the vibrant planet of Pandora is analogous to the movie audience’s transport into a new cinematic experience, via unprecedented 3-D technology. Avatar’s fantasy of a New World comes complete with a vanishing race of threatened native peoples, including a sexy female native who embodies the new planet’s “nature.” While these plot points seem laughably canned, it is worth considering why they seem so overfamiliar. The movie tells one of the archetypal stories of modernity, a story laid down most canonically in the nineteenth century, as mechanization, industrialization, and urbanization came to define modern life while other ways of living came to be typed as desirably “primitive.”

A return to nature, lived intensely in the body, experienced through pleasurable sensory effects, and serving as a pathway back to an authentic self: the fantasy has been compelling (and commodified) since the late eighteenth century. What is striking is that technology itself, even while it is the bringer of a baneful modernity, is also the avenue to redemption via an augmented physicality, a promise offered by the stereoscope as well as by the modern three-dimensional movie. That duality is captured in the idea of the “avatar,” a doppelganger and mediating figure, created by technology, who paradoxically offers an avenue to a more genuine self. The movie vividly depicts the creation of a technologized new body, celebrating prosthetic devices that enable a hyper-real embodied experience. Cameron’s Romantic account of the machine is not the one of postmodern media history, of Kittler, or cyborgian accounts of the subject. The machine doesn’t evacuate agency but instead affirms a profound subjectivity, enabling an enhanced route back to authenticity and “nature.” While some critics assailed the film for its clichéd narrative and troubling politics, the fantasies it animates have a long, compelling history. The mass-cultural picturesque in the stereoscope might appear to be derivative and formulaic, but its machine-made illusions reveal profound desires for travel and transformation, dreams still potent in culture today.

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, The World of Stereographs (Gettysburg, PA: W. C. Darrah, 1977), 18.

² Charles Wheatstone’s 1838 comments on his invention of stereoscopy are reprinted in Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, ed. Nicholas J. Wade (London: Academic Press, 1983), 65–93.

³ B. E. C. Howarth-Loomes, Victorian Photography: A Collector’s Guide (London: Ward Lock, 1974), 69.

⁴ William Merrin provides a helpful overview of the Victorian culture of stereoscopy in “Skylights onto Infinity: The World in a Stereoscope,” in Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception, ed. Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2005), 161–74. Discussions situating stereoscopy within a history of science include Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, “The Giant Eyes of Science: The Stereoscope and Photographic Depiction in the Nineteenth Century,” in Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 148–77; and Nicholas Wade, “Philosophical Instruments and Toys: Optical Devices Extending the Art of Seeing,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 13:1 (2004), 102–24. Isobel Armstrong includes a section on optical toys in Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); on stereoscopy, see especially 337–41. John Plunkett describes the stereoscope’s relation to other nineteenth-century visual devices in “Depth, Colour, Movement: Embodied Vision and the Stereoscope,” in Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, ed. James Lyons and John Plunkett (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 117–31. Stephen Herbert collects primary sources about stereoscopy and other optical devices in A History of Pre-Cinema, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 2000).

⁵ An important recent exception is Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy: or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). Two of the book’s chapters are addressed to stereoscopy. Silverman produces a phenomenological account of photographic history; she studies the stereoscope for the ways it decenters human agency in photography. As she writes, “The stereo camera cannot be reconciled with the Cartesian dream” (80).

⁶ Melody D. Davis critiques the art-historical disinterest in stereoscopy in her review of William Darrah’s monograph. See Davis, “An Essential Reprint in Stereography,” Art Journal 57:3 (1998), 94–6. Davis is the author of one of the single most useful sources on stereoscopy: Women’s Views: The Narrative Stereograph in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2015). The book studies narrative photographs that featured staged scenes of various characters; its chapters are arranged around themes such as marriage and the erotic. Though Davis studies an archive very different from the one considered in this chapter, her book offers a wealth of information about the culture and craft of stereoscopy.

⁷ Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 32, 37. Further references to this text will be cited parenthetically.

⁸ Laura Burd Schiavo, “From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial Photography, and the Popularization of the Stereoscope,” in New Media, 1740–1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 113–37: 128.

