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Victorian ‘Ways of Seeing’?

Victorian ‘Ways of Seeing’?Chris Otter

What was distinctive about perception in the nineteenth century? Canone speak of Victorian ‘ways of seeing’? How do such ‘ways of seeing’relate to material, architectural and technological developments? Toanswer such weighty questions, Isobel Armstrong examines the historyof a single thing – glass. Between 1830 and 1880, she argues, mass-produced glass, stretched and fashioned into plates, mirrors andlenses, insinuated itself between viewing subject and viewed world.By turns transparent, reflective, and refractive, glass produced visualexperiences quite distinct from anything before or after. This epochalspecificity is captured in numerous phrases, like ‘scopic period,’ ‘glassconsciousness,’ ‘glass culture,’ or, simply, ‘Victorian glassworlds.’1 Glassprovided a “medium and barrier’’ through which people saw, and aboutwhich they thought and wrote (7). This seeing, thinking and writingtouched seemingly every aspect of Victorian culture, from politicaleconomy to evolution, astronomy to the Grotesque.

Although these glassworlds were fragmented and multiple, they wereconnected by the material presence of glass itself, which Armstrongtakes very seriously as a tangible thing (361–2). She does exactlywhat Arjun Appadurai once suggested scholars do: she ‘follow[s] thethings themselves.’2 The result is a spectacular and original formof historical phenomenology, a multifaceted, complex meditation onwhat Bill Brown recently described as that which is ‘excessive inobjects. . . their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysicalpresence.’3 Victorian Glassworlds is an extended, joyous study ofphenomenological excess – emotional, poetic, ocular, psychological,bodily – shaped by a bold, playful, historicist reading of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. Yet it is an excess usually shaped by the brittle,blistered medium of glass itself.

Armstrong’s investigations begin with the physical elements ofglass culture, its panes, mirrors, microscopes and magic lanterns.Glassworlds are material, and materially produced. She revealinglyanalyses the laborious production of glass, and particularly the physicalwork of glass-blowing. The specificity of this mode of productionsituates Victorian glass culture within a particular history of labourand political economy. From its moment of creation, glass containedresidues of glassblowers’ breath. In return, they ingested splintersof glass. Object and subject slightly, disturbingly interpenetrated.Glassblowers, Armstrong reminds us, worked in infernal heat. It isunsurprising, she notes, that Marx used glass factories as exemplars

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of capitalist relations of production in Capital.(37) She never lets usforget that the “sensuous force’’ of glass was itself a product of painfullabour.

Here I address two of these physical elements: the window and thelens. While Armstrong’s analyses of windows and glass architecturepropel the reader far into the Victorian imagination, she notes that‘ways of seeing were historically constrained by the technologicalnecessities of the vertical window, the dominant domestic formfor over a hundred years in Europe.’(115) The recurring ‘windowmoment’ in literature, for example, was structured by the shape ofthe window itself: oblong and vertical.(124, 131) But this structurationwas never straightforwardly deterministic, as if the ‘window moment’was somehow isomorphous to the window itself. With the iconic CrystalPalace, she explores the commentaries of observers like Lothar Bucher,whom she describes as ‘seeing in crystal, not seeing through it . . . [theCrystal Palace] is an autotelic world apart, a space existing outside thenorms of solids, weight, volume, and shadow.’(152) Here was sensuousforce in abundance: 293,000 windows generated an experience ofradical excess, making the Crystal Palace a disorienting, shimmering,emotive thing rather than a mere utilitarian object.4 This experiencecould intensify into disarming transparency, of a ‘shadowless, limpid,indefinable medium. . . like living in an underwater world.’(152)Historical experience, and the reflections upon this experience, wasoccurring within a rapidly changing technological, architectural, andperceptual field.

Armstrong’s compelling study of the Victorian conservatory is moreconventional. John Loudon and Joseph Paxton, Victorian Britain’stwo great glass architects, are cast as rivals: the democratic Loudon,carefully constructing salubrious vitreous environments, is pittedagainst the more opportunist Paxton, using glass for display andspectacle, most famously in the Crystal Palace itself. She is equallystrong in demonstrating how the mass-production of glass generatedarchitectural fantasies.5 Paxton himself proposed a ten-mile crystalgirdle around London, while the Builder suggested reassembling theCrystal Palace as a thousand-foot high public watchtower.(156–8)Surveillance was, however, never rendered so explicit: such aerial viewsremained limited to those fortunate enough to take balloon trips overLondon.

