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State University of New York Press - Susan E. Cook

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134 pages

English

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Description

Victorian Negatives examines the intersection between Victorian photography and literary culture, and argues that the development of the photographic negative played an instrumental role in their confluence. The negative is a technology that facilitates photographic reproduction by way of image inversion, and Susan E. Cook argues that this particular photographic technology influenced the British realist novel and literary celebrity culture, as authors grappled with the technology of inversion and reproduction in their lives and works. The book analyzes literary works by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. W. Hornung, Cyril Bennett, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker, and puts readings of those works into conversations with distinct photographic forms, including the daguerreotype, solarization, forensic photography, common cabinet cards, double exposures, and postmortem portraiture. In addition to literary texts, the book analyzes photographic discourses from letters and public writings of photographers and the nineteenth-century press, as well as discussions and debates surrounding Victorian celebrity authorship. The book's focus on the negative both illuminates an oft-marginalized part of the history of photography and demonstrates the way in which this history is central to Victorian literary culture.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. The Daguerreotype: Dickens’s Counterfeit Presentment

2. The Solarized Print: Little Dorrit’s Sun and Shadow

3. The Forensic Photograph and the Cabinet Card: Failing to Observe with Sherlock Holmes

4. The Double Exposure: Double Negatives at the Fin de Siecle

5. The Postmortem Photograph: Photographing (in) Wessex

Conclusion Photographic Absence and the Vampire’s Modern Celebrity

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

Loisirs

Histoire de la photographie

Royaume-Uni

Great Britain

Stephen Ireland

History of Europe

United Kingdom

Ireland

History of art

19th century

Reino Unido

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 juillet 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438475387
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