⁹ Other critiques of Crary’s divide of stereoscopy from photography include Britt Salvesen’s PhD dissertation, ‘Selling Sight: Stereoscopy in Mid-Victorian Britain’ (University of Chicago, 1997), 69–70; and David Phillips, “Modern Vision,” Oxford Art Journal 16:1 (1993), 129–38: 135–7. Melody Davis launches a stinging critique of all of Crary’s premises in Women’s Views.

¹⁰ Schiavo, “Phantom Image,” 121.

¹¹ I ultimately agree with Crary that nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers developed a new idea of vision, sited in the human body, which provoked new orientations toward self and truth. But Schiavo is right too—stereoscopy was characterized by a popular rhetoric of realism, in tandem with photography. Realism was the dominant note for Victorian photographic practitioners and critics, and remains so for many contemporary critics. Carol Armstrong interprets nineteenth-century photographs as expressions of Comtean positivism in Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

¹² William Merrin, “Skylights onto Infinity,” 163. Scholars who study the actual subjects in the stereoview are William Darrah, in his World of Stereographs; Melody Davis, in Women’s Views; and Bruce Graver, “Wordsworth, Scott, and the Stereographic Picturesque,” Literature Compass 6:4 (July 2009), 896–926, discussed further below. Graver analyzes stereoviews depicting scenes relevant to the lives of Wordsworth and Walter Scott.

¹³ “Stereoscopes; Or, Travel Made Easy.” The Athenaeum 1586 (March 20, 1858), 371–2.

¹⁴ William Darrah describes two major waves of stereoscopic popularity, first in the 1850s and 1860s, and then again around the turn of the twentieth century, when most stereoview production was taken over by large American companies like Keystone and Underwood & Underwood. Despite these oscillations, stereoviews were still consumed throughout the later nineteenth century in both the UK and America.

¹⁵ Krauss also invokes other art-historical traditions in her attempt to debar nineteenth-century photographers, though her discussion seems somewhat dated today: she notes that they did not pursue artistic “careers” or produce artistic “oeuvres” in the usual art historical senses; and, in the case of Francis Frith, discussed below, many of his images were produced by assistants and employees. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42 (Winter 1982), 311–19.

¹⁶ William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (London: R. Blamire, 1792), 67, 68.

¹⁷ William Mason, The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1786), 33.

¹⁸ Ibid., 9.

¹⁹ Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 29.

²⁰ Jonathan Crary observes that stereoviews disrupt “the conventional functioning of optical cues” such that “stereoscopic relief or depth has no unifying logic or order” (Techniques of the Observer, 125). Crary argues that these spatial distortions anticipate those of early French modernist paintings—moving away from the picturesque tradition I discuss here.

²¹ Hankins and Silverman, “The Giant Eyes of Science,” in Instruments and the Imagination, 169.

²² John Leighton, “Binocular Photographs,” Photographic Journal 1 (1853/54), 211–12: 212. Quoted in Hankins and Silverman, “The Giant Eyes of Science,” 169.

²³ See Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2004).

²⁴ Stephen Copley, “Gilpin on the Wye: Tourists, Tintern Abbey, and the Picturesque,” in Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750–1880, ed. Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilcox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 133–55: 135.

²⁵ Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, 30. Andrews also lists George Lambert, Michael Angelo Rooker, and Thomas Malton the younger as prominent landscape painters who worked in the London theaters (30).

²⁶ Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 123.

²⁷ See Stephen Herbert, A Pre-History of Cinema, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2000), 79–88.

²⁸ See Iain McCalman, “The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime,” Romanticism on the Net 46 (May 2007), para. 12. See also Altick, Shows of London, 117–25.

²⁹ Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 163, 166, 162.

³⁰ Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 78. Further citations will refer to this text parenthetically.

³¹ Quoted in Batchen, Burning with Desire, 34.

³² I designate Batchen’s values as “postmodern” even though one target in Burning with Desire is what he calls “postmodernism” in photographic theory. Batchen challenges photographic theorists like John Tagg, Allan Sekula, Victor Burgin, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau for seeing photography as having “no coherent or unified history of its own other than as a selective documentation of its various uses and effects” (5). For these thinkers, according to Batchen, “photographs can never exist outside discourses or functions of one kind or another” (6). By contrast, Batchen wants to describe photography as a distinctive form with a specific history rooted in the early nineteenth century. Despite his critique of postmodernists, however, Batchen still embraces concepts foundational to postmodern media theory, as this chapter discusses.