Armstrong’s architectural glassworlds were structured, then, by glass.Her analyses playfully traverse the physical, physiological and psychicpathways linking vitreous to literary and poetic forms. There arepoints, however, when these nineteenth-century vitreous forms appear

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to resonate more with the twenty-first century critical imaginationthan anything demonstrably Victorian. The panopticon, for example,plays an occasional, rather haunting role. She argues that “the CrystalPalace was a descendant of panoptical technology,’’ and refers to the“staring panoptical sockets of windows’’ in Bleak House.(117, 128) Here,the wonderfully suggestive relationships between form, experienceand language break apart, since the discursive and phenomenologicaldimensions of her analysis no longer bear any historical relationshipwith the material forms of the Victorian period. The Crystal Palacewas neither formally nor functionally panoptic: its structure generatedcountless partial views of people and things. Seldom, perhaps, wasvision so blocked, unregulated and chaotic. Panopticism, as I haveargued elsewhere, is a basically useless analytic tool with which toinvestigate the relationships between built form, perception andpower during the nineteenth century.6 The panopticon’s residualpresence is all the more anomalous given Armstrong’s sustainedreluctance to collapse various practices, from factory organizationto optical technologies, into a disciplinary meta-narrative. It is alsopuzzling given her brilliantly critical reading of Benjamin, whoprovokes reflection on glass culture but is (convincingly) accusedof collapsing nineteenth and twentieth-century glass cultures into asingular, seamless modernity.(163)

This critique can be furthered. Part Two of the book, ‘Perspectives ofthe Glass Panel,’ appears generally rather blind to the geographicaland spatial specificity of glassworlds. When Armstrong argues that“the glassing of London was complete by the mid-century,’’ she isnot making a naively empirical claim, of course, but she refusesto really explicate, or analyse, the uneven spatial developmentof glass culture.(133) Her “glass consciousness’’ was materially,phenomenologically and psychically rooted in London’s West End, notthe East. Indeed, despite occasional forays beyond London, this is avery metropolitan book. Glass consciousness was arguably not nearly sopervasive outside of the wealthier parts of the capital. In remote ruralareas its underlying material framework might altogether disappear.Here is a description of a completely glassless Cornish window, takenfrom the 1884–5 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes:‘one window had not a pane of glass in it, and as a substitute for theglass there were nine hats, and rotten bags, and old straw, and so on,and it was in a very miserable condition.’7 Other modes of imagination,doubtless, were called forth by the sensuous force of these hats androtten bags. For the observer, the glassless world was unsettling. Theinhabitants’ sensory world is rather harder to excavate, although it

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surely lacked the structuring force of glass. We can speak of Victorianways of seeing, but we must always define where such seeing took place,and who was doing it. Armstrong explicates tensions within glassworlds,but there were surely tensions between glassworlds and worlds whereglass was peripheral or entirely absent. References to non-glassworlds,or anti-glassworlds, like London rookeries, Tom-all-Alones, or thedirty windows of Krook and Jellyby, are rare. (139–41, 246–8) Someconsideration of how the undoubtedly new glassworlds within Victoriancities (particularly London) intersected with more extensive tracts ofless vitreous space would have added some geographical texture to thebook.

Armstrong suspends detailed discussion of perception itself untilpart three, “Lens-Made Images: Optical Toys and PhilosophicalInstruments.’’ For me, this was the book’s highlight: indeed, it wasoften quite brilliant. The lens, she notes, “made light mobile, enablinglight to accomplish its own transformations by making non mimeticimages out of itself.’’(253) Armstrong examines three families of lens-machines: those transferring images from one place to another (likethe magic lantern), those which distorted or magnified images (likethe microscope), and those creating the illusion of motion (like thephenakistiscope). The visual encounters with such machines generatedquestions about images, their mediation, and knowledge in general.Although she mentions Jonathan Crary by name only once, this partof Victorian Glassworlds appears as a sympathetic yet powerful critique ofhis work.8 Armstrong is keen to wrest these lenticular glassworlds fromthe clutches of Crary’s more disciplinary framework, which depictsvision as captured and over-determined by a new universe of visualtoys and instruments.