V ICTORIAN N EGATIVES
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pamela K. Gilbert, editor
V ICTORIAN N EGATIVES
Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century
S USAN E. C OOK
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cook, Susan E., 1980– author.
Title: Victorian negatives : literary culture and the dark side of photography in the nineteenth century / Susan E. Cook.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018040333 | ISBN 9781438475370 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438475387 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Literature and photography—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Literature and technology—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Photography—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Realism in literature.
Classification: LCC PR468.P46 C67 2019 | DDC 820.9/356—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040333
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my family.
“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
—Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (62)
The negative is the all-important element; for by it we seek to record some effect of nature, and according to our success in the light-action we get on our plate, so is our print from it valuable or the reverse. Photography is one of the finest of methods for rendering atmosphere and light and shade in all the subtleties of nature’s gradations, and for this we need an approximately perfect negative and that perfectly printed from.
—Frederick H. Evans, “On Pure Photography” (181)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Daguerreotype: Dickens’s Counterfeit Presentment
Chapter 2 The Solarized Print: Little Dorrit ’s Sun and Shadow
Chapter 3 The Forensic Photograph and the Cabinet Card: Failing to Observe with Sherlock Holmes
Chapter 4 The Double Exposure: Double Negatives at the Fin de Siècle
Chapter 5 The Postmortem Photograph: Photographing (in) Wessex
Conclusion Photographic Absence and the Vampire’s Modern Celebrity
Notes
Works Cited
Index
List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 John Edwin Mayall, “Charles Dickens.” Figure 1.2 Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), “In the Bastille.” Figure 1.3 Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), “A new meaning in the Roman.” Figure 2.1 Gustave Le Gray, Le Soleil au Zenith—Ocean [ The Sun at Zenith, Normandy ]. Figure 2.2 Susan Cook, Oxford Tree (detail). Figure 2.3 Susan Cook, Solarized Oxford Tree (detail). Figure 2.4 Samuel Bemis, Barn in Hart’s Location, New Hampshire . Figure 2.5 Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), “Title Page.” Figure 3.1 Alphonse Liébert Co., Alexandre Dumas père and Adah Isaacs Menken. Figure 3.2 Sidney Paget, “I found myself mumbling responses.” Figure 3.3 Sidney Paget, “He gave a cry and dropped.” Figure 3.4 Sidney Paget, “Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” Figure 4.1 The Richard Mansfield Calendar for 1900 , featuring a photograph by Henry Van der Weyde. Figure 5.1 Hermann Lea, “Christminster.” Figure 5.2 Thomas Hardy, “Map of the Wessex of the Novels and Poems.” Figure C.1 Bela Lugosi as Dracula in Dracula .
Acknowledgments
T his project developed over time, and I am grateful to have had the support of so many colleagues, friends, and family members throughout the process.
Diana Polley, Victoria Ford Smith, and Ryan Fong all deserve special thanks. Each read the entire manuscript multiple times over the span of several years and gave me invaluable feedback along the way. I am absolutely indebted to their careful readings and advice. Laura Miller and Beth Womack read portions of the project at critical junctures and offered much-appreciated guidance.
My college photography professors Roy W. Traver, Charles Meyer, and Karl Baden helped inspire this project and taught me how to navigate a darkroom. Years later, Pat Stanbro showed me how to use software to create a negative effect digitally. When I was a graduate student, my faculty mentors, Maurizia Boscagli, Janis Caldwell, Julie Carlson, and Erika Rappaport, all taught me the meaning of research. My graduate school community, including Ben Shockey, Rachel Mann, Yanoula Athanasakis, Summer Star, Mike Frangos, Curtis Asplund, and Susie Keller, helped me think through early versions of some of this material. John Jordan and the Dickens Universe helped me tremendously as a young scholar learning the ropes of academia. Communities created through the Dickens Universe, such as the Dickens Project Winter Conference and the 19th-Century Sciences Group—and Dickens Camp people including but by no means limited to Sarah Allison, Karen Bourrier, Rae Greiner, Deanna Kreisel, Rebecca Stern, and Maria Bachman—were in various ways pivotal to my development as a writer and an academic. Colleagues such as Lucy Morrison, Maura Coughlin, Meg Cronin, Natalie McKnight, and Elif Armbruster—and organizations like the Nineteenth Century Studies Association, the Dickens Society, the North American Victorian Studies Association, and the Victorians Institute—have been instrumental to me in the years I have worked on this project. I appreciate Lucinda Matthews-Jones and the Journal of Victorian Culture Online for giving me a forum to test some of this material in its early stages. Special thanks to Margaret Mitchell for inviting me to guest edit the special issue of LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory on literature and photography. That project helped me realize that this book was a possibility.
Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) generously supported this project with four summer research grants and a yearlong sabbatical. My colleagues at SNHU, past and present, have enriched my life as a scholar. I am lucky I am able to bring my passion into the classroom: students from three seminars over the span of eight years challenged me to think differently about some of the material in this book. I am thankful to have had the opportunity to travel to and work with a number of outstanding collections and curators. Mark Osterman, Joe Struble, and Ross Knapper at the George Eastman Gannett Foundation Photographic Study Center were particularly generous with their time during my visits. I am also fortunate to have been able to work with archives and collections at the J. Paul Getty Research Institute, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, the British Library, and the Charles Dickens Museum. I am grateful to the Charles Dickens Museum, the British Library, Image Works, and Universal Pictures for their permission to reproduce images in this book. At SNHU, Chris Cooper and Jeremy Moore helped me scan additional images from my own collection, and my dean’s office and Jackie Hickox helped make my research travel possible.
Material from chapter 1 was published as “Season of Light and Darkness: A Tale of Two Cities and the Daguerrean Imagination” in Dickens Studies Annual 42 (Summer 2011), and an earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Sun and Shadow: Solarization and Little Dorrit ” in Nineteenth Century Studies 27 (2013). Thanks to the editors of Dickens Studies Annual and Nineteenth Century Studies for allowing me to reprint this material here. I am extremely grateful to Pamela K. Gilbert, Amanda Lanne-Camilli, and the Editorial Board of SUNY Press for their support of this project and to the wonderful production team at SUNY Press for making this such a good experience. I cannot thank my anonymous peer reviewers enough for their thoughtful readings of my work.
I am lucky to have also had the support of friends and family outside academia. Amanda Moceri, Sarah Fisher, Sara Scott, Ivy Irvine, Hayde Castillo, Erika Chen, Julie Ciollo, Sarah Cote, Melissa Harris, Lara Hubner, Michelle Feeney, and my running and roller derby communities have helped keep me centered. My family taught me the meaning of intellectual curiosity, and they are at the core of this project. My godmother, Thea Hoeth, challenged me from an early age to be precise with my syntax. My father, Jim Cook, gave me my first camera, a Pentax. My mother, Vicky Cook, kept a dictionary in our kitchen when I was growing up and made me look up words I didn’t know as we sat at the dinner table—and she read the full manuscript of this book and offered helpful advice. My brilliant husband, Randy Brown, also read the full manuscript. He should be granted an honorary degree and more for his unwavering support over the years. Randy’s incisive and careful editing is the reason this project does not contain more paradoxes.
Introduction
When you are in Paris you will no doubt have an opportunity of seeing Daguerre’s pictures. I shall be glad to hear from you, what you think of them. Whatever their merit, which no doubt is very great, I think that in one respect our English method must have the advantage. To obtain a second copy of the same view, Daguerre must return to the same locality set up his instrument a second time; for he cannot copy from his metallic plate, being opaque. But in our method, having first obtained one picture by means of the Camera, the rest are obtainable from this one, by the method of