³³ John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (New York: Routledge, 2007), 4.

³⁴ Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 2nd edn. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759). Reprinted by Dover Publications (Mineola, NY, 2008). Burke refers to the “exquisitely sensible body” in the section “Of the Sublime” (24). He describes the effects of sensations on bodily “fibres” throughout the book’s fourth part, as in the sections on “The Physical Cause of Love” (118) or “Why Smoothness is Beautiful” (119).

³⁵ Burke had suggested that the terrifying sublime stretched the body’s nervous fibers beyond their normal tone, whereas the calming beautiful relaxed the nervous fibers into a more languid state. Price argues that the picturesque creates a feeling of “curiosity” in the spectator that allows the body’s “fibres” to return to their natural “tone”: “and thus picturesqueness, when mixed with either of the other characters, corrects the languor of beauty, or the tension of sublimity.” Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and, on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, 3 vols. (London: J. Mawman, 1810), i.88–9. See also Walter Hipple, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), especially 204–23.

³⁶ Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 19. Crary writes, “The stereoscope is one major cultural site on which this breach between tangibility and visuality is singularly evident” (19). His stereoscopy chapter is followed by a chapter titled “Visionary Abstraction,” on the paintings of J. M. W. Turner.

³⁷ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Soundings from the Atlantic, 142.

³⁸ Rosalind E. Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” 314. Krauss argues that stereoscopy’s corporeal effects work to disqualify its imagery from the precincts of art.

³⁹ All three essays are reprinted in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Soundings from the Atlantic (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1864). Quotations from his essays will refer parenthetically to this edition.

⁴⁰ David Trotter also emphasizes the “haptic” qualities of stereoscopy in his essay “Stereoscopy: Modernism and the ‘Haptic’,” Critical Quarterly 46:4 (December 2004), 38–58. Trotter argues that stereoscopy’s effects on the sensorium worked to educate the eye in advance of the earliest cinema. He follows Aloïs Riegl in distinguishing between “optical” versus “haptic” experience, one distant and surveying, the other engaged and investigatory. Trotter elevates the haptic as “a form of attachment” to a scene, in contrast to the optical, which anticipates “the bad gaze of twentieth-century cultural theory” (39). This divide seems somewhat optimistic, however, given stereoscopy’s participation in a global picturesque, as I discuss below. Stereoscopy offered a fantasy of both entering a scene corporeally and watching it from above, and it seems politically significant that so many stereoviews depicted geographies of cultural, historical, and tactical importance to Britain both at home and abroad.

⁴¹ Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). See especially chapter 3, “Mechanical Objectivity,” 115–90.

⁴² When Holmes writes of photography as “the mirror with a memory,” he also explicitly includes stereoscopy in his analogy: “[T]his … invention of the mirror with a memory, and especially that application of it which has given us the wonders of the stereoscope, is not so … universally recognized in all the immensity of its applications” (129–30).

⁴³ Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 1–40: 9–10.

⁴⁴ Baudelaire’s essay famously attacks Romanticism, mocking any sentimental and rosy-hued portrayal of the natural world. In fact, he writes, it is Nature “who incites man to murder his brother, to eat him, to lock him up and to torture him” (Painter of Modern Life, 31–2). Yet for all of Baudelaire’s critique of Romantic values, his essay is still suffused with Romantic ideology, especially in its celebration of the outsider artist-genius figure. Though he assails “nature” as an ideal, his essay is still pervaded by a sense of organic embodiment, as seen in character types ranging from the artist Guys, with his acute sensorium, to the Parisian prostitute, with her monstrous, animalistic body. Connecting Holmes to Baudelaire might also seem surprising in light of Baudelaire’s famous attack on photography, reprinted in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 83–9. Reviewing the salon of 1859, he denounced his own “loathsome society” which “rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate” (86–7). In the ensuing passage, too, Baudelaire attacks stereoscopy: “It was not long before thousands of pairs of greedy eyes were glued to the peepholes of the stereoscope, as though they were the skylights of the infinite” (87). Baudelaire dislikes both photography and stereoscopy for their associations with scientific and artistic realism, connoting an idea of art as imitative and mundane. As this chapter has been exploring, however, stereoscopy also invited more phantasmagoric associations, of exactly the type Baudelaire celebrates in his essay on Guys.