Here, Armstrong’s adherence to the materiality of optical devicesand their sensuous force pays rich dividends. The stereoscope, forexample, rendered tangible the physiological and psychological workof assembling an image that did not exist “out there’’ in reality.It demonstrated the perspectival nature of visual perception. Sheobserves that Helmholtz, a major figure in Crary’s work, thoughtthe stereoscope a liberating instrument rather than a source of‘technologized visuality.’ (339) Similarly, Armstrong argues that opticalcontraptions simulating movement generated a rich dialectic offreedom and determination: the freedom to look at something whichwould have absolutely inescapable physiological and psychologicaleffects on the act of seeing itself. The eye is at liberty to gazein multiple directions, yet ‘consent[s] . . . involuntarily to the “direct’’pulsation of movement.’(350) This supple dance of freedom and

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constraint captures the ambivalence of nineteenth-century visualexperience, without reducing it to a disciplinary model. It is probablycorrect that Crary’s argument in Suspensions of Perception, while moreostentatiously Foucauldian, ultimately approximates to somethingsimilar. Armstrong, however, says it rather more clearly, largelybecause of the more material and phenomenological nature of heranalysis.

Armstrong furthers this line of inquiry in her section onthe ‘Dissolving View’ and the ‘Dissolving View’ (292–309). In theformer, a viewed object gradually dissipates, revealing its ontologicalevanescence. This was true of apparently frivolous devices like themagic lantern, but also of those least artificial, most seeminglypermanent objects, stars. Armstrong connects visual concernssurrounding magic lanterns to debates on the nature of nebulae.Anxieties over perception extended to the limits of cosmic space.The view of a nebula revealed vast clusters of stars which were in theprocess of becoming. Nebulae ‘displayed the universe in a condition ofuneven synchronic exchange, decay and renovation, aggregation andseparation coexisting’ (299). Fixed stars not only ceased to be fixedin space, but also in time: like everything else, they were born andthey died.

Such galactic instability was mirrored by equally unsettling questionsrelating to astronomical observation. John Herschel struggled tocomprehend what he saw through his telescope, and acknowledgedhis own optical limitations: ‘in the denser portions of the nebula, sobright is the diffused light, that it is extremely difficult to fix attentionon such minute points . . . glimpses are often caught and lost again, ina manner which renders it impossible to say positively that a star has orhas not been seen’ (305). The stable astronomical view was dissolving.Verifying what had been seen, and recording it, involved double-checking, and the painstaking construction of composite images,vividly reproduced in Armstrong’s text. The dialectic of the dissolvingview/dissolving view, linking the glacial becoming of the nebula totedious astronomical labours, epitomised the existential instability feltby those Victorians who peered longest and most closely through glass.Armstrong contributes here to a genealogy of a key twentieth-centuryconcept: relativity. Wisely, she prefers to use the nineteenth-centuryastronomer’s term of choice, parallax. ‘The universe of parallax,’ sheconcludes, ‘provoked a range of reaction, from celebratory skepticismto anxiety and fury, but it created the terms of controversy.’ (309)

Armstrong’s discussion of perception, language, and imagination,then, is situated in a distinct phase of material history. Rather like

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Lynda Nead’s Victorian Babylon, cultural experience is reconnectedwith the material world without being determined by it in anystraightforwardly “materialist’’ way.9 Nead examines a wider varietyof artifacts: gaslight, streets, sewers. Armstrong, meanwhile, exploresone substance, but in greater depth. Her history is not, obviously,exhaustive, and notable areas of Victorian ‘glass culture’ are notaddressed, like the public aquarium. Glass was also, clearly, not theonly distinctive thing about the visual history of the period 1830–1880:scientific and aesthetic ideas about vision changed, as did numerousother technologies, most notably those providing illumination. Inconclusion, I will return to my opening questions: what was distinctiveabout perception in Victorian Britain? Can we speak of Victorian ‘waysof seeing’? Does 1830–1880 form a ‘scopic period,’ and, if so, whatkind of period is it?

One way to answer this question is to ask what preceded, and whatfollowed, this period of glass consciousness. Jonathan Crary calls thepreceding era the ‘classical period,’ the defining figure of which wasthe camera obscura, a dark chamber pierced by an aperture, throughwhich light streamed, forming an image.10 ‘Modern’ perception, forCrary, involved abandoning this stable, static figure and ‘ground[ing]the truth of vision in the density and materiality of the body.’11

Perception became subjective, relative, and fleshy. Although Armstrongdevotes little time to this break between classical and modern, shedoes acknowledge its existence. The stereoscope is central to Crary’smodern visual regime, and Armstrong agrees, noting how it invitesthe viewer to ‘give up the classical gaze’s authority . . . [and] questionthe stable relation between subject and object.’(341) While I wouldnot dispute the perceptual significance of the stereoscope, I wouldquestion the existence of a ‘classical period’ of vision. It implies aperiod when vision was stabilised by denying the mediating force ofthe eye, which was replaced, quite dramatically, by a subjective theoryof vision where perception was inescapably assembled in the eyes andbrain. There was, undoubtedly, a slow drift towards more subjectivemodels of vision in the nineteenth century, but this began well before1800, while older models lingered alongside newer ones.

