VICTORIAN CRITICAL INTERVENTIONS Donald E. Hall, Series Editor Shires_Final for Print.indb 1 6/22/2009 3:43:07 PM Shires_Final for Print.indb 2 6/22/2009 3:43:07 PM PERSPECTIVES Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England Linda M. Shires THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PREss Columbus Shires_Final for Print.indb 3 6/22/2009 3:43:08 PM Copyright © 2009 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shires, Linda M., 1950– Perspectives : modes of viewing and knowing in nineteenth-century England / Linda M. Shires. p. cm. — (Victorian critical interventions) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1097-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1097-X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Literature and society—England—History—19th century. 3. Optics in literature. 4. Photography in lit- erature. 5. Subjectivity in literature. 6. Objectivity in literature. I. Title. PR595.O6P47 2009 821'.8093552—dc22 2008051411 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1097-0) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9193-1) Cover design by Dan O'Dair. Text design and typesetting by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe. Type set in Adobe Palatino. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Shires_Final for Print.indb 4 6/22/2009 3:43:08 PM For U. C. Knoepflmacher and in memory of E. D. H. Johnson Shires_Final for Print.indb 5 6/22/2009 3:43:08 PM Shires_Final for Print.indb 6 6/22/2009 3:43:08 PM CO N TE N TS List of Illustrations • ix Acknowledgments • xi Introduction • 1 Chapter 1 Nineteenth-Century Challenges to Renaissance Perspective • 17 Chapter 2 D. G. Rossetti’s Double Work of Art and the Viewer/Reader • 36 Chapter 3 The Photographic Perspectives of Henry Peach Robinson and Lady Clementina Hawarden • 62 Chapter 4 Points of View in “Pippa Passes,” The Woman in White, and Silas Marner • 87 Coda • 115 Notes • 117 Works Cited • 135 Index • 147 Shires_Final for Print.indb 7 6/22/2009 3:43:08 PM Shires_Final for Print.indb 8 6/22/2009 3:43:08 PM ILLUSTRAT I O N S Figure 1 D. G. Rossetti, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 1848–49. Oil on canvas, 83.2 x 65.4 cm. Tate Gallery, London. • 37 Figure 2 Henry Peach Robinson, “Fading Away,” composite photograph made from five negatives, 1858; George Eastman Collection, Rochester, New York. • 66 Figure 3 Lady Clementina Hawarden, “Clementina Maude,” photographed at 5 Princes Gardens, South Kensington, London. About 1862–63; Albumen print from wet collodion negative. Victoria and Albert Photography Department, London. Museum no. PH.457:344-1968. • 81 ix Shires_Final for Print.indb 9 6/22/2009 3:43:08 PM Shires_Final for Print.indb 10 6/22/2009 3:43:08 PM Ac K N O W LEDGME N TS I am especially grateful to colleagues and friends who helped me refine points and who generously answered inquiries. Warm thanks go to those who read all or parts of this manuscript: Bob Gates, Steve Weiss, and Mike Goode. The Syracuse University English Department 2007– 2008 Faculty Writing group afforded evenings of welcome intellectual exchange during a long winter and spring. Although I have moved to a new university position, these insightful former colleagues know that my warm wishes remain with them: Susan Edmunds, Claudia Klaver, Patty Roylance, Roger Hallas, Monika Wadman, Jeannie Britton, and Vincent Stephens. A lively conversation in New York City with E. Warwick Slinn about a range of nineteenth-century poems came late in the going, but at a crucial moment, nonetheless. Steven Cohan supported me more like a brother than a friend dur- ing the writing of this book. Since he retains everything I don’t—from numerous facts (like what is covered on my insurance policies), to our old co-authored manuscript pages from Telling Stories, to all the books I sold many years ago and then needed again off his bookshelves—his help proved essential on more than one occasion. While busy writing on twentieth-century film and television, he nevertheless offered a sympa- thetic ear about texts in which he had only a remote interest. My extraordinary husband, Uli, exercised his usual care in watering the seeds of ideas and in reading first drafts—using the motif of the long, skinny dachshund, in red pen, for those sentences which seemed to go on way too long or to have lost themselves in a neighboring yard. I won’t easily forget our excited conversations about Rossetti and Dyce, our visit together to the fantastic Turner retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his single parenting for a year, or that beach vacation, dangling before me if I