⁴⁵ Bruce Graver argues that stereoscopy should be considered a crucial aspect of Wordsworth’s reception history in Victorian England. He is also interested in terms of the picturesque, but chooses to focus largely on the literary and visual reception history of Wordsworth and Walter Scott. Bruce Graver, “Wordsworth, Scott, and the Stereographic Picturesque,” Literature Compass 6:4 (July 2009), 896–926.

⁴⁶ The online archive and vendor of stereoviews “World of Stereoviews” devotes an entire page only to views of Tintern Abbey, reproducing fifty different stereoviews, <http://worldofstereoviews.com>.

⁴⁷ Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 version), Book 11, lines 158, 160–1.

⁴⁸ Tim Fulford, “Virtual Topography: Poets, Painters, Publishers and the Reproduction of the Landscape in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 57–8 (February–May 2010), paragraph 23.

⁴⁹ Thomas Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 7. Pfau notes that he is influenced by Colin Campbell’s argument in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (London: Blackwell, 1987).

⁵⁰ Books did not reproduce photographs directly on their pages until 1876. Early photographic books, like those produced by the Howitts and Francis Frith, were illustrated by “tipped in” photographs pasted onto the pages.

⁵¹ William and Mary Howitt, Ruined Abbeys and Castles of Great Britain and Ireland, photographic illustrations by Bedford, Sedgfield, Wilson, Fenton, and Others, First Series (London: A. Bennett, 1862), 74–82.

⁵² Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, 9, 22. Helen Groth analyzes the Howitts’ photographic books in the chapter “Wordsworthian Afterlives and Photographic Nostalgia,” in Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 52–80. She understands these illustrated books as attempting (and failing) to integrate England’s premodern past with its industrial present.

⁵³ Catherine Sinclair, Hill and Valley; or Hours in England and Wales (New York: R. Carter, 1838), 250.

⁵⁴ I am grateful to Richard Menke for pointing me toward the idea of a poem as a kind of re-playable technology. He provides a definitive account of Victorian fiction’s media effects in Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

⁵⁵ The stereoviews I have found depicting factories are all American-made productions published after 1900.

⁵⁶ The Stereoscopic Magazine: A Gallery of Landscape Scenery, Architecture, Antiquities, and Natural History, Accompanied with Descriptive Articles by Writers of Eminence, vol. 1 (London: Lovell Reeve, 1858), 8.

⁵⁷ I have used the Welsh spelling of “Conwy” in the text, but retain the anglicized spelling of “Conway” where these appear in the titles of nineteenth-century artworks.

⁵⁸ William Howitt, Ruined Abbeys and Castles of Great Britain and Ireland, photographic illustrations by Thomson, Sedgfield, Ogle, and Hemphill, Second Series (London: A. Bennett, 1864), 69–70.

⁵⁹ For the anti-Catholic elements of the Gothic, see Robert Miles, “Abjection, Nationalism and the Gothic,” in The Gothic, ed. Fred Botting (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 47–70.

⁶⁰ Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, i:53–4.

⁶¹ Ibid., i:55.