Armstrong’s supple, dialectical analysis allows for more contestationand ambivalence than Crary’s, and she laudably refuses to give herglassworlds phase the Foucauldian epithet ‘the modern period.’ Heruse of the term ‘classical gaze,’ however, suggests some commitment toan epistemic model of history, which her emphasis on the relativisingand subjectivising of nineteenth-century perception reinforces. I wouldbe interested to know how an epistemic model of perceptual change

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relates to Armstrong’s more material-phenomenological model. Herglassworlds appeared when glass panels, mirrors and lenses becamemass produced: this is material determination “in the last instance,’’however sophisticated. Her argument provides a more material andless absolute, model of perceptual change than Crary’s. This commit-ment to a material break becomes even clearer at the book’s end, whenArmstrong argues that ‘the decisive shift from lens to screen (behindwhich there is nothing), from trace-filled transparency to the tracelesspresence of sheer glass, from material made by breath or cut by hand toa computer-controlled material floated on metal or gas, has generatedanother set of questions than those addressed in this book.’ (361)

Victorian glassworlds, then, were brought into being by massproduction and the proliferation of glass structures and devices. Theyterminated when clearer, machine-made glass became available, whichwas fashioned into new forms, most significantly the screen. LikeCrary, Armstrong does not follow visual perception into the twentiethcentury. Unlike Crary, however, Armstrong is adamant that nineteenth-century modes of perception transform into something else. Butwhat? Armstrong’s work does not imply that the twentieth centuryexperienced a radical recrudescence of ‘objective’ vision. Rather,the historical trajectory she describes so wonderfully in VictorianGlassworlds implies that substantial mutations could take place withinsubjective or relativised perception. The rise of cinema and televisioncreated a new relationship with glass. When (or if) glass architecturebecame banal, for example, the experience of it would change.The development of scientific instruments like bubble chambersand electron microscopes would produce different perceptual andepistemological conundrums.12 These are truly ‘another set ofquestions’, and one can only hope that future authors tackle them withsomething approaching the same combination of learning, analyticrigor and sheer invention as Armstrong.

(Ohio State University)DOI: 10.3366/E1355550209000629

Email: otter.4@osu.edu

Endnotes1. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3, 1, 13. All subsequent references will beby page number parenthetically in text.

2. Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 5.

3. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ in Brown (ed.) Things (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2004), 5.

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4. On the thing/object distinction, which owes much to Heidegger, see Brown, ‘ThingTheory,’ 5.

5. On urban fantasy, see Frank Mort, ‘Fantasies of Metropolitan Life: PlanningLondon in the 1940s,’ Journal of British Studies 43:1, January 2004, 120–151.

6. Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain,1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3–5.

7. William Hawke, in Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. VolumeII. Minutes of Evidence and Appendix as to England and Wales (London: Eyre andSpottiswoode, 1885), 614.

8. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the NineteenthCentury (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990), and Suspensions of Perception: Attention,Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999).

9. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-CenturyLondon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

10. On the camera obscura, see Crary, Techniques, 26–66. See also Michel Foucault, TheOrder of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1974).

11. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 11–12.12. See, for example, Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Artefacts and Aesthetics

Marcia Pointon

This is a courageous book in every way. While it tackles issues oftaxonomy, it defies taxonomic categorisation. Crossing disciplinaryboundaries, moving rapidly from the minutiae of the lives of glassworkers to the large picture of the Great Exhibition, from the insightfulsnatch of a verse by Christina Rossetti to the solemnity of a RoyalCommission report, Armstrong carries her reader along with verveand a strong sense of her own fascination with the relationshipsbetween the production of glass and its impact on the ways inwhich people understood and articulated their environment. It isconstantly thought-provoking and I found myself while reading whatis a deliberately digressive account following avenues of connectedideas: when reading about the ‘fairy’ child on the disproportionatelily leaves (174) I thought immediately of the art of Richard Daddwhose extraordinary fairy paintings were executed during his periodas an inmate of Bedlam. The construction of the book with itsunusual combination of discursive passages, critical commentaries,observations and gobbets of text, reminded me of shards of glass. Ishall never walk among the reflective surfaces of the recent buildingsin our urban environment without thinking of this book. By and large,Armstrong deals deftly with the ambiguities and contradictions posed

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