would just finish the revisions. Our sonA lex had xi Shires_Final for Print.indb 11 6/22/2009 3:43:09 PM xii / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS nothing to do with the book; he wisely kept his perspective focused on his social life and his own intellectual and creative pursuits as he headed to college. The Victorians Institute, the MLA, The Society for Textual Studies, and the North American Victorian Studies Association offered valuable venues to present material on word and image to specialized audi- ences. John Maynard, Jim Kincaid, Susan Wolfson, Pamela Dalziel, Nick Frankel, Patricia Ingham, Esther Schor, Amy Lang, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra answered specific queries, helped with sources, offered oppor- tunities to speak, or otherwise lent support. Roslyn Vanderbilt, Ruth Bennett, Holly Nelson, and Ken Pallack shared coffee, poems, stories and time. I also thank my mother, Helen Shires, for her interest in things academic, at a time when her own concerns were far more pressing. During 2006–2007, Cathryn Newton, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Professor Gregg Lambert, Chair, Department of English at Syracuse University, provided me with research and administrative leave. I am grateful for a generous contribution towards illustration permissions from Dean Gerald Greenberg. Because of the high reproduc- tion costs for color illustrations, especially for an academic press, I have set up a website at www.lindashires.com which features many of the paintings and photographs referenced in this book. As this book went to press, my editors and I discovered that the Victoria and Albert Museum has made obtaining reproductions far easier and less expensive than in the past, for which we were grateful. For three years, Kevin Mensch has made my online days in Firestone Library, Princeton University, run smoothly. Two anonymous readers for The Ohio State University Press made salient suggestions I have worked to address fully. I could not have been luckier in my editors: Sandy Crooms of The Ohio State University Press and Donald E. Hall, series editor, who showed eager initial interest and patient long-term support. This book provides an opportunity to celebrate the careers of two of Princeton University’s outstanding scholars of nineteenth-century lit- erature and culture: my husband, U. C. Knoepflmacher, and his mentor, the late E. D. H. Johnson. It is offered as a modest token of gratitude for their superb teaching and writing, which opened new vistas for numer- ous students, colleagues, and friends over the years. Princeton, NJ and New York, NY, February 2009 Shires_Final for Print.indb 12 6/22/2009 3:43:09 PM I N TRODU C T I O N But besides holding your head still, you must, when you try to trace the picture on the glass, shut one of your eyes. If you do not, the point of the brush appears double. Perspective can, therefore, only be quite right, by being calculated for one fixed position of the eye of the observer; nor will it ever appear deceptively right unless seen precisely from the point it is calculated for. Custom, however, enables us to feel the rightness of the work on using both our eyes, and to be satisfied with it, even when we stand at some distance from the point it is designed for. —John Ruskin, The Elements of Perspective (1859), 241–42 To say that our culture has been and continues to be shaped, informed and pro- grammed at bedrock level by the perspective paradigm is more than wordplay— though language requires that perspective not be an object like any other, because, metaphorically speaking, it has a bearing on the conditions determinant of all objectivity, of perception of objects, from whatever angle or point of view they might be considered in relation to a horizon line or a set distance. —Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (1995), 52 Written while he was teaching art to young girls at Winnington Hall School, John Ruskin’s manual on perspective, quoted above, was meant to be read in conjunction with the first three books of Euclid. No doubt, his appreciation for geometry as well as art and “right” seeing fueled his interest in writing and illustrating such a book. How useful it may have been to schoolgirls sketching landscapes or to amateurs learning to draw cathedrals in scenic views is another matter. Still, Ruskin firmly believed that all artists should learn the basic rules of Renaissance linear perspective, distance, horizon line, and standing point. He bemoaned the fact that few painters knew the complexity of the rules, and fewer still followed them. Even his favorite painter, J.