⁶² Sophie Thomas provides an excellent account of the Diorama in “Making Visible: The Diorama, the Double, and the Gothic Subject,” in Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2008), 115–35. Thomas argues that there is a “latent link” between the Diorama’s uncanny effects and the “mental states associated with Gothic fiction, such as terror, uncertainty, and (psychological) extremity” (132). By contrast, I suggest that the Diorama belonged to a Romantic picturesque tradition. William H. Galperin offers a provocative account of the Diorama in The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 60–71. Galperin emphasizes effects of “dislocation” and “indeterminacy” in the Diorama’s spectatorial experience, especially as these were conveyed under cover of darkness (65–6). Galperin suggests that Daguerre chose to depict Gothic churches, rather than cathedrals, as part of a deliberate visual strategy courting ruins and incompleteness. This account doesn’t quite seem to match with the list of Diorama subjects provided by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, however, which includes both chapels and cathedrals in various states of ruin or completion. See Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, 2nd rev. edn. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, [1956], 1968), 184–6. Diorama subjects included “The Chapel of the Trinity in Canterbury Cathedral” (1823); “Interior of Chartres Cathedral” (1824); “Ruins of Holyrood Chapel, Edinburgh” (1826); “Roslyn Chapel near Edinburgh” (1826); “Effect of fog and snow seen through a ruined Gothic colonnade” (1827); and “Interior of Rheims Cathedral” (1830).

⁶³ Altick, Shows of London, 166.

⁶⁴ Gernsheim and Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre, 26.

⁶⁵ Sophie Thomas, “Making Visible,” 121.

⁶⁶ An unexpected link between the mass-culture Gothic and its more high-culture architectural revival lies in the fact that Daguerre’s Diorama in London was designed by the architect Augustus Charles Pugin (1762–1832), father of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52), Catholic convert and famous pioneer of the Gothic revival in nineteenth-century architecture.

⁶⁷ William Darrah suggests that Ruskin influenced the production of cathedral stereoviews in World of Stereographs, 18.

⁶⁸ Ruskin’s famous diatribe against the picturesque appears in Modern Painters III (1856). I discuss Ruskin as a quintessential picturesque tourist in The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), chapter 1.

⁶⁹ The Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, 39 volumes, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1903–12), 9:279. Further citations refer parenthetically to this edition.

⁷⁰ Alan Davis describes Ruskin’s use of both photographic and printing techniques in “Technology,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin, ed. Francis O’Gorman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 170–86.

⁷¹ Ruskin’s early enthusiasm for photography quickly soured as the imagery became popularized and mass-produced. Michael Harvey provides a definitive account in “Ruskin and Photography,” Oxford Art Journal 7:2 (1984), 25–33. Also helpful are: Karen Burns, “Topographies of Tourism: ‘Documentary’ Photography and The Stones of Venice,” Assemblage 32 (April 1997), 22–44; and Brian Hanson, “Carrying off the Grand Canal: Ruskin’s Architectural Drawing and the Daguerreotype,” The Architectural Review 169:1008 (February 1981), 104–9. For a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue devoted to Ruskin’s daguerreotype collection, see Ken Jacobson and Jenny Jacobson, Carrying off the Palaces: John Ruskin’s Lost Daguerreotypes (London: Bernard Quaritch, 2015).

⁷² The most important recent work on Daguerre is Stephen C. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). This study focuses especially on Daguerre’s non-photographic artworks, as well as his financial dealings. Pinson uses the metaphor of “speculation” to link all of Daguerre’s enterprises across art, technology, and entertainment—not least, an obsolete definition of “speculation” that entails the close observation of nature. He links the Diorama to the daguerreotype through a notion of “optical naturalism,” a quasi-scientific, conventionalized vision of “the effects of nature as seen through optical instruments” (56). He does not discuss the more Romantic or picturesque aspects of the technology that I highlight here. Discussions of the Diorama by Sophie Thomas, Richard Altick, and William H. Galperin do not mention the daguerreotype. The Gernsheims’ book on Daguerre does not really compare the two technologies, noting only how disparate they are. Two photographic historians who do make the comparison propose opposite arguments: Janet Buerger sees both the Diorama and the daguerreotype moving toward scientific positivism and artistic realism, while Geoffrey Batchen sees the Diorama affirming Daguerre’s commitments to picturesque illusionism, which also pertained to his invention of photography. See Janet E. Buerger, “The Genius of Photography,” in The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration, ed. John Wood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 43, 48, 49; and Batchen, Burning with Desire, 138–43.

⁷³ Essays devoted to Ruskin’s artworks can be found in the exhibition catalogue, John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye, ed. Susan P. Casteras et al. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993).

⁷⁴ In Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory: Already the Past (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), Jennifer Green-Lewis argues that Victorian photographs foregrounded the pleasures of texture as signifiers of time passing, especially in imagery of fossils and old buildings. For Green-Lewis, this imagery speaks to photography’s broader function as an image encapsulating the past: “A photograph of a fossil (indeed, a photograph of anything) is arguably a fossil in itself; like the trilobite, it is a material trace of something that once was” (81). This rhetoric captures a distinctively Victorian, naturalized notion of photography—“Nature drawn by her own hand”—as Green-Lewis observes, even while she also mobilizes the metaphor for her own elegiac account. My understanding of the photographic fossil follows more after Walter Benjamin, who deploys the term to describe the nineteenth-century’s outmoded, discarded commodities. His usage is ironic and defamiliarizing, intended to focus our attention on cultural detritus as clues to human-made social and economic transformations. Susan Buck-Morss discusses the Benjaminian fossil in The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 160–1, 211–12. As Buck-Morss writes: “Under the sign of history, the image of petrified nature [the fossil] is the cipher of what history has become” (161).

⁷⁵ Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 66.

⁷⁶ Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities, 8.

⁷⁷ See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973); and John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

⁷⁸ Michael Rosenthal, “Introduction,” in Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750–1880, ed. Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilcox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 1–12: 11.

⁷⁹ The scope of the global picturesque is indicated by the essays collected in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press [1994], 2002), ranging from Holland to South Africa to Palestine. The Asian influence on English eighteenth-century gardens is described by Ciaran Murray in Sharawadgi: The Romantic Return to Nature (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999). G. H. R. Tillotson analyzes British picturesque traditions in India in “The Indian Picturesque: Images of India in British Landscape Painting, 1780–1880,” in The Raj: India and the British 1600–1947, ed. C. A. Bayly (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990), 141–51. Tillotson notes that the earliest professional British landscape painter to visit India, William Hodges, arrived in Madras in 1780 (142).

⁸⁰ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 255–6.

⁸¹ Merrin, “Skylights onto Infinity,” 165.

⁸² The catalogue of the London Stereoscopic Company is held in the British Library.

⁸³ W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” Landscape and Power, 5–34: 9–10. Also relevant is the scholarship of James R. Ryan, who argues that landscape photography was a crucial aspect of the European imperial project in his chapter “Framing the View,” in Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 45–72.

⁸⁴ Helmut Gernsheim, Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends, 1839–1960 (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, [1962], 1991), 104.

⁸⁵ “America in the Stereoscope,” The Times (May 3, 1860), 12.

⁸⁶ “American Scenery. Published by the London Stereoscopic Company,” The Photographic Journal 7: 108 (April 15, 1861), 167–9: 167.

⁸⁷ Married to a British wife, Nathaniel P. Willis published his essays in both London and the U.S., and was known to American readers for his acquaintance with both geographies. See Cortland P. Auser, Nathaniel P. Willis (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969).

⁸⁸ Nathaniel P. Willis, American Scenery, or, Land, Lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature, 2 vols. (London: George Virtue, 1840), I.iii.

⁸⁹ See, among others, Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

⁹⁰ A useful source is Douglas R. Nickel, Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Frith’s stereoviews of Egypt are examined in Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Two or Three Dimensions? Scale, Photography, and Egypt’s Pyramids,” in Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, ed. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 115–28. Grigsby studies the way that both photographs and stereoviews struggled (in different ways) to portray the vast scale of the Egyptian pyramids.

⁹¹ Darrah, World of Stereographs, 131.

⁹² Egypt had a long visual history in England before Frith arrived with his camera. Most influential were the lithographic series by David Roberts, The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia (1842–9) and Egypt and Nubia (1846–9). While Frith chose some similar perspectives to Roberts, the photographer’s version of Egypt was more stark and minimalist. Roberts’s engraving of the Sphinx added rocks and trees to the foreground, whereas Frith’s version offered only an unbroken stretch of sand; Roberts granted the Sphinx a humanized face, while Frith’s version seemed almost faceless.

⁹³ Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia, Illustrated by One Hundred Stereoscopic Photographs, Taken by Francis Frith for Messrs. Negretti and Zambra; With Descriptions and Numerous Wood Engravings by Joseph Bonomi … and Notes by Samuel Sharpe (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1862), 3.

⁹⁴ Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 33–59.

⁹⁵ Reviewing Frith’s Egypt stereoviews, the Athenaeum acknowledges that they exceed the usual picturesque formula, capturing the “vividness of strong sunshine in its daring moments.” But any potential strangeness is mitigated by the cultural scripts already defining Egyptian landscapes for Victorian viewers. “This is not the Egypt of panoramas, but, in a word, the Egypt of Genesis, of Herodotus, and of Quintus Curtius.” Frith’s images ultimately domesticate the foreign landscape, as “Typhon … is admitted to our firesides; … and Isis comes to us to spend the holidays.” “Stereoscopes; or, Travel Made Easy,” The Athenaeum 1586 (March 20, 1858), 371–2. The views and stations of Egyptian iconography had already been established before photography, a cultural saturation apparent when the Art Journal review praises Frith’s photographs as superior to the many “thousands” of views lately “accumulated.” “Egypt and Palestine,” Art Journal 44 (August 1858), 229–30: 229. Stereoviews were received as the latest addition to an already abundant Victorian visual archive of Egypt, freely available to British firesides.

⁹⁶ See Stacy Miyagawa, England to Egypt: The Photographic Views of Francis Frith (Riverside, CA: University Art Gallery, 1988).

⁹⁷ Bill Jay, Victorian Cameraman: Francis Frith’s Views of Rural England 1850–1898 (Newton Abbott, UK: David & Charles, 1973), 29.

⁹⁸ For more on Francis Frith’s corporate authorship of photographs, see Jordan Bear, Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), chapter 5.

⁹⁹ Jay, Victorian Cameraman, 29.

¹⁰⁰ See <http://www.francisfrith.com>.

¹⁰¹ Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities, 1.

¹⁰² As cited by the OED: “(1868) J. H. Blunt Reformation Church of Eng. I. 401.”

¹⁰³ As cited by the OED: “(1993) R. Hughes Culture of Complaint iii. 195.”

¹⁰⁴ John Frow summarizes important strains in the philosophy of tourism in “Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia,” October 57 (Summer 1991), 123–51. As Frow notes, questions of authenticity dominate all of the various critiques of tourism, whether they are snobbish attacks on herd-like behavior or more subtle inquiries into the search for a lost sense of meaning. In each case, scholars circle around the problem of the relationship between the thing seen and its representation, or simulacrum.

¹⁰⁵ A tagline in an early Kodak advertisement read, “This Kodak moment can’t wait for Dad to get home.” Kodak reintroduced the slogan in the 1990s and trademarked it in 1992. For the urban dictionary, see <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kodak%20moment>. Today “Kodak moment” also takes on a nostalgic sense, given the company’s 2012 filing for bankruptcy and the obsolescence of many of its media products. For a history of Kodak’s early advertising campaigns, see Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

¹⁰⁶ In “The Picturesque and the Kodak Moment,” Ron Broglio describes an ingenious teaching exercise in which he sends students into the field to take landscape photographs using picturesque techniques. The brief essay appears in the “Praxis Series” of Romantic Circles, <https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/contemporary/broglio/broglio>.

¹⁰⁷ Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 30.

¹⁰⁸ As Geoffrey Batchen writes, in a review of Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer, “Serious questions need to be asked about histories that continue to represent the modern era as a perpetual artistic battle between reactionary naturalists and a progressive, anti-realist avant-garde” (88). “Enslaved Sovereign, Observed Spectator: On Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer.” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 6:2 (1993), 80–94.

¹⁰⁹ On pornography in the stereoscope, see Colette Colligan, “Stereograph,” Victorian Review 34:1 (2008), 75–82; and Linda Williams, “Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the ‘Carnal Density of Vision,’” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 3–41. See also Rachel Teukolsky, “Victorian Erotic Photographs and the Intimate Public Sphere,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 42:2 (May 2020), DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2020.1733321.

¹¹⁰ Rosalind E. Krauss, in “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” writes that stereoscopy serves as a “proto-history” for the mechanism of the cinema, “just as stereography’s own proto-history is to be found in the similarly darkened and isolating but spectacularly illusionistic space of the diorama” (314).

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Picturesque